Before returning to his attempts at a no damage run of Final Fantasy VIII, before he leaves AGDQ at the end of the week to return to his normal streaming schedule, Carci had one thing left to do: Chill out in his hotel room and talk with me over Discord to review the toughest, most cheek-clenching moments from his now-legendary run.

Whether you were awake in the wee hours of Wednesday the 17^th of January to see Carci leap out of his chair and take a victory lap in AGDQ’s main hall, or you caught his post-run euphoria after the fact on YouTube, you would be correct in guessing it took him a while to settle down after accomplishing such a monumental achievement. “I was just elated,” he says. “I spent most of that time replying to thousands of messages and hanging out with people.”

Most GDQ players respond the same way. You celebrate with your couch, and then you jump online to scan through social media posts about your accomplishment. Carci’s no damage run of Resident Evil 2 Remake generated even more buzz. The replay pulled in over 60,000 views less than 24 hours after GDQ posted it to YouTube. GDQ’s choice of thumbnail, an overjoyed Carci raising his fists and throwing his head back, summed up his mood perfectly. “I'm still in disbelief. For viewers, beating a game without taking a single point of damage is a great watch. I had so much fun providing that entertainment. The sense of achievement I got from doing it feels leaps and bounds better than my RE7 run” at an earlier GDQ, “even though I'm very satisfied with that run.

I enjoy finding little optimizations to make it even safer. This run was about me taking a no damage route and doing it on a stage. It’s a testament to all the time Matt and I spent routing the game.”

As proud as he is of his achievement, Carci’s favorite event of the show was runner JSR_ and his companion, Peanut the Dog, tag-teaming Gyromite, an NES title where player one controls a character while player two—Peanut, in this case—performs actions by operating a plastic toy called R.O.B. the Robot. “The clear winner of most views per video is definitely going to be the dog speedrunner. I can’t be angry about that. That dog earned his stripes and is deserving of the most popular run in the marathon.” For as good a boy as Peanut is, the run has amassed 200,000 views as of this writing compared to Carci’s 364,000. This isn’t a comparison of one run to another. Rather, it illustrates how impressive finishing a game on its hardest difficulty, and without taking damage of any kind, really is.

“If I end up never submitting another Resident Evil run to GDQ, I’m satisfied with this run being the run. I can be happy with this for the rest of my life.”

Enjoy Carci's complete Resident Evil 2 no damage run from AGDQ 2024.

A day and a half after his run, I caught up with Carci to talk about specific moments and to get his thoughts on what’s next. My first question concerned a change in routing that occurred early on, in Claire’s first encounter with zombies. Instead of running through the east corridor to the shutter door where Marvin pulls you to safety, Carci used to hang a right at the end of the corridor and loot a board and handgun ammo from a supply closet. The closet is guarded by a zombie cop. Since you’re low on ammo so early in the game, Carci would shoot off its leg, grab the items, then weave around the dismembered undead to avoid getting bit in the ankle as he ran toward the shutter door.

In his run, Carci skipped the supply closet. That surprised me. The board you find there comes in handy almost immediately. Your next stop is the west hallway, where a Misty batters at a window near a room you must enter. Unless you board the window, she will smash through the glass and lurk in the hallway the next time you pass through. Wouldn’t it be safer to risk getting bitten by the zombie guarding the supply closet in the east hallway if it meant being able to board up the window on the west side? Not according to a change Carci and his friend MattDaRoc made to their routing. “I would be relying on RNG to determine how quickly the zombie’s leg gets removed. Claire's got higher critical shot rate, but fewer rounds. I'd have to run in there, grab the ammo, and grab the board without getting hit.”

Carci decided it was easier to skip that and take another risk later, albeit a smaller one. “If you go through the RPD before the helicopter crashes, the most zombies you are going to get in the west hallway is one. The only reason you go into that cubby in the east hallway is to get a board that prevents that female zombie from smashing a window and climbing into the west hallway. But after the helicopter crashes, she de-spawns.”

His route for Claire takes him through the west hallway two more times. On his second pass, Carci has two boards for those windows. Securing them will prevent zombies from breaking through on his third pass. “I won’t be traveling through that hallway ever again as Claire. As Leon, I would.”

Perhaps the most nail-biting moment of the run occurred just after Mr. X makes his first appearance. Carci’s strategy is to lure him out to the roof, then loop around him and duck through the door he entered. Mr. X took his time joining Carci on the rooftop. When he finally shouldered his way outside, he turned his back to Carci. That was intentional. Carci had attempted to pick up the bullets on the bench sitting on the far side of the door. That caused Mr. X’s AI to register the bench as Claire’s last known location. With the monster’s back turned to him, Carci—who said moments earlier that he wanted to “try a little something-something”—ran for the door, thinking he could squeak past before Mr. X could turn around. Three things happened almost at once, and the combination almost cost him the run.

First, Mr. X heard Carci’s footsteps and spun to face him. Second, the door, still open from Mr. X passing through, was swinging closed. Third, Carci seemed to get hung up on the door. All of that added up to Carci taking a second too long to escape. If he’d taken two seconds, I’d be writing a much gloomier ending.

“That was definitely complacency,” he says. “I was trying to showboat, but my movement messed up a little bit. I ended up colliding with the hinge of the door. I was lucky to just barely clear it because I was a few frames away from getting hit by Mr. X's punch.”

A force stronger than complacency played a bigger part in his near miss. “After that, I realized, okay, I absolutely cannot do shit like that anymore. I was just elated to have a full showcase of all the cool things about no damage runs.”

Mr. X factored into the run again several minutes later, but not in a way anyone expected. After picking up the jack in the evidence room, Carci ducks and weaves around Mr. X again—with all door hinges on their best behavior—and moves up through the locker rooms on the second floor. He stops in the S.T.A.R.S. office and unlocks the cage to claim the submachine gun. Then he approaches the door leading back to the hallway, but he doesn’t pass through it. The plan here is to listen for Mr. X’s footsteps. Ideally, he’ll stomp down the hallway past the office, find no sign of Claire, and turn around to head back through the locker room and down to the main floor. That puts him far from the library, where Carci must go next.

There was a moment of panic when Mr. X went into the library. His footsteps faded, then grew louder as he lumbered back into the hall outside the office… and then disappeared. Carci was on his guard. If he’d lost track of Mr. X, the behemoth could be lying in wait anywhere. Oddly, and serendipitously, he seemed to have vanished.

Carci isn’t 100 percent sure what happened here, but he has a theory. A YouTube video by Slippy Slides breaks down how Mr. X’s AI works. The reason you’re able to move through the RPD with no loading screens is because the game is constantly streaming data pertaining to the surrounding area. Everywhere else is dropped from memory to make room for geometry you’re likely to pass through sooner rather than later. Mr. X operates similarly. “In unloaded areas, he quickly teleports and skips from one place to the next, but he looks around from room to room,” Slippy explained in his video. “I might be easily pleased, but I genuinely thought that the noises you hear of him walking around above us would just be sound effects and nothing else. How cool is it that he moves around looking for us, even though we never see it?”

What that means for you, the player cowering in one of the few rooms Mr. X cannot enter, is that Mr. X can teleport to sections not loaded in memory. Unless you do something that alerts him, such as picking up the jack in the records room or firing a weapon, the game has unwittingly granted you a reprieve. It doesn’t last long, so you should do as Carci did and complete the next steps of your plan quickly.

By the time Carci confronted William Birkin’s “G3” mutation, he and his couch team were trying to keep a lid on their excitement. G4 is much easier to defeat if you know how to use the lay of the land in your favor, making G3 effectively the last major obstacle in his path. His strategy—pop the first set of eyes with the SMG and acid rounds, shock his system with the spark shot, and alternate between acid rounds, the SMG, and lightning to bring him down—was beautiful to behold. That’s precisely what Carci hoped for. “I love the strategy I used. It looks cool just because of how you completely shut this boss down.”

Carci’s old strategy relied on pummeling G3 with the grenade launcher’s acid rounds until he dropped. That’s hardly thrilling to watch, and it has a slight flaw. G3 absorbs more damage on Hardcore difficulty. Walk into the fight short on acid rounds and you’d better have other weapons handy. Carci uses acid rounds to pop every eye until only one, mounted on G3’s shoulder, remains. “You only have a window to fire one spark shot. That causes G3 to expose” the cluster of eyes in his chest. That’s when the SMG shines. “The submachine gun is a DPS”—damage per second—“monster. The 50-round mag empties in, like, three seconds. You can just dump a whole mag into his core. It’s what does the lion's share of damage to G3. The strategy is optimized for very specific components of that fight, and it’s just a really beautiful fight to watch when you’re playing as Claire.”

G4 went down faster than expected. Carci’s strategy is to run from one end of the tram in the center of the platform to the other, alternating between lobbing grenades and firing Claire’s chain gun into the nest of eyes in his center. When G4 dropped to his belly and crawled forward, Carci knew he had won. “You just have to wait for the final cutscene to trigger.” It’s not quite that simple. “I kept retreating so he wouldn’t reach me and ruin the run.”

That was the moment Carci knew he’d won. It didn’t hit him at once. He had completed no damage runs with Claire before, but never in front of tens of thousands of people. When his couch and the attendees behind him broke into applause, Carci grinned and threw up his fists. Unable to contain himself, he removed his headset and raced across the auditorium. “I almost had to give myself permission to just fucking run wild. It had been nothing but practice, making sure I could replicate the route and every movement over and over again. When I won the last fight, I was like, It’s over. It’s fucking over. I took my headphones off and ran straight into the crowd. Any number of things could have gone wrong, and they didn't. I was just happy.”

Alone in his hotel room talking to me over Discord, Carci gave thought to what the future holds in store. He’s not finished with Resident Evil 2 Remake, although he has no interest in performing a speedrun. He finds the game’s movement too inconsistent. A knife-only run appeals to the challenge runner in him. Another option is to combine the fundamentals of speed and challenge runs. “It would be kind of cool to see what the most consistent strategies are if you were to focus not on consistency, but on speed. You decrease your chances of actually completing a no damage run, but you get to add in speedrun tricks here and there that are reasonably consistent.”

One of the best parts of accomplishing his goal is the sense of relief it gave him. “I don't really feel any pressure. I want to find more runs that make me feel a sense of accomplishment mechanically speaking, not necessarily just routing.”

Carci's segmented no damage run in Resident Evil 3 Remake (2020).

He was already looking ahead. Since returning from the event, he’s devoted many hours of his livestreams to putting Resident Evil 3 Remake under a microscope. “Resident Evil 3 Remake has a lot of RNG, so my route for no damage wasn't as optimized. Basically, after getting an S-rank no damage run on Inferno difficulty in six segments, I decided, okay, I got my YouTube video, I'm done with it. I really want to play something else.”

Resident Evil 3 Remake is one of my favorite games in the series, but I agree with Carci regarding RNG. On high difficulties, the final battle against Nemesis is punishing to the point of unfairness. You could run a perfect game up to that point, only for Nemesis’s erratic attacks to squash you. He’s not giving up. Whether it’s RE3 Remake or another installment, he wants to recapture the excitement of performing no damage runs in other series entries, plus the extra challenge of not saving his game. One mistake and he’d get booted to the beginning.

It's too early for him to state what his GDQ future holds in store. Perhaps another Resident Evil game. Or perhaps other games he’s expressed interest in mastering, such as Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or one of Square’s Final Fantasies. Thanks to his RE2 Remake run this year, he’s under no pressure to choose. “It’s engaging to me to try new things. That’s really what I always want to be doing: Something new. I cannot put myself into a position where I'm forcing myself to play it or my livelihood is dead. If I do more Games Done Quick events after this, I want them to be for other games, and I want to figure out what those other games might be so I can grow my audience.”

The most important thing for Carci is to set a goal. Then the fun begins: Learning how to bend and contort a game’s parts—level design, movement, attacks, AI, everything—in a way that allows him to achieve it.

“Your reward for work is more work. That’s where I am with it now.”