About Me

Hello :). I am N3rd_Squared,commonly nicknamed as"N3rd/Nerd". My real first name is Derek if you want to call me by that too. I've been gaming since I was 6 years old,and while it's been more of an obsession lately that I want to get over,it's pretty much my favorite hobby of all time. Around 2009,I got into speedrunning for the very first time when I saw a speedrun of a game called Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell on SpeedDemosArchive(SDA). The run is very outdated by now and has since been beaten by 40 or so minutes,but I was introduced to this whole side of gaming that I had never seen before. This interest was especially encouraged when a marathon happened in early 2011 called Awesome Games Done Quick(AGDQ). Seeing all of those runs happening including a run of the sequel to Splinter Cell,and a run of Super Mario 64 with a mere single star was mind-boggling to my young brain. I decided in August of 2012 that I would try this speedrunning thing myself and did my first full run,which was New Super Mario Bros.(NSMB)2 Any%. The run was done in 5 or so parts and was very sloppy,but it propelled my interest in speedrunning tenfold,with the Games Done Quick(GDQ)events becoming big starting in 2013,and continuing to do so to this day. What I still consider one of my best of all time moments within speedrunning was when I ran a Mario game called Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon. I enjoyed it a ton casually and decided in November 2013 or so that I would run it. Within 5 or so months,I got the World Record(WR)of 3:34:47. Me getting that WR(and just running a game I loved in general at this level)was some of the most fun I've had in gaming. It was eventually beaten by 26 minutes(WR now is 3:08:12 by Riidolsk),but running for the record was so worth. Where I feel my speedrunning hobby REALLY took off was when a horror game called Outlast came out around this time. I had seen horror game runs before,primarily with Amnesia the Dark Descent at A/SGDQ in 2013,but the game already being broken a month after release,as well as the way the Out of Bounds is done,felt very different and unique to me,and I wanted to see where it would go. The game proceeded to get so broken thanks to a glitch called doorboosting that you can beat the game in less than 10 minutes,resulting in the old Any% category being renamed to All Chapters. An Outlast runner named Saint Connor(huge shoutouts to him <3)ran this All Chapters category at SGDQ in 2014. I stayed up at 3 in the morning to see his run,and while the stream buffered often for me while I watched,I was still really impressed with what I saw. I decided immediately after the marathon ended that I would run the game with the category named No OoB. The rest is pretty much history,with the game being broken even further thanks to a glitch called wall riding. I still speedrun the game to this day(on and off),and am proud to have stuck with a speedrun game for this long. I'm getting pretty close to adulthood as of now and might not speedrun as often as I do currently,but I hope to continue this hobby for the foreseeable future. I hope to entertain people with any speedruns or streams I do. Thanks for reading,and I hope you enjoy my speedrun(and sometimes casual gaming)stuff <3