How to Play Sprint

Sprint is a one-life auto-runner. Your cyan runner is pinned to a fixed point near the left of the canvas while the neon corridor scrolls past it — you never steer, never shoot, and never collect anything. The only verb in the game is jump, and the whole skill ceiling sits in deciding when to press it.

• Press Space, click, or tap to jump.
• A second tap while airborne triggers a double-jump — useful for tricky obstacles.
• Dodge magenta ground pillars (jump over) and amber ceiling pillars (stay grounded).
• Combo obstacles stack both in one column — the hardest pattern in the game.
• One collision ends the run. Beat your best distance!

Every jump applies the same fixed impulse against the same constant gravity, so your arc is identical every time: roughly 104 pixels at the peak, and about two-thirds of a second from takeoff back to the floor. You cannot hold the button for a higher hop or tap it lightly for a shorter one. Sprint is a timing game: the arc is a constant, and you only control where it starts.

You get two jumps per airborne phase, and the counter refills the instant you touch the floor. The second jump replaces your vertical velocity rather than adding to it, so firing it at the top of an arc roughly doubles your height while firing it during a fall arrests the drop. The runner sheds cyan sparks the moment its jump count hits zero, so you can always see what is left. Tap Space rather than holding it — key repeat will fire your second jump for you.

Reading the Three Obstacle Types

The generator rolls one of three patterns with roughly equal odds, and telling them apart on sight is the game:

• Magenta ground pillars are narrow columns three tiles tall, planted on the floor. A single jump clears them, but you must be at least six frames into your arc when the pillar arrives — start the jump between a fifth and a third of a second before contact.
• Amber ceiling pillars hang from the top and reach further down than they appear: their underside sits above your head but below the peak of your jump. There is no duck button and you do not need one — staying grounded clears them. The reflex tap is what kills you.
• Combo pillars stack both types in a single column, leaving a sixty-pixel window. Your twenty-eight-pixel runner fits on paper, but the window sits between roughly forty-eight and eighty pixels above the floor while your arc peaks past a hundred. Combos end most runs.

Scoring and Distance Milestones

Your score is distance — one metre per ten pixels of scroll, counting up in the HUD. There are no multipliers, bonuses or pickups, so the only thing that raises your number is staying alive. Difficulty is smooth rather than stepped, with no levels or waves: the corridor starts at four pixels per frame and accelerates on every frame you survive. Obstacle spacing tightens on the same schedule until it hits a hard floor, after which rising speed alone carries the difficulty.

Four milestones — 500, 1000, 2000 and 5000 metres — are the closest thing Sprint has to structure. Each drops an amber banner and plays a three-note ascending chime, and within two hundred metres of the next one a small green NEXT readout appears under your distance. The background also warms its red channel as you close on five thousand metres, drifting the corridor from near-black blue toward purple.

Strategy Tips

• Watch the right edge, not your runner. Obstacles spawn just past the canvas edge and need about a second and a half to reach you at starting speed. That window is your whole reaction budget.
• Commit late rather than early. The safe window for a ground pillar is about a third of a second wide; it closes on the near side because you have not climbed high enough, and on the far side because you have already landed.
• Default to doing nothing. Roughly a third of what comes at you needs no input at all, so training your hand to stay still beats any jumping trick.
• Hold the second jump in reserve. One jump clears every ground pillar unaided, so spend the second only to correct a mistimed first — once the sparks are trailing, you have nothing left until you land.

What Makes Sprint Different

Most endless runners have spent fifteen years adding things: lanes, coins, magnets and jetpacks, unlockable characters, purchasable revives. Sprint removes nearly all of it — no lanes, no currency, no power-ups, no continues, and one collision ends the run. What is left is a single button, a single life and a single number.

A Brief History of the One-Button Runner

The auto-runner has an unusually clear point of origin. Adam Saltsman's Canabalt (2009) took an ordinary platformer, removed every control except jump, made forward motion automatic and let speed climb without limit — defining a format browser and phone games have rebuilt ever since. The mobile boom scaled it up, with Temple Run (2011) and Subway Surfers (2012) adding lanes, collectibles and continues. Then the pendulum swung back: the dinosaur in Chrome's offline error page put a jump-only runner in front of an enormous audience. Sprint sits on the minimalist side of that split.