In the world of speedrunning, any game can be your mountain to climb. It doesn’t matter how big or small. Here at Twin Galaxies, we know a thing or two about famous and notorious shockwaves sent through the gaming universe from astronomical accomplishments in even the smallest of games. That’s what drew us to the story of Jaku and his amazing achievement in an odd little video game and marketing tool called Yo! Noid.
Jaku began his rise to prominence in an entirely different game scene. When Super Mario Maker first released, it became an instant classic on Twitch. This saw the rise of tons of personalities and some of the best Super Mario players out there. Players would share seemingly impossible levels and streamers would try to beat them, sometimes taking hours upon hours for a single level. One of the best tools for level submission while streaming is Warp.World, which was created by Jaku.
Jaku picked up in popularity due to his work on Warp.World and his Mario skills, quickly making him one of the staples in the Mario Maker streaming community. Now he is a Twitch partner, while also keeping a job doing cyber security. The Mario Maker community unsurprisingly has a lot of crossover with the speedrunning community and many streamers connected through events like Games Done Quick. Eventually Jaku made the choice to jump into speedrunning and ended up picking an unpopular NES game to run, eventually putting him at the top of the leaderboard through mastery of the game and the discovery of a new glitch.
That game was the Now Production developed and Capcom published Yo! Noid on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game is actually completely different in Japan, released first as Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru. Capcom oddly struck a deal with Domino’s Pizza to promote their mascot, the Noid, and the game was rebuilt with new assets, but with similar mechanics.
The Noid is a strange bit of late 80s to 90s culture, as he was a gremlin of a character that was the one responsible for cold or smashed pizza. Domino’s claimed that they “avoid the Noid”, but the advertising campaign was fairly confusing and a little backwards for most mascots who were shown enjoying the product. The Noid was quite the jerk and his claymated presence was undesirable to say the least.
The Yo! Noid game is a fairly standard platformer, seeing players running right, smacking enemies with a yo-yo, and doing some flying and mole whacking for some variety. The one mechanic that sets it apart though are the pizza eating competitions between other Noids at the end of certain levels.
This particular segment is almost entirely random in its execution, and having a lucky run is what finally pushed Jaku into the sub-20-minute mark. His sum of best level completion times is even better than the current tool-assisted speedrun, due to the glitch he calls the “Jaku Jet”.
Through Twitter, we did a short interview with Jaku about the Yo! Noid run and speedrunning in general. Jaku pointed out that it was a mix of nostalgia and a desire to conquer a game that had defeated him as a child that led him to a Yo! Noid speedrun.
“Yo! Noid was a game from my childhood and when my Twitch chat wanted me to speedrun an NES game, I picked that one because I had never beaten it as a kid,” Jaku explained. “I figured that it was a game that wasn't really gonna be that tough. Little did I know that the RNG in game was pretty much what controlled the outcome and that 2 others were actually competing for WR at the time I decided to start.”
Jaku may have not known there was a race already happening to make it to the top of the Yo! Noid mountain, but you wouldn’t have known that from the effort he put in. Through extensive play, he discovered something unheard of in the game. It was something that was about to give him an edge no one else had.
“Lucky for me, I managed to stumble onto a speed boost in the game,” Jaku continued. “It was a glitch that went unnoticed for the 26 years of the games life and that helped me close the gap a bit on the WR and then with really good RNG have one of the best runs of the game ever.”
This little trick put Jaku over the top in Yo! Noid. He currently holds the world record for an “Any%” run in the game on SpeedRun.com.
Speedrunning can be quite an undertaking in time, organization, memory, and effort. Sometimes trying to memorize the finest bits of a game for a speedrun can change one’s perspective on approaches to life outside of the game. For Jaku, his everyday life and interests actually influenced his perspective on speedrunning.
“I think it's kinda more the opposite,” Jaku says. “A lot of things I approach in life [are things] I'm able to use in speedrunning. I love trying to figure out how things work and have for most of my life. So bringing this into speedrunning, I'm able to figure out how or why certain things would/should work and use that to my advantage in the game.”
In closing, Jaku was kind enough to share his perspective on the community of speedrunning now, as well as brief thoughts on where the scene is headed in the future.
“The speedrunning community is great bunch of people. The amount of friendships that have formed out of it and the amount of great things everyone has done together has been outstanding. I think the speedrunning community has done a great amount of good for the world and I don't see it slowing down!”
Jaku has certainly made a name for himself on Twitch, as well as in his work in security research. He also hosts a podcast called the Warp World Podcast with notable speedrunners, video streamers, and players GrandPOOBear and Xwater, which covers recent (usually retro-themed) gaming news and features guests. He’s certain to be a voice we continue to hear about as long as the speedrunning scene continues to flourish.
Note: As of this publication, Jaku's record has not yet been submitted to Twin Galaxies for official adjudication and recognition.
