In the mid 2000s, long before Celeste reached consoles and charity marathons, a small freeware platformer about a red experiment named Ogmo was teaching players how to die hundreds of times on the way to a single perfect jump. Released on Windows PC in June 2004, Maddy Thorson’s Jumper Two took the bones of the original Jumper, rebuilt its physics, and dropped sixty tightly constructed stages into the hands of anyone willing to download it from her personal site.
For most players Jumper Two is a brutally difficult precision platformer. For a tiny speedrunning community, it became something else. Its instant respawns, built in timers, and exacting jump physics turned each stage into a time trial puzzle. A decade later, that quiet culture of leaderboard chasers surfaced on one of the biggest stages in speedrunning when runner Hornlitz took Jumper Two to Summer Games Done Quick 2016 and threaded Ogmo through an Any percent showcase in just over twenty two minutes.
This Speedrun Game Chronicles entry follows Jumper Two from freeware release and forum scoreboards to its small but lasting footprint on Speedrun.com and at GDQ, tracing how a short indie platformer carved out a niche as both training ground and showcase run for fans of difficult 2D platformers.
Ogmo, New Physics, And A Game Built For Repetition
Jumper Two is the second game in Maddy Thorson’s Jumper series. It stars Ogmo, a failed military experiment created in 1888, recaptured after the events of the first game, and then thrown out of a plane in the opening of the sequel. The story is simple and strange, but it does what it needs to do. It gives Ogmo a reason to keep jumping.
Mechanically, Jumper Two is much more ambitious than its predecessor. The game contains sixty main stages, grouped into ten themed sectors of five levels each and a final stretch of ten stages. Each screen is a single, self contained challenge of spikes, moving hazards, and environmental gimmicks. The only objective is to reach the exit, but almost every level also hides collectible gems for players who want more than a simple clear.
Ogmo’s movement is defined by four jump techniques. A normal jump lifts him off the ground. A double jump lets him correct once in midair, but only after leaving the ground or touching a power up. The new wall jump lets Ogmo cling to vertical surfaces and rebound in the opposite direction, while the skid jump rewards an abrupt change of direction with extra height. These moves combine into long sequences of buffered inputs, tight wall climbs, and diagonal jumps that are only barely possible.
Jumper Two ships with both a normal and an easy difficulty. Normal mode offers no checkpoints and full access to the game’s unlocks. Easy mode adds checkpoints inside stages but locks out time trials and certain unlockables, encouraging serious players to learn the standard difficulty if they want to see everything. The game also tracks best times per stage and unlocks a time trial mode, turning each level into a kind of built in individual level speedrun.
In short, Jumper Two is structured like a speedrunner’s practice tool. The player starts instantly, dies instantly, and sees their performance quantified as a small number beside each stage. The pain comes from how punishing those numbers are to improve. Reviews and retrospectives from the era repeatedly describe the game as one of the best but most ruthless freeware platformers of its generation.
Early Time Trials And Forum Competition
While there is no official speedrun category list from the mid 2000s, primary sources give a sense of how players began treating Jumper Two as a game to race rather than simply to beat. The built in timer and gem system pushed players to replay each stage, shaving tenths of a second off their best times and trying risky routes to reach out of the way gems.
On forums connected to Thorson’s work, players traded strategies, custom levels created in the Jumper Two Editor, and challenge formats that look very close to later speedrunning culture. An archived thread for an “Olympic Decathlon” challenge built around Jumper Two’s editor keeps score in points based on gem counts and level performance. It features players arguing about how best to route stages, how many gems can be collected efficiently, and even whether it is acceptable to reset with the function keys to escape bad situations, complete with someone admitting that they feel wrong about “terminating Ogmo’s life that way.”
The French runner who submitted a single segment Jumper Redux run to Speed Demos Archive in 2010 described Jumper as “a pure platform game” and noted that they also kept casual speedrunning times for several stages of Jumper Two and Jumper Three. In the same write up, they point out a small but important technical quirk in the series: the original Jumper engine suffers from a brief lag spike when music loops, a problem they say also exists in Jumper Two and can ruin precise jumps if it occurs at the wrong moment.
Taken together, the in game time tracking, community challenges, and comments from early runners show that years before Speedrun.com existed, Jumper Two already had the basic pieces of a speedrun scene. Players were timing themselves, optimizing sequences, and arguing about tiny technical details that might make or break a run.
From Freeware Relic To Speedrun.com Niche
By the mid 2010s, Speedrun.com had become the default home for many PC freeware speedruns, and the Jumper series came along with it. The Jumper Two page lists Any percent and 100 percent categories, with internal statistics noting eleven runs submitted by two players and a small follower count.
Both categories are dominated by Hornlitz, a runner known for his work in precision platformers like Celeste, as well as other titles. His profile lists a 19 minute 15 second Any percent time and a 1 hour 23 minute 6 second 100 percent run, each submitted about nine years before this writing. In his Backloggery entry, he notes that he has beaten all sixty stages and collected every blue and red gem on normal difficulty, which lines up with community expectations for a full completion playthrough.
No other runners appear to have seriously contested those records on Speedrun.com. The site lists no guides and no forum threads for the game, and its stats page shows the leaderboards being added around the time Hornlitz was active in the mid 2010s. Jumper Two’s speedrunning community is therefore unusually compact. It is essentially a single dedicated runner posting his personal bests and then carrying those skills into a marathon showcase.
Jumper Two On The GDQ Stage
Jumper Two’s most visible moment came at Summer Games Done Quick 2016, where it was slotted into a block of punishing PC platformers that also featured Celeste Classic, Prompt, Escape Goat 2, and Super Meat Boy.
According to the official schedule and GDQ tracker, the run took place on July 5, 2016. Hornlitz ran Jumper Two Any percent with an estimate of roughly thirty minutes and a final recorded marathon time of 22 minutes 4 seconds. The run was paired with a donation incentive to show the special stages, and contemporaneous coverage from sites like Shacknews notes the incentive total and describes Jumper Two as part of a sequence of highly technical platformer runs meant to highlight PC indies.
The VOD on the GDQ YouTube channel preserves that performance. The commentary walks viewers through how Ogmo’s different jumps interact, why certain sectors are considered chokepoints, and how the game’s instant death design means one missed skid jump can erase a good pace. Short clips preserved on Twitch capture small memorable moments and crowd reactions during the same run.
For many viewers, that GDQ showcase was their first exposure to Jumper Two. PC Gamer’s preview of the marathon encouraged readers to pay special attention to the sequence of PC precision platformers, calling out Jumper Two by name and framing the block as a crash course in obscure but rewarding indie speedgames. Discussions on Reddit during and after the event also linked the run back to the larger story of Maddy Thorson’s work and to questions about how much the Jumper series influenced Team Meat’s Super Meat Boy, a connection that earlier threads in the speedrunning subreddit had already raised.
Within the history of Jumper Two speedrunning, that single GDQ appearance effectively marks the public peak of the game’s visibility.
Categories, Routes, And Techniques
On paper, Jumper Two’s speedrun categories are straightforward. Any percent focuses on reaching the final credits as quickly as possible. That category plays the sixty main stages in order on normal difficulty, using the default route and ignoring optional gems whenever they would add risk or time. 100 percent attempts to clear not only the main stages but also secret levels and all gem objectives, since gems and fast times are tied to unlocks and are disabled if the player uses certain easy mode features or modification toggles.
Routing in Any percent therefore revolves around stage knowledge, not sequence breaks. Public sources do not document any large glitch based skips or out of bounds tricks, and the game’s single screen stage design makes such exploits difficult to find. Instead, runners focus on optimizing how they chain Ogmo’s four jump types while respecting the internal cycle timing of moving hazards. Sector layouts often demand that a player arrive at a given cannon or moving platform on a specific cycle, which in turn grows out of how precisely they handled earlier jumps.
The physics make that timing fragile. Ogmo accelerates and stops quickly, which means that small input differences can produce big positional changes several jumps later. Juniors new to the game often overcorrect or hold a direction for a fraction of a second too long, which sends Ogmo into spikes even if the initial jump looked correct. Long strings of wall jumps and skid jumps require the runner to think in terms of rhythm and sound rather than simple visual cues.
A further wrinkle comes from the engine’s brief stutters when music loops. As the Jumper Redux speedrunner noted in their Speed Demos Archive comments, the original version of Jumper suffers a noticeable short lag spike each time a track restarts, and the same issue exists in Jumper Two. On most stages this is only an annoyance, but if a track loops during a long sequence of tight jumps, it can throw off the runner’s timing in ways that are hard to predict.
In 100 percent, the route gains a new layer. Gems that are trivial to grab casually can become major time losses in a run, since they often sit just off the main path behind extra hazards. Video walkthroughs of Jumper Two 100 percent and long form Let’s Plays show how full completion runs must weave through hidden passages, revisit earlier sectors to reach secret levels, and plan gem collection around Ogmo’s limited midair adjustments.
The result is a speedgame that demands concentration more than creativity. There are few radically different routes. Instead, runners try to internalize the intended paths for each stage so thoroughly that they can execute them without hesitation. That style of play made Jumper Two a natural fit for a charity marathon block designed to showcase how elegant a difficult platformer can look when someone has fully mastered its movement.
Community, Influence, And Legacy
Measured by raw numbers, Jumper Two’s speedrun community is tiny. Speedrun.com lists only two runners and eleven runs. The GDQ schedule shows only one marathon appearance.
Measured by influence, the picture looks different. The game is part of a lineage of freeware platformers that trained a generation of players and designers in demanding, restart friendly stage design. Community wikis and retrospectives point to the Jumper series as a key example of what fans call “Nintendo Hard” indie games, and they track Ogmo’s cameos across later titles, including a playable appearance in Super Meat Boy and costume references in An Untitled Story.
Modern discussions about Super Meat Boy and Celeste frequently name check Jumper Two as a design ancestor, with players on forums like r/Games and r/speedrun recommending it as a free, legally downloadable way to experience Maddy Thorson’s early work and calling it some of the best and hardest platforming of its era.
Within that context, the tiny set of official Any percent and 100 percent runs function as a kind of historical record. They show how one skilled runner navigated the game when speedrunning infrastructure finally caught up to a decade old freeware release. The SGDQ 2016 VOD preserves what a clean Any percent run looked like in real time on stage. The Backloggery log and Speedrun.com entries preserve what those skills looked like when translated into personal best attempts at home.
For players coming to Jumper Two through Celeste or TowerFall, those records offer a roadmap. They show where to save time, where to respect the hazards, and how to treat each stage as a short, self contained challenge that rewards repetition and precise control.
Jumper Two will probably never have dozens of active runners or a constant stream of leaderboard updates. Its role in speedrunning history is quieter. It is a short indie game that trained both players and a designer, then stepped back as those people carried its lessons into newer works. In that sense, its small but well documented speedrun history fits the design perfectly. Every jump is deliberate, and every successful run feels like a narrow escape.