In the long history of speedrunning platformers, certain runners become inseparable from the games they play. For A Hat in Time that figure is Doka. Across years of routing, world record pushes, guide writing, and tournament play, his name became woven into almost every part of the game’s speedrunning culture.
By the time the indie collectathon from Gears for Breakfast was establishing itself as a modern answer to Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie in 2017 and 2018, Doka was already recording full game runs and experimenting with the movement tech that would define the meta. Over the second half of the 2010s and into the 2020s, he moved from promising runner to de facto architect of A Hat in Time speedrunning, and eventually onto the stage of Awesome Games Done Quick 2026.
This profile follows that arc from early Any percent experiments to Death Wish marathons, community infrastructure, and a main stage charity marathon run, tracing how one runner helped turn a niche 3D platformer into a deep, well documented speed game.
Growing With A Hat in Time
When A Hat in Time released in 2017, it revived a style of open world 3D platformer that many players associated with the Nintendo 64 era. The game’s tight movement, hat based abilities, and generous routing flexibility made it a natural fit for speedrunners. Within a year, a dedicated leaderboard on Speedrun.com had formed around categories like Any percent and All Time Pieces, and Doka was one of the users whose name appeared again and again on those boards.
Early uploads on his YouTube channel, where he streams and archives runs under the handle DokaSR, show full game Any percent times steadily dropping from the mid forties into the thirties. Videos labeled former world records such as 43:02.25, 40:58.35, 36:36.28, 35:58.69, and eventually 34:11.17 chart a personal progression that mirrors the community’s growing sophistication.
From the start, his runs carried a certain style. They leaned on tight movement, aggressive use of lag based tech when the category allowed it, and a willingness to commit to risky quick kills on bosses. That aggressive, movement forward approach would soon become one of the hallmarks of top level A Hat in Time play.
Shaping Any Percent And Main Categories
Doka’s most visible contributions came in the main full game categories, especially Any percent and All Time Pieces.
On full game leaderboards, the Any percent record traded hands repeatedly in the game’s first few years. Doka’s sequence of improvements into the mid and low thirty minute range helped define what a modern Any percent route looked like, combining faster movement tech with more efficient Time Piece ordering. Even when later runners pushed the time lower, his runs became reference points that others studied, segmented, and built upon.
In parallel, he invested heavily in All Time Pieces, a longer category that puts more emphasis on routing and consistency. Speedrun.com’s record list for All Time Pieces includes a 1:13:39.260 run by Doka in mid 2025, with his name also appearing across many of the individual level records that feed into that route. The pattern is clear. He was not just chasing single run record times. He was mapping out how the game’s many acts, rifts, and DLC chapters fit together at high speed.
Those full game records established Doka as one of the main Any percent authorities. But he was also drawn to the game’s hardest content.
Death Wish And The Appeal Of High Difficulty
When the Seal the Deal DLC launched in 2018 it introduced Death Wish, a challenge mode in which the Snatcher offers long chains of punishing remixed stages that reward stamps for each completed objective. It was an obvious home for speedrunners who already felt at ease in A Hat in Time’s more demanding platforming segments.
Doka became one of the standard bearers for this content. A Reddit thread from mid 2019 highlights a Death Wish Any percent clear in 59:03.20 tagged as a world record, a run that community members immediately described as “nothing short of insane.” On his channel and the leaderboards, later uploads show him pushing Death Wish Any percent further with runs like 55:47.66 and multiple lagless variants around the fifty nine to fifty five minute mark.
These runs were not just about survival. They exported the movement tech honed in Any percent into a mode full of one hit kills, tiny platforms, and camera unfriendly hazards. Watching them, it is clear that his understanding of the game’s physics and trick setups translated into a different kind of showcase. Where the base game Any percent run is a sprint, Death Wish is a gauntlet designed to break the player’s rhythm. Doka made it look rehearsed.
Individual Levels, Rifts, And Workshop Records
Beyond full game categories, Doka’s handle appears over and over across the game’s individual level boards. Speedrun.com’s combined stats for A Hat in Time list over a thousand players and thousands of runs, yet his name repeatedly sits in the first place slot on acts and rifts across Mafia Town, Subcon Forest, Battle of the Birds, and Alpine Skyline, including recent restricted lagless records in levels like Queen Vanessa’s Manor, Contractual Obligations, and the Battle of the Birds finale.
He carried the same approach to the game’s Steam Workshop scene. On the separate A Hat in Time Workshop leaderboards, Doka serves as a super moderator and top runner on custom maps such as Hat Kid’s Moveset Tutorial, Botanical Bypass, Starlane Stroll, Black Hole Rift, and others that have their own records and routing quirks. A Steam collection of rift levels notes his world record on the Starlane Stroll map, underscoring how his movement skills and routing interest naturally extend into custom content.
These records matter both for prestige and for pedagogy. Many prospective runners learn new tricks first from short individual level videos, which Doka has produced for everything from movement tutorials to boss quick kills. In that sense, each IL record is also an instructional piece.
Guides, Tools, And Community Infrastructure
If full game runs and individual level records show what is possible, the guides and tools that surround them show how to get there. Here, too, Doka’s fingerprints are clear.
On the A Hat in Time guides page on Speedrun.com he is listed as the author of core documents such as the List of Community Allowed Mods, the primary Any percent guides, the All Time Pieces guides, and a technical note on getting GameCube controllers working with the PC version of the game. These documents sit alongside a community maintained main category world record progression sheet and console command notes, forming the backbone of the game’s written knowledge base.
On the Workshop side he also authored setup guides explaining how to manage multiple versions of the game and how to configure workshop centric speedrun installations, smoothing out a set of technical hurdles that could otherwise keep new runners from ever attempting a run. Forum threads show him answering practical questions about things like disabling mods for speedruns or pointing players toward movement tutorials and the community Discord, reinforcing that he is not just documenting routes but also onboarding players into the community.
The result is that A Hat in Time speedrunning feels unusually well scaffolded for a relatively niche game. Routes are written down, allowed mod lists are clearly specified, and technical setup problems have dedicated guides bundled right alongside Any percent notes. For many years, those documents have carried Doka’s name.
Tournaments, Races, And On Stream Competition
Within the A Hat in Time community, organized tournaments became a proving ground for both routes and runners. The AHiT Speedrun Community channel on YouTube hosts multiple tournament finals featuring Doka, including Any percent bracket matches, Ship Shape tournaments that focus on specific DLC acts, and All Time Pieces DLC events.
In those series he often appears opposite runners like FMOptimist and doesthisusername, trading games in best of three sets and testing how well finely tuned routes hold up under the pressure of live races. Those matches also served as public demonstrations of the strategies that his guides discussed, creating a feedback loop between written resources and on stream play.
Outside of tournaments, co op videos and joint projects with other runners, as well as appearances in community compilations and mod showcases, helped keep A Hat in Time visible long after the initial wave of release coverage had faded.
Recognition From Developers And Media
One sign of how closely Doka’s name is tied to A Hat in Time is the attention his runs drew from the developers themselves. An IGN Facebook post highlighted a video in which the development team watched and reacted to his full game playthrough, framing his performance as “incredible” and marveling at how he broke apart their stages. That sort of direct acknowledgement from the creators is rare in speedrunning, particularly for a game without a giant publisher.
His workshop creations have also been promoted by community artists and modders. A Bluesky post from a community artist mentions creating an icon and title card for a Celestial Snatcher mod by Doka, an example of how he moved from simply playing the game to actively contributing new boss content and challenge ideas.
These moments do not directly change the leaderboards, but they underscore his position as someone whose work helps define what A Hat in Time looks like in motion, both for players and for the people who built it.
AGDQ 2026 And The Main Stage Moment
The clearest public milestone in Doka’s career arrived at the start of 2026. On January 5, he took A Hat in Time to the stage at Games Done Quick’s flagship winter marathon, running Any percent Lagless on PC at Awesome Games Done Quick 2026. Event trackers and VOD threads list his estimate as 55 minutes and the actual run time as 41 minutes and 30 seconds, with commentary and hosting from familiar community names like selcouthmind, elisamiau, and afterimage.
The inclusion of A Hat in Time on the AGDQ schedule placed it alongside big budget titles and new releases, and it gave a wider audience a glimpse of the routing depth that players inside the community had been building for years. Preview articles and schedule roundups highlighted the marathon’s mix of major RPGs, shooters, and platformers, while the VOD thread on r/speedrun recorded the links and times for viewers catching up after the fact.
For Doka, that run represented more than a single successful marathon appearance. It was a capstone moment that connected his work on local leaderboards, guides, and workshops to the larger speedrunning world. The tech and routes that had been tested in tournaments and refined across years of PB grinds finally appeared in front of one of the largest audiences the scene has.
Legacy In A Hat in Time Speedrunning
Speedrunning legacies are built on more than world records. They depend on how runners shape the culture and infrastructure around the games they love. In that sense, Doka’s legacy in A Hat in Time is unusually complete.
He spent years pushing down full game times for Any percent and All Time Pieces and embraced the punishing Death Wish challenge mode as a showcase for high difficulty routing. He claimed and defended a long list of individual level and workshop records, which in turn provided bite sized examples of advanced techniques for newer runners.
Just as importantly, he wrote and maintained guides, mod lists, and setup documentation that turned a technically quirky PC platformer into a game that ordinary players can pick up and learn to run without fighting their own installation. He served as a moderator and super moderator for both the base game and the Workshop leaderboards, helping to adjudicate runs and keep community standards consistent.
By the time he stepped onto the AGDQ stage in 2026, Doka was not just a runner representing a single title. He was the person whose routes, records, and documents had quietly shaped how that title is played at high speed. However future categories evolve, however new DLC or mods change the game, any complete history of A Hat in Time speedrunning will find his name all over it.