A chill ran down my spine when I realized I recognized the first eight words. I knew this quote off by heart. It was from Rick Dekkard's monologue at the end of Blade Runner, his “I don't know why he saved my life...” bit.

This was my time to shine.

I watched the countdown with anticipation. Three...two...one...and I was off and typing.

My fingers were a blur as I punched out Harrison Ford's memorable lines. There was no way I could lose. I was pumping out more words per minute than ever before—and making no typos, to boot.

After about ten seconds, I snuck a peak up at the racetrack on my screen...and my heart sank. Maddawg was destroying me. He was a full car-length ahead.

Determined, I sent all my energy to my fingers. They moved with minds of their own, seemingly finding letters and bits of punctuation all by themselves.

It was Zen.

But it wasn't enough. Despite my personal best of 91 words per minute, Maddawg left me in his tracks with a blistering 136 wpm.

The loss was disheartening, but not so much that I gave up on TypeRacer, a wonderfully addictive Web game that pits random groups of players against one another in races to tap out famous quotes from popular movies (and the occasional book) as quickly as possible.

I can't imagine a much better distraction for anyone who spends his or her time at work in front of a keyboard. There's nothing to install on your computer, you can join a race in seconds, and each event takes less than a minute to play out.

It's even better if you're a movie buff—though beware of losing the odd race due to fits of laughter, as happened to me when I was tasked to type the following quote from last year's Juno:

“Yeah, you just take Soupy-Sales to prom. I can think of so many cooler things to do that night. I might pumice my feet, I might go to Bren's Unitarian Church, maybe get hit by a truck full of hot garbage juice, you know? ‘Cause all those things would be exponentially cooler than going to prom with you.”

It's still in Beta, and I can imagine plenty of ways that it might be improved before final release, such as providing permanent user accounts to track stats and typing speed progress for those who aren't playing the game on a social network like MySpace, which appears to enable these features.

Still, if the measure of a successful Web game is the degree to which it adversely affects one's productivity, TypeRacer can be judged a runaway hit just as it is.