In the first decade of Games Done Quick, when a handful of Nintendo classics quietly turned into global spectator sports, Scott “Sinister1” Audette became one of the faces of that shift. A long-time member of the Speed Demos Archive community and a specialist in late-1980s NES games, he built world-class times in titles like Ninja Gaiden and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, helped commentate one of the most famous Super Metroid races in history, and then stepped into the ring himself for a blindfolded Punch-Out!! run that reshaped what people thought was possible in a boxing game from 1987.
His name today is tied most closely to that blindfolded exhibition, but it rests on years of routing, record chasing, and behind-the-scenes work that pushed Punch-Out!! and NES speedrunning into a new era.
From SDA Regular To NES Specialist
Audette arrived in the Speed Demos Archive scene in the late 2000s as the NES library was becoming a favorite testbed for precise, unforgiving runs. He quickly carved out a niche as a methodical runner who could explain as well as execute.
On the leaderboard side, one of his early calling cards came in Ninja Gaiden. SDA’s records show him taking the “low percent” category, where runners complete the game while collecting as few powerups as possible, in 13:07 in 2012, a time only thirty-five seconds slower than the best unrestricted completion. That balance between constraint and speed foreshadowed what he would later attempt in Punch-Out!!: using artificial limitations to showcase deep knowledge of a game’s rhythms.
At the same time he was running and submitting tapes, he was also helping build the scene’s infrastructure. On Speed Demos Archive he wrote a feature-length interview with GDQ founder Mike “mikwuyma” Uyama, a profile that doubled as an oral history of how marathons like Classic Games Done Quick and Awesome Games Done Quick came together. That dual role as both runner and community chronicler would continue for years.
Building A New Standard In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
By the early 2010s, Audette’s main focus had shifted to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the NES boxing game that had already accumulated decades of playground myths and legendary high scores. On Speed Demos Archive, longtime Punch-Out!! coverage notes that as of July 2015 the fastest known single-segment time for the game stood at 16:24, held by Sinister1, before later runners pushed the record down into the low 15-minute range.
Those times did not appear out of nowhere. Community histories by later runners describe the period from roughly 2012 to 2014 as the “Sinister era,” when his routes and consistency formed the benchmark everyone else was chasing. Summoning Salt’s retrospective on Punch-Out!! records, for instance, describes how new strategies like an optimized Don Flamenco fight opened the door for more runs to survive into the game’s highly random middle stretch, allowing Audette to set a series of progressively lower world records before others began to overtake him.
By the time Games Done Quick marathons were drawing tens of thousands of live viewers, Audette was not only one of the most accomplished Punch-Out!! runners but also one of the game’s most recognizable voices.
The Voice Behind GDQ’s Breakout Race
Audette’s on-camera legacy does not start with a blindfold. Before that, many viewers met him as a commentator.
During Awesome Games Done Quick 2014, GDQ staged a four-way Super Metroid race that is still widely cited as one of the most influential marathon runs ever. Polygon’s write-up of the event highlights the “two off-screen voices” who handled the broadcast’s play-by-play and analysis: Golden and Sinister1, whose commentary framed the race for tens of thousands of new viewers and helped make it a template for esports-style speedrun presentations.
By then, Audette had become one of GDQ’s most trusted stage presences. When organizers wanted to showcase both Punch-Out!! and the possibilities of blindfolded play, he was the obvious choice.
AGDQ 2014: A Blindfold, A Charity Marathon, And A Guinness Record
On January 10, 2014, at Awesome Games Done Quick in Washington, D.C., Sinister1 walked on stage, wrapped a cloth around his head so that it covered his eyes, and picked up an NES controller. Donations during the marathon had surpassed a special incentive goal; as a result, he and fellow runner Zallard1 agreed to attempt blindfolded runs of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! in front of a packed hotel ballroom and more than 80,000 Twitch viewers.
GamesBeat’s contemporary report on the run describes a room that had to sit in near-silence so Audette could hear the game’s audio cues, then erupted after each knockout as he worked his way through the circuits. Guinness World Records later recognized the feat under the title “Fastest blindfolded completion of WVBA Championship in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!,” recording his time as 28 minutes 21 seconds at AGDQ 2014 and noting details like a 38-second demolition of Von Kaiser.
The run did not end in a blindfolded victory over Tyson himself. Guinness recounts that “eventually, Sinister1 met his match when he fought the game’s final boss,” landing several blows but ultimately losing the fight. Yet that failure is part of why the performance remains so resonant. It reads less as a “perfect run” and more as a demonstration of how far expertise and pattern recognition can push against the limits of human perception.
The recording of the blindfolded AGDQ 2014 run, hosted on the SpeedDemosArchiveSDA YouTube channel and mirrored in higher-frame-rate versions, has accumulated well over a million views across platforms in the years since, becoming a standard recommendation whenever people ask where to start with GDQ highlights.
Beyond 2014: Records, Races, And A Changing Role
The blindfolded Punch-Out!! exhibition did not mark the end of Audette’s time on the main stage. In the years that followed he continued to appear at marathons, sometimes as a runner, sometimes as a commentator, and often as both.
In 2016, he returned to GDQ for another blindfolded Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! showcase, this time sharing a controller with Zallard1 in a two-players-one-pad gimmick run that speedrun communities still single out as one of AGDQ 2016’s standout performances. In 2020, the pair reprised the concept at another Games Done Quick event, demonstrating once again how far collaborative routing and muscle memory could be pushed in a game nearly as old as the NES itself.
Outside the marathon schedule, Audette’s YouTube channel tracks a broader range of personal bests. Playlists catalog former world-record times in Punch-Out!! and its romhacks, as well as strong showings in other NES titles and co-op records in games like Double Dragon II. SDA’s Ninja Gaiden page still lists his 2012 low-percent run as the benchmark for that challenge category, underscoring how his influence extends past a single series.
By the late 2010s, interviews suggest that his day-to-day relationship with speedrunning had shifted. In a 2019 conversation with streamer Dan Gheesling, Audette spoke about starting speedrunning around 2008, building a career as a mental health professional, and later working for Twitch in a role connected to speedrunning and broadcasting. He also described the mental and emotional toll of long record grinds and the sense of closure that came with achieving certain goals, language that hints at a gradual move away from constant record chasing.
Today, the official Punch-Out!! leaderboards on Speedrun.com are dominated by newer names like Summoning Salt, whose single-segment and Tyson fight records sit atop categories once held by Sinister1. Audette remains present in the community as a moderator and elder statesman, but his legacy is less about the current top time and more about the foundation he helped lay.
Legacy: Designing The Blueprint For Blindfolded Runs
In retrospect, Scott Audette’s most important contribution is not any single record time but a blueprint.
His AGDQ 2014 Punch-Out!! run showed tens of thousands of viewers that blindfolded runs could be something more than novelty stunts. Guinness World Records grouped his performance with other carefully verified blindfolded feats, putting Punch-Out!! alongside Ocarina of Time’s “child dungeon” challenge and Super Mario World’s blindfolded completions as part of a new class of documented skill displays. Articles from mainstream gaming outlets treated the run as a serious achievement rather than a curiosity, emphasizing the donation thresholds it met and the discipline required to memorize audio cues across an entire game.
Within the Punch-Out!! community, his routing and consistency helped bridge the gap between early legends and the current era of micro-optimized, tool-assisted-analysis-inspired strategies. Summoning Salt’s later histories position Sinister1 as the runner who carried the mantle of world record holder into the mid-2010s before being surpassed, a necessary step in the chain that eventually produced sub-two-minute Tyson fights and sub-sixteen-minute full-game runs.
From a broader speedrun history perspective, he occupies a similar place to figures like AndrewG on the platforming side. He arrived early enough to shape how games were run, he stayed long enough to help design how marathons presented those runs to the public, and he left behind a body of work that modern runners still study.
Speedrun Legacy Profile: GOAT Tier Assessment
Within the Speedrun Legacy Profiles framework, Scott “Sinister1” Audette sits in a high but specialized tier.
Across all games and eras, his career does not rest on a long list of multi-decade records or cross-genre dominance. Instead, it is anchored in three pillars: world-class Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! times in the early 2010s, pioneering blindfolded play that earned a Guinness record and mainstream attention, and a sustained role as commentator and organizer during GDQ’s formative years.
Taken together, those achievements place him in the upper ranks of NES-era specialists and in the very top tier for blindfolded and exhibition-style speedruns. In a GOAT Tier system that reserves its absolute highest “World Tier” for runners who combined cross-game dominance with long-running world records, Sinister1 fits best as an A-level figure whose influence on Punch-Out!! and blindfolded challenges is disproportionate to the length of his record-holding years.
His blindfolded AGDQ 2014 run remains one of the defining performances in marathon history. His records have been surpassed, but the route he mapped and the stage presence he brought to NES boxing continue to shape how new runners, commentators, and viewers experience Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! today.