Gunnermaniac

He has a younger sister. He also has an English Mastiff named Misty.

His parents both worked in the medical profession when he was younger, and he often used them use the word ‘gunner’ to refer to someone who was and ‘overachieving try-hard, but with a negative connotation,’ according to his FAQ. He therefore decided to use it as his gamertag, because it felt that it suited him. He later added ‘maniac’ to his name during middle school after a moment of random inspiration.

Gunnermaniac has been playing console video games since he was four years old. He played a variety of games, including Luigi’s Mansion, Pokémon and Yoshi’s Island, among others. He also played World of Warcraft as a teenager.

After dropping out of college, Gunnermaniac got a job as a pizza delivery man. During his free time, he played a lot of Super Smash Bros. and spent a lot of time on various forums. At the time, many people were campaigning to raise money in order for Super Smash Bros. Melee to be held at EVO. One day, he visited one of these websites and they had linked Trihex’s stream as part of the campaign, so he visited it to see what it was about.

He found that Tihex was speedrunning Yoshi’s Island, which happened to be one of his own favorite games from childhood. He was mesmerized by the mechanical skills and technicalities involved in the run, which also reminded him of his own approach to Super Smash Bros. After that, it became part of his daily routine to rush home after work to watch more of Tirhex’s speedruns. However, after a while Trihex took a two-month break from streaming, but left a link to the SpeedRunsLive Twitch channel, so Gunnermaniac clicked through to that page. This helped him to discover other speedrunners who were currently trying to beat the world record for Pokémon Yellow. One of these speedrunners was werster.

After watching Werster successfully achieve a 1h 59 min run on April 1, 2013, he felt that he could do it better and decided to dedicate himself to attempting to do so. He therefore started watching various streamers’ runs, including Werster, and taking notes on all of their strategies. He then attempted his first run and managed a 2h 21min time. He has kept up the grind ever since.

He started streaming on March 29, 2013. Since then, he has broken a number of Pokémon speedrun records and also done speedruns at a few AGDQ events.

His language isn’t always clean.

• Sun – Thurs: 18:00 – 00:00 UTC
• Fri & Sat: No stream