In the early 2010s, charity marathons were transforming speedrunning from a niche forum hobby into a spectacle watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Games Done Quick and its winter event Awesome Games Done Quick became the public face of that change, a place where hard optimization, goofy crowd pleasers, and community in jokes all shared the same stage. Out of that moment came a short but memorable appearance by a runner best known simply as Missy, whose online handles “missy goes fast” and “missygoesfast” captured both the joke and the reality of her role in the scene.
Her legacy is not a stack of verified world records on leaderboards. Instead, it lives in the memory of a single marathon block and the way she turned a notoriously awkward physics comedy into one of AGDQ 2014’s most beloved co op showcases.
Surgeon Simulator And A Game Built For Disaster
To understand why Missy’s appearance landed so strongly, it helps to look at the game she carried onto the stage. Surgeon Simulator 2013 began life as a 48 hour game jam project and was later expanded into a full release. In that version players control a clumsy would be surgeon, Nigel Burke, using deliberately unwieldy controls that make every operation feel like a slapstick accident. Reviews and retrospectives from the time describe it as a blackly comic, physics driven “operation sim” that is designed less around realistic surgery and more around the spectacle of chaos.
Developed by Bossa Studios in London, the game was one of the surprise indie hits of 2013, notable both for its origins at the Global Game Jam and for the sheer number of viral videos it spawned. By 2016 Guinness World Records reported more than three million copies sold across platforms, making it one of the best selling titles ever to emerge from a game jam.
For speedrunners, Surgeon Simulator 2013 posed an unusual challenge. Most classic speedgames rewarded memorization and precision. Surgeon Simulator was built around unpredictable physics, fiddly controls, and the constant threat of everything going wrong on camera. Turning that into a reliable marathon performance required a different kind of skill, a willingness to ride the chaos instead of stamping it out.
Building A Presence In The GDQ Community
Missy arrived at AGDQ 2014 as part of the Speed Demos Archive community that had organized earlier marathons and helped seed the first Games Done Quick events. Speed Demos Archive Like many early runners she used forums, IRC, and marathon attendance as much as any official leaderboard to carve out a place in the scene.
In the weeks after the event she introduced herself on the post AGDQ “keeping in touch” thread, giving fellow attendees and viewers a way to follow her outside the marathon. There she pointed people to her Twitter handle @missygoesfast and to a Twitch channel under the name “otokonokohime,” inviting messages and conversation. On social media she later adopted the display name “mickey” but kept the same handle and the same mix of self deprecating humor and visible affection for her friends and audience.
Her presence at AGDQ 2014 went beyond a single run. Viewers on the r/speedrun subreddit remembered her as a constantly visible supporter on the marathon couch, calling her “MVP support” and singling out her energy during one of the Yoshi’s Story segments as a highlight of the event. In a community that was still heavily male both on stream and on stage, other fans would later point to Missy in discussions of early woman runners at GDQ, recalling her co op surgeon run and general on stream presence when explaining to newer viewers that women had been part of the marathons from the beginning.
AGDQ 2014: 2014’s “Octodad”
The centerpiece of Missy’s legacy is a single run during Awesome Games Done Quick 2014. In the official GDQ run index, Surgeon Simulator 2013 appears with the category “Any% All New Surgeries Co op,” credited to ProfessorBroman and Missy, with an estimated time of twenty minutes. The run was scheduled in the early morning hours of January 10, 2014, leading directly into a long Borderlands 2 co op block.
Within the marathon community the organizer spreadsheet even jokingly labeled it “2014’s Octodad? co op,” a reference to the wildly popular Octodad run from the previous year that had blended physical comedy with tight execution. Surgeon Simulator was being slotted into that same role, a chaotic showpiece that would keep viewers awake, laughing, and donating in a brutal time slot.
The archived video, originally uploaded on the Speed Demos Archive YouTube channel and mirrored countless times, runs a little under an hour in total, with roughly nineteen minutes of timer active speedrun in the middle. In game, Missy and co runner ProfessorBroman race through the “all new” A and E surgeries, juggling organs, tools, and wildly flailing arms while an on call developer from Bossa Studios phones in to offer commentary and jokes.
What stands out in that footage is not just the novelty of co operative Surgeon Simulator, but the way Missy handles the pressure. She keeps a steady flow of banter with Broman, riffs with the developer on call, reacts in real time to donations and couch commentary, and threads the needle between intentional slapstick and genuine execution. The precision required to complete the surgeries on schedule is hidden under constant jokes and reactions, but long time viewers and other runners watching live understood exactly how much practice was required to make a game famous for awkward controls look that smooth.
Support, Couch Culture, And Representation
Most accounts of the run from viewers at the time focus on how it felt to watch. A Reddit thread titled “That Missy support @ AGDQ 2014!” is filled with comments that do not mention split times at all. Instead, posters celebrate how enjoyable her commentary was, how she boosted the atmosphere during other runs, and how she seemed to appear everywhere the camera pointed during the marathon.
That reaction speaks to a broader dynamic in early GDQ history. The charity marathons needed charismatic runners and front facing hosts, but they also depended on the labor of couch commentators, donation station staff, and behind the scenes volunteers. For viewers who could not see the control room or donation desk, people like Missy became the visible stand in for that energy, sitting on the couch, reading the room, and filling dead air when technical issues or awkward moments cropped up.
Her role also mattered for representation. Discussions on r/speedrun in 2015 about woman runners at GDQ specifically name Missy’s Surgeon Simulator co op run from the previous year as an example, showing that viewers were paying attention not only to the games being played but to who was holding the controllers and microphones. In a marathon scene where a handful of high profile women such as Cosmo Wright were already shouldering the burden of visibility, Missy’s presence on a different kind of showcase run helped widen the picture of who could belong on the couch.
Streaming, Community Threads, And Life Beyond The Stage
Unlike some contemporaries, Missy did not pivot from that AGDQ performance into a highly public full time streaming career. The GDQ VODs site lists only the single Surgeon Simulator 2013 appearance under her name, with no subsequent marathons on record. The Speedrun.com pages for Surgeon Simulator 2013 do not show her handles among the current verified record holders, suggesting that any personal bests she achieved either predated the modern leaderboard or were never submitted.
Instead, her legacy traces a different path. Her Twitch channel under the name “otokonokohime” still exists and has at various points been used for streaming and highlights, often categorized under Just Chatting rather than pure speedrunning. On Twitter, where she posts as @missygoesfast, she has shared snapshots of everyday life, joked with friends, and at one point celebrated completing nursing training, hinting at a professional life outside games.
This trajectory is familiar in the marathon community. Many runners and couch commentators of the early 2010s moved into entirely different careers as the years went on, leaving behind only a handful of VODs and forum posts for later viewers to discover. For Missy, that single AGDQ run and the flurry of support threads that followed function as a time capsule of a particular moment in speedrunning history, when the community was still feeling out its identity and the line between “serious” speedrun and comedic showcase was deliberately blurred.
Legacy In Memory And Replay
More than a decade after AGDQ 2014, the Surgeon Simulator co op run by ProfessorBroman and Missy still circulates in playlists of “must watch” GDQ moments. It appears alongside standout marathons of games like VVVVVV, Metroid Prime, and Banjo Kazooie in viewer made highlight lists and discussion threads about interesting GDQ runs. When fans reminisce about “old GDQ speedrunners you would love to see again,” Missy’s name surfaces as an honorary mention, tied directly to that out of control operating room and the laughter it generated.
Within the broader story of Surgeon Simulator 2013, her run marks an important moment where a game designed to be frustrating and ridiculous proved it could still function as a serious speedgame in a live marathon setting. The category “Any% All New Surgeries co op” has since been run by other players and refined on leaderboards, but the AGDQ 2014 performance remains the most widely watched and the one most often cited when people talk about Surgeon Simulator at GDQ.
For the Speedrun Legacy Profiles, Missy’s story illustrates a side of speedrunning history that numbers alone cannot capture. She did not leave behind a towering stack of record times. Instead, she left the memory of a room full of people laughing at a collapsing rib cage, a couch chanting along as a donation total climbed, and a game that should have been unmanageable turned into a confident performance through practice, trust in a co runner, and an instinct for how to entertain.
In a community where so much attention goes to the person holding the controller, Missy goes fast stands as a reminder that support players, couch voices, and one off showcase runners can shape an era just as surely as the names on the leaderboard.