A Dog Speedran Gyromite At AGDQ And It Was Incredible

Twice a year, video game fans are treated to a spectacular week-long event filled with incredible speedruns from dozens of runners. Games Done Quick has been home to quite a few exciting speedruns over the years, but none have been quite as hyped as this year’s Gyromite run. That’s because it was run by a dog.

Awesome Games Done Quick is live right now, and earning money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. At the time of writing, this year’s speedrunning marathon has earned over $500,000 for charity, and is expected to earn at least double that, if not much more. It’s a wonderful event for a great cause, and it routinely pulls in millions of viewers twice a year.

So what’s this about a dog? Well, yesterday, there was a run of Gyromite, a NES game of somewhat questionable quality where you use the rarely-utilized ROB controller to interact with the game and move some stuff around a level. Speedrunner JSR was scheduled to run Gyromite, but he’s not doing it alone — his adorable shiba inu Peanut Butter joined in on the fun.

JSR set Gyromite up in Game B mode, which essentially puts Professor Hector into an autorunning mode and has the player pressing buttons to move pillars up and down to direct Hector to the ending. It only requires two button presses, which means Peanut Butter was able to control the game by pressing just two buttons… and with some coaxing with ham and cheese.

Peanut Butter was able to complete all 25 levels of Gyromite in 26 minutes and 24 seconds with essentially no mistakes. He did unfortunately have to replay one of the levels about 20 minutes into the run, after an enemy didn’t deload like it should have, sadly dashing his hopes of getting a world record.

It was an incredible achievement for a dog, and even if he didn’t set a world record for the game, he is the very first dog to ever speedrun – Gyromite or otherwise – a game at a GDQ event.