In the long history of speedrunning, some players are known for one era, one game, or one famous race. PJ DiCesare, better known online as TheSuperSNES or simply PJ, built a legacy across entire libraries of strange and punishing games. He became a veteran marathon runner, a world record holder in multiple series, and a kind of in house archivist for titles that most players barely remember.
From the earliest Games Done Quick marathons to modern Twitch streams and a sprawling personal website, PJ turned a love of difficult retro games into a career as a streamer, speedrunner, and game developer, with a particular focus on ActRaiser 2, Bionic Commando, Mega Man, and other “retro gems,” as he describes them in his own profile.
Early Projects, Twin Galaxies Rules, and Seven Sagas
PJ’s speedrun story begins with long, punishing role playing games. On his personal archive, he lists a real time run of Elnard, the Japanese version of The 7th Saga, from 2009. That run followed rules inherited from the old Twin Galaxies era: no resets, strict adherence to archaic category definitions, and a willingness to keep going even when the run went off the rails.
In an extended note about his 7th Saga “SS” run, he explains that this version forced him to play through disasters that later runners would simply reset away. A late game boss fight cost him roughly forty minutes, and a failed attempt to recruit another character turned into nearly an hour of recovery. He remembers the run partly as a historical artifact from a time when real time RPG runs were still figuring out their own norms.
That experience shows two traits that would define his later legacy. First, he is unusually willing to live with risk, randomness, and long odds. Second, he does not treat a bad run as wasted time. Even his rough early efforts become data points and stories, preserved on his site with route notes and commentary rather than quietly discarded.
Battletoads, Beat ’em Ups, and the Art of the One Credit Clear
If Elnard and The 7th Saga show PJ’s endurance, the Battletoads family of games shows his taste for violence, chaos, and extreme execution. On his speedrun list, he records work across the entire series: NES Battletoads, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs on Super Nintendo, Battletoads for Game Boy, Battletoads and Double Dragon on both NES and SNES, and Battletoads Arcade.
For Battletoads Arcade, he set personal best runs with each of the three characters, Pimple, Rash, and Zitz, each at maximum difficulty and each requiring a one credit clear on original arcade hardware. In his notes on these runs he emphasizes that he used an original Battletoads Arcade board, a supergun setup, and that the requirement of clearing on the hardest difficulty in a single credit radically changes how stages four and six must be played. Players who “credit feed” their way through cannot rely on the same survival strategies.
On NES, his list includes an any percent no ACE run of Battletoads, solo and co op any percent runs of Battletoads and Double Dragon, and a Pimple run of Battlemaniacs that stood as a highly competitive time before new routes emerged. His Battletoads and Double Dragon co op record with MechaRichter began as a kind of experiment at the 2012 Awesome Games Done Quick bonus stream, then turned into a highly optimized console run that he later cataloged in detail.
For PJ, these games were not just vehicles for fast times. They were laboratories for routing, cooperative coordination, and crowd entertainment. Battletoads NES races, Battletoads Arcade one credit clears, and glitch heavy Battletoads and Double Dragon segments became staples of his marathon identity, always sitting somewhere between technical showcase and slapstick ordeal.
A Fixture of Games Done Quick
By the time Games Done Quick moved from small hotel conference rooms to convention center stages, PJ was already a familiar figure on the couch and at the controller. His own list of Games Done Quick appearances begins at AGDQ 2011 and stretches for more than a decade, covering ActRaiser, Battletoads, Kirby Super Star, Lagoon, Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Ninja Baseball Bat Man, Mega Man 7, Gauntlet 2014, BattleBlock Theater, and many more.
The catalog shows him racing ActRaiser’s Professional mode at AGDQ 2011, running Battletoads NES in both race and warpless categories, co oping Kirby Super Star with Romscout, and headlining notorious problem games such as Lagoon and The Lawnmower Man. Later marathons see him return with ActRaiser 2 on its hardest settings, Bionic Commando 100 percent at Summer Games Done Quick, and Bionic Commando Rearmed and Rearmed 2, expanding his presence into a whole interconnected family of swing based action games.
The Games Done Quick listings also reveal how consistently he worked in cooperative and group formats. He appears alongside longtime collaborators such as MechaRichter, Murphagator, Klaige, and others on runs of BattleBlock Theater, Gauntlet 2014, Ninja Baseball Bat Man, Pocky and Rocky, TMNT 3, and other multiplayer titles. The effect was a marathon persona built as much on shared commentary, jokes, and chaos as on execution alone.
Viewers and writers who have tried to summarize PJ’s presence at GDQ often describe a particular blend of difficulty and comedy. A 2022 blog profile on his work highlights runs of Mohawk & Headphone Jack, Gauntlet, Lagoon, and BattleBlock Theater, noting that he picks games with extreme camera swings, awkward physics, or restrictions that turn ordinary mechanics into slapstick. Those choices reinforced his identity as a runner who seeks both challenge and showmanship.
Dragon View and Grand Memory Clobber
Nothing captures PJ’s appetite for risk quite like his Dragon View “Grand Memory Clobber” run. Dragon View is an action RPG for Super Nintendo whose code contains a notorious glitch. If the player kills the first boss and never resets the console, then reaches a specific dragon cutscene hours later, uncleared memory can corrupt the game in spectacular ways. Most of the time this crash simply kills the run. In extraordinary circumstances it can instead warp the player straight to the credits.
On his site he describes Grand Memory Clobber as a real time, single segment, console run that relies on the exact state of every byte in RAM when that cutscene plays. There are no other documented real time runners of the category, and he credits tool assisted speedrunner Khaz for mapping the game’s memory and helping with route considerations, while also acknowledging fellow researcher Omnigamer for digging into the glitch at his request.
In early 2018 PJ organized a dedicated streaming event built around this glitch, attempting dozens of multi hour sessions in search of a single successful warp. A community write up on reddit records that his final run clocked in at 1:07:07 or 1:07:12 depending on timing standard, and notes that he had to endure dozens of failed attempts where Dragon View simply crashed or produced nonsense. Commenters there pointed out that this was likely the first time the glitch had ever carried a real time run all the way through the credits rather than hanging or soft locking, making it a genuine one of a kind performance.
Grand Memory Clobber sits at the far edge of what speedrunning can be. It is a category built on hours of grinding for a chance at a wildly improbable outcome, rooted in deep technical research and an acceptance that the most likely result is failure. That PJ pursued it anyway, and documented the result carefully for others, says a great deal about his place in the hobby.
The Bionic Commando Project
Beyond Battletoads and Dragon View, PJ devoted years of work to Bionic Commando. On his speedrun list he tracks records across the series: Bionic Commando arcade, NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color’s Elite Forces, and the modern reimaginings Bionic Commando Rearmed and Rearmed 2.
In the “Bionic Commando NES additional info” section of his site he states plainly that all of his listed NES times were world records at the time he wrote the entry. Both United States runs use a new barrier skip in Area 12, and he notes that the Japanese run predates that discovery. He also uses that page to credit earlier runners such as Feasel, Hotarubi, Tom Votava, and Scott Kessler for teaching him routes and strategies, and finishes with a broader statement that modern achievements rest on the “tremendous legwork” of those early players and their collaborations.
This pattern repeats across his notes. For Brandish he explains how another runner surpassed his once record setting time, and he uses the page to highlight that newer run rather than dwelling on his own. For Battletoads in Battlemaniacs and for HyperZone he points to modern records from other players and expresses admiration for how far they pushed things. In Robotrek and Brain Lord he puts just as much energy into explaining glitches, combat math, and map structure as he does into celebrating his own personal bests.
Taken together, the Bionic Commando pages show PJ as more than a record chaser. He is a curator for a small constellation of games, someone who takes responsibility for writing down what has been discovered and pointing newcomers toward both his work and that of peers. That emphasis on shared credit and documentation fits cleanly with his comments about early NES speedrunners and his belief that fast times should be the product of collaboration.
The Super SNES as Archive and Classroom
Over time PJ’s Twitch channel and his website merged into a larger project. On Bluesky he describes himself as “Streamer, veteran speedrunner, game dev. ActRaiser 2, Bionic Commando, Mega Man, other retro gems. He/him,” a concise summary of a life built around difficult action games.
His site, TheSuperSNES.tv, organizes that life into categories: personal bests, Games Done Quick appearances, casual runs, challenge categories, and a “Compendium” that includes an ActRaiser 2 bestiary, a detailed Bionic Commando NES section, Mega Man 7 mechanics notes, Robotrek bestiary and combat math, and more. Many of these pages read like technical manuals. The Robotrek section breaks down battle calculations and equipment behavior. The Mega Man 7 notes explain obscure glitches and version differences. The ActRaiser 2 pages show enemy data and boss behavior that would normally remain buried in code.
A companion Patreon page explains that he is a veteran speedrunner and full time streamer who wants to build “a centralized database of information” about the games he plays, including documentation that goes beyond what a typical route guide would cover. The goal is not only to push his own times down, but to create resources for viewers, future runners, and anyone curious about these titles.
This teaching impulse shows up in smaller ways too. His speedrun entries frequently recommend outside leaderboards or other runners to follow, such as the dedicated Mega Man leaderboards that he cites as the “one stop shop” for those games, or other Battletoads and Bionic Commando runners who have surpassed his records.
Legacy in the Speedrunning World
PJ DiCesare’s legacy is not captured by a single world record or iconic clip, although he has those as well. It rests in a combination of things that rarely come together in one person.
He is a veteran marathon runner who has been part of Games Done Quick since the early years, helping establish a template for runs that are both technically demanding and genuinely funny to watch. He is a Battletoads specialist whose one credit clears and detailed notes on hardware, difficulty, and category definitions helped set high standards for how those games are approached. He is a Bionic Commando expert whose routes and records across multiple platforms tied that series together and inspired newer runners.
At the same time, he is a researcher and archivist. Dragon View’s Grand Memory Clobber, his extensive notes on 7th Saga, and his compendium of ActRaiser 2 and Robotrek data show someone willing to spend hundreds of hours not only playing games, but taking them apart, explaining them, and preserving the results.
For the history of speedrunning, PJ represents a bridge between eras. He comes from the Twin Galaxies and Speed Demos Archive generation, but he adapted to the Twitch era, multi hour marathon schedules, and highly produced events without losing the informal, experimental spirit that defined the earliest marathons. His career makes a case for speedrunning as both performance and scholarship, where a good run is not only fast, but also well understood and well documented.