Jhay is a Super Mario Galaxy speedrunner from Wales, United Kingdom. The 21-year-old has become one of the more dominant speedrunners in recent years by grabbing six out of nine world records in the main speedrunning categories for the Super Mario Galaxy games. Recently, he joined three other Galaxy speedrunners in the charity event Games Done Quick to compete in an Any% run live.
Little did he know, that he would manage to beat his own world record live on GDQ. This has resulted in an outpouring of love and appreciation for the speedrunner, and gave Super Mario Galaxy speedrunning a much-deserved boost in visibility. Game ZXC spoke to Jhay about finding speedrunning, the recent world record, the speedrunning community and game developers, future plans, and more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Can you introduce yourself to those that are not familiar with you?
A: I'm Jhay, and I'm a speedrunner. I'm primarily speedrunning Super Mario Galaxy. I recently took part in the GHQ 2023 for charity. Yeah, it was a pretty big event for me.
Q: How did you find yourself interested in speedrunning?
A: So I've always been a very number-oriented person. Even when I was younger, I was always trying to just do things as fast as possible, even just in regular life. Even when I was younger, like going around on my bike, I'd always time myself. I've always wanted to do things fast. And when I saw people doing it with games, I was obviously interested immediately.
Q: What was the first game you ever ran, and how did you get to where you are now?
A: The first game I ran was Super Mario Odyssey. When that came out and it was new, I wanted to get into that straight away. I only did it for a couple of months. And then I basically just did a bunch of random games, until I got back into it again, in 2020. I met a bunch of the community, and my friends from the community started moving over to speedrunning Galaxy. And they were like, 'oh, you should come and do it with us.' So I was like, 'Yeah, I'll play some Galaxy.' And now I'm a little bit addicted.
Q: Speedrunning has become much more popular compared to its early days, but it's somewhat of a niche still. Do you think it can break into the mainstream gaming culture?
A: Yeah, for sure. I think it's on the up and up for sure. Even these big events like GDQ, and ESA, all these other events, just getting out to more and more people is always so good. And even like, a lot bigger content creators and streamers have been talking about it, watching speedruns, and even getting involved themselves, that's just going to push it out to more people. So I can definitely see it becoming a lot bigger in the future. It's just getting there slowly.
Q: What do you think are the next big things in speedrunning? What do you think about games designed for speedrunning?
A: I don't know. In terms of games being designed for speedrunning, you see a lot more lately, with developers making them speedrun friendly, adding in-game timers and stuff like that. I know the Celeste developers are really into the speedrunning scene, and they interact with the community a lot. I hope to see it in the future where a lot more developers just interact with the communities more. Because I find that in a lot of games, developers patch out stuff that doesn't really affect the casuals but will affect the speedrunners.
Q: Let's talk about Super Mario Galaxy 2. You just managed to break the world record for Any% live on Games Done Quick. How does that feel, and how special is it to break it in that fashion?
A: I've been playing a lot of Galaxy 2 leading up to the event. I was practicing for like weeks and weeks beforehand, but the week before the event I must have killed seven runs or so that were at a world-record pace in the late game. We were always joking about it on the stream they were always 'oh, you're choking all these runs, so you can get it at GDQ.' Just laughing about it but didn't think that it will actually happen. I would be too nervous for that. But for it to actually happen. It just completely blew my mind. I don't think anything like that'll happen to me again.
Q: Can you talk a little about how hard the world record was to achieve, especially considering the circumstances?
A: The thing with Galaxy 2 is that it's a very reset-heavy speedrun, and like the first three or four levels, there is so much that can go wrong. And basically, every mistake at the beginning just loses way too much time. So you just find reset after reset. So, when you have these big events like GDQ, and you're like, "Okay, I've got one shot, I can't really mess up the early game, we're just going to crumble from there." So actually, all four of the runners in the race had like really good beginnings, which for Galaxy is super rare. But another thing about Galaxy the late game, like worlds five, and six, have some of the most precise and difficult strats stuff that you don't normally get all the time. So for so many of those strats to go right in GDQ like that, I was shaking during those strats. It's crazy.
Q: Can you perhaps give an overview of the different categories for those uninitiated?
A: Yes, so for Galaxy 2, we've got four Main Categories. We've got Any%, which is basically just beating the game as fast as possible, any percentage completion. And then we've got 120 stars, which is all 120 basic yellow stars. So, beat the game, not 100% but all the yellow stars. Then we've got 242 stars, which is 120 and then the added green stars you unlock after. So that's the 100% category, pretty much. And then there's just the green status category, which is just that green section on its own. But Any% has always been the most popular of all the categories. It's always the most competitive.
Q: The record is now 2:54:51, 4.4 seconds under your previous WR. That's a long time to run a game. What were some of the moments you were dreading and how did your confidence grow (or waver) during the run?
A: In Galaxy 2, there are two main big run-killers. So, in world three in Freezy Flake, we've got a trick called Sorbetti Skip, which was that huge rock jump to the end planet where you fight the boss. And basically, every single of those jumps needs to be frame-perfect. So you need very good mashing, shaking rhythm on the controller. You want to be pressing the A button and shaking on the exact same frame, and you have to do 15 or so of those to get to the boss fight. I was the only one in the race that was doing the route that required it.
So, before I was like, I don't know if I can even get it in the race. I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't nail that on the first try. And there's another trick called Inside the Castle in World 4 in the Bowser stage. And that is probably one of the most precise tricks in the whole run. So, when I was past both of those, that's when my confidence was high. But there's still a lot that can go wrong at the end. So nerves are still very high.
Q: Some of your WRs from Super Mario Galaxy have been surpassed, although several still remain. Are there any plans on returning to Galaxy 1?
A: I've been spending a lot of my time recently re-learning Super Mario Galaxy 1, the original game, so I want to try and get some of my old records back on that one. And my main goal was to try and get all nine Galaxy 1 and Galaxy 2 categories at once. But I don't know about that. That's a rough one.
Q: How far do you think the record in this category can be pushed?
A: I've had some paces to be around low 2:54, some really good ones that have been maybe 2:53 pace. So I can definitely see going down to 2:53. Not soon, but 2:53 will definitely happen in the future.
Q: As you alluded, Super Mario Galaxy 2 isn't your first speedrun game. Are there any challenges in transitioning between games?
A: I'm quite lucky that between Galaxy 1 and Galaxy 2, the general movement tech is pretty much the same. The way the long jumps work is pretty much the same in both. Same with backflipping. So the general movement is basically the same, but it's just adapting to the levels pretty much. Obviously, they have completely different levels between the games, which requires getting used to those again.
Q: Are there any speedrunners or content creators that you follow or look up to? Both within the Super Mario Galaxy community or without.
A: One of the main people that got me into speedrunning Galaxy actually was my friend who ran Odyssey with me at the time, Sailo. He was one of the people that convinced me to get into Galaxy running. And we'd always spend a lot of time watching the current world record holder, which was Mr. Cloud Kirby. We used to watch him all the time and be like 'how is he this far ahead of us?' We were wondering 'How in the world are we gonna ever catch up to this guy?' Sailo is another top runner in the game. He's, he's been grinding a lot recently.
Q: Do you follow any other speedrun games?
A: I've been trying to get into watching a lot more recently. I've been watching a lot of Celeste because it is super satisfying to watch. It's crazy. Just seeing how crazy some of the levels are. Another one I've been watching more recently is Lego Star Wars. That game has exploded in popularity, it's a really interesting run to watch. I have a couple of friends that run that.
Q: Among speedrunners and fans of speedrunning there's some competition on which is the hardest game to run. What are your thoughts on different games and speedrunning?
A: I don't know. It's a difficult thing because you can't really compare certain games to others. You can kind of compare Galaxy 1 and Galaxy 2 because they are pretty similar. But you couldn't really compare Galaxy to a game like Mario Odyssey or Mario 64. It just doesn't really work. Yeah, I guess every speedrun is unique in its own way. Which is, I think, what makes it cool. No, you're not going to take a top runner from a Mario game and chuck them on Dark Souls, and expect them to become the best immediately. It's one of those things that just takes time.
Q: Have you thought of completely changing games or platforms?
A: No, not really anything I've considered, no. I'm just way too addicted to Galaxy. I've tried a bunch of other speedruns. I've done a bunch of different speed games before, but Galaxy was the only one that I stuck with for a long period of time. All the other ones were kind of just like I played for a few weeks and got bored. And there's only one that really I enjoyed that much.
Q: How do you feel streaming and Twitch have affected the speedrunning community?
A: Being able to watch and cheer on runners live is such a cool feeling. Watching someone on a good run, you start to feel nervous for them, like you feel your heart rate increasing. It's such a different experience to experience that with somebody live instead of just watching a video of it.
Q: Before I let you go, any shoutouts you'd like to give?
A: Just the overall Galaxy community in general. We've got a pretty big community now, it is growing all the time. But there are a bunch of other top runners like HardcoreGaming. He's been grinding some Super Mario Galaxy 2 Any% recently. So, hoping to see some big stuff from him soon. But yeah, just overall, the whole Galaxy community. I definitely couldn't be where I am without them. They've been cheering me on a lot recently. And it's super nice to see.
[END]
