In a game where nothing moves unless you draw a line, time itself becomes a resource. Mini Metro, the minimalist subway planner from Dinosaur Polo Club, turned the geometry of public transit into a score chase and then into a fully fledged speedrunning scene. On PC, mobile, and consoles, players now measure their skill not only by how many passengers they can serve but by how quickly they can deliver the first hundred, five hundred, or thousand riders on each map. By early 2026 the main speedrun.com board for Mini Metro tracked 590 runs across 33 levels from about 75 runners, a modest community by the standards of platformers or action games but one that has refined a very particular style of routing and reset heavy play over a decade.
This chronicle follows that evolution from early browser builds and high score screenshots to formal categories, timer rules, and map expansions that kept giving runners new networks to optimize.
From Mind The Gap To A Global Metro
Mini Metro began life in a three day Ludum Dare 26 game jam, where the Curry brothers created a prototype called Mind the Gap. A web based pre alpha appeared in September 2013, followed by a Steam Greenlight campaign in March 2014 that passed within three weeks. The team launched Mini Metro into Steam Early Access on 11 August 2014, then released the full desktop version in November 2015 and brought the game to iOS and Android in October 2016.
From the beginning the game’s structure lent itself to time based challenges. Each city starts with a handful of simple circle, triangle, or square stations. Passengers spawn with a desired shape, trains move at a fixed speed, and each week the player chooses upgrades such as extra lines, carriages, tunnels, or interchanges. The game scores you by counting how many passengers you successfully deliver before a station overcrowds and ends the run. Later updates added named modes such as Normal, Extreme, Endless, and Creative, along with daily and weekly challenges and a steadily growing roster of cities from London and Paris to Cairo, Lagos, and Auckland.
For most players this structure framed Mini Metro as a score based puzzle and an achievement hunt. For a smaller group, it offered a canvas for precise, repeatable routing and timing.
Score Chasing And Early Metro Optimization
Before anyone set up an external leaderboard, early fans treated Mini Metro like a classic high score arcade game. On the in browser build and the early desktop versions, players posted screenshots of London, New York, and other maps with passenger totals that pushed far beyond the default achievement thresholds. In a 2014 thread on the Mini Metro subreddit, one player shared a London score of 1,492 passengers and described a dense network of looping lines that always kept at least one carriage available for each station while never letting too many passengers pile up in one place.
Those posts already show the core ideas that would later define speedruns of the game. Players discovered that keeping stations serviced by multiple lines, minimizing the number of tunnels across rivers, and maintaining compact loops through diverse station shapes all contributed to stability and higher throughput. Later threads about maps such as Addis Ababa talk about “loops only” runs that complete demanding achievements like transporting eighteen hundred passengers using only looped lines and careful upgrade management.
What these players were doing looked a lot like routing in other strategy or puzzle speedruns. They experimented with patterns for placing lines on each map, identified which weekly upgrades were almost mandatory for long runs, and learned which station spawn patterns were worth restarting to chase. The missing piece was a shared standard for where the clock started and stopped.
Formal Categories: 100, 500, And 1000 Passengers
That structure arrived when Mini Metro gained a dedicated page on speedrun.com. The board defines three core categories for every map: 100 Passengers, 500 Passengers, and 1000 Passengers, along with miscellaneous categories for Survival Metro, Extreme Challenge, Unlock Completion, and Overcrowd.
Instead of pushing a run until eventual failure, runners now focused on hitting fixed passenger milestones as quickly as possible. For each city the board tracks separate leaderboards for variants such as London and London 1960 or Paris and Paris 1937, and allows runs on PC, PS4, Android, and other supported platforms.
The 100 Passengers boards show the immediate impact of this framework. Across thirty three maps, world record times tend to cluster a little under two minutes, with top players such as Psh3m0_, CloudConnection, Chocobochild, aleph_0, jaylooker, and others repeating across multiple cities. London’s 100 Passengers record sits at just under one minute fifty five seconds, with Paris, New York City, Berlin, Hong Kong, and many later maps also clearing the first hundred riders in roughly two minutes or less.
The 500 and 1000 passenger categories extend the same idea to longer routes. While the board interface does not display those tables by default, the category structure reflects a community consensus that the most interesting milestones are not only “how long can this map survive” but also “how quickly can a well planned metro move a meaningful population.”
In practice this split created two distinct kinds of optimization. The 100 passenger runs emphasize explosive early game layouts and aggressive use of the first few upgrades, while 500 and 1000 passenger runs force players to engineer robust mid game networks that can maintain throughput as station density increases.
Routing The Metro: Loops, Shapes, And Resets
Watching Mini Metro speedruns or reading strategy posts reveals a consistent set of routing principles. The map is fully visible and the list of possible station shapes is known, but the order and placement of new stations are random. Runners therefore treat each map as a puzzle that must be solved repeatedly until the opening stations appear in favorable positions.
Community discussions and shared runs highlight several recurring themes. On maps with significant rivers such as London or New York, runners typically try to minimize the number of tunnels spent crossing water, since those upgrades are limited and every extra tunnel introduces slow, fragile sections of a line. On compact city layouts such as Hong Kong or Osaka, they favor short loops that pass through as many different station shapes as possible, allowing trains to pick up and drop off passengers without detouring to distant termini.
The “loops only” Addis Ababa achievement thread illustrates how this thinking evolved. The player describes building multiple looped lines that reuse the same tunnels and reconfiguring them week by week depending on where new stations appear, a strategy that translates almost directly to both 500 and 1000 passenger push runs.
Because passengers board and alight automatically, what matters most for speed is reducing empty travel and ensuring that every train carriage is moving useful riders toward their targets. Runners talk about “starving” low importance stations by assigning them only a single line, while high demand hubs near the center of the city are served by multiple intersecting loops. Resets are frequent, since even a small early inefficiency can cost several seconds on a run that only lasts two or three minutes.
Rules, Timers, And Verification
As the board matured, runners had to decide how strictly to regulate submissions. The forum section attached to the Mini Metro speedrun.com page includes polls on questions such as “Should a timer be required?”, “Should there be a leaderboard for workshop levels?”, and “What should happen to deleted or unavailable videos?”, along with a thread titled “Starting From Restart”.
Even without full access to the thread contents, the topics themselves show a community working through typical timing and verification problems. Requiring an on screen timer raises expectations for clear video proof. Workshop level leaderboards would extend speedrunning into user generated maps, but complicate standardization. And the “Starting From Restart” discussion points to the question of whether runs must begin from a fresh session or can be chained off previous attempts.
Technical tools also evolved. A guide section on the board links to an AutoHotkey script that can automate starting runs, reducing human delay when resetting maps, and in 2022 or 2023 moderator Aeihu posted an “Autosplitter (PC Only)” thread, indicating the release of a LiveSplit integration for more precise timing on desktop.
Taken together, these developments moved Mini Metro speedrunning away from informal “this felt fast” records and toward reproducible, frame counted achievements that fit comfortably within broader speedrunning standards.
New Maps And Modes, New Categories To Fill
Mini Metro’s post launch support ensured that the speedrun board would never be static. The developers repeatedly celebrated the game’s longevity on Steam, writing in a 2023 news post that Mini Metro had enjoyed ten years of updates, with “over two dozen” maps, new modes, Steam Workshop support, and a major “Miniversary” update that brought over crossover maps from sister title Mini Motorways.
Patch tracking by sites such as Perfectly Nintendo and the Steam news feed shows a steady cadence of content. Guangzhou arrived in mid 2019, Lagos and Santiago in October 2020, Chicago in December 2020, Chongqing in early 2021, and Budapest and Addis Ababa later that year, with further additions such as Nanjing, Tashkent, and others through 2022. The Miniversary update in July 2023 added Tokyo, Lisbon, and Warsaw as new maps on Switch and PC, along with photo and GIF capture tools that encouraged players to share their best networks.
Every new city meant another set of 100 passenger, 500 passenger, and 1000 passenger tables to populate. On the current board, later maps like Budapest, Cairo, Lagos, and Auckland already show competitive 100 passenger times around two minutes from names familiar from the original set of cities, which suggests that many runners treat new content as fresh ground for applying well honed routing principles rather than learning an entirely different game.
The addition of Creative mode and daily or weekly challenges also allowed for more experimental forms of speedrunning, such as racing to complete specific achievement conditions on a given day or building deliberately constrained networks as quickly as possible.
PC, Mobile, And Console: Parallel Commutes
Mini Metro is available on desktop, mobile, and multiple consoles, and the presskit lists Steam, Humble, the App Store, Google Play, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Apple Arcade, and Huawei’s AppGallery as supported platforms, with staggered releases from 2015 through 2021.
The speedrun.com game entry recognizes this breadth and tags runs across PC, PS4, Android, and other variants, but the presence of PC specific tools such as the auto splitter and AutoHotkey scripts indicates that the most tightly optimized runs tend to rely on the precision and reliability of mouse and keyboard or gamepad input on desktop.
Mobile and console communities, meanwhile, continue to focus heavily on in game achievements, daily challenges, and high score chasing. Threads on r/MiniMetro show players comparing long survival runs and talking through strategies for difficult achievement maps such as Addis Ababa, where loops and careful upgrade choices are key even outside formal timed categories.
For the purposes of this chronicle, that split is part of the story. Mini Metro’s speedrunning scene does not exist in isolation from the broader player base. Discoveries about loops, tunnel placements, or upgrade orders often surface first in casual discussion and only later become standard practice in world record routes.
Mini Metro’s Place In Speedrunning History
Compared to marquee speedrun titles like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, or modern action platformers, Mini Metro is a small, quiet game. It has no boss fights, no complex movement tech, and no traditional story to skip. Yet over a decade, it has built a distinctive niche where routing and RNG management come together in a different way.
The game’s fixed train speeds and simple passenger logic turn city layouts into something like a real time math puzzle. Runners cannot move faster than the trains allow, so every improvement comes from smoothing the network, trimming unnecessary edges, and restarting until the opening station pattern matches a well tested plan. In that sense Mini Metro belongs to the same family of speedruns as high level Tetris modes, puzzle games with deterministic rules, or factory builders where paths and throughput matter more than reflexes.
With 33 maps, multiple game modes, and a community that continues to refine routes and rules years after release, Mini Metro on PC and mobile has earned its place as a quiet but enduring chapter in speedrun history.