In the history of Portal speedrunning, few names are tied to the game as tightly as the runner known as Shizzal. An American player who describes himself as a “top speedrunner of the Portal series,” he spent years grinding the original Portal and its offshoots until he briefly held world records in all four of the game’s main categories at once.
Across dozens of records, hundreds of leaderboard times, and visible work as a moderator and mentor, Shizzal helped shape Portal’s modern speedrun scene. His runs were picked up by outlets like PC Gamer and Red Bull, he appeared on the Games Done Quick stage, and even earned recognition from Guinness World Records for his out of bounds performance.
This profile looks at how he went from a forum regular asking for cube throw advice to one of the central names in Portal speedrunning, and why his “grand slam” of categories still matters even as newer runners push the game further.
Finding Portal and Learning the Craft
Speedrun.com shows Shizzal joining the site in the mid 2010s and quickly gravitating toward Portal. Over time he submitted more than two hundred runs across multiple games, with more than a hundred in Portal alone, and eventually took on moderator duties for the game.
Early Portal forum posts capture him as a learner rather than a record holder. In a 2018 thread on “glitchless cube throws,” Shizzal described struggling to get consistent distance on important cube launches and said he hoped to reach a top ten time. Other runners broke down his technique, told him where to stand and when to release the cube, and reassured him that the time save was only a few seconds.
That thread reads like a snapshot of Portal’s middle era. The movement tech was already advanced, but there was still space for dedicated runners to climb the rankings by grinding fundamentals like cube throws, air control, and bunnyhopping. Shizzal came out of that period with enough confidence and knowledge to shift from student to teacher.
By 2016 and 2017 he was answering new players in “which category should beginners start in” threads, pointing them toward glitchless runs and community guides. He was no longer only chasing other people’s times. He was helping define what a beginner path into Portal should look like.
Building a Career Run by Run
On the leaderboards, Shizzal’s portfolio shows both breadth and depth. Speedrun.com records him with more than 180 full game runs and over 40 level runs, most of them in games built on the Source engine or inspired by Portal’s design.
Portal itself sits at the center. The site lists more than one hundred Portal runs by Shizzal across categories such as Inbounds, Inbounds No SLA, Glitchless, Out of Bounds, and category extensions like “All Main Categories” or challenge modes that limit movement or controls.
Around that core he ran and often dominated the wider “Portalverse.” He posted world record times in the story mode of the popular fan campaign Portal: Prelude, including glitchless and inbounds variants, and held top times in the puzzle mod Rexaura and the community pack Portal Elevators.
He also spent time in other titles, from Sanctum to Celeste and Half-Life 2, but the pattern is clear. Everything circles back to Portal and to mastering every way of moving through its test chambers.
The Grand Slam of Portal’s Main Categories
Portal’s leaderboard is organized around four main any percent styles that define the game’s competitive history: Out of Bounds, Inbounds, Glitchless, and Inbounds No SLA, where “No SLA” bans save load abuse techniques.
By early 2020, years of grinding put Shizzal into a rare position. A Reddit post celebrating his 6:53 Out of Bounds run notes that he simultaneously held the world record in all four of these primary categories, and even calls the accomplishment a “grand slam” because only two runners had done it before him.
His Out of Bounds run, the fastest single segment completion of Portal at the time, was recognized by Guinness World Records with an official listing that credited him as the record holder on 19 March 2020 with a 6 minute 53.9 second time.
On the Inbounds side he broke the 10 minute barrier, posting a 9:59 that represented the first sub ten minute run under those rules and became its own bit of speedrunning trivia.
The remaining categories filled in over the same stretch. He pushed Glitchless down into the mid fifteen minute range and took the fiercely contested Inbounds No SLA record with a 12:01 run that he described as improvable even as it sat at the top of the leaderboard.
For a brief window in 2020, the same name occupied the number one slot in every main Portal category. Later records by runners like CantEven would push times even lower, but Shizzal’s sweep remains a turning point for the game’s history and a measuring stick for anyone who came after.
Defining Glitchless for the Wider Audience
Portal’s Glitchless category is meant to show the game at high speed without the most visually extreme tricks. That balance made it a natural fit for marathons and for newer runners, and it became another arena where Shizzal left a visible mark.
He uploaded a series of glitchless world record videos, including a 15:16 run that he labeled as a former record and broke down for viewers. Red Bull’s “10 essential speedruns you need to see” article singled out one of his glitchless performances as the Portal run to watch, describing how he “makes short work” of the game at full speed.
That same skillset carried onto the marathon stage. At Summer Games Done Quick 2020 Online he ran Portal glitchless in 16:07 as part of a late night block that also featured Portal 2 and other first person puzzle games. GDQ’s stats page records the run and the Games Done Quick YouTube channel hosts the full VOD, giving his glitchless route a permanent showcase in front of a global charity marathon audience.
In later forum discussions about what counted as “glitchless,” Shizzal was among the moderators explaining that techniques like portal standing and portal peeking were allowed while more extreme tricks remained banned, a sign of how his routing knowledge and rule interpretation shaped the category’s evolution.
Moderator, Rulemaker, and Community Voice
Beyond his own times, Shizzal has spent years working behind the scenes on Portal’s leaderboard infrastructure and community norms.
Speedrun.com lists him as a moderator for Portal and some related titles, and Portal forum posts show his name attached to threads about verification, demo submissions, and category requests.
In one discussion about whether console runs should have their own category, he weighed in as part of the moderator team that had to balance fairness, technical constraints, and community interest. In another thread he welcomed new runners and pointed them toward glitchless guides, emphasizing accessibility and clarity for beginners.
The picture that emerges is of a runner who treats portal speedrunning as more than personal performance. He reviews runs, enforces rules, explains mechanics, and helps organize category extensions. When players ask about confusing tech like save load routes or movement scripts, they often find his name somewhere in the responses or in the documents linked as references.
Voice Commands, Mods, and Experimentation
Even as he chased record times, Shizzal experimented with ways to keep Portal fresh for both himself and his viewers.
On YouTube he posted a challenge video titled “How I Beat Portal With ONLY My Voice,” where he mapped every necessary action to voice commands and completed the game under those constraints. He followed that idea into Portal 2, exploring whether the sequel could also be driven entirely by spoken inputs.
His leaderboard history shows similar curiosity in the modding space. He holds multiple first place times in Portal: Prelude categories, including story runs that use different rulesets, as well as strong placements in Rexaura and Portal Elevators.
Those runs blur the line between “Portal specialist” and “Source engine technician.” They demonstrate not just knowledge of one game’s chambers, but a broader feel for how Portal’s physics, triggers, and tricks carry over into fan campaigns and challenge packs.
Presence on Streaming Platforms
While speedrun.com and record lists capture the competitive side of his career, streaming profiles show how he presents himself to viewers.
On Twitch he introduces himself with a pronunciation joke and a simple tagline: “What’s up, I’m Shizzal … top speedrunner of the Portal series.” His account has several thousand followers and a library of Portal and Portal 2 VODs, including No SLA runs and practice sessions.
On YouTube he is similarly branded. The channel description calls him a “top level speedrunner of the Portal series” and highlights videos such as his 6:53 Out of Bounds, 12:01 No SLA, and 15:16 glitchless runs as former world records.
Together these platforms extend his influence beyond leaderboards. Viewers who discover Portal speedrunning through a GDQ block or an article can follow those links back to his channel and find full explanations, commentary, and experiments that help demystify the game’s most complex tricks.
Legacy in the Portal Community
Portal is an old game by modern standards, yet its speedrunning scene remains active because of runners who treat it as a living laboratory rather than a solved puzzle. Shizzal belongs squarely in that group.
His 2020 grand slam across Out of Bounds, Inbounds, Glitchless, and Inbounds No SLA marked the end of one era, in which a single runner could hold every major record through sheer dedication, and the beginning of another, where that benchmark inspired others to push times lower.
His presence as a moderator, teacher, and community voice helped give Portal a consistent rule structure and a clear path for new players, while his marathon appearances and challenge runs introduced the game to audiences who might never read leaderboard forums.
Records change hands and categories evolve, but the story of Portal speedrunning in the late 2010s and early 2020s is impossible to tell without Shizzal. His career is a reminder that a legacy in speedrunning is built not only on the fastest times, but on all the quiet work of learning, teaching, moderating, and finding new ways to make an old game feel surprising again.