Kari “Essentia” Johnson came of age in speedrunning at the moment long single player games were moving from message boards and private captures to public marathons and charity broadcasts. A Utah based runner who built her reputation on Final Fantasy marathons and Chrono Trigger mastery, she became one of the earliest recognizable faces of the Speed Demos Archive community and one of the few women in a hobby that was still overwhelmingly male.
By the late 2000s she already held respected records in Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IX, then refined those skills into a style of long form planning that would eventually produce a 5 hour 40 minute single segment 100 percent run of Chrono Trigger, recognized at the time as the world record. At marathons she turned that same discipline into six hour showcases that closed out entire events, and she did it while balancing college, family life, and a growing role inside the early Games Done Quick community.
More than a decade after her peak, Essentia’s name still circulates whenever fans talk about the first era of role playing game speedrunning, the birth of charity marathons, and the moment single segment RPG runs went from novelty to standard practice.
Finding Speedrunning and Becoming the “Destroyer of Final Fantasies”
Essentia first discovered Speed Demos Archive in August 2006 while reading a Majora’s Mask challenge guide on GameFAQs that mentioned SDA videos without linking them. Curious, she searched for them and landed on an early Majora’s Mask run, then began exploring what was possible when players treated games as timed challenges rather than casual playthroughs.
Within a year she had moved from spectator to contributor. A profile on Speedrunwiki later summarized her early career by noting that she specialized in role playing games and held notable SDA records in both Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IX. Her FFVI single segment run on Super Nintendo was completed in 4 hours 48 minutes in July 2007, while her Final Fantasy IX run on PlayStation clocked in at 8 hours 32 minutes that March.
An interview on Speed Demos Archive introduced her to the broader community as “SDA’s sweetheart,” a runner from Utah whose strengths were planning, endurance, and a willingness to tackle long games that most players were content to experience only casually. The same feature called her “The Destroyer of Final Fantasies,” but emphasized that her talent reached beyond RPGs into games like Donkey Kong Country 2 and Dr. Mario 64.
Essentia herself explained that she was drawn to long role playing games because of the planning involved. She loved puzzles and jigsaw building, and saw routing Final Fantasy titles as a related kind of problem solving. That mindset drove her FFVI run, where she had to map an entire single segment route through a game filled with random encounters and fragile strategies such as repeated Joker Doom setups against the Imperial Air Force. In her SDA commentary she described one section where most attempts died, and how advice from the forums led her to rework the route so that the Siren summon could salvage failed Joker Dooms.
In interviews years later she looked back on that first FFVI single segment as a turning point. Speaking to VICE in 2015 she recalled that, in 2007, many players still doubted that a full length RPG could be completed in one sitting at a competitive level. After her FFVI run went live on SDA, other runners began attempting single segment RPGs of their own, and the format quickly grew more common than segmented runs.
Classic Games Done Quick and the Birth of Charity Marathons
By the time charity marathons began to coalesce, Essentia was already a respected SDA runner. When organizers assembled the first Classic Games Done Quick marathon in early 2010, journalists later described the lineup as an “A list” of about twenty top SDA players. That group was overwhelmingly male, but one of the few women on the schedule was Kari “Essentia” Johnson.
Coverage of that first event notes that CGDQ was improvised in the basement of organizer Mike Uyama’s mother’s house after technical problems at MAGFest forced the group to relocate. Within that cramped setting, Essentia ran a suite of games that drew directly from her SDA portfolio, including Final Fantasy VI, Donkey Kong Country 2, and Dr. Mario, while also taking part in late night races and informal teaching sessions that framed the culture of charity marathons as collaborative rather than purely competitive.
Her connection to Games Done Quick deepened over the next few years. Community recollections and forum discussions remember that some early Summer Games Done Quick events were hosted at her house in Utah, an arrangement fondly recalled later in donation messages that referenced “when the venue was Essentia’s house.” That detail is more than trivia. It shows how embedded she was in the logistics of GDQ at a time when the series was still a small, tight knit gathering rather than a weeklong convention in hotel ballrooms.
Chrono Trigger and the Single Segment 100 Percent Record
Although Final Fantasy VI made her a name on Speed Demos Archive, Chrono Trigger became the centerpiece of her legacy. She started working on Chrono Trigger in preparation for the first Awesome Games Done Quick, aiming to create a single segment 100 percent route that collected key items and completed the major sidequests without resets.
At Awesome Games Done Quick 2011 she brought that route to the marathon stage. The GDQ VOD archive lists her run as Chrono Trigger on Super Nintendo in the 100 percent category, completed in 6 hours 36 minutes 18 seconds. The run was one of the longest showcases on the schedule and helped teach both live attendees and early Twitch viewers what a full length RPG speedrun looked like when performed in front of an audience.
Shortly after AGDQ 2011, she began refining the same route offline. In 2012 Speed Demos Archive posted her Chrono Trigger 100 percent single segment run with a final time of 5 hours 40 minutes, along with an extensive written commentary that walks through almost every major split. Later that year a Wired feature on speedrunning listed “Kari ‘Essentia’ Johnson” as the world record holder for Chrono Trigger with that same 5 hour 40 minute time, placing her alongside the top runners in Wind Waker, Super Mario 64, Portal, Metroid Prime, and other headline games.
Essentia’s own description of the run makes clear how demanding it was. She outlined optimizations like using Omega Flare to shred late game bosses, careful control of Chrono’s equipment, and a sequence of sidequests routed around acquiring the Blue Rock and teaching Lucca Flare at exactly the right time. She also described smaller saves, such as menu tricks that skip cutscene transitions and specific ways of manipulating random encounters in places like Lab 16 or the Sewer Access.
Even with that planning, she emphasized that Chrono Trigger’s last dungeon could still break a record attempt. In an interview about Summer Games Done Quick she noted that a 100 percent Chrono Trigger run can encounter anywhere from zero to six fights in one of the final areas, a swing that leaves room for improvement even when the player executes perfectly. That pragmatic attitude, which treats randomness as a challenge to prepare for rather than an excuse, helps explain why other runners held her Chrono Trigger work in such high regard.
Co Operative RPG Marathons and Shared Finales
As Games Done Quick grew, Essentia’s role shifted from solo record setter to co operative marathon anchor. By the mid 2010s she was pairing with other RPG specialists to turn long runs into communal performances.
At Summer Games Done Quick 2015 she joined fellow runner puwexil for a co op Chrono Trigger 100 percent run that served as the marathon’s finale. Promotional pieces and interviews that previewed SGDQ highlighted that closing Chrono Trigger segment, with Essentia herself explaining that the appeal of speedrunning for her had moved from pure competition toward having a reason to keep replaying favorite games. A similar co op Chrono Trigger run by the pair also appeared as the finale of RPG Limit Break 2015, underscoring how closely her name had become tied to that game in the eyes of marathon audiences.
Co operative runs were not limited to Chrono Trigger. She also appeared in marathon lineups with Half Minute Hero and other titles, and earlier in her career had run Final Fantasy VI at the original Classic Games Done Quick, accepting donation driven naming incentives and taking on challenges such as suplexing the Phantom Train that delighted viewers even when they slowed the final time.
These performances showcased a key part of her contribution to the culture around RPG speedruns. She treated long games not simply as puzzles to be solved in isolation, but as platforms where routing, charity, and community interaction could coexist. Viewers tuned in to see precise execution and thoughtful planning, yet they also saw a runner willing to steer that planning toward good television when the schedule or donation incentives demanded it.
Trailblazer for Women in Speedrunning
From the start of her career, Essentia understood that she was an exception in a scene dominated by men. The SDA interview in which she was introduced as “SDA’s sweetheart” noted that she was “one of the few females” in the community at the time, and she told the interviewer that she wanted to encourage other women who loved games to try speedrunning.
That status carried into the marathon era. Pacific Standard’s 2015 feature on Games Done Quick singled out the first Classic Games Done Quick lineup as containing “one of the few female speedrunners at the time, Kari ‘Essentia’ Johnson,” underscoring how visible her presence was in a twenty runner cast.
Nearly a decade later, she returned to that role in a new context. In May 2019 Games Done Quick launched Frame Fatales, an online marathon series that showcases women runners. Among the earliest Frame Fatales events was a four hour fifty one minute Final Fantasy VI run by Essentia, placed beside other women led runs in games like Ristar and Sekiro.
That appearance linked her original work as a rare woman at mixed gender events to a new generation of women focused marathons. For viewers who had discovered RPG speedrunning through her Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy performances in the early 2010s, seeing her return under the Frame Fatales banner underscored how much the community’s demographics and self awareness had changed.
Balancing Family, Faith, and the Demands of Long Runs
Throughout her career Essentia talked openly about the tension between long runs and the rest of her life. In the SDA interview she explained that she began serious speedrunning while finishing college and then transitioned into life as a stay at home mother, using speedrunning as a way to exercise her mind and focus on complex problems. She mentioned that it was easiest to run when her child was asleep and even shared stories of attempts interrupted by pregnancy kicks and wake ups from naps.
Religion also shaped how she approached the hobby. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, she told SDA that her faith taught her patience and that she sometimes prayed for help in staying calm during difficult projects such as the Final Fantasy VI run. That patient approach showed in her commentary, which focused more on solving problems and handling bad luck than on celebrating personal talent.
By 2015 she was clear that she did not want to pursue speedrunning as a full time career. In her VICE interview about Summer Games Done Quick she said that making a living from streaming would require constant broadcasting, and that she preferred to spend that time with her family and keep speedrunning as a hobby.
Her public schedule reflects that choice. After the mid 2010s she became less visible in the wave of new world records on modern leaderboards, and her appearances at mainline GDQ events grew sporadic. Instead, she resurfaced for specific charity marathons such as Frame Fatales 2019 and the Classic Games Done Quick 10th Anniversary Celebration, where she once again ran Final Fantasy VI, this time in roughly four hours seventeen minutes.
Those later runs function more as tributes to her earlier work than as attempts to reclaim leaderboard dominance, yet they reveal a consistent pattern. For Essentia, speedrunning has remained something to fit around family, faith, and other obligations, not something to reorder life around.
Legacy in RPG Speedrunning
Kari “Essentia” Johnson’s measurable achievements are impressive on their own. She produced a series of foundational Final Fantasy runs on Speed Demos Archive, including a 4 hour 48 minute single segment Final Fantasy VI and an 8 hour 32 minute Final Fantasy IX, at a time when many players still doubted that full length RPGs could be completed in one sitting. She carried that expertise into Chrono Trigger, where she crafted a 100 percent route that reached 5 hours 40 minutes and was recognized in contemporary coverage as the world record.
She also played a significant part in shaping the public face of marathons. At Classic Games Done Quick and early Games Done Quick events she combined long Final Fantasy showcases with a willingness to host runners and facilitate the logistics of in person gatherings, even opening her own home for early SGDQ installments. At Summer Games Done Quick and RPG Limit Break she helped establish co operative RPG finales as anchor segments, most memorably in Chrono Trigger with fellow runner puwexil.
Perhaps most importantly, she broadened many viewers’ sense of who could be a speedrunner. As Pacific Standard noted, she stood out at the first charity marathons as one of the very few women in the room. In her own words she acknowledged feeling different from the “typical gamer,” yet she used that position to invite other women to consider speedrunning and to show that motherhood, religious faith, and high level play could coexist.
In the years since her peak competitive times were set, Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series have seen new runners, new glitches, and new records. Yet when historians of the scene look back at how long RPGs first became fixtures of marathons and leaderboards, Kari “Essentia” Johnson remains a central figure. Her FFVI and Chrono Trigger runs are still recommended viewing for anyone who wants to understand how careful planning, patience, and a strong sense of community turned six hour epics into some of speedrunning’s most memorable performances.