If you watched only one run from 2024's Awesome Games Done Quick event, it was almost certainly Peanut Butter the dog playing Gyromite--putting ROB to shame with his flawless navigation in the pursuit of victory and cheese. Training a dog to do anything isn't easy, and training a Shiba Inu to do anything is even more of a challenge, but streamer and longtime speedrunner JSR_ knew that his furry friend was up to the challenge. He was so sure of it, in fact, that the two spent nine months training in preparation for the challenge, and JSR_ sat down with GameSpot at AGDQ in Pittsburgh to talk about the experience.

JSR_ recognized Peanut Butter's intelligence and aptitude for training right away, using positivity (pawsitivity?) training to teach him typical dog tricks early on. He wanted to get him involved in other challenges, but rather than enroll him in agility competitions, JSR_ opted to combine Peanut Butter's love of training with his own project: a quest to complete speedruns of every game featured on the Angry Video Game Nerd show. At that point, it had taken five years and well over 2,000 hours. Most games the Nerd played for his show would frustrate the average human, let alone a dog, but there was an exception.

"[There were] 200 speedruns I had to learn, and one of them was the ROB the Robot episode where I played Gyromite," JSR_ explained. "And as I was playing it, it struck me that ROB is simple enough that if I trained Peanut Butter to press the buttons instead, I could play Gyromite with my dog."