In most games, the player who breaks the hardest record becomes a legend on a leaderboard and then fades into a row of digits. In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and in the wider speedrunning world, Summoning Salt turned that story inside out. He not only pushed a brutally difficult NES boxing game to its limits, he then spent years turning the entire culture of speedrunning into long-form documentary history.
By the middle of the 2020s, his name sat at the top of multiple Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! leaderboards, including the single segment category where a 14:46 run left second place more than thirteen seconds behind. At the same time, his YouTube channel, built around hour-length histories of world records in games like Super Mario Bros., Mega Man 2, Mario Kart 64, and Halo 2, had grown into one of the biggest platforms in all of speedrunning. Commentators and archivists began calling him “the speedrun historian” and “the internet’s premier speedrunning historian,” a player who turned grind and frame-perfect inputs into narrative.
Punch-Out, Single Segments, And The Tyson Fight
Summoning Salt’s public story begins with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the 1987 NES title that remains one of the most punishing reaction tests in the console’s library. From the late 2000s into the 2010s, a small group of runners worked to push the game from “hard childhood memory” into a tightly optimized speed game. By the early 2020s, leaderboards at Speedrun.com show Summoning Salt sitting at the top of the full-game single segment category with a time of 14:46.480, more than thirteen seconds ahead of the nearest competitor.
That single segment record is only part of his Punch-Out legacy. The game’s final fight against Mike Tyson became a separate obsession, both for him and for the wider community. In the 2000s, Matt Turk’s 2:13 Tyson fight stood as an almost mythical benchmark. Summoning Salt’s own video “The Quest to Beat Matt Turk” revisits that era and includes original footage from the day he finally tied Turk’s time, reflecting on how long the record had loomed over the scene.
Over time he became the dominant Tyson specialist. Public data compiled in early 2026 notes that as of December 2025 he held records across multiple Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! categories, including single segment and the Tyson fight itself, and that his single segment time was significantly ahead of the field. In 2020 he became the first player to break the 2:01 barrier for the Tyson bout. After that, shaving each additional second required thousands of attempts, a process covered by contemporary reporting and his own explanations.
The culmination of that grind came in 2025. After nearly five years and around seventy-five thousand attempts, Summoning Salt landed a 1:59.97 in-game time on Tyson, making him the first person ever to defeat the boss in under two minutes. In a run covered by gaming outlets, he hit all twenty-one frame-perfect punches, executed a string of nearly flawless dodges, and needed extraordinarily favorable random behavior from Tyson, with the pattern appearing perhaps once in several thousand fights. In interviews and posts afterward, he described the achievement as his greatest gaming accomplishment and suggested that while someone might one day beat the record, he had no desire to chase an even more precise time.
While those Tyson grinds unfolded, he also explored the game in more unusual ways. In 2022 he set a blindfolded single segment world record in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, clocking in just under twenty minutes. Coverage from gaming outlets and community posts note that as of 2025 he remained the only player to complete the game blindfolded in under that mark. The mix of conventional and blindfolded records helped cement his reputation as not only a commentator on speedrunning, but a top-tier performer within one of the scene’s most unforgiving games.
From Runner To Storyteller
Summoning Salt’s other legacy began almost by accident. He has said that the spark for his documentary work came from watching fellow runner Sinister1 stream a talk about the history of Tyson fight records. In January 2017, he released “World Record Progression: Mike Tyson,” a video that stitched together old recordings, commentary, and leaderboard data into a continuous narrative about how players had chipped away at the fight over time.
That video found an audience quickly. Its success encouraged him to apply the same treatment to other games, and over the next several years his channel filled with histories of world records in titles ranging from Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart 64 to Super Mario 64, Cuphead, and Mega Man 2. By early 2022, he had produced more than thirty such histories and attracted over a million subscribers. His videos also began to stretch out in length, frequently running forty-five minutes or more, with some later pieces reaching feature-film runtimes.
Writers covering the scene have emphasized the way his work changes how people think about speedruns. A Eurogamer feature on speedrunning documentaries described him as “the most famous creator in the speedrun history space” and framed his videos as stories about communities rather than just individual runs. A later profile described him as “arguably the internet’s premier speedrunning historian,” someone whose documentaries let viewers follow the evolution of a strategy or a glitch across years of experimentation.
Summoning Salt himself has cited sports documentarian Jon Bois as an influence, especially in the way Bois blends statistics, archival footage, and plainspoken narration into long-form narratives. That influence is visible in the pacing and structure of videos like “4-2: The History of Super Mario Bros.’ Most Infamous Level,” which uses frame counts and arcane tricks to tell a story about trial, error, and incremental discovery.
By March 2022, his audience was large enough that he announced he was leaving his day job to work on the channel full time. That shift marked a turning point not just in his own career, but in the recognition of speedrun history as a sustainable form of video game media.
Research, Method, And Voice
Behind each documentary sits a research process that looks more like historical fieldwork than casual video production. In interviews, Summoning Salt has said that preparing a new video begins with contacting community members, forming a small private Discord server, asking detailed questions, watching tutorial content, and playing the game enough to understand how it feels to execute the strategies he is describing. Only when he has a grasp of both the mechanics and the personalities does he begin drafting the narrative, deciding which rivalries, glitches, and failed attempts will carry the story.
That method shapes the tone of his videos. Runners and commentators who appear in them often remark that he gets the details right, while still making their niche battles legible to a broader audience. The Video Game History Foundation’s podcast introduced him in 2021 as “the speedrun historian and world’s fastest Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! record holder,” and used the conversation to highlight how he balances his identity as a competitor with his work as a chronicler.
His work also reached beyond YouTube into more traditional film. In 2023 he served as narrator for Running with Speed, a feature-length documentary on the rise of the speedrunning community. Coverage around the release highlighted how his voice, familiar from hours of YouTube narration, helped frame the broader story of marathons, leaderboards, and online communities for viewers who might only have seen a few minutes of a stream before.
Platform Battles And Public Presence
As his audience grew, Summoning Salt’s work collided with the realities of platform moderation. In 2022 his documentary on the history of Mega Man 2 world records, a seventy-eight-minute video built around archival run footage and interviews, was repeatedly age-restricted by YouTube. First it was flagged for “excessive swearing,” then, after a successful appeal, for violating a policy on sex and nudity despite having no sexual content. Coverage of the incident in outlets like Ars Technica and other gaming press used his case to illustrate how opaque and inconsistent platform enforcement can be, especially for long-form creators whose work depends on recommendations and ad revenue.
For years he guarded his personal identity carefully, streaming world record attempts without showing his face and letting the “Summoning Salt” handle stand in for anything biographical. In June 2025, that changed, at least briefly. In a video about Super Smash Bros. Melee’s “Break the Targets” mode, he appeared on camera in a suit and tie to announce a limited-run series of VHS releases for some of his documentaries, an affectionate nod to old sports tapes and physical media. Coverage of the face reveal emphasized that he still planned to keep on-camera appearances rare, treating the moment as a special occasion to promote the VHS project rather than a permanent shift in style.
Even that small on-screen moment reinforced something about the persona he has built. The suit, the deadpan delivery, and the decision to press world record histories onto VHS all fit the way his videos present speedrunning: as something both intensely modern and strangely archival, a digital equivalent of classic sports broadcasts and long-ago championship reels.
Legacy As A Speedrun Historian
By early 2026, Summoning Salt occupied a rare position in the history of competitive gaming. As a runner, he pushed one of the most demanding NES titles into territory that once looked unreachable, holding the all-game single segment record, the Tyson fight record, and the blindfolded world record in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! at various points in his career. As a creator, he helped define a genre of documentary that treats individual runs as chapters in long, collective stories about problem solving, rivalry, and persistence.
Journalists who cover games have increasingly turned to his videos as reference points when they explain speedrunning to new audiences. Features in outlets like The Guardian, Eurogamer, and Forbes describe his work as central to how viewers outside the community learn about record histories, glitch discoveries, and the culture around marathons and online races. Within the community, his histories of games such as Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart 64, and Mega Man 2 have become part of the shared memory of those scenes, watched by new runners as both entertainment and education.
In the narrow category of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, his 1:59 Tyson fight and his blindfolded full-game run are achievements that will anchor any future history of the game, even if other names eventually replace his at the top of the boards. In the broader landscape of speedrunning, his legacy rests just as much on the hundreds of hours of documentary footage he has assembled, work that turns time splits and leaderboard updates into a narrative record.
For a Speedrun Legacy Profile, that combination is the key point. Summoning Salt represents a different kind of “greatness” than a player who wins dozens of categories across multiple games. His records are concentrated in a single NES title, but his historical work reaches across generations of games and consoles. He stands at the intersection of play and preservation, the Tyson specialist who not only beat the boss faster than anyone else, but also made sure the story of how everyone got there would not be forgotten.