To the NSMB Community

I started speedrunning New Super Luigi U in January 2016 right after AGDQ that year when Ewaller's 100% WR was recommended to me by the YouTube homepage. I watched through the entirety of that run and got inspired to try it out. At the time, the only categories on the leaderboard were Any% and 100%. 100% speedruns were my specialty across speedrunning in general but I knew the run would be long and difficult for me to start with and I didn't want to do Any% because the category was competitive. So I picked up a middle ground category called All Castles. I wasn't aware of any videos of the All Castles speedrun, so I did my first run completely blind with a time of 1:27:xx. I suggested on the forums page of the leaderboards if I could have that run up. That's when somebody submitted the WR of All Castles at the time, which was 1:06:46 by Acearinos. I was shocked to see that time and had no intentions of getting near that time. Later on the summer that year, I joined the NSMB discord server after Altabiscuit promoted it after his run of NSMB he did in SGDQ2016. After doing a few runs of All Castles, I stopped playing NSLU as my main focus on speedrunning was on A Link To The Past.

At the end of 2016, I got burned out of speedrunning A Link To The Past after achieving my major goals and wanted to move to a different long-term speedrun. So I came back to New Super Luigi U to improve my time. The community was very dormant as most people on the leaderboards have stopped running long before I came into the scene. However, I had two other competitors, SuperNoahTV and Stache and all three of us competed to beat each other's times down in All Castles. Stache improved much quicker than us and beat Ace's WR with a 1:06:36 while SuperNoah and I were still sitting at around 1:10s. After Stache got the WR, he moved onto other games, Noah played the game less and I was still playing. Eventually when I got a 1:07, I made a push for the WR until in May 8, 2017, I finally broke the record with a 1:06:15 after many heartbreaking losses. Stache came back a few days later to beat the record back (don't remember the time), but I beat it back the next month.

From that point, I became well-known in the NSLU community as a large influencer of NSLU speedrunning by revolutionizing new strats, tricks and routes. Many runners across the NSMB series would watch my grind of several categories and I actively interacted in all of the NSMB games. However, becoming an influence in the NSMB community came with a price of elitism and arrogance. My mindset during these years were unhealthy. I wanted WRs in NSLU where it would be hard for anyone to beat my times. Throughout 2018-2020, I played NSLU almost every day to try and lower my WRs as much as I could. If anyone were to threaten to take my records, I made remarks that discouraged people from taking them. I've been called out multiple times that my behavior wasn't okay. Eventually, people started distancing themselves from me and treated me differently in the community. My mental state was very unhealthy at the time to realize it in the moment but whenever I think back to those times now, it fills me with regret.

2020 was the year when NSLU speedrunning really started expanding and the competition really got fierce. It was also the year where I was starting to lose passion for the game as I found passion in New Super Mario Bros. 2 instead. Because people were getting better, I was getting less attention in NSLU speedrunning and the focus was on the runners who were going for respectable times. I was jealous over the people who were getting very good very quickly that it negatively affected my relationships I had with members of the NSMB community and by the end of that year, I completely left the community.

In 2021, I lost all of my WRs in NSLU and felt very depressed because the runner who took them was very talented across all of the NSMB games. Knowing that I had no chance of reclaiming any of those records back, I thought about completely leaving NSLU speedruns behind me. I didn't know how to take it all in that I was no longer the best NSLU runner. Thinking back at this, I should've done what everyone would do and that is to congratulate them for their achievement but I was naive and I really wanted to be the best. This is obviously not how a runner who had a large impact should react and if you are reading this, I truly apologize.

In December 2024, I came back to NSLU to see where I want to go with the game. I have a much different mindset with the game and the beauty of it all is that I have no intention of being a WR contender anymore. My mindset with speedrunning has changed and that I no longer care about leaderboard competition, but being the best runner that I can be. As of 2023, I stopped submitting any PBs I achieved on speedrun.com because of that. I no longer enjoy the pressure of competing with other people's times and that focusing on myself and what I want to do with my speedruns have helped me be a better speedrunner mentally.

I acknowledge that I'm not innocent in the things I've done in the NSMB community. I made some positive friends but also made negative impacts with some people in the community and I held an unnecessary grudge to the community as a whole due to my influence and dominance of New Super Luigi U. I acknowledge that some people in the community will likely still see me for who I was and if you still do not wish to support my grind then I will respect that. I apologize to the NSMB community for what I've done in the past years. I've been doing everything I can to improve myself as a person and my own community has witnessed my progression. I will still do runs of the game but have no intentions of submitting any future PBs onto the leaderboard.