The May Sackboy Knit-Speedrun Challenge culminated in an unprecedented tie for first place. We tracked down one of the two winners, Shay “Glitchy” Legg, to learn more about his back and forth experience.
Glitchy is a 19-year-old hailing from “quite a small town” in Hampshire, UK. Let’s go in-depth on how he got into speedruns, strategies for how to play Sackboy: A Big Adventure trials, and expectations for July’s PS5 challenge.
Congrats! You came out at the top of the leaderboards tied for first in the Sackboy Knit-Speedrun Challenge. How does that accomplishment feel?
It was pretty cool! I think the craziest thing to me was the fact that it was a tie. At first it was a bit of back and forth between me and Cookiest [Monster]. He was the first to get the winning time and I remember finally getting a good run and being amazed to see it matched his exactly. As much as I would have loved to beat it, it's awesome that we tied. I definitely didn't expect it within 1ms!
That's an incredible margin. What do you think you did "right" to match his time? What do you wish you could've done differently to get past that mark?
Hmm, I think I had a pretty good start. There's a little technique where you can get some extra distance by rolling right before the mole (or whatever it is) and it launches you in the sky. I think I timed that part perfectly. The rest was mostly minimizing air time and making sure I rolled as much as possible. It’s hard to say what I could have done better especially when dealing with millisecond differences, but I think I could have had a bit of a tighter line at the end.
It’s impressive how the little details make a difference when speedrunning, and how they’re sometimes hard to even notice.
Yeah for sure, it's very odd, I feel like my runs that feel the slowest end up being the fastest sometimes!
What got you into Sackboy? Did you play LittleBigPlanet?
Oh yes! LittleBigPlanet was one of the first games I got for my PS3. I remember my older brother visiting me with his games collection when I was younger. He showed me LBP and I was instantly hooked. Absolutely love the series, heard of SABA, and couldn't not get it! Although I would love to see a return to the 2.5D games someday.
It was definitely a groundbreaking game in that genre. Did you get into video games because of family? Does your brother still play?
I would say family and friends yeah. My brother still quite enjoys the odd game! I think he plays a fair bit of Warframe.
Do you speedrun other games aside from Sackboy?
It's kind of new to me honestly. I think the fact there's a leaderboard in the trials on SABA brought out my competitive side a bit, although I did do a few speedruns of the original LBP games -- nothing too crazy though.
It’s cool that LittleBigPlanet and Sackboy exposed you to speedrunning. Do you think you'd like to try it in other games?
For sure! Any game with interesting movement is a good candidate I'd say. The new Ratchet looks cool as hell and I'd imagine that'd be pretty fun to speedrun. I haven't bought it yet though.
Do you watch any other speedrunners for inspiration?
Hard for me to think off the top of my head, but when I did LBP I quite liked to watch a friend of mine RbdJellyFish as he would mainly do LBP speedruns. I also watch PPJ and Nightcarries too, actually!
Do your other friends know you speedrun?
Most do yes! I'm in an LBP Speedrunning discord and have a few friends in there.
Now that you have more experience, what do you need to be a good speedrunner?
All you need is patience and perseverance! There have been countless times I've felt like quitting but soon after I end up getting a record, the feeling when that happens makes it all worth it.
How long do you practice daily? Do you have any tips or tricks for setting up practice runs?
If I'm really trying to beat a time I'll go upwards of 6 hours, but usually I’ll just pop on for 1 or 2 hours to see if I can improve my times a bit. The best skill is to just be attentive and pay attention to how the individual moves work and combine I'd say. A lot of the time you'll discover little tricks on accident, and you can apply those in many ways.
A good example is there's a way to get a bit of a speed boost when using the Bounce Pads. If you roll and then bounce you go pretty far and you can use that to get a really good time on the Bounce Pad trial.
The trick with the mole to get distance on the tournament is effectively doing the same thing but replacing the bouncepad with the mole. Cookiest was the madman that found that, would have never occurred to me to try that
Have you spoken to CookiestMonster?
I do! He is definitely my biggest competition right now. He's a very good player and got some very hard times to beat on the trials, lots of back and forth between us getting records
Sounds like a rivalry or friendship in the making.
Haha, thats pretty accurate, all in good sport though but I do have more records on the trials!
What are some of your records?
All trials except 12 and 7, in solo at least. Leaderboards don’t distinguish between player count, so we use a particular site to keep track.
It’s not time to let up on your successes. Will you be running next month’s PS5 challenge?
Definitely! I’m looking forward to the competition. Maybe someone will blow my times out of the water. That'd be exciting! I think [the challenges are] a cool idea! A good way to get more people into speedrunning for sure, and it would be awesome to see it evolve.
Let's hope it happens. Any last words of wisdom for other people looking to follow in your footsteps in the challenges?
When in doubt, spin! It could get you the extra distance to save your run. Make corners your enemy too -- cut all of em!
You can follow Glitchy’s Sackboy adventures on Twitter and on YouTube, where he uploads most of his speedruns. He plans to start streaming on Twitch soon. Put the lessons you’ve learned from this interview to the test in future PS5 Sackboy Knit-Speedrun Challenges!