Humanity has long pondered the question- can a dog play basketball? Well, speedrunner JSR taught his dog Peanut Butter to do the next best thing- to play baseball. Specifically, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB for the Super Nintendo. If you’re vaguely remembering another dog playing Gyromite at Games Done Quick six months ago, that was Peanut Butter too. JSR, was gracious enough to agree to an interview with Old School Gamer Magazine. Thanks for being here.
Thank you! It’s great to be here, I am very proud of my doggo and I am excited to talk about him.
First of all, please introduce yourself and Peanut Butter, in your own words.
My name is James, I go by JSR, and PB is my 4-year-old Shiba Inu, named as such because together I can have my best PB every day. I got him during the pandemic, and immediately noticed how smart he was. Eventually, I began training him to do advanced tricks and stuff, and that coincided with me speedrunning Gyromite for a project I was working on. With some work and some creativity, as well as the help of some of the members of my community, we created a custom controller and the rest is history!.
How does Gyromite work as a game that makes it practical to replace R.O.B. with a dog?
Peanut Butter already had the ability to press a button. When I realized that I could use him by proxy to control the game, I decided to route the game out for him and work with him to do a run. Gyromite is a very slow game, an auto-scroller, with simple controls, so I figured that would be the perfect opportunity for him to react and work with me. It turned out, he’s a lot better at it than I thought initially, and now we’re looking at much more advanced stuff.
As many fans know, R.O.B. isn’t really very practical for its purpose as a controller disguised as a toy. How is Peanut Butter better than, or worse than, R.O.B. as a controller for playing Gyromite?
For one thing, he doesn’t use as many batteries! (Haha) He does run on a lot more treats though! He is so much faster than R.O.B. is, making it a lot more effective to use a dog. In fact, his run is the fastest recognized speedrun on speedrun.com, since there isn’t a human-only category (as of this interview). Of course, he also can get distracted and we do time from belly itches on occasion…
Gyromite is, after all, a fairly simple game. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB is a somewhat more sophisticated one, though. How did you determine it was practical to teach Peanut Butter how to play it too?
I also speedrun that game, and as I was trying to come up with another game to attempt, I played it and realized that with Auto Fielding on he could play that as well. I did a little research to make sure that was legal in that category, and went on to reroute that game so that he could play it!
Does Peanut Butter have any idea what’s going on? I was a little surprised at how nonplussed he was performing in front of a crowd at Summer Games Done Quick.
We worked really hard at that! Lots of training every weekend at PetSmart, as well as my buddy’s house where his toddler-aged nieces and nephews play with high volume and intensity. Training P.B. there was extremely effective, and it didn’t surprise me at all once we got there how well he did. I know a lot of people were shocked by that, but we were prepared.
I think it’s safe to say that Peanut Butter is your main claim to fame. However, you’re a speedrunner in your own right. What games do you run, and why?
The game I’m most known for was my first speedrun, The Legend of Zelda, on the NES, which my current Personal Best is a 28:26, good for 6th place as of now… Even though I haven’t actively ran that game for a few years (haha). I was the first person to ever get the sub 30/80/90 in Zelda 1, Zelda II, and A Link to the Past. I also performed a speedrun from every episode of The Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN), 200 games in total. I’ve had over 70 world records, and I’ve done 8 GDQ runs in my career, which is part of the over $250k that PB and J have both raised in our careers. I’ve also been involved in tournament racing, in both vanilla and randomizers as well.
What is the appeal of running these older titles to you? Do you have a favorite?
I suppose it is a little bit of reliving my childhood. A lot of these games are extremely hard, notoriously so. When I was a child, they kicked my rear end (lol). Speedrunning, in a way, is my chance to get back at them. With lots of practice and strategies, pre-planning, and my adult hand-eye coordination, I’ve been on a bit of a redemption tour of sorts.
Aside from Peanut Butter, what would you say has been your greatest personal accomplishment in this hobby?
Definitely completing the AVGN Trials (the aforementioned AVGN project), where I ran 200 games from each AVGN episode. This project began in 2018, and I finished it in 2023. It took me over 15,000 attempts, and I clocked over 2,500 hours in both learning games as well as attempting speedruns. During that project, there were many times I didn’t think I was going to complete it. In fact at one point, I was pretty sure I had abandoned it completely! However, with some persistence and some free time, I was able to complete it. (You can see all about this and more at avgntrials.com)
Do you have any idea yet what game you’re going to teach Peanut Butter to play next? Or is he just going to be an expert in Gyromite and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB?
There’s a couple things we’re working on! Right now, I’m routing out the N64 game Pokemon Snap. I’m pretty sure this will be a possibility as well as other projects, such as Silent Hill 2 (Dog%) and Castlevania on Famicom Disk System (which is very similar to the NES version except for there’s an easy mode without knockback). With his new controller that we built before SGDQ, as well as some of the new interfaces were working on, not only can we play on real hardware, but now we can do much more complex control schemes too!
Those are all the questions I have for you. Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
Thank you so much for having us! Bebe and I are looking forward to seeing you all at my Twitch stream (twitch.tv/jsr_) where Peanut Butter occasionally plays and I love to hang out and chat with retro gaming fans!
Well it was great speaking to you. Thanks for agreeing to this interview.
BUTTON!
William Schwartz is a media writer who specializes in South Korean media, but also writes about a wide variety of popular culture subjects- including retro video games.
