In the long history of Super Metroid speedrunning, there are a few runs that define eras and a smaller handful of names that anchor the community’s memory. For more than a decade, the name Zoast has been tied to world records, route innovation, and a calm precision that made one of the most demanding speedgames on the Super Nintendo look deceptively simple. From early single-segment records archived on Speed Demos Archive to a marathon-closing co-op run at Summer Games Done Quick, his work with Super Metroid forms one of the clearest examples of a player shaping a game’s competitive culture over an entire generation.
This Speedrun Legacy Profile traces how Matt “Zoast” Thorne moved from early 2010s marathon stages into a long grind of world records in any percent, 100 percent, low percent, category extensions, and ROM hacks, and how his Twitch and YouTube archives now serve as both primary record and teaching text for a community that still routes around his benchmarks.
Early Years And The SDA Era
Super Metroid itself arrived in 1994 and quickly grew into one of the most studied titles on the Super Nintendo. Rankings from magazines and later retrospectives consistently placed it among the system’s greatest games, which helped make it a natural target when organized speedrunning coalesced on websites like Speed Demos Archive and later Speedrun.com.
By the early 2010s, Matt “Zoast” Thorne appeared regularly in the Speed Demos Archive ecosystem. Runner pages on the SDA site list him under his handle, with Super Metroid as his signature game and a growing catalog of single-segment runs. In October 2013 SDA recorded him with a 44:26 any percent run and a 1:17:54 100 percent run on Super Nintendo hardware, both single segment, setting a new bar for the site’s leaderboards.
Those records did not arrive in isolation. SDA’s marathon companion show The Sunday Sequence Break featured earlier 100 percent runs from Zoast, showing times in the low 1:20s and tracking his steady improvements. The broadcasts give a glimpse of a runner already embedded in the community, experimenting with routing and execution on stream while established names like Cosmo, Dessyreqt, and others rotated through the same shows with their own games.
SGDQ 2013 And A Breakthrough On Stage
For many viewers their first sustained encounter with Zoast’s play came not on SDA’s static pages but on the stage of Summer Games Done Quick 2013. In July 2013, he ran Super Metroid 100 percent at that year’s SGDQ, finishing with a 1:19:55 marathon time that was substantially faster than prior marathon records and helped re-introduce the game to a broader charity marathon audience. The run lives on in multiple uploads from Speed Demos Archive and in GDQ’s own VOD archives, where it is often cited by longtime viewers as an example of how quickly Super Metroid could be pushed under marathon pressure.
Community commentary that followed that run framed him as part of a new wave of Super Metroid specialists who were willing to grind both practice and full runs for marginal gains. Those early 2010s marathons still had a very different feel from later arena productions, but in the middle of that looser format, a clean 100 percent Super Metroid from a focused runner stood out. Over the next several years, the SDA listings and scattered marathon appearances show him steadily swapping older times with new personal bests, as his focus shifted from posting “a good run” to the pursuit of outright world records in every main category.
Building A World Record Resume In 100 Percent
If there is a single category that most clearly traces the arc of Zoast’s climb, it is 100 percent. In the mid-2010s, community threads on the Metroid subreddit celebrated a new 100 percent world record of 1:15:52 from him, a significant improvement over prior records that already demanded near-perfect boss fights and execution through some of the game’s tightest rooms.
He was not finished. By the late 2010s and around 2020, a series of runs lowered that 100 percent record even further, culminating in a 1:12:56 and then a 1:12:55 that pushed the in-game timer into territory that once seemed reserved for tool-assisted demonstrations. Community posts on the Super Metroid and speedrun subreddits marked those moments as turning points, with one widely shared comment arguing that holding world records simultaneously in any percent, 100 percent, and low percent made him “the king of Super Metroid beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Those threads, along with his own uploads of the runs to YouTube and Twitch, now serve as primary sources for the 100 percent era of his career. They capture not only the final times but also his own commentary on routing, boss patterns, and the decisions behind particular risk levels in each segment.
Low Percent, Ice, And The Hardest Ways To Finish Zebes
Alongside his work in 100 percent, Zoast spent years wrestling with Super Metroid’s most restrictive categories. Low percent challenges, and especially low percent ice, ask runners to complete the game with minimal item collection, leading to fragile boss fights, strict ammo management, and routes that force Samus through rooms for which she was never fully equipped.
In this environment, shaving even seconds off a record can take months of practice. Multiple threads on the speedrun subreddit chronicle his progress in low percent ice, including a 50:20 run that stood as a world record at the time and later improvement to a 48:25 with a 35-minute in-game time. Those runs, archived on Twitch and mirrored to YouTube, document the optimization of a category where drops, boss patterns, and room strats all leave very little room for recovery if anything goes wrong.
The combination of 100 percent and low percent dominance mattered for his reputation. Community commentary around his 1:12 100 percent run often notes that, taken together with his low percent and any percent work, he held world records in all three “main” categories at once, a rare accomplishment in any speedgame and especially in one as deeply contested as Super Metroid.
Category Extensions, ROM Hacks, And Nintendo Power%
As the Super Metroid community matured, new categories and ROM hacks broadened the ways runners could interact with the game. Zoast not only participated in this expansion but helped define its upper limits. His Speedrun.com profile shows a long list of first-place times across Super Metroid’s category extensions, including Nintendo Power percent, Any% All Bosses, Low% Speed, and multiple GT Code and co-op categories.
Nintendo Power percent, for example, is a route designed to approximate the item collection path laid out in an old magazine guide. In that category, Zoast set a 1:02:46 run with a 40-minute in-game timer, a world record performance that other runners now compare against tool-assisted demonstration times for the same route.
Beyond the base game, he also took on ROM hacks that reconfigure Super Metroid into something far less forgiving. The hack Super Metroid Impossible, often described as a kind of “evil timeline” for the game, features far stricter damage and movement requirements than the original. On that hack, Zoast has held world records in both any percent and 100 percent, including a 1:56:48 100 percent run that his own uploads describe as a world record performance.
These categories and hacks mattered for his legacy because they showed that his execution and routing skills did not stop at the main categories. Instead, he brought the same attention to detail to variants that demanded a very different mindset, often developing techniques that other players then studied and adapted for their own runs.
The Any Percent World Record Grind
In Super Metroid speedrunning, any percent real-time attack is the headline category that most viewers recognize. The leaderboard at the top of Speedrun.com has shifted slowly over the years as runners squeezed seconds out of an already optimized route. For extended stretches of the 2010s, Zoast traded any percent world records with runners such as Behemoth87, with a famous 41:32 run in the mid-2010s that Reddit threads at the time hailed as the work of “a living legend” and a new standard for the category.
After that early back-and-forth, the leaderboard went through a long period of small improvements from multiple runners. Then, in late 2022, after a hiatus from serious any percent grinding, Zoast returned and produced a 40:45 run. Community posts and his own uploads note that this run became the any percent world record in November 2022 and held that status until August 2023, when Oatsngoats finally beat it with a 40:36.
Even after others moved the any percent mark lower, the gap between his regular play and world record pace stayed small. Discussion threads about that 40:45 run point out that he continued to post times that would rank near the top of the leaderboard even when he was not on world record pace, underscoring how far ahead his baseline execution was compared to most runners. A ShinyZeni “Speedrun Spotlight” feature later summarized the situation by noting that Zoast averaged second place across the top seven Super Metroid categories and held first place in four of them, calling him “definitively the top runner of Super Metroid across the widest breadth of categories.”
In parallel with the real-time grind, he returned to an older timing tradition by setting a separate world record in any percent measured by in-game time. In 2025 a Reddit post from his own account presented a 0:26 IGT any percent run and described the project as a year-long effort to explore an under-investigated timing method from speedrunning’s early years. This run, hosted on his YouTube channel, became a kind of historical project as much as a record, tying modern tech and routing back into the timing standards that defined Super Metroid’s earliest leaderboard discussions.
Marathons, Co-Op Runs, And Public Face Of The Game
While the individual records form the skeleton of his legacy, marathons and co-op runs flesh out the public image of Zoast as a representative of Super Metroid. His SGDQ 2013 100 percent run remains a favorite among long-time Games Done Quick viewers, often cited in discussions of underrated marathon performances both for its execution and for the way it framed the game for a general audience.
A decade later, he returned to the main stage as part of a three-runner co-op performance at Summer Games Done Quick 2023, teaming with fellow Super Metroid specialists ShinyZeni and OverfiendVIP for a 100 percent run that closed the event. Interviews conducted around that run and archived on YouTube show him reflecting on changes in the community since his early SDA days, discussing the mental load of long grinds, and talking about his friendship and rivalry with other top runners.
These appearances help explain why his influence reaches beyond his own channel. For many viewers, their first encounter with high-level Super Metroid play came through a GDQ marathon, and for a significant portion of that audience the player on stage was Zoast. Those marathons in turn pushed new runners toward his Twitch and YouTube archives when they began learning the game themselves.
Streamer, Musician, And Teacher
Outside of recorded runs, Zoast’s day-to-day presence in the community has come through his channel on Twitch under the handle “zoasty.” His channel description introduces him as someone “mostly known for [a] decade long grind of Super Metroid world records” and notes that his “biggest love is music,” a theme that shows up in streams where he alternates between practice, attempts, and live musical performance.
Statistics sites that track his channel activity note that he has been streaming since 2012, mostly in Super Metroid, and that he remains one of the most watched English Super Metroid streamers in recent months. Beyond the numbers, a set of interview and discussion videos with fellow runner ShinyZeni, collected in a dedicated playlist, show him walking through routing decisions, historical changes in any percent strategies, and the mental aspects of returning to a category after long breaks.
His YouTube playlist titled “my world records” functions as both an archive and a teaching tool. Each video typically includes some explanation of the category, context for how long the grind took, and sometimes post-run commentary that breaks down specific rooms or boss fights. For newer runners, these are as much lecture notes as highlight reels, and they help explain why so many modern strat guides cite his runs or compare against his lines.
Legacy In The Super Metroid Community
Taken together, the record times, marathon appearances, category extensions, ROM hacks, and thousands of hours of streaming make a strong case that Zoast is one of the defining figures in Super Metroid speedrunning. Community voices in multiple threads explicitly call him the best or “king” of the game, usually not just because of one record but because he pushed nearly every competitive category to a new level while maintaining a long-term presence as a teacher and collaborator.
Even in periods when others hold the any percent real-time world record, the leaderboard and the broader conversation still orbit his work. Runners frame new times against his old ones, strat videos point back to his world record routes, and retrospectives on the game’s history place his SDA era runs, his SGDQ 2013 marathon, and his 2020s grinds as anchor points in the story.
In that sense, the legacy of Matt “Zoast” Thorne is not a single number on a leaderboard but the way Super Metroid looks and feels to anyone who has tried to run it in the last decade. The lines he drew through Zebes, the categories he popularized, and the commentary he recorded have become part of the shared language of the game, ensuring that long after individual record times fall, his influence will remain visible in every room and every new runner who learns from his work.