In the first decade when livestreamed speedruns began to leave forum threads and charity marathons for a wider audience, a Canadian player from Montreal was quietly shaping a new way to watch them. Gabriel “Bismuth” Girard started like many runners, chasing faster times in Minecraft and classic console games. Over time he became something different. Through a carefully crafted series of explanation videos, long form histories, and marathon appearances, he turned world record runs into case studies and speedrunning itself into a kind of popular science.
Today, Bismuth is a mostly retired competitor who still streams and runs games on occasion, but his primary legacy sits on YouTube. Under the name Bismuth he hosts a continuing series of Speedrun Explained videos and the History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge, projects that treat runs as experiments and glitches as phenomena to be understood instead of secrets to be hoarded.
Montreal, Minecraft, And A First World Record
Gabriel Girard was born in Canada and is based in Montreal, Quebec. He created his YouTube channel in early 2011, at first uploading a broad mix of gaming videos centered on older titles. The moment that set him apart from other creators came through Minecraft, not Mario.
His first archived upload is titled “Minecraft any% in 18:35.33 (Former WR),” a run that reflects how early he was to treat Minecraft as a formal speedrun rather than a sandbox. The time was a world record for the category when it was set, and it marked him as one of the first players to route the game with the goal of defeating the Ender Dragon as quickly as possible.
That early work led to a defining appearance at Awesome Games Done Quick 2014. In a now fondly remembered marathon segment, Bismuth played Minecraft any percent in front of the AGDQ audience and clocked a new world record during the live run. Viewers on the speedrun subreddit reacted to the clutch ending and the unusual strategy he used in the final fight, where he exploited the fact that beds explode in the End to blast the dragon whenever it charged him. Commenters and Bismuth himself referred to the result as a world record and discussed how much time remained on the theoretical limit given the luck in that particular marathon seed.
In those early years he continued to run and route several games. His profile on speedrun.com shows recorded personal bests and long term involvement in titles such as Donkey Kong 64, several Mario games, and Jetpac. In a number of smaller but highly technical categories like Jetpac’s individual level “1 Rocket” and “8 Rocket” he still holds first place times, a reminder that his analytical style has always been anchored in hands on play.
From Runner To Analyst Of Classic Nintendo Games
By the mid and late 2010s, however, Bismuth’s main impact began shifting away from his own records and toward the way he explained the records of others. His channel gradually moved from general gameplay toward heavily produced commentary videos that unpacked how top speedruns in older Nintendo games actually work, with a particular emphasis on the Mario series.
This transition crystalized in 2018 with the release of “How is this speedrun possible? Super Mario Bros. World Record Explained,” a half hour breakdown of the then current any percent world record in Super Mario Bros. For many viewers it was a first serious introduction to concepts such as frame rules, 1–2 pipe clips, wrong warps in 4–2, and bullet bill manipulation in 8–2. The video circulated widely enough that it was picked up on gaming forums and tech sites that were trying to describe why the record felt near perfect.
That first major Super Mario Bros. explanation was followed by further entries in what fans began to call Speedrun Explained. In late 2018 he revisited the game with “Is 4:55 the perfect speedrun?,” then broadened out to other titles. Over the next several years he released world record explanations for Super Mario 64 tool assisted runs, Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario World, classic GoldenEye levels, and other games that defined speedrunning’s first generation of console records.
These videos are not simple highlight reels. They slow a run down, isolate each decision, and reconstruct the history of a route from early strategies to present day refinements. In effect, they create a public archive of how a record came to be, who contributed which idea, and what limits remain.
The Speedrun Explained Method
Part of what makes Bismuth’s work distinctive within speedrunning history is his method. Each Speedrun Explained video is built around three elements. First is context. Before he starts dissecting a run he situates the game and its category, outlining how previous world records looked and why they mattered. He often uses charts and simple diagrams to show progression in times or to mark the route on a map of the level.
Second is mechanical depth. Rather than simply naming glitches or tricks, he pauses to define them in plain language and then connects them to the underlying code or physics wherever possible. His Super Mario Bros. explanations, for example, walk viewers through how frame rules gate level transitions and how that leads to the famous idea of “saving a frame rule” instead of merely saving frames, which in turn governs acceptable patterns in stages like 1–1 and 8–2.
Finally he treats a record as a living thing. Nearly every episode includes a section near the end that asks whether the run can be improved, what luck would have to look like, and which segments are still fragile. He is careful to respect the runner whose record he is covering, often highlighting their own comments and prior runs. At the same time he frames every world record as a temporary boundary in a longer story.
The broader community has responded to that approach with a mix of appreciation and dependence. Reddit threads about new records in games like Super Mario Bros. warpless have been filled with comments predicting or asking for “the Bismuth video” that will eventually explain exactly what just happened. For many viewers, particularly those outside the tight circles of each game’s community, his channel became the way to “catch up” on a category’s entire history in a single sitting.
The History Of The A Button Challenge
If Speedrun Explained is built around individual records, Bismuth’s other major project is built around a long running challenge. Beginning in 2021 he released a series titled The History of the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge, a multi part documentary that follows how players attempted to complete Super Mario 64 while pressing the jump button as few times as possible.
The series starts with an origin story for the challenge and then traces how different contributors, including well known analyst Pannenkoek2012 and glitch hunters like Tyler Kehne, found ways to lower the number of required button presses using cloned enemies, unusual physics interactions, and precise positioning inside what they describe as parallel universes.
Across eight long episodes released between 2021 and 2022 he treats the challenge as a kind of collaborative scientific project. Each part credits individual discoveries, explains how new techniques change the possibilities for routes, and even borrows language from physics to describe movement through the game’s spaces. The same meticulous style that made his Super Mario Bros. videos accessible now serves a historical purpose, preserving years of obscure research that might otherwise remain scattered across forum posts and tool assisted run descriptions.
Science Communication, Talks, And “Mostly Retired” Speedrunning
Bismuth’s own description of his work has shifted over time from runner to educator. His Twitch panels and social media profiles describe him as a mostly retired speedrunner and emphasize that he is the creator of Speedrun Explained and the SM64 A Button Challenge history series. He still streams and occasionally performs challenge runs, often in Donkey Kong 64, but the foreground has become analysis rather than grind.
That analytical identity has carried him beyond YouTube commentary into formal talks. At Big Techday 22 in Munich he presented on “Speedrunning video games as a gateway to scientific endeavours,” introducing an audience of developers and engineers to speedrunning as a structured way to explore complex systems. The event’s program described him as a video producer and speedrunner who uses his channel to link science communication with video games, using community achievements to teach ideas such as probability and experimentation.
In that sense his public persona now resembles that of other science communicators more than a traditional full time runner. He uses heavily edited videos, clear narration, and visual aids to make the hidden workings of games legible.
Legacy And Place In Speedrun History
Measured purely by records, Gabriel “Bismuth” Girard can point to early world records in Minecraft any percent and a collection of first place times in smaller categories like Jetpac. His ladder results in games such as Super Mario Bros. are respectable but not the defining part of his story. The heart of his legacy lies instead in how he turned speedruns into narratives that preserve technical detail without losing human drama.
His Speedrun Explained series has given the wider gaming world a common language for understanding what happens on the screen when a runner clears a classic game in an impossibly low time. His History of the SM64 A Button Challenge has documented one of gaming’s strangest and most intricate community projects in a way that will remain useful to historians of play long after forums vanish.
Within the speedrunning community he occupies a role somewhere between commentator, archivist, and teacher. Threads that celebrate new records and breakthrough glitches routinely point back to his videos when they need a reference point for how a category reached its current state. For new runners his work often serves as a first lesson in how deep a seemingly simple game can become once its mechanics are pushed to the limit.
For esportshistorian.org and the Speedrun Legacy Profiles series, Bismuth represents a particular kind of figure in competitive gaming’s history. He is not only a competitor or a commentator. He is one of the people who taught the broader world how to watch speedruns and how to think about them as a kind of experimental craft. In doing so he helped fix the stories behind many of the most important early records in a form that future players, researchers, and fans can revisit long after the timers stop.