Just a Speed Runner, that’s all…
(Ok, that’s not true, I suppose)
My name is James, and I go by JSR. Welcome to my website and autobiography! I wanted to have a place to tell folks a bit about myself, in case they were curious. I was born August 16th, and born and raised in Las Vegas, where I’ve lived my entire life. A life-long gamer, I grew up on a steady diet of Nintendo and Sony consoles, playing classics such as The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Country, EarthBound, and many more. Some of these games, I played so much, that I became quite adept at them, and eventually this would lead to me speedrunning them!
I had a short music career in the late aughts, which helped me to gain confidence in front of crowds and on a microphone. This experience would serve me greatly later in life, in regards to my ability to speak and entertain on live streams and at live events. I had some great experiences, and met some great people, some of whom I’m still friends with to this day!
In 2016, one of them joined with me to create a podcast, and to promote said podcast we began a Twitch channel to livestream our ‘casts. Soon after, we began streaming games which eventually led to myself trying speedrunning out. What is speedrunning, you ask? It’s the effort to beat a video game as quickly as possible, typically using only the hardware and game as commercially available at launch, under a specific ruleset. It’s a competitive and daunting community, but one in which I’ve found my calling and, truly, where I belong. Eight years later, I’m a Twitch partner, and I have the confidence to speedrun anything.
In 2018, I began “The Angry Video Game Nerd Trials of JSR” (which you can read about on this very site!), a project to speedrun a game from every episode of the AVGN (The AVGN is a YouTube personality that has been making humorous reviews of terrible video games, since 2004). This project took almost 5 years, 2500 hours, and 200 speedruns to accomplish. Until I trained my doggo, this was the project which defined me as a streamer and speedrunner…
That is, until 2020. That was the year I adopted my best friend, Peanut Butter. This Shiba Inu was born in July 2020, and when he came home to me in October we fell in love. He is the bestest boy, and he trains and works so hard for me! P.B. for short, he is smart, loyal, and hilariously fun to play and train with. And it all came full circle for me in July 2022, when as part of the AVGN Trials, I had to speedrun Gyromite. After training P.B. for 9 months, we were able to accomplish a speedrun of Gyromite using only P.B. as a “controller”, meaning I had no inputs directly made by myself. This was accepted as a run at AGDQ 2024, and we raised over $30,000 performing that single run!
P.B. and I continue to entertain to this day. I stream regularly on Twitch (twitch.tv/jsr_) and continue to play games as quickly as I can. Peanut Butter continues to do his best to help me out, playing classics such as Gyromite, Wild Gunman, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, and more! Together, we hope to entertain folks, raise money for good causes, and have a great time together! We hope you will join us!
