Hometown: Cali, Colombia
Currently Living: Cali, Colombia
Primary Speedgame: Crash Bandicoot
Q: What's the first speedrun you ever watched? What got you into speedrunning?
A: This might be a little embarrassing, but I remember watching videos of casual races of games on Youtube back in 2014 and I thought that it might be fun to try to race a game. I told some friends about it and we ended up choosing Crash Bandicoot as our race game. I beat the game a few times in preparation for the race and I also did some research and ended up coming across SpeedRunsLive. I remember trying to set up the IRC client, and reading carefully through the commands so I wouldn’t mess up. We ended up not going through with the race, but that’s how I got my first glance at speedrunning.
Q: What was it like for you when you first started speedrunning? How has that changed?
A: My real first speedgame was actually Gex: Enter the Gecko, despite researching and learning Crash 1. I started running the game in December 2014, I believe. The game was really appealing to me just because of how broken it was. Since Gex wasn’t very popular, I was pretty isolated from the speedrunning community in general, so I couldn’t really say how speedrunning was back then because I just focused on my own thing.
I got into the Sprash (Spyro + Crash) community almost a year later after I started speedrunning and it was the first speedrunning community I ever got into. It’s kind of strange to look back at it since there’s so many people that have quit running the games and are barely active in the community anymore. A few things have changed too; Spyro and Crash communities are now separated and the Crash 1 community was very isolated from the Crash community for a long time.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I’m actually not working on anything as of now. This is probably the one time since I started speedrunning where I just don’t know what to do next. I wanted to go back to Crash Bandicoot 100%, but I don’t enjoy the category nearly as much as Any%, so I don’t have any motivation to run it. What I might end up doing is practicing lots of the harder strats in Crash Bandicoot Any% and grind for the 39:xx.
Q: You’ve been working on Crash Bandicoot for a long time now. You just nabbed the Any% WR back from Koji just a few days ago. Does the game and competition still excite you?
A: Koji left speedrunning as a whole a couple of months ago for an indefinite time, unfortunately. He is an exceptional runner and I have a lot of respect for him. What I want to do is try to keep pushing the game further; I feel that’s what Koji would want, and that’s what I’ll do. Getting the WR back is just a step forward, but there’s still a lot I want to do with the category, and that’s exciting.
Q: Who's another runner that doesn't run your games that you admire and why?
A: It’s hard to say really. I admire a couple of runners within the Crash and Spyro communities, but there are few runners outside of Sprash who I constantly look up to. I guess there’s runners like Abney317, who runs Mario Kart 64, and Furiouspaul, who runs Castlevania, who I respect and admire because of their persistence to their runs.
Q: How do you handle frustration or bad runs?
A: I keep thinking positive. I think that’s the key. The grind to take the record back was a long painful journey, but what good would it have been to give up? It was frustrating, very frustrating, but keeping a positive mentality and adding the support I got from everyone in the Crash community and from my viewers in my stream helped me deal with the frustration. Bad runs are bound to happen; not every single run you do is going to be a PB. I feel the key is to understand that they can happen and to understand what you did wrong and practice hard so you don’t do the same mistakes as often. That’s why I have a word document that has all my finished times with some notes about where I did my major mistakes, so I can practice those areas.
Q: How do you think our generation will incorporate video games and speedrunning into middle and old age?
A: I actually don’t know; it’s not a question that has crossed my mind. I’m not too worried about what it’ll be in the future. It might be because I don’t even know what it will be of me in three years when I’m done with university and I just need to think about that before thinking about speedrunning in a long term.
I guess it’s up to each person to see if they want to quit running, but keep supporting the scene when they are older, or if they just want to keep running until it’s not possible anymore, but for me, I still need to make some other life decisions before thinking of anything else in a long term.
I guess when it comes to video games in general, they have been getting a lot of relevance in the last few years even over here in Colombia. I feel like even when you grow older, you’ll keep having the same love for games as before. It’s not like stopping someone who has been playing games basically all their life from playing games is going to be easy.
Q: Lastly, is there anybody who you'd like to shout out or plug their stream?
A: There’s honestly a lot of people I would love to give shout outs, so I’ll just give shout outs to the Crash and Spyro speedrunning communities. They have both meant a lot to me over the past few years.
Thanks, Jorge.
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