Every dog has its day, and for one Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter, that day is completing an unassisted run of Gyromite, the 1985 NES platformer, at this year’s AGDQ (Awesome Games Done Quick) speedrunning event.
The canine prodigy is the companion of fellow speedrunner JSR_, who is also on the AGDQ lineup performing a Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse run. While this is Peanut Butter’s (and any dog, for that matter) first foray at AGDQ, he’s not new to speedrunning by any means, having previously completed a 25:29 run of Gyromite in July this year – the run is even listed on JSR_’s speedrun.com profile page, so it’s about as official as speedrunning can get.
Now, you might be wondering how Peanut Butter, a dog without opposable thumbs and any understanding of how to any% speedrun a game, has managed to become a speedrunner himself. According to JSR_, his first run involved indicating which control pads the Shiba Inu should press, but otherwise, the good boy was unassisted. “No assistance, autofire, macros, or save states were used,” according to JSR_.
Of course, this level of canine speedrunning expertise didn’t happen overnight, with the YouTube video caption for Peanut Butter’s first Gyromite run explaining the work that went into it. “This took years of training. I wanted to train him to do something special, when I realized as a puppy that he was much smarter than most other dogs I’ve seen,” the description says, “since I’m a speedrunner (and PB was literally named after, you know, getting a “PB” in a speedrun) it only made sense to me.”
Peanut Butter’s big public speedrunning debut is listed as ‘dog assistance’ for the speedrun type at AGDQ, but it looks like this puppy is about to blow it out of the park all on his own. Meanwhile, I’ll be questioning why a dog has better speedrunning skills than me for the rest of the day.
Lead Image Credit: JSR_
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