I had an idea for a fun race format, which piggybacked off an already existing format of races called the Quick 5 by EpicNeonNinjaMonkey. Epic would in the past hold “Quick 5” races which consisted of giving people 1-2 weeks to learn 5 games that were selected by him and his community. Sometimes the games were full-game goals, sometimes they were partial, and generally previous winners or participants of the past races got to choose the future race games.

I changed the format up a little (with his blessing to go ahead with the idea) and we created RAFR (RANDOM AS FUCK RACE).

Using this website to generate a random video game from an entire library, we generated a list of 5 random NES games. Everyone this time only had 3 days to practice, and Kat and I again picked partial goals for each game that were generally supposed to be 5-10 minutes per goal. The first list ended up being:

Right off the start you can see… well, uhh, Q*Bert was the big elephant in the room. Nobody liked Q*Bert and everyone agreed after Q*Bert sucked a lot. We decided to keep Q*Bert in the list though as Kat and I both agreed, random, for better or for worse had to be the focal point of these races.
Felix the Cat is an underrated platformer with terrible music, and Side Pocket was a passable (though janky) NES pool game.
Gremlin’s 2 was actually a platforming game I’m very familiar with as some speedfriends run it, and have told me to try it out in the past, and I had never tried until the race. I actually found Gremlin’s 2 to be one of the harder games on this list to learn properly to the point my own route was basically all safe strats.
Puyo Puyo was the last game. I’ve actually played Puyo my entire life, but I never knew its origins were on NES! It was neat to see this one was generated.

Our first race had 4 participants (myself and Kat included) and one had to drop last minute due to health issues, which is always ok!

My brother Shauny7188 handled the re-streaming so Kat and I could participate and my brother, and event-friendly Walranium helped with commentary.
My brother often streams RPGs and speedruns on Twitch, and Walranium is a very friendly variety streamer who often helps with commentary with our events.

Feel free to check them out, here:

Kat and I plan to hold more RAFRs in the future. They’re open to anyone to join!

Here are the old races!