werster

werster grew up playing a variety of console games and enjoyed them so much that he would replay them, even into his teens. Part of what he enjoyed about replaying them was challenging himself to beat his personal times. He started doing this with various Sonic game levels when he was around nine years old. But the first came that he really challenged himself to complete in its entirety Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Speedrunning hadn’t yet become a phenomenon, so it was purely for his own enjoyment at the time.

Therefore, when he discovered the SpeedRunsLive (SRL) website during its early days in 2010 he was really excited, as it gave him the opportunity to collaborate with other speedrunners and to chat and compete with other like-minded gamers. After going through The Legend of Zelda games and Super Mario Bros. games, some community members suggested attempting to race Pokémon Red/Blue to Misty.

His first attempt was average, which made him feel frustrated. This motivated him to make his own personal attempt later. However, this time, rather than going in blind, he decided to map out the course properly and to figure out the best approaches beforehand. He also decided to further challenge himself by mapping out the entire game, rather than just to Misty.

The next day, werster attempted his first run through and succeeded in beating the world record by 20 minutes. This made him realize how much people hadn’t yet mapped out in the Pokémon games and decided to try out the other titles as well. He soon became addicted to the speedrunning process, as he enjoyed all of the strategic considerations that it entailed, as the smallest decision could greatly affect the overall time of a game.

He competed at his first GDQ event in 2013 and has since been among the most renowned members of the speedrunning community, even inspiring other speedrunners such as Gunnermaniac to make their own first attempts.

He started uploading his Sonic level speedruns to YouTube in 2009.

He doesn’t have a set schedule but tends to stream daily for between 3 – 6 hours per session.

werster’s favorite Pokémon game is Pokémon Crystal, while his favorite Sonic games are Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Knuckles Adventure and sonic Heroes.