Games
Ahead of the Game: GrandPOObear
Meet David Hunt — aka GrandPOObear — the world’s greatest and most theatrical speedrunner, as he tackles a seemingly impossible hacked game and otherwise lives a shockingly normal life.
IT MIGHT BE THE MOST DIFFICULT VIDEO GAME EVER MADE.
After 1,400 hours of malevolent hacking, a notorious developer known as BarbarousKing has savagely twisted the most beloved game of his ’90s-era childhood, "Super Mario World," so that Mario, the ever-innocent, mustachioed Italian plumber in blue overalls, finds himself shipwrecked at sea as invisible, carnivorous fish drop from the sky.
Don’t feel bad if you missed the pre-release hype for Barb’s new game, "Grand Poo World 2." But perhaps you’re already hip to, or even a part of, the growing contingent of gamers devoted to racing the clock as they play absurdly challenging hacks of 20th-century video games — "Super Mario," "Super Metroid" and "Zelda," mostly.
If so, then maybe you’ve seen Barb’s stark, chilling trailer, in which the name of the game — "Grand Poo World 2" — is spelled out above large Chinese letters as ominous thunder crackles over the soundtrack. Or maybe you’ve heard Barb promise, “This game features trolls that at times will be funny, at other times cruel. I am still a jerk; I make no apologies.”
As insiders know, the game is an homage to the most vaunted individual that the speedrunning universe has ever beheld, Barb’s dear friend Poo. That’s a nickname for GrandPOObear, the online handle of 34-year-old David Hunt, a onetime snowboarding star, who streams to more than 150,000 followers six days a week on Twitch. Hunt has notched world records for nearly every crazy-hard "Super Mario" ROM hack now in existence. "Super Dram World," that minefield of invisible Mario-eviscerating blocks that one can only survive by throwing and landing on shells in midair? After some 80 hours of practice, Hunt ran through that puppy in 23 minutes and 13 seconds before a boisterous live audience.
Late nights and fist pumps
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But Hunt is not just speedrunning’s Usain Bolt. He’s also its Elon Musk. He’s a crafty entrepreneur who, on the side, runs a small business, "Warp World," that draws 50,000 people each week to its game-related podcast, and also markets a tool that lends gamers superpowers. Using CrowdControl, customers can pay a small fee (set by a streamer) to kill a "Zelda" player or throw “ice” under Mario’s feet. In the red-hot video game space of 2019, Hunt is living proof that even a niche standout can, if he carries the aura of magic, pull down a few hundred thou a year and become a celebrity.
Hunt’s magic is his boyish accessibility. He is, to quote an Internet meme, “the people’s speedrunner.” Though he is a devoted husband and father, he looks — in his trademark flat-billed ball cap — like he’s 14. He’s got a guileless, toothy grin that somehow bespeaks kid joy, and when he plays, he lets the faithful right into his hopped-up soul. When the first "Poo World" came out in 2017, Hunt told his live audience, “I’m gonna cry, man. I’m so humbled.” Later, when the travails inherent in the game induced Hunt to destroy his favorite controller on camera — and drop more f-bombs than a sailor in a tattoo parlor — he still exuded a sparkling charm. As Barb puts it, “I’ve never gone to Poo’s stream and not had a good time.”
And today — Thursday, February 7, 2019 — is a special day in Poo land. Just after 9 a.m. Pacific Time, Barb released "Grand Poo World 2," and numerous Poo acolytes are devoting the day to playing, or watching Hunt play, the game. “I work for Comcast, took the day off,” one AsmodeusNoF notes on Poo’s chat.
“That’s why your Internet will break.”
Myself, I’m speeding through the suburban hinterlands of Portland, Oregon, in a rental car, running late, scrambling to reach Poo World Headquarters — in other words, the nondescript, conifer-shaded ranch home in which Hunt broadcasts his stream. When I arrive, Hunt is in the living room, generously suspending the stream for my benefit, and for a few seconds I peer behind the curtain, into his off-camera life. Here is the gamer himself, barefoot, in gym shorts. Here is his lovely wife — most fans know Gina Hunt as Lady Poo — perched on the blue sectional by the TV in the living room, holding in her arms a tiny one-month-old baby boy.
Gina tells me the name of the child, but then Hunt tells me that to the outside world the boy shall be known only as B. “It’s not really fair to put him in the spotlight when he has no concept of what’s going on,” Hunt explains. “I want him to grow up and invent his own personality.” Listening, I’m struck by the gravitas in his words — and it’s clear to me that, for all the crazy fun he’s having, Hunt is no kid. There’s something deeper, more methodical at work with this guy.
We step into his gaming studio, a small, sparsely lit room crowded by three monitors, and Hunt settles in for what will surely be a long journey. "GPW2" has 23 levels, and Barb has predicted that to complete the entire game Poo will need to endure two weeks of anguish.
Hunt flicks a few buttons, then he’s live. “OK, we’re going to start right now,” he tells his faithful. “We’re starting. It’s happening. We’re doing it. Let’s go.”
Family guy
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GrandPOObear is one of a small contingent of "Mario" and "Zelda" players with more than 50,000 followers on Twitch. Barb is the evil, bearded wise man who waxes analytic when delivering online reviews of other game designers’ work. CarlSagan42 is a microbiology Ph.D. with a maniacal laugh. PangaeaPanga is a skinny, hyper young game designer who ran track at the University of Connecticut. "The New York Times" has thrilled over how masterfully he plays "Super Mario World" blindfolded.
What these gamers have in common is a retro sensibility. Maybe you too have gone goggle-eyed upon stepping into an arcade and eying a glimmering game from the days long before 3D animation: "Pac Man," "Donkey Kong," "Space Invaders," "Defenders," whatever. These guys feel that nostalgia every day, especially Hunt. He was 5 when "Mario 3" first came out.
"That’s right when you start having memories,” he says. “I can remember staying up really late with my sister as she babysat me, trying to beat the game.”
Hunt had other passions. He watched ESPN religiously, honing an ardor for sportscaster Stuart Scott (1965–2015), who authored such choice phrases as “Just call him butter ’cause he’s on a roll.” Hunt also snowboarded. “I spent my childhood trying to get to the top of a 6-foot halfpipe at Nub’s Nob,” he says, describing a small resort in Michigan. “I was a little kid with an oversized fishtail snowboard not made for tricks. I couldn’t do anything.”
GrandPOObear HQ
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Luckily, Hunt was obsessive. As he got older, he practiced certain tricks repeatedly until he mastered them. He attended the University of Colorado, ostensibly to study journalism, hoping to land himself in an NBA broadcast booth. He got an internship with the Denver Nuggets and shot T-shirts out of a slingshot at games. Mostly, though, he rode, hucking himself off cliffs and hiking up through the pow at Copper Mountain and Vail.
After college, Hunt moved further west, to Lake Tahoe, dreaming that he could make it as a pro boarder. As he waited tables and taught snowboarding to kids, he got close — won a couple rail jams, got his picture in "TransWorld." But then in 2013, as he was crossing a trail, an out-of-control skier — a heavyset beginner with a thick Southern drawl — came out of nowhere and sideswiped him; a hit-and-run crash.
At first, Hunt’s injuries seemed straightforward: A broken kneecap, a torn MCL, a fractured L1 vertebra — unsurprising stuff for a cliff jumper. But the brunt of the force had hit his spleen, which soon became infected. As the abscesses grew in the week after the accident, his gut puffed out until it looked as though he were pregnant. Hunt had a fever of 105. He could barely eat.
“I was dying,” he says. When Gina rushed him to the hospital, doctors found he was suffering from a salmonella infection. They gave him a transfusion and performed emergency surgery to remove the abscesses, but afterward, as he spent four months in the hospital, his digestion was thrown. Five-feet-seven inches tall, he went from a shredded 165 pounds to an emaciated 105.
Largely unable to work, lonely and bored, Hunt lay in bed playing "Mario 3." As he got better he drilled certain sequences, doggedly mastering the tricks. He saw how gaming, like snowboarding, is the domain of grind monkeys willing to practice all day. Being obsessive has its merits.
GrandPOObear's snowboarding days
© GENO FONDEROLI
Then one day he tuned into Twitch. He quickly surmised that he could host his own channel. And somehow, he immediately knew that his streaming name would be GrandPOObear. Why that moniker? “Growing up,” he would tell people, riffing, lying through his teeth, “I had a friend named Christopher Robin. Once I went to a basketball camp and Pooh Richardson, the NBA star, was there.” Scores of different, dubious, diverting stories rolled off Hunt’s tongue.
His audience was out there, waiting. It was just a matter of time.
HE SAW THAT GAMING, LIKE SNOWBOARDING, IS THE DOMAIN OF THOSE WILLING TO PRACTICE ALL DAY.
A live Twitch stream can be excruciatingly boring — creepy, even. It invites you into the raw, unedited theater of another person’s life, so that you might be with the streamer hours on end while he scratches his nose or slurps away at a Big Gulp. It’s easy to understand why, of the million-plus Twitch channels currently going, the vast majority have fewer than 10 viewers.
It’s also easy to see why Hunt has thousands of paid subscribers. He’s entertaining, a consummate thespian. The clipped videos on his Twitch channel play like great moments in theater. In one slugged “Kid in a Candy Store” that’s been watched 57,000 times, Hunt stands and hops up and down on the seat of his chair, maniacally laughing, as he celebrates the February release of Nintendo’s "Mario Maker 2," a game-making system. In another clip, Hunt wears cheap blue sunglasses and a tousled blonde wig over his shaved head as his right hand sports a gleaming Power Glove, a late-’80s Nintendo virtual-reality tool. When he leans back, cringing over a minuscule failure, viewers get him in profile and can revel in the mulletlike cut of his wig.
The theatrics of POO
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Hunt is so beloved that during one 2018 stream a fan named the_kobold_inn gave him a surprise $4,000, partly in tribute to Hunt’s generosity. “You donate a ton of your time to helping others out,” Kobold typed into chat. He wasn’t exaggerating. Last year, Hunt coordinated Mario Masters Colosseum, a four-day game-a-thon that gathered a dozen speedrunning stars to raise more than $100,000 for Direct Relief, a nonprofit that provides medical services to the poor. In his eight appearances at Games Done Quick, a larger, twice-a-year game-a-thon, his own play has landed hundreds of thousands more in gifts, mostly to Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Still, Hunt’s greatest talent involves creating pathos and tension onstream. And the biggest dramas revolve around the developer BarbarousKing. Streaming on Twitch, Poo depicts Barb as both his number-one brah and his archnemesis. When "GPW1" came out, Hunt said of Barb, “I respect the hell out of him.” But a few months later, Hunt hired one of his idols — Tim Kitzrow, the sonorous voice behind the classic video game "NBA Jam" — to record some memes he could use on his stream. His favorite was a one-second snippet that intoned, “Barb’s a dick!”
Barb, who lives in North Carolina, once made a living as a visual artist, painting otherworldly scenes of, say, sword-bearing man-goats. He brings the same dark aesthetic to video games, in the form of dastardly jokes. It’s all about pacing. He’ll route players through a series of daunting obstacles — pillars and smokestacks and pipes so tightly bunched that they may have only 1/60th of a second to jump. Then he’ll deliver a lull — an easy jump, a ho-hum obstacle — before evil suddenly rains out of the sky.
Back playing "GPW2" at GrandPOObear HQ, Hunt is an hour into a tough level, “Deuce Lair,” and, it seems, inches from the goal line. After he vaults Mario into a fast-moving green pipe, stars dance under the pipe and the words “Course Clear” glimmer onscreen.
Fucking count it!” Poo celebrates, standing and pumping his fist in delight. He cues an audio clip of Kitzrow that bellows, “Suck it, rest of the world!” Then, not a second later, he tumbles back into his chair, watching gape-mouthed as his ostensibly victorious Mario plummets out of the pipe and falls into the ocean.
“No, don’t die!” Hunt wails. “Am I dead?” As if in assent, the screen gives off the wa-wa-wa sound of pixelated death. Mario keeps falling. Now all Hunt can do is mourn. He removes his hat from his head, a gesture of befuddlement, and then asks, “How does that work?”
But does it even matter how? And who ever said that, in a world created by BarbarousKing, life is fair?
Retro sensibility
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In the days after the release of "GPW2," the game hangs over the "Super Mario" universe like a plague. I learn that a few dozen streamers are racing to finish it as fast as possible. This is a fool’s contest rich in sleep deprivation, bad coffee and poor dietary decisions. Hunt doesn’t need to go there. He’s established. He’s a family man who limits his streaming to 40 hours a week, so that he can read B. his favorite book, "The Wonky Donkey."
Still, I’m intrigued by the circus sideshow, so on Saturday morning, I tune into the Twitch stream of one Noble Tofu, a Los Angeles tattoo artist. Tofu’s been up for most of the past 48 hours, leaving his gaming station only to attend to bodily functions. He has taken a week off work to tackle "GPW2."
“Yesterday,” he remarks, “my girlfriend brought me food.”
Soon, I type into the chat box a note saying I’m a journalist with questions. Tofu gets nervous. “I’m getting trolled here,” he responds.
When I give Tofu the link to my website, to show I’m legit, his fury only escalates. “Don’t sass me!” he says. “I’m on red alert with trolls!”
I have better luck with a gamer named Electronic Logic, who I catch after he’s spent 35 straight hours playing "GPW2." “I was feeling a little dizzy,” Logic tells me, having just woken from a restorative 11-hour slumber. “I could see letters written in the paint on the wall. T’s and X’s and H’s,” he adds, helpfully, before sharing that he’d become the first person on the planet to finish GPW2 — or, rather the game’s 23 advertised levels. “
"There are actually two more levels,” Logic adds. “Hidden levels. We’ve found them through reverse engineering, but we don’t know how to access them. It’s like there’s a cave in the mountains and you don’t know where the entrance is.”
Later, Barb will tell me that "GPW2" contains a “convoluted, cryptic and intricate puzzle that hides the game’s true ending.” The puzzle features anagrams that provide players with clues they can use to find hidden passages to the game’s last boss fight and its exit. The puzzle, likely unprecedented in ROM hack history, is a shout out to Hunt, who, Barb notes, “loves escape rooms and puzzles.”
All through the night, Electronic Logic will swap a Google Doc back and forth with three other gamers, trading clues as he tries to crack the mystery. The midnight quartet will ponder questions such as “What is the significance of the noise after the Corndilly level?” Growing sarcastic, Noble Tofu suggests the solution lies in a mathematical formula: “We take the square root of how many spikes are in Level 7. Once we get that we ask Barb for his social security number.”
Talented AND entertaining
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While such midnight madness is under way, Hunt slips out to savor a professional wrestling match, an indie production put on by a small punk rock outfit, Defy Wrestling. When I meet him at Portland’s seedy Hawthorne Theater, it’s an outre crowd: Neck tattoos, leather; even the chanting is laced with profanities.
In this milieu, Hunt fades into the woodwork, a normal guy in baggy jeans and a gray hoodie wrapped tight over his ball cap. He takes his seat in the front row, expounding with wisdom on the fakery and schtick of each grappler. “Wrestling and gaming have a lot in common,” he says. “To succeed, you need to be both talented and entertaining.”
Until the last match of the evening, Poo goes unnoticed. Then, Defy Wrestling’s reigning champ, Artemis Spencer, emerges from the locker room rippled with sinew, clad in a skimpy Speedo. Spencer is a grappler and a gamer. He follows Poo on Twitch, and within minutes, he spots Hunt in the crowd. Then he reaches through the ropes and fist-bumps his man crush. The moment is at once wink-wink ironic and laden with meaning. Master showmen have ways of finding each other.
Token gesture
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OH MY GOD. I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH. I DON’T EVER WANT IT TO END.
When Hunt wakes up on Monday, the midnighters have finished "GPW2." This is inconsequential to Hunt. “Another human spent over 1,000 hours making this thing, and he named it after me,” he says. “I’m going to take my time. I’m going to enjoy it.”
The key to "GPW2," it turns out, lies in recalling a character from Hunt’s childhood. Mario’s brother, Luigi, is also a plumber. Tall and skinny, he wears a green hat. After Hunt picks at the puzzle for five hours, he goes out on a limb and logs in as Luigi. Jazzy victory music plays. Luigi glides on the home stretch, and Hunt goes ballistic. “Oh my god!” he says, his laughter a mix of mania and glee. “This is the greatest thing that’s ever existed in the history of time!”
Later, Hunt will express worries that his celebrity, and his income, could dry up. “How many TV shows have a 15-year run?” he asks. “I’m a TV show and an athlete, so I have to act like it could end tomorrow.” He has an investment adviser, a tax guy. Managing the business is work, he says. Drilling on game sequences also is work. “I’m like an NFL player,” he says. “They pay me for Monday to Saturday. I do Sunday for free.”
Strike a pose
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Today is Hunt’s Sunday. He just plays, through fires that erupt onscreen and past swarms of giant blue blowfish. In the end, he’ll finish "GPW2" in 24 hours of playing time, 10 fewer than the midnight quartet. On Wednesday, Poo beat his own world record, lowering it to 1:03:32. “Oh my god, I love this game so much,” he rejoices. “I don’t ever want it to end!”
When Gina comes in with a plate, his eyes are still glued to the screen. “I just finished,” he says, his voice gentle and sweet. “It was the greatest thing ever.” He does not look up. He’s already started his next run through "Grand Poo World 2."