In the first decade of online speedrunning, when Games Done Quick events were still small gatherings and SpeedRunsLive IRC channels were the central meeting rooms of the hobby, one runner named Garrison helped define what real time Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country runs could be.
A Texas based runner known almost entirely by his handle, Garrison entered the scene around 2009, rose to hold the Super Metroid any percent world record off and on for several years, and brought a philosophy of “traditional” full game categories to one of the most competitive communities in speedrunning. He became a regular face at Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick, running everything from Bio Force Ape in the AwfulGDQ block to Bucky O’Hare and Donkey Kong Country on the main stage, while also contributing definitions and category standards that still shape how Super Metroid is timed and routed today.
This Speedrun Legacy Profile follows Garrison from his first experiments with Super Metroid on a modded handheld to the widely remembered four way AGDQ 2014 race and his later work with obscure platformers, then closes by considering how his ideas about “traditional” categories and self imposed limits continue to echo through the hobby.
Early Years, Texas Roots, and a Turn toward Speedrunning
Garrison grew up playing the same Nintendo and Super Nintendo titles that would later become his main speedrun games, but he did not enter the speedrunning scene until adulthood. In a mid 2010s interview with Retronauts, he described a turning point in 2009 when he left a job he disliked and began looking for a new focus. As he later put it, he “started speedrunning back in 2009 after quitting a job [he] hated,” and Super Metroid quickly became the game that captured his attention.
Instead of learning on an original cartridge, he first played Super Metroid on a modded PlayStation Portable, chasing “low percentage” completions that he had heard about in early Let’s Plays. From there he began pushing for faster in game times with fewer items, using the game’s internal timer as a target and gradually increasing his mastery over wall jumps, mockball movement, and early item routes.
His introduction to marathons came not as a runner but as a viewer. A friend ran Super Metroid at Awesome Games Done Quick 2010, and watching that run convinced Garrison that the techniques he had been practicing on his own could matter in a broader community. Around the same time he discovered SpeedRunsLive, an IRC based racing hub, and began entering weekly Super Metroid races that would soon become one of the central social rituals of that community.
By the early 2010s he had committed himself to speedrunning seriously. He registered on speedrun.com under the name Garrison and began submitting runs not only of Super Metroid but of a growing list of NES and SNES action games. The profile that survives there today lists dozens of runs across titles like Donkey Kong Country, Metroid, Bucky O’Hare, Donald Land, and various other platformers, alongside his location of Texas, USA.
Super Metroid, SpeedRunsLive, and the Race to Thirty Minutes
Super Metroid remained the center of Garrison’s work for several years. On SpeedRunsLive he became one of the most visible names in the game’s weekly races, and by 2012 and 2013 he had climbed to the top of the any percent leaderboards. In his Retronauts interview he recalled that after joining SRL he raced Super Metroid “a ton” and “eventually rose to be the world record holder in the any percent category off and on for a couple years.”
Community records from that period back up that memory. A preserved Super Metroid any percent leader list on speedrun.com shows Garrison with a run of 45 minutes 17 seconds real time and 30 minutes flat in game time, performed around twelve years before the present, a combination that placed him near or at the top of the category in the early 2010s. In March 2013 a post on the Metroid subreddit celebrated a new performance in which “Super Metroid speedrunner, Garrison” beat his own real time world record and set an in game time record of thirty minutes, underlining how closely the community was tracking his progress.
Later discussions among runners credited him as the first player to surpass Hotarubi’s long standing 2008 any percent world record, a milestone that symbolized the shift from an era defined by early Japanese runners to one led by the English language Twitch and SRL communities. In a TeamLiquid speedrunning thread from 2012, Garrison’s Twitch channel appears in a list of “recommended streams” with the note that “Super Metroid is one of the best runs and Garrison is one of the best,” a simple line that shows how he was already viewed by a broader esports audience.
The technical side of his Super Metroid work included both execution and category definition. As the community debated which tricks should be allowed in “any percent” and how to keep runs comparable across different glitch levels, Garrison became one of the most articulate proponents of what he called “traditional” any percent. In a definition that he wrote for Speed Demos Archive and that is now quoted on A Complete Guide to Super Metroid Speedrunning, he argued that traditional any percent should defeat the four statue bosses and Mother Brain, stay in bounds, avoid the Golden Torizo code and Space Time Beam abuse, and focus on “the feeling it was to go through the game after first play and try to go through it as fast as possible.”
That definition was more than a technical rule set. It captured a philosophy of speedrunning that emphasized respect for the original game design, a preference for glitches that work around level layout rather than breaking the game’s logic completely, and a desire to keep the category accessible to new runners while still leaving room for optimization at the highest level.
Bringing Super Metroid to the Games Done Quick Stage
As his records improved, Garrison transitioned from online races and SDA uploads into the growing marathon scene. A prominent photograph that accompanies the Retronauts piece shows him running Super Metroid at AGDQ 2013, which the caption describes as “the last year the marathons could fit in a room this size,” capturing both the modest scale of that era and his place in it.
If AGDQ 2013 marked his arrival on stage, AGDQ 2014 cemented his place in marathon history. That winter’s four way Super Metroid any percent race between Garrison, Zoast, Ivan, and Krauser has been cited repeatedly as one of the most memorable runs in Games Done Quick history. A Top Ten Historically Significant Speedruns feature on GameFAQs singled out the race as the Super Metroid performance that “lingered most in the memories” of viewers and praised its combination of close competition, expert commentary, and crowd energy. A later list of essential speedruns to watch explained that the AGDQ 2014 four way race was “a sight to behold” and recommended it to newcomers as an entry point into the hobby.
During that race, Garrison’s role was not simply one of four interchangeable runners. He brought to the stage the same traditional any percent philosophy that he had been refining in SRL races, and his comfort with marathon settings showed in his calm reactions to the swings of luck and execution that defined the run. To many viewers who encountered Super Metroid speedrunning for the first time that week, Garrison’s name became permanently associated with the game.
The race and his earlier solo showcases at AGDQ also helped bridge speedrunning and esports audiences. In online discussions around that time, commentators pointed to the Super Metroid race as an example of how speedruns could create competitive drama comparable to traditional esports matches, an argument that would influence later coverage of GDQ events in mainstream gaming press.
Donkey Kong Country and an Eclectic NES and SNES Portfolio
Even as Super Metroid dominated his early years, Garrison rarely limited himself to a single game. In the same Retronauts interview he emphasized that after reaching his goals in Super Metroid he “picked up Donkey Kong Country and held the records in that game for a couple years as well,” while also noting that he had run “about forty games at varying skill levels” and completed runs at six different live marathons.
Donkey Kong Country became his second signature title. On fan curated DKC leaderboards his name appears with an eight minute forty two second any percent time recorded in 2013, placing him among the top runners in the world at that moment. Speedrun.com lists him with a Donkey Kong Country any percent run of eight minutes fifteen seconds and an all stages time of thirty three minutes twenty three seconds on Super Nintendo, evidence of continued refinement and multiple category focus.
On the GDQ stage he brought those skills to a wider audience. Summer Games Done Quick 2014 included “Donkey Kong Country by Garrison in 36:51,” an all stages showcase that appears in the official playlist for that event and has been rehosted many times since. The following years saw him expand his marathon portfolio further. At AwfulGDQ 2013 he was the runner chosen for Bio Force Ape, a notoriously strange unreleased NES title, with the official run index listing “bio force ape, Garrison” in the overnight slot of January 10. At AGDQ 2014 he ran Donald Land, a McDonald’s themed Famicom platformer, in roughly nineteen minutes as part of a block dedicated to obscure games.
These choices reflected his personal tastes. In the Retronauts conversation he explained that he was drawn both to high skill cap games and to “obscure games” whose mechanics interested him, citing Bio Force Ape, Streemerz, and Super Contra 7 as examples of titles he enjoyed learning and running. His later work with Bucky O’Hare, a Konami platformer with a cult following, carried that same blend of technical difficulty and obscurity.
By 2014 he had already filled a gap in the SGDQ schedule by running Bucky O’Hare on short notice, a run he later described as a favor that he had less than a day to prepare for. In 2017 he returned to SGDQ with a more polished Bucky O’Hare Hard Mode performance. The official video listing for that event advertises “Bucky O’Hare by Garrison in 28:26” and notes that the run was recorded live at Summer Games Done Quick 2017.
In explaining what made Bucky O’Hare interesting, he pointed to both its Konami style stage design and an unusual anti piracy feature. Hard Mode, he explained, was originally rigged to make bootleg copies “impossible” to complete by turning every hit into an instant death if the game detected an illegitimate cartridge, a design quirk that speedrunners must work around even when playing on authentic hardware. That blend of deep technical knowledge, appreciation for developer intent, and willingness to tackle games on their hardest settings became a recurring part of his reputation.
Defining “Traditional” Categories and Debating Glitches
Garrison’s influence extended beyond the runs he performed. In forum discussions and wiki entries he became one of the clearest voices arguing for category labels that divided extreme glitch techniques from more conventional runs.
The Super Metroid any percent definition he wrote for Speed Demos Archive, later incorporated into A Complete Guide to Super Metroid Speedrunning, was one expression of that work. By proposing a “traditional” category that stayed in bounds, banned GT Code and Space Time Beam abuse, and focused on the main boss statues and Mother Brain, he gave runners a shared framework for comparing records and for explaining to viewers what they were watching.
At the same time he engaged with the tool assisted speedrun community on TASVideos when debates arose over GT Code, arbitrary code execution, and the legitimacy of cheat codes. In one widely quoted comment he pointed out that the real time Super Metroid community had already “divorced runs that use GT Code into its own categories,” and he suggested that TAS categories should follow a similar pattern rather than mix fundamentally different types of run under one label.
Those arguments were not about banning tricks entirely. Garrison did not oppose heavy glitch runs in principle, and he participated in discussions about how to route out of bounds segments and early fight sequences himself. What he advocated was clarity and fairness in category naming so that viewers and runners alike would understand what rules a given record followed and why a slower but more “traditional” route might still deserve its own leaderboard slot.
Together, his written definitions and his public forum posts helped shape the taxonomy of Super Metroid speedrunning at a time when the community was deciding how to handle emerging techniques like Space Time Beam and GT Code. The fact that modern Super Metroid guides still quote his “traditional any percent” description is itself a marker of that influence.
Stepping Away, Coming Back, and Life Beyond Records
By the middle of the 2010s, after years of Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country grinding, multiple Games Done Quick appearances, and an ever expanding portfolio of obscure platformers, Garrison stepped back from marathon running for a time. The Retronauts interview notes that his last run before that break was not actually SGDQ 2015 but AGDQ 2016, where he raced Rockman 4 Burst Chaser X Air Sliding, a Mega Man ROM hack.
When he returned to SGDQ in 2017 to run Bucky O’Hare on Hard Mode, he framed the comeback as part of a broader attempt to reevaluate his life. He explained that he had “set out to move on in life and pursue relationships and job opportunities,” but when those plans did not work out he decided that revisiting speedrunning could help him “rediscover” himself. Bucky O’Hare Hard Mode, with its punishing one hit kill mechanics and tight platforming, became the project through which he renewed his connection to the community.
Outside of marathons, he continued to stream under the handle 0garrison on Twitch, focusing on Bucky O’Hare, Metroid, and occasionally returning to Super Metroid. His advice to new runners in that period reflected both his years of experience and a willingness to challenge perceived limits. He encouraged newcomers to connect with game specific communities on speedrun.com, SRL IRC, Discord, and Twitch, and he closed his Retronauts interview with a piece of advice that has since been quoted widely in speedrunning circles. People, he argued, tend to assume that only an “idiot” would try what seems impossible, but if a runner wants to “break minds,” they have to be willing to “be that idiot.”
In the years since SGDQ 2017, his direct presence on leaderboards has become less frequent, but his runs continue to circulate through GDQ archives, recommendation lists, and guide pages. New Super Metroid players still encounter his wording in the any percent section of modern guides, and lists of must watch speedruns continue to highlight the AGDQ 2014 race in which he played a central part.
Speedrun Legacy
Garrison’s legacy in speedrunning rests on several intertwined contributions.
First, he helped push Super Metroid any percent into a new era. By racing regularly on SpeedRunsLive, holding the world record off and on for several years, and pushing the in game time down to the thirty minute mark, he moved the benchmark that would challenge later runners like Oatsngoats, ShinyZeni, and others.
Second, he played a central role in making Super Metroid a spectator sport. His AGDQ 2013 performance and especially the AGDQ 2014 four way race helped show how a single player speedrun could generate the kind of tension and narrative associated with competitive esports matches. To many viewers, his name is permanently linked to that moment when Super Metroid racing crossed over into broader gaming culture.
Third, as a Donkey Kong Country runner and marathon regular, he demonstrated that a single runner could balance top level performance in a marquee title with a wide portfolio of obscure games. His work on DKC any percent and all stages, his early presence on fan leaderboards, and his later marathons with Bio Force Ape, Donald Land, and Bucky O’Hare illustrated a particular kind of “Renaissance runner” identity that later multi game specialists would emulate.
Finally, his written and spoken reflections shaped how communities define fairness and tradition in categories. From codifying “traditional” Super Metroid any percent to arguing for category splits around GT Code and cheat based glitches, he helped preserve a space for runs that respect the intended structure of a game while still embracing advanced techniques. That concern for clarity and intentional design continues to influence how runners and moderators on sites like speedrun.com draw lines between any percent, low percent, glitched, and “true ending” categories.
For modern readers and viewers, Garrison’s story is a reminder that speedrunning history is not only a sequence of times and leaderboards but also a record of people who defined what those times mean. As long as players race Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country, and as long as new runners look up “traditional any percent” to understand what they are getting into, traces of his work will remain in the background of every run.