Ryan J. White of Toronto, better known in speedrunning as “Goose” or “RWhiteGoose,” spent the mid 2000s climbing from a new name on The-Elite’s GoldenEye rankings to one of the game’s most prolific world record holders. Along the way he helped define the culture of GoldenEye 007 speedrunning, organized tournaments and community contests, and then reinvented himself as one of the first major YouTube storytellers of “speedrun history.”
His career also illustrates the complications that come when a prominent figure’s off stream comments collide with a community’s values. In the late 2010s, after screenshots of offensive remarks circulated, Games Done Quick banned him for violating its conduct standards, and parts of the speedrunning scene distanced themselves from his work. Even so, his GoldenEye records and his long running SpeedLore series continue to shape how players and viewers think about the game’s history.
This profile looks at that full arc: the records, the media work, the controversies, and the legacy that remains.
Early Life and Finding The-Elite
Ryan White was born in Toronto on July 19, 1989, and came into speedrunning in the era when GoldenEye 007’s competitive scene lived almost entirely on a single fan site. Biographical writeups describe him as discovering The-Elite’s GoldenEye rankings around 2000, then finally joining in the summer of 2005 when he was old enough and had better access to the internet.
Once he submitted a full “times page” to The-Elite, his initial results already placed him in the top 75 on the GoldenEye world rankings. That meant he started his career already respectable in the eyes of the community, with room to grow into the upper tiers.
Within months he did exactly that. In November 2005 he tied the long standing world record of 0:35 on Cradle Agent, becoming only the fourth player to reach that time and the first person to set any kind of record on Cradle in more than a year. Shortly after, he achieved an untied world record of 0:51 on Surface 2 Agent, joining a short list of players who had managed untied GoldenEye records at all since the early 2000s.
Those early marks signaled the community was not just welcoming a new player, but a long term contender.
World Records and the Rise of Goose
From late 2005 through 2007, Goose pushed deeper into GoldenEye’s world record table and climbed The-Elite’s overall ranking system. Speedrunwiki’s archived profile of Ryan White describes how, in 2006 and 2007, he repeatedly cut times on some of the hardest stages and briefly rose to third place on both time and points based rankings.
The GoldenEye World Records Monthly page for April 2006 captures a snapshot of that rise. During that one month he set four world records, including Surface 1 Agent 1:03 and multiple Silo times, and the newsletter named him “Player of the Month,” noting that he was “the most active WRer playing right now” and that his Silo records showed he could take on the toughest levels alongside the established legends.
Over a longer span, The-Elite’s WR database credits Ryan White with a total of 95 GoldenEye world records, 18 of them untied, with six of his records still standing today. That tally places him among the most productive record setters in the game’s history.
Those records were not confined to one control style or one moment in time. Community writeups emphasize that he often played on the 1.1 control scheme instead of the more popular “dot strategy,” and that he continued to return to the game in later years as new strategies and techniques emerged. His world recordography spans everything from classic early levels to late game stages, including the coveted Silo Secret Agent 1:10 during a particularly strong month in early 2007.
Beyond GoldenEye: Perfect Dark and Mario Golf
Although GoldenEye remained his home base, Goose’s speedrunning footprint extended into other Nintendo 64 titles. In Perfect Dark he recorded competitive times that earned him a place in The-Elite’s parallel ranking system for Rare’s sci fi shooter.
Speedrunwiki notes that he also pursued world records in Mario Golf 64’s Speed Golf mode, where he held all six North American records and several world “non GBA ported character” records, with videos hosted on his personal YouTube channel. That branching out into another game with a small but dedicated timing community foreshadowed the broader “Nintendo 64 folklore” direction his content would take years later.
Even with those other pursuits, GoldenEye remained the axis around which his reputation turned.
Streaming Era and GoldenEye on Twitch
By the early 2010s, speedrunning’s center of gravity was shifting from static leaderboards toward live streaming on Twitch. Ryan White took advantage of that change. After what his Speedrunwiki profile calls a hiatus from mid 2010 to mid 2012, he returned to GoldenEye, motivated in part by the rise of live streaming.
In that era Goose became one of The-Elite’s most visible streamers, showcasing both full game runs and single level attempts on his Twitch channel. Viewers could watch him chase new personal records and world records in real time, often accompanied by long, improvised commentary about GoldenEye’s history, routing, and community politics.
Outside community wikis, biographical sites like Famous Birthdays and other profile pages describe him as a “professional 007 GoldenEye player” whose Twitch following crossed into the tens of thousands, and emphasize that he earned recognition primarily through live streams of his sessions on that channel.
Those streams proved to be a bridge between the insular GoldenEye scene and a wider speedrun audience.
On the Couch: GoldenEye at Games Done Quick
That bridge became fully visible at Awesome Games Done Quick 2014. In the final hours of the marathon, Goose joined Alex Anderson (Bassboost) for a co op GoldenEye 007 run intended to push the game’s full campaign time as low as possible.
Games Done Quick’s own run index lists “GoldenEye” at AGDQ 2014 as a co op performance by “RWhiteGoose” and “Bassboost,” and notes that their run occupied a late night slot on January 11, 2014. A Kotaku article covering the event highlighted the run as “another instant classic,” noting that the pair completed the game in 24 minutes and 1 second and that they represented the elite GoldenEye community on a charity marathon stage.
In the years since, that AGDQ run has often been cited as one of the most accessible introductions to GoldenEye speedrunning. Viewers unfamiliar with leaderboard culture could see cooperative execution, hear live explanations of tricks, and feel the room’s reaction as the run hit its final split.
For Goose himself, it was his highest profile live performance. GDQ records list no further stage runs by him after 2014, even as he continued to stream GoldenEye and build his audience elsewhere.
SpeedLore and the YouTube Documentary Turn
If his world records made him a major player within The-Elite, his YouTube work made him a recognizable name across speedrunning as a whole.
On his main channel, now branded as “Goose’s Gamer Folklore,” he launched the GoldenEye SpeedLore series, a long running set of videos that each trace the full history of a single stage’s world record progression. Episode introductions describe SpeedLore as “the series where we take a look at the history of GoldenEye’s world records,” then proceed to walk through times, strategies, and the personalities behind them, often drawing from community databases and archived videos.
These videos combined several roles at once. They served as informal documentaries, as teaching tools for newer players, and as a way for GoldenEye’s small community to narrate its own past. Reddit threads and forum posts through the mid 2010s often recommended SpeedLore episodes as entry points for people curious about how speedrunning worked.
In addition to SpeedLore, Goose used his channel to host year in review specials, deep dives on specific discoveries, and more general “gamer folklore” videos exploring strange glitches, mysteries, and quirks across various Nintendo 64 games.
By the late 2010s, he was no longer just a GoldenEye competitor. He was one of a handful of creators actively documenting speedrunning history in video form, years before that style became common across YouTube.
Views on Competition and Structure
Alongside his videos, Ryan White also wrote about speedrunning as a competitive activity. In a 2017 Medium essay titled “Should we take Speedruns seriously?” he argued that leaderboards, proof standards, and rule enforcement were essential to preserving the integrity of speedrunning as a form of competition.
In that piece he describes his home community, The-Elite, as having been “fairly chaotic” before stricter policies were adopted, and uses examples from GoldenEye to argue that unified rules and verification expectations make the hobby more fair and more meaningful. He positions himself firmly on the side that treats world records as achievements that deserve clear structure, rather than as casual personal milestones.
The essay fits neatly with the themes that run through SpeedLore. In both formats he emphasizes structure, order, and hierarchy, mapping exactly who held which records and for how long, and encouraging viewers to think of those tables as a kind of history book.
Controversy, Community Standards, and the GDQ Ban
In late 2018, Goose’s public reputation shifted. Screenshots of posts and private chat logs circulated on Reddit and Twitter, with critics arguing that his statements included sexist, transphobic, and anti semitic language.
Games Done Quick responded by announcing that he would not be permitted to participate in its marathons. A ComicBook.com report on the decision quoted GDQ as having “verified the authenticity” of screenshots attributed to Goose, and stated that GDQ had banned him due to comments that violated its code of conduct, including sexist and transphobic remarks. An academic paper analyzing GDQ’s moderation decisions later listed him among runners banned for “sexist and anti semitic comments,” further underscoring that his language had crossed lines set by the event and by parts of the broader community.
Reddit threads in r/speedrun and other communities recorded heated debates over what to do with his presence. Some argued that his records and videos should be separated from his views. Others insisted that platforming his content effectively endorsed harmful beliefs, especially in spaces where younger viewers and marginalized groups might be present.
In his own public response, Goose acknowledged that the language revealed in those screenshots was wrong and stated that he understood why people were upset, while also trying to distinguish between his past posts and who he wanted to be going forward.
Within GoldenEye’s own community structures, he stepped down from certain leadership roles, and The-Elite undertook its own internal discussions about moderation and standards.
Later Work and Partial Withdrawal from the Spotlight
After 2018, Goose’s relationship to large community platforms and live events changed. With GDQ closed to him and many online spaces reevaluating whether to promote his content, his work centered increasingly on his own channels and on the GoldenEye community that had followed him for years.
He continued and expanded the SpeedLore format, launched new video series under the “Goose’s Gamer Folklore” name, and produced long form episodes such as “GoldenEye 2025 Year in Review,” which walk through the latest untied world records and highlight ongoing achievements by current players.
On Twitch and YouTube he still appears as a streamer and commentator, often focusing less on chasing new personal bests and more on watching other players’ records, exploring obscure glitches, or reflecting on the game’s past. Speedrun.com entries for modern GoldenEye ports like the Nintendo Switch Online and Xbox versions show that he occasionally records runs in those categories as well, although he is not one of the dominant leaderboard names in those newer scenes.
Outside observers have noted that his more recent public persona emphasizes regret and an attempt to move in a better direction. A 2025 blog reflection on “Those who walk away from speedrunning,” for instance, describes Goose as having been “very apologetic for the last three years” and suggests the author believes his efforts to change are sincere, while also acknowledging that others may disagree.
In practice, his role has shifted from active tournament participant or marathon runner to something closer to an exiled historian, continuing to document GoldenEye while remaining controversial in parts of the wider speedrun world.
Legacy in Speedrunning
Ryan “RWhiteGoose” White’s legacy in speedrunning is layered.
As a competitor, his numbers speak clearly. Ninety five GoldenEye world records, eighteen of them untied and several still standing today, place him in the top tier of the game’s history. His early breakthroughs on stages like Surface 2 and Silo helped push GoldenEye’s routing forward, and his long climb into the top three of The-Elite’s rankings made him one of the defining “Eliters” of the mid 2000s.
As a community organizer, his 2009 GoldenEye tournament and repeated involvement in The-Elite’s Summer Contests reinforced the social side of that scene and helped create spaces where players competed not just in-game, but also for community recognition and camaraderie.
As a storyteller, his SpeedLore and Gamer Folklore videos opened a door for countless viewers who might never have otherwise understood the appeal of watching world record tables evolve. Many later speedrun documentary channels, and even independent fan films about GoldenEye, have explicitly cited his work as an inspiration.
At the same time, the language revealed in his past posts and the subsequent GDQ ban left a mark on his reputation. For many speedrunners and viewers, those comments made it impossible to separate the creator from the content. Community debates about how to handle his presence on leaderboards, subreddits, and marathon couches became part of a broader conversation about what kind of behavior speedrunning is willing to tolerate from its visible figures.
When future historians of speedrunning look back on GoldenEye and the rise of YouTube speedrun documentaries, it will be difficult to tell that story without including Ryan White. Any honest account, though, has to hold his competitive and creative achievements alongside the harm caused by some of his public and private statements, and the ways those statements shaped his relationship to the communities he helped build.