In the history of cooperative speedrunning, few partnerships are as tightly linked to a single game as AJ and Betsruner. Working inside the puzzle-box world of Portal 2, they helped turn its cooperative campaign from a clever bonus mode into one of speedrunning’s most technical and demanding showcases, pushing records down across multiple categories and carrying those routes onto marathon stages.
Portal 2 co-op as a speedrunning frontier
Released in 2011 by Valve, Portal 2 expanded the original game’s single player puzzle design into a full cooperative campaign, with dedicated test chambers that forced two players to think and move as one. Official descriptions of the game highlight this co-op mode as a major pillar, alongside a larger story campaign and new mechanics like gels and excursion funnels.
By the late 2010s, the co-op campaign on Speedrun.com had settled into a familiar set of categories. Full game boards tracked Cooperative Game Any Percent and All Main Courses, with thousands of runs and more than two thousand players listed on the main Portal 2 hub. That busy leaderboard masked what a small, tight knit group of runners actually drove the cutting edge. At the center of that group for years sat AJ.
Leaderboard records list AJ as playing from Rhode Island, with appearances on co-op boards going back many years and a steady trail of personal bests in both full game and level categories. Unlike some runners who bounce from game to game, AJ’s public footprint is focused almost entirely on Portal 2 and its co-op modes, often under the handle “AJspartan” on video descriptions.
Building a partnership and a style
If AJ is the constant in this story, the other half of the equation is Betsruner. On Betsruner’s user page, the history of Portal 2 co-op looks almost like a joint résumé. There are early All Main Courses times with other partners, but the top entries tell a different story: Cooperative Game Any Percent in 17 minutes 42.567 seconds with AJ, All Courses in 34 minutes 42.730 seconds with AJ, and a high-placing 25 minute 56 second All Main Courses run with the same pairing.
These runs, combined with a string of world record uploads on YouTube, reveal how the two divided labor in-game. Many commentaries describe one player taking the more precise “controller” role while the other lines up movement, flings, and risky portal placements. Even without long interviews, watching their shared demos shows a particular rhythm: barely audible countdowns, simultaneous jumps into funnels, snapshots of portals placed at the last possible moment, and an almost casual willingness to reset rooms that would still count as fast for most runners.
All Main Courses: from Guinness record to sub-26
One of the clearest snapshots of AJ’s impact comes from the All Main Courses category, the most recognizable way to run Portal 2’s co-op campaign from start to finish. In January 2019, Guinness World Records recognized AJ and Betsruner for the fastest single segment completion of Portal 2 co-op All Main Courses, credited with a time of 27 minutes 30.967 seconds, verified using Speedrun.com data.
That Guinness listing captures a moment in the middle of a larger arc. On Betsruner’s channel, video titles trace the same category through a chain of “Former World Record” uploads, with times like 26:59, 26:55, 26:09, and then a 25:53 run where the description talks about pushing lower still. The leaderboards echo that climb. Betsruner’s profile shows their best cooperative All Main Courses time at 25 minutes 56.050 seconds with AJ, near the top of a board filled with teams using the same route concepts they helped normalize.
The specifics of those improvements live in individual chambers rather than in one big discovery. Watching their sub-27 and sub-26 runs side by side reveals new corner cuts around funnels, faster laser alignment tricks, tighter abuse of momentum in long fall sections, and bolder risk-reward decisions such as skipping intermediate platforms. Many of those optimizations are now standard in modern routing, but at the time they forced the community to rethink what “clean” co-op movement and timing looked like.
Any Percent and the 17:42 benchmark
Alongside All Main Courses, AJ and Betsruner also focused heavily on the Cooperative Game Any Percent category, which allows more aggressive use of glitches and skips. A December 2020 post on Reddit’s r/speedrun forum highlighted their Any Percent time of 18 minutes 48 seconds as a new world record and noted that the previous mark at 18:58 had also been held by the same duo.
The story did not stop there. On the cooperative Any Percent leaderboard, AJ and Betsruner eventually appear at the top with a recorded time of 17 minutes 42.567 seconds on PC, listed as achieved four years prior to the present leaderboard snapshot. That entry stands out in more ways than one. It represents nearly a full minute shaved from their earlier publicized records, and it was set in an environment where other top teams were already familiar with major skips. Lowering the time into the 17 minute range had less to do with discovering a single new glitch and more to do with perfecting execution and consistency across dozens of chambers and out-of-bounds tricks.
AJ’s role in that process is visible both in recorded runs and in scattered community appearances. A solo co-op run credited to AJ on the Portal 2 boards, for example, shows the same willingness to adapt co-op tech to different formats, reinforcing the idea that he was not just learning existing inputs but helping interpret them in new contexts.
Marathons and showing co-op to the world
For most casual viewers, AJ’s work came into focus in the summer of 2020, when Games Done Quick pivoted to an online format during the COVID-19 pandemic. At Summer Games Done Quick 2020 Online, AJ and Betsruner ran Portal 2’s All Main Courses co-op category in 33 minutes 28 seconds, finishing well under the marathon estimate on the official schedule.
Coverage from that day emphasized how different co-op Portal 2 looked from the first game’s more familiar single player run. One write-up singled out AJ and Betsruner’s performance as a highlight of the marathon’s second day, noting how the constant barrage of portals and synchronized movement turned a puzzle campaign into a sustained showcase of teamwork under pressure.
GDQ was not their only stage. A few months later, the pair appeared on the schedule for SourceRuns Marathon 2020, listed for another Portal 2 co-op All Main Courses run, this time with a longer, more relaxed estimate suited for commentary and teaching. Across these events, AJ’s presence helped cement Portal 2 co-op as a marathon staple, showing organizers and audiences that the mode could be both understandable and entertaining even at top speed.
Community work, races, and fundraisers
Outside of leaderboards and headline marathons, AJ’s name appears throughout the Portal 2 co-op scene in more informal contexts. Speedrun.com records and video descriptions show him pairing with runners like Msushi and others in partner swap races and experimental categories, including challenges that mixed different co-op types or imposed additional restrictions.
Fundraiser events and community marathons also benefited from his time. A Portal 2 Speedrun Hub fundraiser thanked AJ alongside several other core runners for donating their time to a long charity broadcast, reflecting how much the scene relied on a small circle of veterans willing to route, practice, and then perform on demand for an audience.
Taken together, these smaller appearances sketch a picture of a runner who did not disappear once world records shifted. Instead, AJ continued to race, commentate, and contribute to routing conversations as the community adopted new tools and adjusted category rules. His involvement in co-op events that used updated timing tools and anti-cheat mods helped bridge the gap between older record-setting runs and newer standards for verification.
Legacy in portals, demos, and leaderboards
Speedrunning legacies are not always measured in total world record days. They are often measured in how a game feels to run after a particular person’s era. For Portal 2 co-op, the modern experience is built on routes, tricks, and expectations that AJ helped define alongside Betsruner. Their Guinness-recognized All Main Courses record captured a mid-campaign milestone, but the subsequent march toward sub-26 and the 17 minute Any Percent landmark on Speedrun.com reveal the deeper influence of their work.
Today, new teams working through Portal 2’s co-op boards study archived demos and marathon VODs that still bear AJ’s name in the timer or in the splits. Even when those runs are no longer world records, they remain templates for how to plan chamber order, how to divide responsibilities between players, and how to communicate under pressure. In that sense, AJ’s legacy is not only in the numbers on a leaderboard but in the muscle memory and callouts of every co-op team that followed.
For a game built around the simple idea of connecting two points, it is fitting that Portal 2’s cooperative history runs through a partnership like AJ’s. Between official records, marathon showcases, and countless practice rooms, he helped connect casual play with high level optimization, leaving behind a route map that continues to shape how runners think with portals.