When people in the speedrunning world talk about living inside a console library, they usually mean a handful of games. For Piotr Delgado Kusielczuk, better known as TheMexicanRunner or TMR, the phrase became almost literal. Between 2014 and 2017 he played and beat every one of the 714 officially licensed NES games released in North America and Europe, live on Twitch, while the world watched him wrestle with miracles, punishments, edutainment cartridges, and classics.
By the time he sat down to finish the project with a run of Super Mario Bros. 3 in February 2017, a community had formed around his NESMania channel, news sites were treating his finale as an event, and he was on his way to a Guinness World Record for completing the entire licensed NES library.
That feat alone would be enough to make him a landmark figure in speedrunning history. But NESMania is only one part of his story. Before and after the project, TMR built world class runs in games like Battletoads, Contra, and Cuphead, headlined marathons for Games Done Quick, and became one of the most recognizable retro specialists on Twitch.
Origins and Early Life
Kusielczuk was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, to a Mexican father and Polish mother. He grew up in Mexico, moving between cultures long before he became a global name in retro gaming.
Like many NES kids, his earliest gaming memories were tied to the grey box and its library of platformers, shooters, and licensed oddities. Among those games one title in particular took root. He discovered Battletoads as a child, fell in love with its mix of variety and difficulty, and actually finished it as a kid, long before most of his future audience would ever see the end of Turbo Tunnel. Years later he would say that Battletoads had been his favorite NES game since childhood and that part of his drive to stream came from wanting to share that accomplishment with someone else.
Music was a second thread in his life. TMR played guitar and would eventually use that skill as part of his streaming identity, composing and performing music tied to his projects and closing out marquee runs with live songs. When NESMania ended, he celebrated by singing and playing guitar on stream after the credits rolled in Super Mario Bros. 3, turning the finale into a performance as much as a completion.
Finding Speedrunning and the NES
TMR began streaming NES speedruns on Twitch on January 3, 2013, choosing to focus on the hardware that had defined his childhood. While many runners of his generation gravitated toward newer consoles or single showcase games, he leaned hard into the idea of exploring the breadth of the NES catalog. Early on he built a reputation in Battletoads and Contra, titles already legendary for their difficulty. His streams combined serious play with a relaxed, conversational tone in Spanish and English, attracting viewers from across Latin America, Europe, and North America.
Those early speedruns laid the groundwork for everything that followed. They proved that there was an audience for deep NES expertise, and they taught TMR how to shape long hours of grinding into something watchable. Before he ever announced NESMania, he had already developed the instincts needed to keep viewers engaged while he repeated a stage, experimented with routing, or explained why a particular section felt unfair even by 8 bit standards.
NESMania and the Dream of 714 Games
The idea for NESMania was born in a difficult moment. In 2014 TMR’s mother developed kidney cysts and her health began to decline. He moved from London back to Mexico to help care for her and found himself juggling worry, family responsibility, and the need for some kind of outlet. During an online conversation, friends from Chile jokingly suggested that he should try to beat the entire NES library. What started as a sarcastic comment struck him as exactly the kind of impossible task that might steady him.
On May 28, 2014, he began NESMania with a playthrough of Whomp Em. He defined the project in simple terms: beat all 714 NES games that were officially licensed by Nintendo in the NTSC and PAL regions, live on Twitch, with the entire journey archived and tracked in public. The number 714 came from a combination of official counts and community research. There were 679 North American releases and 35 PAL exclusive cartridges in his list. As viewers combed through obscure catalogs and cross checked lists, they uncovered a handful of missing games and helped refine the final total.
From the beginning NESMania was designed like a long historical project. Every game had a defined winning condition, even when the cartridge did not provide one. For score driven titles with no clear credits, TMR and his community agreed on goals such as finishing all levels, reaching a designated loop, or achieving specific scores. He kept a detailed Google spreadsheet that logged completion dates, total time played, who in chat won the raffle to choose each next game, and short written impressions that read like mini reviews.
At first his rules barred outside help. He vowed to play blind, using only original manuals and his own problem solving to reach the end of each cartridge. That ideal held for a time but the realities of the NES library forced changes. Some games were notorious for being designed around secrets, obtuse hints, or arcade style repetition. Others, like Miracle Piano Teaching System, were not even traditional games. Miracle Piano Teaching System required more than 90 hours of guided practice on a real keyboard and became the single longest entry in the project.
Eventually TMR began accepting certain hints and suggestions from viewers, particularly when dead ends threatened to stall the project entirely. Even with that help, NESMania took 3435 hours of gameplay spread over nearly three years, a span that averaged a little under five hours per game.
The Grind, the Pain, and the Joy
NESMania was not a greatest hits tour. Alongside beloved classics like Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda came licensed movie tie ins, buggy curiosities, and games whose reputations rested mainly on childhood frustration. TMR’s own reviews and later interviews speak to the emotional landscape of the challenge.
Ikari Warriors became one of the most infamous cartridges in the project. Long, slow, and unforgiving, it forced him to adapt by practicing on emulator with save states to learn patterns and discover glitches and safer routes. He wrote afterwards about how few players in the world had beaten the NES version without using the famous ABBA continue code and emphasized how much patience the game demanded even when played well.
Other entries surprised him. In his notes on games like Vice: Project Doom and Astyanax he praised strong mechanics, music, and storytelling, pointing out titles that might have slipped past casual players but revealed depth on a second or third playthrough. His writing on the NESMania site reads like an evolving catalog of the system’s design language, giving modern readers a map through genres, release years, and difficulty levels.
For viewers, the grind and the joy were shared experiences. NESMania became a place where people revisited childhood games, suggested titles they had never finished, and watched alongside TMR as he tackled obscure sports games, oddball experiments, and late era releases. Comment threads on forums like GameFAQs and Reddit show fans tracking his progress, linking the spreadsheet, and encouraging others to tune in.
The Finale and a Guinness World Record
By February 2017 TMR stood one cartridge away from finishing the licensed NES library. News outlets like Nintendo Life and Crunchyroll ran stories explaining the scope of his project and highlighting how much time it had taken. The final choice, Super Mario Bros. 3, was deliberate. It was one of the best known games on the console and a way to end NESMania on a shared high note.
On February 26, 2017, he streamed the finale live. After completing the game, he celebrated with a song and guitar performance on stream while chat flooded by in several languages. Coverage afterward emphasized that he was the first person to beat all 714 licensed NES games live on Twitch, an accomplishment that resonated beyond the speedrunning community into broader gaming press.
Later that year, on September 7, 2017, Guinness World Records recognized NESMania as a world record for completing the entire licensed NES catalog. For TMR himself, the project page on his website describes the feat as a lifetime achievement, something that could never be taken away from him and that he remains deeply proud of.
Battletoads, Contra, and a Reputation for Difficulty
Parallel to NESMania, TMR continued to push the limits of specific games. Battletoads became his signature title. Across multiple categories he held world records at various times, including warpless runs, hitless categories, and cooperative any percent runs with fellow runner jc583.
In July 2017, after already being known for his Battletoads mastery, he achieved a new world record on the NES any percent category with a time of 12:45.27, beating the previous record of 12:47.50 after more than 8200 attempts. That run highlighted the other side of his legacy: an ability to grind a single route thousands of times without losing his sense of humor or his connection to chat.
His work in Contra followed a similar pattern. On speedrun.com he posted competitive times in categories like low percent, showcasing a blend of routing, execution, and risk management that mirrored his Battletoads approach.
Cuphead and the Modern Indie Scene
For most of his career TMR stayed rooted in retro hardware, but the release of Cuphead in 2017 pulled him into a more modern arena. Cuphead’s art style and difficulty drew comparisons to Contra and classic boss rush games, and TMR’s viewers urged him to give it a shot. He bought the game, learned its patterns, and quickly climbed to the top of its leaderboards, holding world records in multiple categories during the game’s early months.
His Cuphead 100 percent run became a centerpiece of Summer Games Done Quick 2018. According to the official schedule, he ran Cuphead 100 percent, regular mode, legacy version, in a 50 minute slot that night, a performance backed by StudioMDHR itself. The developers created promotional artwork of TMR’s mascot in the Cuphead style and encouraged fans not to miss the run.
For many viewers, that appearance crystallized his identity as more than a retro specialist. He brought the same clarity of explanation, willingness to showcase mistakes, and musical personality to a modern indie title that he had shown in 8 bit games.
Marathons, Blindfold Runs, and Showmanship
TMR’s reputation is also tied to his marathon performances. From Classic Games Done Quick anniversary events to multiple editions of Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick, he has been a regular on charity marathon stages, often representing Battletoads. Official GDQ records and VOD archives list his runs in both solo and cooperative formats, including a co op any percent Battletoads run with jc583 at AGDQ 2015 and several warpless showcases across later events.
One of his most famous demonstrations did not happen at GDQ at all. At the European Speedrunner Assembly, he performed a blindfolded, deathless Turbo Tunnel run in Battletoads in front of a live audience. Commentators and viewers, many of whom remembered failing that level as children, gave him a standing ovation. Reddit threads and forum posts from the time refer to him as a legend and describe the run as one of the standout moments of the marathon.
For TMR, those showcases tie back to the same impulse that drove him to stream in the first place. Battletoads, Contra, and Cuphead are not only tests of execution; they are opportunities to invite an audience into the rhythms of risk, reset, and success. His commentary, often delivered while juggling inputs at full speed, gives viewers a way to understand what they are seeing without losing the drama of the attempt.
NESMania’s Legacy and the Broader Influence
On his own project page, TMR describes NESMania as a dream that became reality and as a lifetime achievement, but he also emphasizes what it did for other people. He notes that the idea of beating an entire console library has inspired similar projects on Twitch, exposed viewers to forgotten catalog titles, and given people a shared space to relive childhood memories.
Evidence of that influence appears across the speedrunning scene. Tool assisted speedrun project TASMania, for example, directly cites NESMania as its inspiration, aiming to publish TAS runs for all 714 licensed NES cartridges and borrowing TMR’s spreadsheet structure and goals. Lists of “library completion” challenges on retro forums routinely place NESMania alongside later projects that tackled the SNES, the Game Boy, the Nintendo 64, and other systems, treating TMR’s marathon as a template for how to approach such an enormous task.
Within speedrunning more narrowly, his Battletoads and Cuphead achievements helped show that high level play in notoriously punishing games could still be presented in a way that felt welcoming. His combination of serious practice, self deprecating humor, and willingness to talk openly about burnout and difficulty left a mark on how many modern runners approach their own streams.
A Living Legacy
Today TMR continues to stream retro games, speedruns, and variety content on Twitch and to archive his work on YouTube, building on an audience that first found him through NESMania or a single Battletoads clip. His name appears in record histories, marathon schedules, and Guinness books, but his legacy is perhaps most visible in the way people talk about taking on impossible challenges.
In the story of speedrunning, TheMexicanRunner stands as the runner who treated an entire console library as a single long route. He turned three years of grind into a shared narrative, proved that there was still unexplored life in a thirty year old catalog, and then kept going, chasing faster times and harder showcases long after the NES credits rolled.