Video Game Speeding for Kibble

Video Game Speeding for Kibble – by Liam Sweeny.

A dog plays a video game. You see, if I just told you that, we could pick up our coats and go home right now. I mean, that’s a pretty weird story, right? Did they win, lose, get distracted by a milkbone? Who knows, who cares. Dog played a video game, and Darwin has returned from his grave to write a supplemental chapter of The Origin of Species. But this isn’t just about a doog playing a video game.

This is about a dog beating a 1985 Nintendo game (Gyromite) in 26 minutes and 24 seconds. It’s about speed. The gamers he’s surrounded by, and the one that ones him, are speed players. How fast can they beat a game? This particular contest was put on by Games Done Quick, a group that has speed contests for gamers and gives the money raised to cancer charities and Doctors Without Borders. This is a whole subset of gaming that not many people have heard of.

So the dog, PB (for “Peanut Butter” or “Personal Best”) had been trained since a pup to play Gyromite, much like one of our own children we might train to play Nocturne No. 9 – Not “the piano”; just that song. And apparently, if you teach a pooch to strategically hit paddles with their paw, you can get them to do anything, including beat a video game that, at least once in its life, was beating humans.

Can you imagine the kid that couldn’t beat that game, much less in 24 minutes, and they’re reading this article? How bad would you have to feel. I mean, how good are they at destroying squeaky toys? Because they have to be better at it than Peanut Butter in order to save any face at all.

I’m going to try to teach my cat to play Super Mario Bros. She’ll probably spend lesson one not batting the turtles with her paw. No; lesson zero would be to get off my damn computer keyboard. Alas, not everybody can have a Peanut Butter for a student.

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