Across the history of speedrunning there have always been players who chase the biggest stages and the most watched games, and there have been others who quietly build whole pockets of history in the shadows of those spotlights. FlannelKat belongs to the second group. A runner from North Carolina in the United States who lists she her pronouns, she has spent nearly a decade turning overlooked, sometimes downright strange games into living categories on leaderboards and marathon schedules.
On paper her profile looks like a collector’s shelf more than a focused resume. By 2024 she had logged 164 full game runs across 100 unique titles and 109 categories, with a total recorded run time of more than four and a half days. Scrolling through that list takes you from familiar names like Super Metroid and The Legend of Zelda to obscure TurboGrafx 16 action titles, British microcomputer oddities, and digital pinball simulations. The variety is the point. FlannelKat’s legacy is less about one era defining record in a single flagship game and more about proving that almost any game can be shaped into something worth running, documenting, and sharing.
Early Runs And A Broad Base
Speedrun.com records her first submitted runs about nine years before the present, with early work in titles such as Tetris on NES, Super Metroid, and a spread of indie platformers like INK, Slime San, and Mighty Gunvolt. Those first submissions do not chase world records in the most competitive categories. Instead they show a runner testing the waters of timing, routing, and recording as many players of that era did, picking familiar titles and then gradually drifting toward stranger choices.
Within a few years the center of gravity in her profile shifts. The NES and Super Nintendo staples remain, but they become only a fraction of a much larger catalog that includes PC Engine and TurboGrafx 16 games, Amiga titles, Apple II educational software, and experimental modern indie releases. By the time she has built up that catalog of 100 games, her list reads like a guided tour of side rooms and back shelves that many retro fans never explore.
Pac Land Across Boards And Platforms
If there is one series that ties a large portion of her work together, it is Pac Land. In the mid 2010s and early 2020s she carved out a reputation as one of the most dedicated runners of this unusual side scrolling Pac Man game across multiple platforms. On speedrun.com she holds first place times in the Arcade US four trip category with a 6 minute 08.270 second run, and in the Atari Lynx four trip category with a time of 8 minutes 42 seconds. She also recorded strong times on the TurboGrafx 16 version, including a 27 minute 09 second run in the eight trip category and additional four trip completions.
Those times are not merely curiosities buried on an inactive board. They sit alongside forum threads and community discussions in which she helps shape how Pac Land is timed, how trips and rounds are separated into categories, and how ports should be compared. One Pac Land thread from 2021 preserves her comments about how to handle the Atari Lynx version and how to define trip based categories so that runners can meaningfully compare arcade and home versions. In a genre where many players focus on a single platform, FlannelKat treats Pac Land as an ecosystem and treats each port as worth documenting.
Pac Land also serves as an early example of the way she gravitates toward games that sit on the border between well known and forgotten. The franchise is recognized enough that many retro fans know its name, but few have studied its timing quirks across boards. FlannelKat’s runs, notes, and discussions help fill that gap.
TurboGrafx, PC Engine, And Deep Cut Action Games
Pac Land is only a small part of a much deeper attachment to the TurboGrafx 16 and PC Engine libraries. Her profile is full of times in games like Bravoman, China Warrior, Exile, Valis IV, Fray in Magical Adventure, Energy, and Beyond Shadowgate. In many of those titles she is not just participating but setting the pace. She holds first place times in categories such as Valis IV any percent, Fray in Magical Adventure any percent, Energy any percent, and Exile: Wicked Phenomenon any percent without the Working Designs localization.
These games share some traits. They are mechanically demanding, often a little awkward by modern standards, and they exist on hardware that never reached the mass market penetration of the NES and Super Nintendo in North America. They are the sort of titles that might have remained curiosities without a small group of runners willing to learn their quirks and demonstrate that they can be completed quickly and reliably. When a player sees a clear leaderboard with top times, verified videos, and established categories for Valis IV or Bravoman, FlannelKat’s runs are part of what makes that structure possible.
Her work on The Adventures of Rad Gravity shows the same pattern. In that NES action platformer, she posted a 36 minute 23 second time in the 100 percent category, good enough for second place, and wrote in the run description that she was partly motivated by how lonely the 100 percent board looked. Where some players look for established races, she looks for empty leaderboards that could use a spark.
Dicing Knight, Weird Dreams, And Other Deep Cuts
The further down her list of games one scrolls, the stranger the selections become. There is Dicing Knight Period on WonderSwan, where she recorded a 38 minute 09 second clear and left notes about the challenges of routing a roguelike style action game for consistency. There is Weird Dreams, a surreal DOS title where she posted a 10 minute 51 second time in the “All Dreams” category, embracing a game that even among retro enthusiasts is better known from magazine screenshots than from detailed play.
Other entries include Astrosmash on Intellivision, Venture and 2010: The Graphic Action Game on ColecoVision, Amazing Penguin on Game Boy, and On The Ball on SNES. None of these games anchor large modern speedrun communities, yet each one has a complete, verified run from her that shows where the boundaries of play can be pushed. In several cases she occupies first place in categories that had either no submissions or only a single early time before she arrived.
Taken together these runs form a kind of informal archive. They document how far into the margins a dedicated player can push speedrunning as a practice. They also provide a blueprint for others who might want to follow, complete with video evidence, timing notes, and category definitions.
Digital Pinball And Moderation Work
In recent years FlannelKat’s attention has turned more visibly toward digital pinball. On speedrun.com she serves as a moderator for Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball, Digital Pinball: Necronomicon, and Akira Psycho Ball, three console based pinball titles that combine simulation with stylized level design. Her moderator role means that she does more than simply submit runs. She verifies other players’ times, manages categories, and helps keep the boards active.
She also leads by example. On Flipnic she holds a first place time in the New Game Plus category on PlayStation 2 emulator with a run of 1 hour 03 minutes 54 seconds. In Digital Pinball: Necronomicon she sits at the top of the Realms Mode leaderboard with an 18 minute 40 second clear on Saturn emulator. In Akira Psycho Ball she has the world record in Story Mode with a 24 minute 59 second run.
Digital pinball runs live at a crossroads between traditional score attack arcade play and modern route driven speedruns. By moderating these boards and pushing their categories forward, FlannelKat helps demonstrate how pinball tables, with their randomness and complex scoring rules, can still be framed as clear, repeatable speed goals.
Marathons, Co Op Runs, And Community Presence
Although much of her work lives on leaderboard pages, FlannelKat has also brought these games to marathon audiences. In 2022 she appeared at the SpeedGaming NKH Marathon with a Pac Land run, introducing that board shaped classic to viewers who might only have known Pac Man from its original maze format. She has also been featured in magFAST showcase events, including a run of I Wanna Stop The Simulation and other “fast but offbeat” titles that fit the marathon’s focus on unusual games.
Marathon clips and schedule archives show her name associated with events like Awfully Silly and Mercy Kill, community marathons that explicitly spotlight flawed, difficult, or strange games, as well as with the Big Bad Game A Thon, a long running event dedicated to “bad” games and oddities. These appearances match the pattern in her leaderboard choices. When a marathon wants a game that is both entertaining and underrepresented, FlannelKat is a natural fit.
Her collaborative work reinforces that impression. On the co op ghost hunting game This Is A Ghost she co holds first place times in team exorcism categories with runners PeaceEgg and PunchMuffin, demonstrating that even in a catalog dominated by solo retro games she is comfortable working in team settings and embracing modern indie titles.
Guides, Threads, And Quiet Infrastructure
Speedrun.com lists her as the author of five guides, although many of those documents and forum posts are short and focused on particular routing questions or category definitions. In Pac Land threads she writes about how to interpret trips and loops. In discussions around digital pinball she contributes timing rules and suggestions for how to handle in game randomness.
This sort of work is easy to overlook. It rarely shows up in highlight reels or external coverage. Yet without runners willing to write guides, explain their routes, and verify the runs of others, many leaderboards would stagnate. FlannelKat’s guides and moderation actions are part of the quiet infrastructure that allows obscure games to have coherent, trustworthy records.
Making Space For Strange Games
It would be easy to measure FlannelKat’s legacy only in world records and leaderboard placements. There are plenty of those. She holds or has held first place in Pac Land on multiple platforms, in several digital pinball tables, and in a long list of deep cut action games on systems ranging from WonderSwan to TurboGrafx 16.
A fuller picture, however, sees her contribution in the broader shape of her work. Over roughly a decade she has shown that a speedrunner does not have to choose between one flagship title and complete obscurity. Instead she has modeled a third path, one where a player builds an identity around curiosity, variety, and a willingness to learn systems that most people have never heard of.
When future historians of speedrunning look for evidence that the hobby was about more than a handful of main stage games, they will find it in profiles like hers. The records she set in Pac Land, Bravoman, Exile, and Digital Pinball: Necronomicon, the guides she wrote, and the marathons where she showcased weird games for appreciative audiences all testify to a simple idea. Any game can be worth running if someone cares enough to give it structure, to write down what they learn, and to invite others in. For many of the games on her list, FlannelKat is that someone.