I regret to inform you the Games Done Quick dog did not get a world record speedrun time

I enjoy Games Done Quick, an organisation that raises money for charity (this year is the Prevent Cancer Foundation) by playing games at peak efficiency. If you've never watched it before, I recommend loading up the Twitch stream at about 1am and sort of gently dissociating while someone plays an 80s NES game you've never heard of. Speaking of, one of the headline acts for this year's stream - which is running through to this Sunday 21st - was Peanut Butter, a shiba inu trained to press buttons on command, "playing" a NES game that came out in 1985. Although Peanut Butter obeyed his training, some technical issues colluded to snatch a world best time from him - but he raised many thousands of dollars, so good for him.

Peanut Butter is the latest high tide line in the efforts to put more weird and difficult hurdles between you and the controls of games when speedrunning or streaming them. And I must ask: where next? A cat? A snapping turtle biting pressure sensors? A Grey parrot to play a game without any input from you at all? Where will this madness end!?

Peanut Butter is owned by JSR_, a speedrunner whose achievements include running every game covered on the Angry Video Game Nerd (a project he started in 2018, which kind of baffles me), and the best Dog Assistance run for Gyromite. Which, yeah. Although the framing of it has been "the dog is playing the game!" what's actually happening is that JSR_ is playing the game using his dog, so it's less a demonstration of how well he knows Gyromite and more a demonstration of how well he has trained Peanut Butter. Which is very well, I might add. This took a year of teaching Peanut Butter to, as well as pressing the pressure plate buttons when directed, sit still for half an hour.

Peanut Butter seems like a lovely dog, and he and JSR_ are clearly very close, but this is a ladder we started climbing a while ago, when that guy played Untitled Goose Game dressed as a goose, and I dunno if I want to keep climbing much past "man spends year getting dog to concentrate", because we're already at fish v Elden Ring. At a certain point you get into monkeys and typewriters territory. Humans are not a species above locking dozens of cats in a room with NES controllers and a webcam.

Flippant jokes aside, I do hope that speedrunning dogs don't become, like, a thing. I can genuinely very easily see a world where a bunch of fame-desperate young adults buy shiba inus, and then abandon them when it turns out to be hard work. And look, I realise I'm probably ontologically evil for not liking the meme dog stream as much as everyone else. The meme dog stream raised loads of money for charity, and I was a bit sad that Peanut Butter didn't get his record (an enemy screen-wrapped from the left side to the right side, and appeared right in front of a level exit). Aside from me being a massive curmudgeon about this enchanting piece of internet-targeted doggo whimsy, I do enjoy GDQ as a thing, and you should check it out and donate if you've a mind to.