Ryan White (2026-03-21 interview)

Ryan "RWhiteGoose" White
Subject Speedrunning Date 2026-03-21 Interviewed by CartridgeCulture

Ashley Rojas: Hey, Ryan. Good morning. Actually, is it morning for you?

Ryan White: Good day. It's the afternoon, two o'clock.

It's very cool to be speaking with you, popping up on the other end of my screen here.

Nice to speak with you.

As well. It's very cool. Sorry, I don't have words.

Yeah, no worries, man. Look, I've been around online for a long time. I know exactly the feeling, so it's all good. We're just two nerds hanging out.

Yeah. I talk to a lot of people who are my heroes, including yourself, and I never quite get over the celebrity feel of, "Oh my god, I'm talking to someone who's a celebrity, or someone that I really look up to." It still happens after all these years.

It is funny. Maybe we'll get into it in the conversation, but the first time I felt it was chatting with the big Boss man in 2005. As it turns out, he's this very shy, meek, quite autistic nerd. To have that nervous feel and then, in hindsight, realize, oh, he's almost like our little brother nowadays, in terms of how we towed him around the community and built up his confidence. You realize later that maybe it was kind of funny or silly to have that feeling in that moment. Yeah, there you go.

Right, right. I never quite let that go, because I think, at least with what I do, having a little bit of fanboyism is important because it shows you're excited. I'm calling it fanboyism, but there are deeper words for that. I think being excited for what you do, just being passionate, is at the core of all of this. I'll be as professional as I can, but I'll never stop being passionate about it.

That is a good way to put it, and we'll probably get into something like that as well in our conversation. You're right.

I assume you've probably had a lot of people reaching out to you asking about speedrunning questions and GoldenEye questions. Obviously I'm going to touch on quite a lot of those, but I really wanted to focus on Gamer Folklore because I'm very impressed with what you've done with it. As I mentioned in our email, there was just something about the cicadas specifically: that kind of ephemeral quality, all of the memories that are alongside the main memories that make those bigger moments more important.

I love the transitions you have with the power lines against the sunset, just all of these little things. As I said in my email, that is such a difficult memory to grasp visually, and it's difficult to communicate. Man, you nailed it, and you nailed it so effortlessly. It was natural to you. I'm just going to keep gushing here, but I was super impressed with that.

Awesome. That's cool to hear. I appreciate hearing those thoughts about the cicada transitions and whatnot. What's funny is I never really watched anime, which is where all that stuff is from. Certainly in this sphere, the online gaming sphere, a lot of people you associate with, your friends, do. Sometime during COVID, a couple of my buddies begged me to watch Evangelion. I watched the main season and one or two of the movies.

I forget when the first time I used that cicadas and power lines transition was, but it would've been sometime around then. I was doing it as a half-hearted joke reference. I don't know anime too well, but I know that's sort of a classic transition there. I just put it in, and it really hit home for a lot of people, which is cool.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm surprised to hear it's an anime thing. Maybe not entirely, because I'd imagine that kind of stuff also comes from you drawing on your own personal memories.

That's it too. I have many vivid memories of sitting in the backyard. I grew up in a residential area in a big city. When I was a kid, I didn't know what those cicada sounds were in the summer. I thought, is it the electricity pulsing through the wires? That's where you get that association between the cicadas and the power lines. As it turns out, it was cicadas.

I don't know, there's just something about this whole idea of continuing to play these old games, whether competitively or just out of trying to find more enjoyment from them, and connecting that with younger, brighter days. Certainly those summer days with cicadas in backyards are some of those days. We get into other elements too, like the sound of the mourning dove, which is a pretty well-known nostalgic sound from back in the day, or even old fast food restaurants. Just the nostalgic vibes that I think a lot of people connect to more than ever these days.

I definitely agree. I think nostalgia is the strongest way to get people to pay attention, especially in this space, but it also makes it personal. That was another thing I liked about your work, especially with Gamer Folklore: you never forget the human element. That's important, obviously, because we're all human, but I think putting in those little things makes it more meaningful. I was always very impressed with how well you were able to hit on the actual history, the objective facts and what you need to say, but also the way that you do that and wrap it all up. I've always been impressed with your production.

Having Princess Peach in place of the MGM lion is such a perfect little fun thing. Man, I hope you never stop doing all those fun little transitions and sound effects. After you say something notable, you're like, "Bam, sound effect," and it's something from an N64 game. You use a lot of Wind Waker sound effects, Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time. Man, I'm going to get to a point where I don't have anything else to say other than gushing, but it's very impressive.

I appreciate it. A lot of it is borrowed or inspired stuff. The Peach in place of the movie studio logo actually came from a guy who goes by Sweetner now. He was the main editor of what we called the Kapap Trilogy, which was the first set of hoarding videos in the Elite. At the start, three guys got together, set a bunch of golden icons, saved them for a few months, and then made almost like a feature movie revealing them all.

It really took on a life of its own and got to a point where hoarding, playing secretly and then posting your times later, kind of became the standard in the community. That certainly has its drawbacks and detriments, but the first three were really cool, and that's what inspired so many people to do it. Sweetner was the guy who first did the Peach in place of the movie studio intro. I took inspiration from that, made my own version, and ran from there.

I think it worked out really well for you. Just to actually get started here, because I'll definitely just gossip my way halfway through this interview: could you tell us a bit about your background growing up in Toronto?

About my background growing up? Yeah, okay, sure. I would say I had a pretty normal upbringing. I was fortunate to have a stable home and a loving family. Growing up in the '90s, at some point I got video games as a gift here and there. My first console was actually the Sega Genesis, believe it or not, which a lot of people don't know, and my first really big game to dive into was Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I played a lot of that when I was five, six years old, and then I got the N64.

Mostly what occupied my time as a kid was hockey. I played single-A hockey, which is the third highest level from the top when you're a young lad. I wasn't up there up there, but it was still a serious and competitive mode of hockey. From five to 13, and really until 17 through high school, most of my time was spent going to school, playing hockey, which would be three or four times a week in the winter and fall, and then video games. That was mostly my life, and video games were there, I guess, to keep me quiet and in the house.

I can almost envision the arcs of my childhood playing various games at various points. Like I say, I started with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. When I got an N64, my first game was actually NHL 99, hearkening to the hockey. I grinded that. I remember doing crazy challenges, like playing as Canada against Poland on super easy and trying to see how many goals I could get, winning 60-nothing in a 60-minute game. I guess doing these challenges and seeing where I could push games was always a big part of growing up.

In the summertime I would play a lot of video games as well. I had a cousin who I played with, and he was not very skilled, so it often was just me showing him how to beat a game or whatever. I didn't have brothers, so I didn't have anyone to play Smash Bros. With, and that's why that game is a big black hole of knowledge for me. I really don't know much about Smash at all. It was a lot of single-player stuff, just filling the time between school and hockey.

You said you were already making your own challenges with your first N64 game. To push back even farther, do you know where the idea came from of you sitting down and going, "Okay, I'm going to make my own challenges in this game, I'm going to take it to the next level"? Do you know where that part of yourself came from, the want to challenge something?

The want to challenge myself in video games specifically?

Yeah, specifically when it comes to video games.

I do remember specifically playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles and seeing that there's a timer on screen, which is not uncommon for games, but not every game has one. Even at five or six years old, the thought was, okay, there's a timer, therefore beating it more quickly is good. That association, which is really what speedrunning is, was just natural to me. Maybe it's the luck of the draw on what game I had, or the way my brain is wired: okay, this makes sense, beat the game quickly. In Sonic 3, you even get more points for beating the level quickly, to a certain point. What's the highest score? How fast can I go?

I also remember being seven years old and watching the '96 Atlanta Olympics. I have a vivid memory of watching the men's 100-meter dash in my grandmother's house, which she had my whole life, from the '70s, well before I was born, up until only a couple of years ago after she passed. This is a house that was in my life for 30-plus years. I vividly remember watching the 100-meter dash and watching Donovan Bailey win for Canada.

I do love the Olympics and sports. Sports are an interesting thing. Especially when you look at people who succeed at sports, obviously there's a ton of work that gets put into it, but there's a large element of luck: being in the right place at the right time to be given the resources, to be pushed in a certain direction. When you're 14 or 15 years old, you can't conjure money and find the discipline and time to go to the arena and train or go to the golf course or whatever. You have to be along for someone else's ride to a large extent.

Sports are kind of like that. I played hockey and that's what I did, and I loved it. I had a great career. In terms of finding an element where I could push myself and do something interesting, a challenge, video games were right there. That inspired me to go that direction.

Interesting. Almost like a natural athlete's desire, but video games, especially speedrunning, don't quite have the same barrier to entry. I don't think the investment of having to know someone and having all these resources is quite there. It obviously is to some degree, but with video games and speedrunning, you can start on your own, by yourself in your living room or bedroom, which is why I think this is so special. Obviously all massive sports journeys start from a very intimate, personal place, but that's part of why I like video games: because they are so intimate and personal.

Most of the time you're playing them by yourself. A lot of times you'll play multiplayer, but most of my experiences with video games were very personal, by-myself experiences. To be able to take that from an intimate bedroom experience to, okay, now I'm an athlete and I'm doing this professionally, especially in the span that you did - actually, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so let me hop to GoldenEye here. GoldenEye came out in '97. Do you remember when you were first exposed to GoldenEye as a child?

Yeah, it is a bit of a funny thing. Certainly when I was younger I was a bit more of a contrarian. When all my friends were playing GoldenEye and Ocarina of Time, I remember specifically being like, oh, I don't want to play those. I have no interest, whatever. You guys think you're cool and so on. It actually took me a few years to get into those games. I do remember getting GoldenEye about a year later, I believe in 1998. I was in Michigan on a family trip and we got it from a Target there, I think in about May '98 or so. About a year after it came out, I started playing it.

Of course, this is also around the dawn of the World Wide Web. My dad had a decent job in a typical downtown office, and every now and then I would go in with him. When I did, I would browse the internet, and naturally I would browse for video game codes and cheat sheets and stuff. I'm there at nine, ten years old in a formal office setting, looking up GoldenEye on some office computer in the early internet. That's kind of funny, but it's how I learned about various strategies that were new in that day, as well as the early version of the Elite speedrun community for GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.

I always had it in the back of my mind: okay, there are these guys out there who speedrun, isn't that kind of interesting? At the time I'm 10, 11 years old, so I didn't get involved yet, but I certainly remembered that this was a thing that existed, and at some point the inspiration struck to revisit it a few years later.

Can you recall when you first started taking GoldenEye speedrunning seriously? When you transitioned from playing it casually, and that interest first built up to where you're like, okay, now I'm going to start hitting for times?

It's kind of a funny thing. I'll preface this by saying that when I was, say, 13, 14, 15 years old, I remember playing Mario Golf and feeling like I was wasting my time. You're 13, you're 14, you're thinking, "Man, I'm still playing video games. This isn't cool." All my friends are out there being cool and going to parties and dating and that kind of thing, and I'm here playing video games. You feel a certain way about that. At some point I realized, okay, if I'm going to play video games, I should try to make the most out of it one way or another. That thought sat with me: this is a waste of time unless I'm doing something with it.

I do vividly remember it was Canada Day 2005, July 1st. I was 15, not quite 16 years old. My cousin came over, and as a summer throwback we put on the N64 and played some GoldenEye. That was the point, in July 2005, when I realized, okay, we're in 2005, we're two generations removed from the N64. If I'm going to start playing GoldenEye again, of all things, then I'm going to look up the speedrun community, join, and try to do something. That's exactly what happened. By September 2005, I was on the rankings and starting to grind and play for records.

That's crazy. Would you have ever imagined yourself getting on the records so quickly after joining?

Not really, but I think everyone has that journey now. We've seen it play out so many times in the GoldenEye speedrunning community, where people get inspired to play one way or another, join the ranks, and see their name on the cool website. The website is like no other. I think that is a large appeal of it; it is the best ranking system around. You see your name up there and you think, okay, well, I can improve this and that. Oh, maybe I can get this first, easier world record. As it turns out, some of them are not that difficult to get early on. Every era has its easy world records.

In October I had achieved my first tied world records, Runway Secret Agent 23 and Depot Agent 26, which were ones that dozens of players had achieved by that point. Did I think I would get them that quickly? Probably not, but one thing leads to another and you just keep rolling with it.

When you first started, what kind of reference was there for strategy? This was so back in the day. How did you learn at the very beginning? How did you first get started when it comes to strategy and technique?

It was super early. YouTube had just been invented and there were barely any videos on it, because there were fewer people online, and people didn't even know that YouTube would stick around. The main GoldenEye videos that I watched were hosted on Speed Demos Archive, and they're actually still there to this very day, which is cool. I think every two or three years, someone from the GoldenEye community who was friends with the guys at Speed Demos Archive was like, "Hey, here's an updated list of all the world records. Here are the videos, you can host them."

There were a bunch of runs on that website, particularly the Aztec runs of Wouter Jansen, the Dutch legend, with Aztec 00 Agent 1:56. Unbelievable record to see back in that day. I'm reminded of the joke, oh, this phrase would do harm to a Victorian child. That run, Aztec 00 Agent 1:56, to a young Goose just does something. It was truly shocking. With these runs you could at least see the routes, you could see what the world record or close to it was, you could see where to strafe, where to look down.

Then of course on the GoldenEye Elite forums, there was some conversation about strategies and techniques and people posting about their adventures to improve their times. It was almost like a rite of passage back then to read the entire history of the forums, which, as someone who's hanging out on the internet, why not? You spend weeks doing so and catching up, and you learn the ins and outs of what people experienced and how they improved their times.

What were the early forums like from the very beginning?

That's something that I've pondered doing a deep dive on every now and then. It is fascinating, because you can get these glimpses of the early forums where there are posts from the day of September 11, 2001, and what the actual live reaction of a bunch of gamer teenagers was on that day, for example, and posts about new consoles coming out and expectations and anticipation for that. You just get a very raw, unfiltered view of what a bunch of guys who were, say, 15 to 23 years old were talking about on the internet back then.

Obviously communication moved way more slowly back then. A lot of people had dial-up internet. You could make a few posts a day, so every message was a lot more meaningful, and a lot of them are still there. There's actually a bit of Elite forum lore where a bunch of posts from 2003 and 2004 are missing, because it was on a platform called ezboard and then it got transitioned to one called Yuku. During that transition, about two years of forum posts mostly got lost. You almost get into the lost media of forum posts, let alone movies and videos and so on. A lot of stuff has survived from 2001 on.

It's just a bunch of dudes hanging out on the internet, which is in a way not too different from today. Back then it was just so much more intentful and meaningful because of the slow nature of the internet.

Right, right. I love that: because the internet was slower, everything was more meaningful. We were talking about YouTube, and the Elite and the GoldenEye community starting to upload videos. That's actually something you've talked about on the record quite a lot: the difficulties and unique challenges of trying to upload a video in that 2005 era. All the mailing around of VHS tapes, having them sit at someone's house, or whoever was super shy and couldn't walk down to the mailbox to drop off his tapes. It's incredible that we have so much material from that time, considering all the difficulties that people had to go through to get it there.

Very much so. At the same time, there are a lot of missing pieces where you just wonder, what if? I guess that's no different than history. You imagine, what if we had footage of this battle from 200 years ago or whatever. To your point, with my early videos, we had a family digital camera with maybe a four-megabyte memory card. I could record either one-minute videos in a bit of a higher quality or four-minute videos in worse quality, no sound. I'm 16 years old, I have no idea how to do it, so a lot of them are kind of freehand, a bit shaky, and just remarkable stuff.

There was a time, in the early Twitch era, when I was a bit more of a stickler on the quality of capturing your runs. Looking back now, there's certainly an affection for the true early era of this. Any remaining artifact of these runs is amazing to see.

Right. I think artifact is the proper term, because as history goes on - this is like the Indiana Jones thing. If I bury something in the desert, it doesn't make it an artifact, but if I wait 200 years and take it back up, it's suddenly valuable and worth something. I think as time goes on, having those kinds of files and those kinds of artifacts - so much of history is archeology. You're given four or five little broken pot shards and you can kind of see the curve on them, and you're like, okay, well, we can tell that they made a vase. We can tell that it was probably shaped like that, but we only have four or five pieces, so we just have to fill in the shape of it with guesses.

That's why I think oral history is so important. Oral history is giving us so many more pieces of that vase, especially in the video game community. Just to speak on my side: so many people will think of history as ROMs and prototypes, something you can download, something digital and tangible. No, the oral history is so much more important, because I guarantee you the ROM will not be there. I guarantee you the floppy disk will not be there. That got thrown out 20, 30 years ago, but the memory in people's heads never goes away.

That's why I think it's so important that you're doing all this, because god, someone needs to write it down, and you're really the first person who's attempted to do that in any kind of popular format. I'm sure you're not the only one to document the history of speedrunning or GoldenEye speedrunning or the community or the Elite or all those things, but there's the way that you do it, in a format that's easily digestible and entertaining and fun. Also, personally, I feel you're just a great communicator of history. I think that is so dang important. I'm getting a little off topic here, but some of the stuff that we still have from back in the day is incredible, considering all the circumstances that had to be in place to get it there.

Two quick things to that point. One: you talk about the builds of games and the ROMs and whatnot. Something that comes to my mind in GoldenEye is that when the developers were making the game and wanted to put in the All Bonds mode, and eventually withdrew that because they anticipated perhaps copyright or likeness issues -

Licensing, yeah.

They played a first-to-100 deathmatch using all four Bond characters. Neither the first-to-100 option nor All Bonds mode is in the game, and presumably that ROM was never saved. No one can play that except those four developers on that day, and yet we have the oral story of them doing it. That's really, really cool, because you can very much imagine what it would be like in their office in the countryside at Rare, playing that match that day. It's very remarkable. As the story goes, it was like 99 to the third and fourth guy, so it came down to the last kill, which is unbelievable. [Note: source reads "1999 to the third and fourth guy"; interpretation unclear.] That's one thing that's truly amazing. I had a second piece, but I'm sure I'll cycle back to it later.

For sure. Just to hop forward a little bit here: you had an interview with Dr. Doak. He reached out to you, I believe, is that correct?

Yeah, this was 2017, in the early days, just when I was starting SpeedLore and catching a lot of people's attention. He reached out, and eventually we connected, and I was able to pick his brain on a lot of things about the game. Two things that I particularly wanted to talk to him about, to see if they could be broken for speedrunning purposes, were the nature of out-of-bounds clips and the nature of Natalya's timer on Control.

As it appears, Natalya on Control sounds like it will probably never be broken. She has to hack away at the computer terminal for about two and a half minutes, and the game literally asks, "Have two and a half minutes elapsed, yes or no?" There's no way to speed that up. If there was, we could save six minutes of total time on Control. That's always kind of been this holy grail in GoldenEye. The other thing is out-of-bounds clips. It sounds from that conversation that out-of-bounds clips are rare in GoldenEye. They are possible, but you would have to find a way to clip back in-bounds, which is this ultimate... We're getting into a fourth, fifth dimension kind of tier, just so far-off, insane things that will probably never happen.

That was cool. In the past year or so, I've been trying to revisit some of my old content that didn't make it as public as perhaps it should. That was one interview. The audio was really bad when I first recorded it, since again, I was kind of new to all this, and I had a guy remaster it, then I put it aside on SoundCloud. I just figured I would post it on YouTube to a wider audience a few months ago. It's cool. Part of the archeology is not only finding an artifact buried, but where can you display it and share it with people so they can learn from it too?

Right, right. I'm very happy that you shared that on YouTube, because it's going to get so much more of an audience that way. The whole point of communicating history is to actually communicate it. I think you made the right choice there. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. As someone who interviews people, that's a rare and flattering thing.

Yeah. 2017 in speedrunning content was really this kind of crazy era. The Twitch boom came about in late 2012, 2013, and got a lot of people interested in speedrunning. We had these streams with hundreds or thousands of viewers of people speedrunning games for the first time, giving exposure to all this. The GDQ marathons took place in this era as well. People were pumped and excited and it got a huge audience. At the same time, a lot of people didn't really know what they were watching. People would ask why this was great: "Oh, Streets Agent 1:12, amazing," but they didn't know what made it amazing. I felt called to explain what goes into it and why it's cool.

At the same time, I know there were guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and the late ApolloLegend and a couple others. Early 2017 is when we all started doing that. I guess it was so new and novel at that time that a lot of the developers took notice. It was almost the first time, maybe, that something they had put so much life, energy, and passion into was being delved into by someone else who also had passion, but from a different angle.

Right, I can definitely see that. You'd be surprised how many developers and former staff are so excited, and have so much energy and things to say about their old projects, and just never get a chance. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. Would you ever be interested in doing further GoldenEye interviews with additional staff?

Oh, certainly. There's an endless amount of questions and things to ponder, and different people remember different things. It would be amazing to chat with anyone else about the game. Certainly the Rare games and N64 games are my bread and butter. Anyone like that, it would be amazing to talk to.

When you interviewed Dr. Doak, did you have questions prepared, or were you doing that off the cuff?

I had a few questions, particularly about the out-of-bounds, the Control skip, and a few other things. I did send them to him beforehand, and I think he messaged one or two of the other developers to ask if they remembered anything about those elements.

Oh, wow. You should see if you could reach out to some other developers. I could absolutely see Gamer Folklore having an interview format, once a month, or more realistically every few months with the work that you need to put in. You have a platform for it. With Dr. Doak, you can go to him and be like, "Hey, those other developers that you were talking to, are they interested in coming on the show and speaking for an hour or so?" I think that would be super cool.

It's also another thing that I personally deal with in my own work: having to speak about something I'm very passionate about, but always doing so from a secondary source. Being able to speak to the person who actually did that thing and move that source from secondary to primary, especially someone with your perspective and your audience, I think that would be super cool.

For sure. One thing you find out talking with developers, and I've seen it a few times on other platforms when a developer calls into a marathon setting, is that oftentimes the speedrunners actually end up knowing more than the developers, or at least equivalent information from a different angle. There's this interesting song and dance: oh, the speedrunners discovered this bug, something that maybe the developers are a bit ashamed of at first, and the developers are like, okay, this is probably why that happened. That's always cool to see.

Right, right. Oh, we didn't set our surface collision quite properly enough, and now they've been exploiting it. God, I don't remember what GDQ it was, but it was Blast Corps on the N64, and they had one of the developers from Rare hop in and comment on the entire run. That was a blast.

When you said that, I think of... I want to say they had an EarthBound speedrun where they had some of the original developers, like Shigesato Itoi, watching, and it was very cool. I remember the speedrunner saying something like, "God, this game is so broken." To them, they meant we know a lot of exploits and we can do a lot of things with that game. You go to a Japanese developer and you say, "Hey, that game that you love, that you put so much work into, it's broken." I was just like, oh, oh no, no, no. You could see the developers trying to argue against it, like, "Oh, well, we didn't know it was broken at the time." I'm like, guys... I'm getting off topic here, but man, it was hard to watch.

Right. It gets into the tact of these discussions. It doesn't come from a place of any ill will. It just comes from different perspectives.

Right. There's a language barrier there and all that stuff. Realistically, that's not the responsibility of the speedrunners to navigate. There should have been a host who said something, or maybe someone who goes to the speedrunners in advance and says, "Hey, listen, you're dealing with a language barrier here. Maybe don't call the game broken. Say that the community has learned lots of exploits and has a lot of techniques that we can apply." I don't want to sound like I'm poo-pooing anyone there.

You touched on another interesting point when it comes to communication about these things: not everyone has it in them to communicate in that kind of clear and tactful way. Certainly when I was first making videos about speed and history, I realized that a lot of it was just translating stuff that had been poorly communicated over the years into a more palatable way.

Yeah, absolutely. Communication in history is a big problem, which is why I like your channel so much. When you focus on the human side, it's a lot easier. Because we're all human, it's easier to fall into a polite and natural tone of speech. You don't really run into that problem as much when you're speaking about it, especially speaking as someone who actually knows the stuff. I also like that you know most of the people you're speaking about, either personally or on some intimate level. They're not just some guy you looked up on Wikipedia. This whole interview is just going to be me praising you for stuff, but I love that you do that.

That's true. I always try to keep my stories more like that. Look, there's always the latest internet drama and some crazy scandal in speedrunning, and I've never tried to chase those too much. I did earlier in my career when I was trying to get my footing, but then I realized, okay, I have no unique perspective to offer on this story. Anyone could replace what I have to say about it, so it's much less meaningful. I would much rather tell stories where I have a unique insight, or at least a platform from which to speak more authoritatively.

Yeah, definitely. Also, just from a giving-back-to-the-community perspective, you put in so much work. There aren't really a lot of people doing oral history stuff, and there aren't people looking at the human side. So much gaming history is limited to the digital domain: the Sonic 2 Simon Wai prototype and Hidden Palace Zone and all the digital stuff. All the oral history stuff, all the more human memories, get shoved to the side. That sucks, because there's only so many bits in a prototype ROM. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here.

It's okay. What do these bits represent on the human level? One thing I love talking about lately, and I mean in a handful of videos like this, is the unique childhood memories as they pertain to these games. One example that jumps to mind is this guy who couldn't beat Wizpig in Diddy Kong Racing. He played dozens and dozens of times in that race, and then finally Wizpig fell off the track and got stuck, and he could beat him. As far as I know, that's never been replicated, but what is there in the bits of the game that shows it could happen? If you know about the game and you know about Wizpig's model and stuff, it makes enough sense.

It's like, what happened on that day to that person to experience that? Can we revisit that memory? Does it matter? What does it represent? I just think that part of it is so cool: these things that are rare, but sort of weirdly shared memories between a very small handful of people.

Definitely. It seems like as time goes on, that shared group of people, especially for the N64 in particular, gets smaller and smaller. Do you ever get that feeling that your audience is shrinking, or that you need to do more to retain the audience you have?

To some extent, but at the same time, I know a lot of the guys who watch my content are guys my age and older, and life just gets busier. I certainly experience that too. At the same time, I like to put stuff out there so it's there and can be referenced later. Look, no one is still alive that remembers the French Revolution or Roman times, and yet we still find that history intriguing and compelling. With World War II, we're getting to a point where very few people are still alive from that, but that history is still important. Is the history of speedrunning equally important to these things? Of course not. In a weird way, I'm fortunate that I can do it for the sake of doing it to a large extent, and whatever comes from that is whatever comes from that.

Yeah, it's a good way of looking at it. You were from about 2005 to maybe 2012 - let's start at 2012. You returned to the game, and I think a large part of that was Twitch happening. How did you feel Twitch changed the landscape of speedrunning, as someone who had been there to experience it without Twitch?

Twitch changed it immensely. At the same time, I also wonder how much of it was just improved internet speeds and people being more online, but they all go hand in hand. You can't have a live stream platform like Twitch without people being online more and better internet speeds. It just completely gave a newer, wider audience to speedrunning. The biggest stream at this time was Siglemic doing 120 stars in Super Mario 64. That's a very palatable, easy speedrun to follow, because a lot of people have played this game. You collect all 120 stars; very simple to follow.

I thought, how do I translate something like that into the GoldenEye realm? It doesn't translate as well, but beat the game as fast as possible, sure. Beat it on Agent difficulty from Dam to Cradle; let's say it takes about 20 minutes. Then I coined the 100% category: beat it on 00 Agent and get all the cheats. That doesn't flow very well either, because you have to go back and play levels for the target times. One or two guys had done that before in the community, but literally only one or two guys.

Especially at that time, SpeedRunsLive was another website that served as a main community hub, in a way we don't really see anymore. Things get so fragmented these days. There are so many different groups and people who stay disparate. For anyone who speedran on Twitch, SpeedRunsLive was the hub. If your favorite streamer wasn't live, you would go there and find someone streaming a game you liked and watch that stream and hang out. It became this perpetual hub, certainly for one or two years, maybe more, where everyone was connected in it together. That's just not something we see on the internet these days anymore.

No, no. Community is important, especially with the Elite. Do you feel the Elite was one of the earliest, more tightly knit game communities that's still around?

Absolutely. I know there are a handful. The Mario Kart guys have a really tight community for Mario Kart 64, and all the other Mario Karts flow from there. There are a handful of others. Especially to have a stable website, a stable forum, to have this kind of community hub and have these characters, your few main cast characters and supporting cast who weave in and out of the community at various times, you can weave together this overarching story of what happened there.

I like the term cast, because I think, especially through your videos, a cast and a family would be a good way of describing the GoldenEye speedrunning community. I thank you for showing the human side and the familial side of the community.

I appreciate that. It's just like a large town or community. Who are all the people? What are they like? You get into these endless interpretations of life. At the end of the day, it just is life in a microcosm. What does it all mean? Why are we here? What are we doing? These are the same questions we ask about life, and that's what it comes down to.

Right. The Elite is also interesting in that it's caused you a lot of personal stress and drama, but I'm sure it's also been there for you for a lot of your own trying times.

Oh yeah. Believe me, there are many nights where I ponder, what if none of this happened? What if I went on and just lived a normal life and never got involved in any of this gaming stuff?

Ryan, the attorney.

Right. Who knows? At the same time, you wonder about life and destiny, as silly as that sounds, because at the end of the day we're talking about video game history online. There's nothing like it online. Well, there's probably things like it, but they're getting further and further between in the modern age. That's something I wonder about my work too: can I make some kind of community that fills that void that is missing from the modern era? How do we go about all that?

Look, I had something like over 20,000 forum posts on the Elite, and in the various chat rooms over the years, I'm sure hundreds of thousands of lines of text. What does all that history mean? There are others who have had contributions of that size. Obviously you live your great moments, great successes of achieving world records or whatever, but also not-as-great moments where you got in a spat with somebody, or you spilled your guts in a way you look back on and think you shouldn't have. Two hundred years from now, if it's preserved, I think that's almost an important part of the greater good: to be able to look back and see what life was like in this era, sort of at the dawn of the internet.

Yeah, definitely. It's also going to be funny in 200 years, when we're both gone, what's preserved of us. If you look at what's preserved from an ancient civilization, ancient Egypt or Sumer or something, none of it's really community drama. You're working on cuneiform tablets or whatever. You have to write about the taxes and the grain. You don't have time to talk about how so-and-so was upset by whatever.

Now, so much of what's preserved of us is forum posts and messages and all this online digital record, and so much of that is going to be, unfortunately, drama. It makes me think about the presence that I'm leaving behind. If someone looks back on me and tries to chronicle Ashley in 200 or 500 years, are they going to see mostly drama? Are they going to see mostly other work? It's something I think about a lot.

Me as well. That's certainly why, especially in the last handful of years, probably almost a decade now - I guess you grow up to a large extent, and it's like, okay, let's try to put goodness out there rather than getting involved in all this drama and flame wars and stuff. Although I say that, and then it's like, you read the thread about what is the ultimate truth, and these flame wars between Marc Rützou and Karl Jobst. Man, there's a reason why drama and gossip have prevailed in human history. It has an appeal that does something to us on some level. I try generally to put out goodness and reason in recent times, and I hope to mostly do that for the rest of my life.

You were always a fairly stable member of the Elite, relatively. You did have your rambunctious stuff, but for the most part there were definitely bigger, hotter personalities. You've seen those personalities at their youngest and most volatile, causing all this drama, and now you're still talking with those people, or you've seen them grow up and now they're adults. I don't really have much of a question here, but I just think it's very fascinating to know someone who was crazy in the community and now they're a father or something.

Sure. I suppose in grand terms, if you grew up in a small town or a middle-sized town, you might have these memories of someone in high school who was absolutely crazy, and now they're a responsible father and member of the community. I guess it's not that different from the real world, and there's some element of respect to leave a bit of the past in the past.

A good example is I met TrueFaith Clemens once in my life, in 2017. We went to see the solar eclipse of 2017 in Kansas City. This is a guy who I'd had many flame wars with over the years. We competed in GoldenEye, where he usually got the better of me, with many intense discussions and trolling and so on. When we met in the Kansas City airport, we just shook hands and agreed: look, the past is in the past. It's all good. We hung out and had a great time together for those few days. I think that's what it's all about. There is that element of respect that I hope most people still have these days.

Oh yeah. Being there in person, it's a lot easier to understand the human element, that the other person is actually a human being. Without that experience, they're text on a screen. You lose everything. Obviously I don't need to tell you this, but being able to see someone in person does so much, which is why I'm a big fan of video calls like we're doing now.

I agree. It's not even just that they're text on a screen; they're almost like a reflection of your world at that time. It's almost like a sparring partner. It's almost like finding Dark Link in the Water Temple. These other people are just text avatars, and you might be in a dark place or a lonely place, in a basement on your computer in the year 2009 or whatever. Everyone is just kind of looking for a punching bag, or whatever the case may be, and it can lead to not-amazing places. Getting out there and meeting people and interfacing with people does make a positive difference.

Yeah. With your YouTube channel, you've had it since 2006, but you were mainly using it to host a few GoldenEye videos. Then I think you had a technique video, and I can naturally see the progression to you hopping on your mic and starting to narrate. Was there a conscious decision in switching to a more documentary style of content?

A couple of things happened there. Being someone who's online, I've been active on a lot of websites here and there. When social media comes out, you make an account and see what it's all about. I had YouTube since back then and posted mostly raw speedruns, to share with the community or post them as video proof.

Then a couple of things happened around 2014, 2015. One is that at that point in my life, in my mid-twenties, I went back to school, to college, to do a broadcasting program. In a lot of ways it was, okay, I'm streaming on Twitch and making content, but it was a more official way to appease your parents to a large extent. I actually did get a lot out of going back to school for a two-year diploma. I learned the Adobe software suite, which Adobe kindly gives out to college students to get them hooked for life, and I learned about content making and editing, just the basics.

Then at AGDQ 2015, and I talked about this in a video not too long ago, I met a fellow who went by Ari2929, and we engaged in that whole International Track & Field 2000 arc where he set a world record in the back room of the GDQ. Ari had a monetized channel on YouTube back then. He was doing montage compilations, Call of Duty snipe montages. He showed me the ways: this is what you do. That added another element of how I can do this at a more professional level, or at least at some kind of revenue-earning level, which certainly helps. That meeting, and then going to school for it, is sort of what really ramped me up to start producing on a more serious documentary-historian level.

Was SpeedLore your first attempt at a show or a format? What did the process of creating the first content on your channel look like?

Two other main pieces of content come to mind before even SpeedLore, probably from about 2015. I did one video, kind of a pre-SpeedLore pilot, about Streets Agent 1:12. Lockwood gets Streets 1:12, an amazing video, and a reaction comes of it, but people don't really know what's going on. So I did a video explaining that level.

Then, also in 2015, I think it was September or so, one night online people were discussing who is Cowan Haines, who is Dark Light 93. I did an impromptu fireside recording sharing what I knew about that character: someone who made a hundreds-of-pages-long fake speedrun wiki article detailing this fantasy career about getting hundreds of world championships in various games. I went over that. Those were my two kind of impromptu pieces of content that just took off.

Then in early 2017 I decided, let's have a go at this. Owing to the Streets 1:12 video and that pilot SpeedLore episode, I thought, how can I parlay off that, how can I keep going? Frigate Secret Agent is a level with a lot of history, so I dove in from there, and it worked out, and I just kept rolling with it.

In terms of preparation for a general SpeedLore episode: go to the world record history page, which I'm thankful the Elite has in great detail, so a lot of that work is done for me already. Go there, open the tab of every single world record ever achieved, fill in any gaps, open those tabs and videos and forum posts, go through them, and tell the story. I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but that's really all there is to it.

I get it. How long does it take you to write your scripts?

SpeedLores are generally completely unscripted. When I was doing them, I would do an introduction and an outro, "Hello, my friends, welcome to SpeedLore," but generally they were completely unscripted. It was just an hour to sometimes three hours of me talking with the world records on the screen. In the modern era with Twitch chat, I can kind of banter back and forth with chat, and a lot of times someone in chat brings up something, or I add in a run to the SpeedLore. That's always been a cool part of it too.

In terms of writing a video script, it depends. Some scripts I work on for years and barely come back to. Other times I'll write a whole 15-minute video in the course of one night. I guess, as a typical writer does, sometimes you're on and sometimes you're not.

On that note, and I've said this before, you do have some real talent in storytelling, and oral history in particular. Where do you think those skills in communication, with a history lean, came from in you?

I was going to say it's hard to say, but something does come to mind. It connects to maybe the very beginning of this conversation. On one hand, I was not really a huge reader of novels, generally speaking, after the age of 10 or 11. I kind of got bored with them, but I was able to read from a young age, from about four years old. I would read typical books that young guys read, like the Hardy Boys, and various factual books, atlases and almanacs too, which is a nerdy thing for a four - or six-year-old to be reading. I think a lot of this storytelling probably comes from reading about trivia and watching videos about hockey from back then.

One thing that jumps to mind: I had a video from 1997, when I would've been eight years old, about the story of the 1972 Summit Series, which was this massive Cold War on ice between Canada and the USSR in hockey. An eight-game series, full of lore and just this insane competition. Four games took place in Canada, four games took place in the Soviet Union, and there was the assembling of this Team Canada against the Soviets, who had been playing together for years, and how it all played out. There was this great multi-VHS set that I had as a kid, and I watched that story play out and learned from it.

I had other hockey videos too, about early Hall of Famers from the 1920s and stuff. In a way, these were sort of early proto-YouTube. Someone could do a deep dive today, a three-hour deep dive on the 1972 Summit Series. I would say learning about sports and hockey as a young boy is probably what taught me a bit of the storytelling: how to lay out stories in a competitive setting. What were the stakes? Who were the competitors? How did it play out?

I almost wonder if the sports nature of hockey and that whole vocabulary, talking about competitors and stakes like you were saying, played into how you speak about GoldenEye now.

That's exactly what jumped to mind when you asked me that question. It was something I would get into flame wars about back, say, 10, 12 years ago: comparing speedrunning to sports. A lot of people online on Reddit and Twitter hated whenever I would do it, but there are certainly comparisons to be made. Tons of them, right? It was just internet nerds being internet nerds.

I grew up watching sports. I played the majority of my early speedrunning career on this 27-inch tube CRT that only had a coaxial input, no composite, so it was terrible. On that TV where I got my early world records, I also watched Tiger Woods's 2005 Masters, where he chips in on hole 16 for a birdie against Chris DiMarco and then goes on to win in a playoff. I watched these insane sports stories play out in that same spot where my early speedrunning career took place.

Do you still watch a lot of sports? Do you still consider yourself a big sports guy?

I do. Sometimes I wonder, should I make a sports channel? It may end up coming to that. Again, I was talking about speaking from a unique perspective, so I kind of go in a more niche direction. I was watching the Olympics there in 2026. I actually have a whole Olympics iceberg made that I've been meaning to do for years, but it'd be a three - or four-hour video, and the IOC is extremely fussy with copyright and stuff. It's like, how do I present this in a good way, and delve in from the basics of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt to these obscure controversies, like the 1948 Olympics where the ice conditions were terrible, and stuff like that?

I do love sports and sports history just as much as gaming history, maybe even more. It just so happens that gaming is where I'm more directly connected and where I tell those stories.

Right, right. Man, you should absolutely do a sports channel. I know we were talking about it earlier with the hockey stuff, but I would be so much more interested in sports if someone talked about it like speedrunning.

It's a good thought. What comes to mind there is the channel TierZoo, who talks about biology and evolution from a gaming and Smash perspective. How much do you lean into the gimmick, I suppose? Is my voice and the music I use familiar enough to carry these sports stories? Perhaps, perhaps not. It's something I certainly hope to get going. I've been meaning to do it for five years, so hopefully not too much longer.

At some point you rebranded your YouTube channel from OurWhiteGoose to Goose's Gamer Folklore and broadened the focus beyond just GoldenEye, which is how we get the modern channel. What was behind that shift?

A lot of it is, how much can you talk about one game? That's certainly a large factor. I had been doing a bit of non-GoldenEye stuff even before then. One thing I noticed with myself in comparison to my contemporaries, guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and others: they were really, really good at focusing on the technical aspect, which is great, and people certainly want to see that. I often found the technical stuff a bit too dry, or it wasn't my strength, or frankly, I didn't want to edit 100 layers in Premiere with all these keyframes to show some technical thing.

A hundred percent.

I would get a bit of criticism for it. Some people would be like, oh, the technical explanation isn't exactly correct. It was kind of a way of me leaning into, okay, the focus on my channel's not going to be on that. It's going to be more about the broader stories and what they mean. I also wanted at some point to have a consistent handle across all platforms. At that point I was figuring out post-Twitch thoughts about expanding beyond just Twitch and YouTube, and I settled on the Gamer Folklore name.

To touch on that, there's only so much to talk about with GoldenEye, and this is something you've even theorized about with your theoretical 0.00 speedruns: the thought that there's only so much to the game, there's only so much you can do in it. I'm just curious about your thoughts on the limitedness of GoldenEye, the finiteness of what you're able to do in the game in terms of community, because it's something that's been on your mind, I feel.

That's been an interesting course of discussion over the past year or two in the community itself. We touched on it a lot during the recent quest to break the 1:10 barrier in the game: how much more can we push it? I guess the conclusion a lot of people came to is that there may still be a fair bit of juice to squeeze from the game. When there was this push to cut a few more seconds and get under one hour, ten minutes total time, all of a sudden we cut six seconds in the course of a couple months and found this new strategy on Train Agent, which is insane. Nobody thought this was possible.

I just described it as that kind of asymptote that you're always approaching but never getting to. I think that's true of almost every speedgame to a large extent. Some of them are more in the first vertical slide, where there's still a ton to do. It's like approaching a black hole: you only see how much more there is as you approach it, and time slows down. Certainly there will be a time when there's nothing left to do.

Then you get into these ideas of, well, what if there's some record that you could achieve, like Aztec 00 Agent, pinball through the glass, surviving the one-in-a-billion run that would take you a lifetime of attempts? Is it worth it for any human to go about and do that? What does that mean? A lot of guys in the game are playing these sort of side leagues now, enemy rockets, fast animation, and having fun with that. Then you take a step back and look, like, well, this is one game. There are tens of thousands of games. Could they all be played like this? You kind of step into this endless ocean of infinite content that you can never even begin to approach over the course of a lifetime. At the end of the day, I guess it just is what it is.

Right. I think that is where the heart of the question is: do you want to get out of the kiddie pool of GoldenEye? You can see the edges of the pool; there's only so much there. I think for a lot of people, they've spent most of their lives building up the muscle memory for this one specific game and its inputs.

It almost makes me want to say, okay, go to the Rare guys, get a few developers together, give them some game design software or something, and let's make a GoldenEye 2: same control scheme, you can use all the same muscle memory, but new levels, new stages. Have you ever considered the GoldenEye community and their abilities applied to GoldenEye ROM hacks? That isn't something you really see too much of, I don't think.

That's been a big question for me too, because I look on YouTube and I see these guys doing really well with Mario and Zelda ROM hacks. I think, what if we could make a bunch of GoldenEye ones? There are a handful out there, no doubt, but for some reason they just don't translate in the same way. They're kind of too unfamiliar. When you play a Zelda or Mario ROM hack, it feels like the same game, whereas in GoldenEye it kind of doesn't. I think so much of GoldenEye is tied to that memory of those specific levels from back in the day.

When you change those levels -

Yeah. When you change the stage entirely, it's like, well, what are the objectives? It's less meaningful, in the silliest way, because is any of it meaningful? Then it becomes, well, what's the point in grinding for a hundred hours on this level that some other person made up? I do remember back in the day speedrunning and going through the cycle of levels and thinking, I wish there were more levels to play. Of course, if there was a GoldenEye 2, it'd be great.

Now, someone would say that Perfect Dark is the GoldenEye 2, and maybe The World Is Not Enough is the GoldenEye 3, which I have tried to rejuvenate recently to some success. It's been cool to see some developments in that game from a speedrunning perspective. At the end of the day, you also wonder, okay, this was all great. Is it time to go outside and just go for a long walk instead?

Right. I almost wonder if seeing the end of GoldenEye makes people consider what they've been doing with it and ask questions that maybe they're not immediately ready to answer, in terms of the investment that's taken them there.

Right. It's this very weird thing. The meaning of anything is such a weird thing to contemplate. There's some belief that GoldenEye and Mario and Zelda sold millions and millions of copies, so to compete at one has some meaning, because a few million people in this world understand what it's like to play it or experience it. When you get to a ROM hack, well, maybe a few hundred people at most understand it. Does that inherently mean the meaning of it is less significant? The ROM hackers are cool, and sometimes I watch these ROM hack GoldenEye stages, but it's just something you can't help but feel when you're playing and experiencing that.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if there's a way to ever get around that. A lot of the appeal of the Elite and GoldenEye speedrunning is trying to find creative ways to get time saves in a shorter and shorter window. The effort that you put in increases as that starts to shrink, but it means that the people who do actually make time saves in that small window are doing so more creatively.

Yeah. You kind of approach this last frontier of that ability to save time, especially with the modern emulator tools. We see this handful of characters who really sink their teeth into decompiling the ROM and looking at exactly what makes things tick. I see a lot of this in Pokémon Snap lately. There's this fella Icy, who was a big GoldenEye and Perfect Dark delver in that sense, and now he's taking Pokémon Snap and really diving into what makes the characters spin a certain way, what setups are viable for a high score.

It's kind of like you only get one crack at the can before you solve everything, and then it's like, well, what's left? I know some people wonder about artificial intelligence and machine learning on these games. For some reason, I just don't think that's going to be very fruitful.

Agreed.

Yeah. I don't know if they're going to be able to understand what it's like to play these games and solve them in any more meaningful way than we already have. Maybe in 10 or 20 years we'll laugh at that, but I don't know. I think the decompilation of the ROMs and looking into the code is the last frontier of figuring out these games, and we're there.

Right. Once we run out of technical hurdles, what's left? Do we go back to the way it originally was, just creating new rules and new categories? Is that how you keep the game alive once you've pushed all the technical things?

Right. That's what the GoldenEye community is faced with lately by doing these side leagues. People have thought about doing seasons, like, oh, you do a fresh rankings reset and this season -

Oh, that's a great idea. Holy crap. Right.

You can do that over and over. If you were so inclined, you could do it with any game. You could even do sports: a regular season of six months where whoever has the best eight times goes into a playoff showdown format.

I would watch that. They have esports - what's it, Rocket League? There must be millions and millions of dollars dumped into Rocket League. Take one hundredth of those millions and dump it into GoldenEye. I think that would be so... Obviously there are licensing things, and that's why I think Rocket League has taken off so much: there are no weird licensing issues. Man, if you weren't making money off of it, if you were just doing it on YouTube, that's a fricking great idea. GoldenEye seasons.

There are really endless ideas to keep competition going if you were so inclined, rather than just grinding out for one more second on the most difficult stage with the most difficult strategy. There's no end to making fun and competing if you want. Another question, on the total flip side, is: is it okay to let a game die? Is that okay, and everyone moves on? We've seen a lot of games that have basically died over time, and sometimes they get revived and sometimes not. In the course of your life, I guess that's just a philosophical question of what you want to do and what you don't want to do.

Yeah. You eventually moved to Gamer Folklore. With the Gamer Folklore videos, I'd assume those are scripted to a certain degree, correct?

Oh yeah. The main channel videos are almost entirely scripted. I've been experimenting lately with maybe scripting the first half and then just free-thinking the rest of it, and that's worked to some extent. Usually the fireside videos are unscripted as well. I'll have a loose outline and just tell a story by the fire about something. For the main channel videos I'll sit down and write a script, narrate it, and then edit the visuals on. The SpeedLores, where I'm going through the tabs and watching the videos live, are the unscripted ones.

Was including the human element a conscious part of Gamer Folklore? Was that something you wanted to do going in, or was that just a result of you speaking personally and the way all this stuff naturally came out?

I think more of the latter. It's just how I learned to tell stories, and what makes the stories, frankly, more interesting is sharing at least a bit of the background of these people. That is something I balance with as well, because a lot of the speedrunners didn't sign up to be public figures. How do I balance that on YouTube? How much of the backstory do I go into with these guys, and how much do I leave a bit of anonymity? I'm always trying to weigh that. Look, it's well known with YouTube that thumbnails with a face in them get more clicks than those without. The human story is always the most important story, no matter what.

A great human story that comes to mind, which I've never really delved into, a quick one, is PerfectAce, the greatest player in GoldenEye and Perfect Dark history. He joins the forums at 10 years old, claiming he's from Pakistan. This is an unbelievable story at the time. No one from Pakistan is on the internet, let alone having a Nintendo 64, let alone speedrunning GoldenEye. What went into all that? As I know him more and he becomes a good friend of mine, I learn bits of the story. We both wondered, could he have had the only N64 in Pakistan in the early 2000s? The answer is he may actually have.

You could almost make a legit award-circuit documentary on that: his journey going to England as a young boy and coming back to Pakistan and playing N64 as a sort of refuge from the world. That to me is more interesting than the frame on which the guard opens the gate, although that can be an interesting story in its own right in the right place.

Oh man, I would absolutely pay for an Elite movie. You know it has enough history, and there's enough story there to make a full documentary.

Eons upon eons of content. Something that comes to mind on the internet is this idea that the notorious Chris Chan is the most documented person on the internet, and people have made dozens of videos about that. You could easily make dozens and dozens of videos about the Elite and everything that's gone into the people speedrunning the game and playing it and where we are now. There's no doubt in my mind. If I had all the time in the world and more, you could make a hundred-part series about this.

Oh man. Okay, so that's the next project for you, right?

Potentially. There are so many projects that I want to do that you just don't have the time for. I've certainly been planning on bringing back GoldenEye SpeedLore, the live presentations on stream, and I wonder, should I revisit the levels one by one again, or is there another format? Dive into them on a character-by-character basis, so the early records of Marc Rützou, the middle records of Marc Rützou, the later records of Marc Rützou, and paint that picture, going through character by character. Go through the community forum month by month: what was it like in January 2001, and the next month, and so on. These are things that I ponder deeply as well.

I would do all of them. That sounds like a great idea. I like your content and I would just love to see more of it. Another thing that I would love, and this is maybe just me as an interview person, is for you to do community interviews, because you would be the best person for it. You already know how to do an interview. You can do one without a script, which is fricking incredible. You already have a connection to all these people. Everyone trusts you and everyone likes you, and you already have the channel for it. Man, I would love to hear you sit down with a speedrunner, maybe once every few months.

For sure. I actually had a plan to meet up with Ace over the winter break and do exactly that, and dive into all this kind of stuff. It didn't pan out, unfortunately. Hopefully it will in the future. In terms of that kind of content, I do have ideas to do it more as a one-off here and there, but as a series it could happen. There has been a guy in the community, Cal, who did a series called Mate Chat, where he would sit down with other Elites and have great conversations. Of course, it's a much smaller platform and it's niche content in itself, so it's hard to grow from just that. There are good conversations with community members that have gotten a few hundred views on YouTube, and they're cool things to check out. He does a good job with it.

Yeah. Also the firesides: I love the firesides. I think they're one of the reasons why your channel and you are so special in the first place. One of many. I understand that you've had issues with access to the cabin and then you had to do them in a different place. Could you tell us about the firesides?

Yeah. The first handful I did were in the old family cabin, which was my grandmother's cabin. Basically, back in the '60s in Canada, a lot of people bought these lots outside of the city for a thousand bucks, which is about $10,000 today. These lots are $300,000 now, so a different time. They slowly but surely built these old cabins on them. Cottages: you'd have the family up in the summer and so on and so forth. A lot of my childhood summers were spent there. Every summer we'd go for two or three weeks, and I had a great time. It became this very special place to me.

That setting, sitting by the fire telling a story, is literally as old as humankind. I would tell a handful from there, and they were wonderful. Then, as time goes by, especially with my grandmother, there's more extended family involved, and you get into the kind of family drama, estate drama and whatnot. My grandmother did pass a couple years ago now. Unfortunately, the cabin has left my side of the family. It's no longer mine, which is unfortunate.

It becomes this chase: how can I get back to a similar cabin? I have been in one. I'm in one right now, actually, believe it or not, and I haven't been recording too many firesides. I did earlier in December. I'm here for a couple more months, so I could do some more. There's this chase of how to get to a permanent place and setup where I can tell these as more of my regular storytelling. Frankly, a studio like that, and really set it up well.

Especially in the latter half of having that place, I was always kind of rushed when I was there. I couldn't stay there for too long, so I couldn't get the technical stuff set up, and that kind of hindered my storytelling ability.

Right. A studio would be super helpful. I think at this point you would benefit crazy from it.

For sure. Give me two seconds, I'm just going to grab a beverage. I'll be right back.

Yeah, totally.

I agree. It's the great chase: when and where and how can you make it happen? Sometimes I almost think about getting just a flophouse cabin, even six hours up north in the wilderness of Ontario, and literally just setting it up as a fireside studio for the sake of it, just to have a place. We'll see.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be actual fire either. As long as I can see something moving on the screen and I can hear the crackling, that good old Ocarina of Time torch crackling sound effect. I know that's not what you use, but I just - god, I love that sound effect.

I get it. Last year I was renting a kind of cottage, and it had a gas fireplace, so there are a handful of firesides from there, and it's cool. The gas fireplace is more consistent, because you just flip it on and it works, so that was easy. Having the authentic wood-burning fire, there's just nothing like it. Then it just makes it so difficult, because everything has to work out perfectly. The tech has to be going perfectly. The fire has to be roaring away in just the right place. You have to give a good performance of telling the story in that particular moment. It's difficult to pull off.

Again, I have the whole Nintendo 64 iceberg written out, and I did record it from my grandmother's cabin one of the last times I was in there, but it was rushed and I messed up the audio. I've tried to recover it, but been unsuccessful. So it's like, should I do that again from the fireside I'm at right now? The answer's obviously yes, but then at night I'm working on a different video or whatever the case may be, and I just haven't gotten there yet.

Do you ever get performance anxiety or any kind of stage fright?

Not really. There are some nights where it's like, oh, I should record a fireside tonight, and you just don't feel like doing it, but that's more motivation than stage fright. Every creative and every person goes through that.

Do you have issues with motivation or finding the time or the energy to put in the work for this?

Sometimes, yeah. Certainly two years ago, I was really unmotivated and I was not posting a lot of videos, and one way or another I lit a fire under my ass and got out there. That's when I started renting these cottages in the wintertime, when they're a bit cheaper. Normally in Canada, a cottage is something you go to in the summer to go swimming and on the lake, so in the winter you can get them for a relatively cheap price. That's what I've been doing the past two winters, just a way to get myself out the door and do something, and get at least a fireside where I can record by.

Certainly since the first year I did it, I did okay. This year, in the past nine months or so, I've been much more motivated and posting a lot more frequently, so I've been able to help that to a large extent.

The channel has over a hundred thousand subscribers. Did you ever see yourself taking off this much when you first started the channel?

I would honestly say yes, as crazy as it sounds. Because the first SpeedLore video got a hundred thousand views, and I saw what other people in this space were doing and getting hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views, I knew that such a thing was possible. A lot of my contemporaries have even larger followings. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, there are a bunch of people who make really great content and have never taken off. So there is maybe a bit of luck involved, and then you get into that whole "luck is when opportunity meets preparation" type of mantra. You do see people who haven't taken off, and you see people who have, and you go, "Man, how did that guy get so big?"

Look, when I'm making videos, it's like, okay, talk about GoldenEye, Mario, or Zelda; these sold eight million, ten million copies. There's that many people who know about the game. When I talk about Beetle Adventure Racing, which I might want to do here and there, okay, it sold 300,000 copies. What's that like? How convincingly can you tell a story when there are fewer stakes, because fewer people know about it? That's something I weigh often in my work.

Please cover Beetle Adventure Racing. You're speaking to someone who was a big fan of the game. I owned it as a kid. There's definitely less at stake with Beetle Adventure Racing than most of the mainline games you cover, but gosh, there's something weirdly charming about it. I want to say it was just a Need for Speed game that they reskinned with Beetles, or something like that. It didn't come from the most creative of studios, but there's something very creative about the end result. Maybe that was just me looking at it, because I was used to the N64 and Japanese-developed Nintendo games, so I started applying that lens to a Western racing game.

You're bang on. I actually have talked about it in two of my more recent videos. In my most recent video I have a segment about it, and then in the comfy winter places one -

The ski lodge one.

Yes. There's literally enough to do a SpeedLore episode on all six tracks of Beetle Adventure Racing, I would say, so that alone could make content. Then the exploration of the game, which is another kind of mini niche that I sometimes delve into: there's a lot of cool stuff in that game too. You're right, it was a Need for Speed 64 that got reskinned into the Volkswagen Beetle, but Paradigm Entertainment was involved, big Pilotwings guys. There are all these cool hidden spots in the game to appreciate.

Oh man. There's a handful of videos that could certainly be made about Beetle Adventure Racing that I hope to incorporate soon.

Speaking of Paradigm, I'm actually going to be talking to... I don't know if you know the soundtrack for Pilotwings 64, the jazzy, smooth jazz soundtrack? That was Dan Hess. I'm speaking to him next week or in the next couple of weeks, and I've never spoken to anyone from the early... I think they called it the N64 Dream Team, all those third-party Western developers that they got to support the N64. That'll be fascinating.

You know me, I'm a Sega baby, so I can tell you all about the early Genesis and all that stuff, but the N64 was super out of my wheelhouse. Also, like you, I got started doing something very specific, and now I'm just at a point where I'm starting to branch out of Sega interviews. Perhaps that's why I'm so interested in speaking with you: because I'm applying what you've done to my own career at this point.

That's cool. Pilotwings was one I never played growing up, but my pal Grav was one of the top runners of the game. Sometime during COVID, when the Nintendo Switch Online came out, I played Pilotwings. The Hang Glider theme is just unbelievable. A lot of people love Birdman, but Hang Glider is just so good. I played the game and beat it. I've done a few videos about that, and I have a few more on my master list.

All I have to ask him about is the inspiration there. I think the early N64 library, especially the introduction to 3D for a lot of Nintendo kids who had never seen 3D before - just establishing that sense of place and that level of quality. That actually ties into my next question, because you had a tweet in August 2024 that says, "The world you grew up in no longer exists." That is so very relevant and touching to me. Could you expand on your thoughts there?

It is a bit of a common meme format. You see it in various niches; it almost becomes a bit of a cliche. One of the first usages of it is a little girl with the Twin Towers in the background, and that's where it comes from: the world you grew up in no longer exists, just a sign of how things change.

I think in particular, something a lot of people discuss these days online is that this nostalgia for the '90s and early 2000s is so strong and palpable, more so than for other eras. Not to get too much into the real world, but a lot of people feel like a lot in the real world is on the decline one way or another, and so the '90s and 2000s were the last great era of humankind. Are we, the people who grew up in that era, the last arbiters of what the old world used to be like before whatever happens? Maybe that's the case, and maybe that is what calls to this nostalgic era, what evokes these powerful thoughts.

I'm right there with you. I think as time goes on, it's easier and easier to forget the past, because those memories get farther and farther away. Part of why I reached out for this interview is that there aren't many people keeping those memories alive. There are people talking about the digital stuff and the programming and the code of the games, but so much of what made the '90s special is all of the oral history stuff, the cicadas and the sunsets and all that stuff, yet no one outside of you is doing it, or preserving any of that, on this level. I wish there were more of you. I wish there were 10 more of you.

I appreciate that. Look, I do too, to get more done, and also if they have a unique perspective. I've never had any PlayStation console, for example. That's a huge blind spot for me, because the PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast and whatnot have these similar memories and vibes.

This gets into something that I love talking about every now and then, which is the kind of playground rumors and urban legends about games. Mew under the truck is the classic one, but there are these more obscure niche ones where it's like, why do so many people remember this game this way? Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64 without rails, for example. Can we combine the two, the oral history with the code, and figure out what was going on there, and why someone saw it that way or remembered it another way?

Yeah, more interviews always help. Has your relationship with games, particularly GoldenEye, changed after so many years of documenting them as opposed to playing them?

This hearkens back to earlier in the conversation, where I talked about being 14 and 15 and playing the games, thinking this is pointless and stupid, what am I doing, trying to find some meaning in it. I was streaming and actively playing the games quite a bit in 2017 and into 2018, after starting SpeedLore, and then I kind of stopped streaming and actively playing them. Look, that was a lot of fun. I was grinding for times and I got some amazing records in that era. On Dam 00 Agent I almost got the world record, and that was the whole story. I got Streets Agent 1:11, a few things like that.

Sometime around 2018, I realized my time is better spent telling the stories and documenting it. I'm not Ace or Clemens or Marc Rützou. They're the ones better off playing the game, so I'm better off telling the story about it. You do see this in the field of sports too. The guys who write books or do the content and the broadcasting and the podcasts are often guys who weren't the star players, but played with the stars on some level. They were the third-liners in hockey, or the goalies, or whatever. They had that perspective. They were there, but maybe their talent is better spent telling the stories instead.

Right, right. I definitely get that. Where do you see Gamer Folklore in five to ten years?

Look, who knows how the YouTube landscape will be, for one. I hope to be posting even more consistently and have greater stories. I've been meaning to make websites to document this further and more iron-cladly archive a lot of stuff, as well as the folklorization of it all, because archiving the primary sources and whatnot is important in terms of being able to pull from that and tell the stories. It's hard to say.

The thoughts get to me of trying to build some kind of community like the old internet, to at least have the kind of heyday where people can seek a refuge from the rest of the world online. Continue to tell these stories and document this stuff. Look, maybe by then getting into other slightly more modern consoles as well, like GameCube and Wii and whatnot, but who knows how it'll all play out?

Yeah. From all your years communicating game history, what's rubbed off on you the most, or what's the most surprising takeaway, as someone who's been communicating it for so long?

On one hand, I want to say just that so many people are interested. I do feel blessed that I can tell these crazy stories of sometimes just one or two guys who played a level in a video game for fun, and tens of thousands of people are listening and enjoying it. That's pretty cool, to just know that there are people out there who also appreciate that sort of thing. I would say really that's the ultimate takeaway.

On the other hand, sometimes someone says, "Oh, you inspired me to play GoldenEye," and they've sunk hours and years into the game. In a way, sometimes I feel a bit melancholy about that. They're thankful for it, and I'm like, "Man, I'm sorry. I wasted your life." That kind of thought muddles with me sometimes as well, but not enough to stop doing what I'm doing, for sure.

You had talked about meaning, and the importance of finding and making your own meaning. I think, like you just said, you establishing this channel allows others to find meaning in what you're talking about or in these old games. I'm a personal believer that you can learn things about yourself and better yourself from interacting with old games and understanding what you get out of it. So I think just you having your channel allows so many people to find their own meaning in it.

That is a good way to put it, because perhaps when I mentioned that sometimes I feel bad about encouraging people to play the game, you're right, I'm prescribing my own interpretation of meaning to them. For them, the meaning might be something completely different, and might be something much more valuable and significant. I've heard from a lot of people who say they picked up GoldenEye speedrunning during a hard time in their life, when they were transitioning from one thing to another, or they were out of work, or going through a breakup or whatever. I guess if the meaning was meaningful to them, then that's important.

Yeah. I think that's one of the benefits of having a show: it's art. You don't know what other people are going to get out of it. I think you just being personable and so forthcoming in your own personality and what you're talking about really invites a lot of people into establishing that meaning. Whatever you're doing with your show, I think you're doing it right. I think you're succeeding.

I very much appreciate that. I have no plans to stop anytime soon. In fact, only to accelerate. So there you go.

Awesome. What are you working on right now, just in your life or with the show in general? What's Goose up to?

Literally right now I'm working on editing a video about the real-world geography of GoldenEye's locations. It'll be up in the next couple of days. That's the video I'm working on right this second. It starts with, is the Byelomorye Dam real? Is Severnaya a real radio facility? I delve into that. I just have piles of other videos that I'm always working on. Like I said, I have these icebergs on the back burner. There's never an end of ideas and formats to make. Sometimes they're just on the back burner for years, but I certainly have a list.

I'm just trying to wade through it all and make what I feel inspired and inclined to make. On YouTube these days, these compilation videos and longer videos do well, so I'm always thinking about assembling those. I like to put in a bit of new information alongside some old classics. I'll probably make a few more of those coming up. Revisiting SpeedLore in some way, which I'm still trying to figure out, is certainly on my plate for the next little while.

Out of everything you've accomplished with the channel specifically, what are you the most proud of so far?

Man, it's hard to say. Some videos really stick out. My 1080° Snowboarding Deadly Fall video is what I consider my masterpiece. My Top 10 Speedruns of the Decade was also one I put so much work into. It took a solid month and it really was a great video. I love that one. It's kind of a reference point: when people look at the 2010s in speedrunning, they can see what I picked as the most important speedruns of that era. So that one's really good as well.

The Chicago Ghost video is amazing too, because that's a reference point: this perpetual mystery that may never be solved, but has evidence that it was something people experienced. Those three stick out as my three best. Then of course the whole SpeedLore series as a whole is pretty cool. At least giving the oral history of GoldenEye fairly completely at some point in time is pretty cool.

Yeah. You do receive a lot of feedback as to how the fans are enriched and appreciate your work.

Oh yeah. Sometimes maybe too much. When they start playing themselves, people want to get involved and be in the next SpeedLore. That's a thing that happens too. They want to say, "Oh man, how can I be the character whose story is told?" That's what inspires a lot of people to pick up the controller and play.

Yeah. All right. That was actually all the questions that I had, and we're just going over our time here, so we hit that perfectly. Did you have any questions for me before we hop off?

Not really. I look forward to the interview being posted in whatever format you're going to do that. I was looking forward to this and I'm glad we chatted. I'm sure we could chat infinitely. Maybe we'll do it again and revisit it with some more topics and questions sometime. That was cool.

That would be super cool. Just speaking to you has been... I'm not normally this casual. I appreciate the vibe that you're giving off, which is also interesting from my perspective interviewing you, because you are a person I've personally seen on the other side of the screen quite a lot, but you've never seen me. So I kind of have a little bit of a head start: I know how he talks, I got the vibe. Man, I really appreciate you speaking with me today. This was super cool.

Look, I appreciate it too. I've come across your site a few times doing research and whatnot. It's something that I'll try to pull from a bit more going ahead. I look forward to seeing it all posted. It was a pleasure. I appreciate the questions and the thoughts. I didn't know I was going to get so much into the sports stuff, but when I really think about it, it truly is a part of the origin story. So I appreciate you being able to pull that out as well.

Right. So much of GoldenEye, and by extension speedrunning as a whole, because of all the influence there, is sports-based in the vocabulary we use to talk about it. Maybe some of that is coincidental, but I think there's a very interesting lineage to be drawn between sports and speedrunning, and the Elite and GoldenEye are a very core part of that, I think. That'll be for another conversation, but there's a very interesting story there.

For sure. We'll see. Who knows if I'll be able to lay some of that out in my future work.

Yeah. If you need any help with anything Sega, just give me a call, give me an email, whatever. If you ever need Sega episode topics, which isn't really in your wheelhouse because you're an N64 guy, but if you ever do stray there, let me know. I can throw so many crazy mysteries at you. I'm getting prototypes and stuff too, so if you ever need content, I'll give you some juicy exclusive stuff.

That'd be cool. Sometimes I make these compilations or whatever, and a handful of Sega mysteries would be sick, because it takes me years to get to them. Still, just to know of them and ponder them when I come across them would be cool. I'll send you an email a little bit later, and I'd love to hear a handful of that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I'll definitely do that.

Awesome. That's great. It was great to chat today. I certainly hope to keep in touch and chat again in the future.

Yeah. Thank you so much again. I super appreciate this. You're wonderful. Thank you again.

You too. It was amazing. Thank you, and stay true.