In the middle years of the 2010s, when speedrunning for smaller single player games began to organize itself around detailed guides, marathon showcases, and specialized tools, one of the clearest examples of a community architect was the runner known as IanSynth.
Best known for his work in the Bastion community, he combined three roles that rarely line up in a single person. He was a top Bastion runner for key categories, a teacher who recorded and wrote tutorials for new players, and a technical contributor who helped build the tools and rules that underpinned the game’s leaderboard. Along the way he also took moderation duties for Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, dabbled in Portal glitchless runs, and reached Master tier in Blizzard’s arena title Heroes of the Storm.
Seen as a whole, his career shows how much quiet labor goes into stabilizing a game’s speedrunning scene long after the first world records have been set.
Finding a Home in Bastion
By the time Bastion’s community had matured, the leaderboards on speedrun.com listed only a few super moderators at the top of the game’s page. One of those names was IanSynth. On the stats and guides overview he appears not just as a moderator but also as the author of multiple key resources, from route notes to tutorial series.
The categories he focused on were the ones that came to define full game Bastion play. New Game Any Percent focused on finishing the story as quickly as possible from a fresh file. New Game Plus Any Percent leaned into the power of a cleared save. New Game All Story Levels, often shortened to NG ASL, asked runners to visit every story area on a fresh file and became the community’s showcase marathon category.
In the mid 2010s, under the channel name Synth, he began to upload full runs and practice material. An early NG ASL video documents a 46 minute 51 second completion, labeled as an older route but still representative of his play during those years.
From there he spent years refining his movement, damage routing, and menuing across all of Bastion’s categories.
Chasing Records in a Niche Game
For many speedrunners, the only part of their legacy that survives is a line on a leaderboard. In Bastion, several of IanSynth’s personal bests were strong enough to be near the top of the board when he set them, and two of them are preserved in his own video descriptions.
A New Game Any Percent run with a time of 13 minutes 44 seconds is described as having climbed to second place at the time he recorded it. A separate New Game Plus Any Percent video with a 12 minute 44 second completion is labeled as a world record for that category on its upload page, an indication of where his routing work had taken him in the mid 2010s.
These runs came from an era when players were still standardizing what a clean Bastion route looked like. Efficient weapon choices, pathing through the isometric stages, and the precise use of game mechanics such as menu storage and debug mode had to be rethought for a smooth full game attempt. Later runners would drive the times down further, but they did so on a road that had been cleared and resurfaced by earlier specialists like Synth.
Teaching Bastion to New Runners
If IanSynth had only posted fast times he would have been one more strong runner in a long list. What set him apart in Bastion was how much effort he put into explaining his game to others.
On the Bastion guides page, his name appears on several core documents. He wrote an All Weapons route guide that breaks down how to collect every weapon efficiently, and he published a short writeup on using the game’s debug mode as a practice tool. On YouTube he assembled “Ian’s NG ASL Tutorials,” a playlist that walks through key stages and tricks for the New Game All Story Levels category and ties directly into the community’s written routing.
Forum posts from this period show the same attitude. In a thread where a new player asked for up to date NG ASL routes, Synth admitted that there was no single comprehensive text guide yet and then offered to type up explanations for any level the player wanted. He encouraged them to join the Bastion speedrunning Discord so that the community could coach them directly.
Taken together, the tutorials, guides, and forum replies paint a picture of a runner who treated his game less as a ladder to climb and more as a craft to share.
Building the Tools Behind the Timer
Behind nearly every modern speedrun is a layer of timing and splitting software that keeps the runs honest and the comparisons fair. In Bastion, one of the most important pieces of that infrastructure was a dedicated autosplitter for the popular program LiveSplit.
On the Bastion resources page, an entry titled “Autosplitter for LiveSplit” credits IanSynth as the contributor and links to a LiveSplit component that automatically handles splits for the game. In the LiveSplit autosplitters configuration file on GitHub, a Bastion component is hosted under a repository named Synthian, further tying the plugin to his work and handle.
Autosplitters may seem mundane, but in practice they define what counts as the end of a level, how loads are treated, and how consistent one runner’s timing is compared to another’s. For a longer category like NG ASL, they also relieve the player from the mental overhead of splitting manually during intense fights and movement sections. Synth’s contribution here is quiet but fundamental. It is the sort of technical labor that lets a small community function as if it had a full commercial toolchain behind it.
A Charity Stage: Harvey Relief Done Quick
The most visible moment of IanSynth’s Bastion career came on a charity marathon layout instead of on his own channel. During the 2017 event Harvey Relief Done Quick he took the game onto the main tracker schedule for a pair of runs.
The official run index for the marathon lists “Bastion NG All Story Levels” with Synth as runner in a 46 minute 59 second slot, followed later that day by “Bastion NG+ Any% No MMS” with a 13 minute 49 second time. The community site GDQ Vods tracks the same segment, noting Bastion under the event’s roleplaying game block and preserving his performances alongside other mid sized titles.
For a niche single player game, that sort of charity marathon appearance is an important historical milepost. It confirms that the routing had matured into something entertaining enough for a general audience and that there were runners capable of carrying the category on a live broadcast. Synth’s presence there, as the person trusted to represent Bastion in a high profile charity stream, is a key part of his legacy.
Uru and the Myst Community
Bastion was not the only place where IanSynth took on long term responsibility for a game’s health. On the speedrun.com page for Uru: Ages Beyond Myst he is listed again as a super moderator, this time for an online adventure title with a very different culture and pace.
In the “Online” category for Ages Beyond Myst, his own solo run with a time of 57 minutes 13 seconds sits in the records, accompanied by a note that the timing was slightly adjusted when the community updated its start rules years later. On other runs in the same category, such as a 50 minute 42 second completion by veo_, the verification field shows Synth’s name, documenting his role in checking submissions and maintaining standards.
If Bastion shows him as a teacher and toolmaker, Uru shows him as a caretaker. The game’s small but dedicated puzzle community depends on moderators who understand both the lore and the technical quirks of the online client. By serving as a super moderator there, Synth helped keep a very different corner of speedrunning organized and legitimate.
Portal Glitchless and Broader Skill
Outside his specialist games, IanSynth also logged attempts in other popular titles. On the glitchless PC leaderboard for the original Portal he appears with a time of 21 minutes 26.620 seconds, recorded on PC around seven years ago and listed with a location of Pennsylvania in the leaderboard metadata.
A Twitch video entry labeled “Glitchless PB [21:26.62]” confirms that the time corresponds to a personal best stream on his channel. The run sits far from the very top of Portal’s densely populated leaderboard, but it reflects a wider pattern in his career. He was willing to dive deeply into one game while still learning the fundamentals of movement, puzzle solving, and route execution in other communities.
Competitive Roots in Heroes of the Storm
Synth’s precision and situational awareness did not come only from single player practice. His Twitch about page describes him succinctly as a Bastion speedrunner and a Master tier player in Heroes of the Storm.
Reaching Master tier in Blizzard’s now retired arena game meant sustaining a long period of high level play against other serious competitors. That experience in a team based environment helps explain the way he approached routing and teaching. The Bastion guides and forum replies read less like isolated notes and more like the sort of field reports a teammate would send to help a roster improve.
Fading from the Spotlight, Leaving the Framework
By the early 2020s his Twitch schedule and about pages describe him in the past tense as someone who used to speedrun Bastion and who does not stream often. The Bastion leaderboards now contain faster times from a newer generation of runners, and other moderators help manage Uru’s small but persistent set of categories and resources.
What has not faded are the traces of Synth’s work that remain embedded in each community. Bastion’s guides page still lists his tutorials and practice notes. The autosplitter he contributed is still referenced in LiveSplit’s configuration. The Harvey Relief Done Quick schedule and VOD index still tie his name to the first charity marathon appearance for the game. Uru’s leaderboard records still mark him as a super moderator and preserve his own early online run.
In that sense, IanSynth’s legacy is less about a single world record and more about infrastructure. He helped define how Bastion is run, taught players how to navigate its levels efficiently, and built tools that quietly serve every subsequent runner. At the same time he lent his name and effort to the preservation of a cult Myst title, to the broader Portal glitchless scene, and to a charity lineup built around relief for a real world disaster.