Karl Jobst: prosecutor of fake records

On 2 December 2017 Karl Jobst finished the first level of GoldenEye 007 in 52 seconds on Agent. The previous record, 53 seconds, had sat since 27 September 2002. Owen S. Good at Polygon wrote that the drop was "akin to the sub-four-minute mile." Jobst was already, by then, a Perfect Dark champion several times over. He had been speedrunning those two Rare shooters since 1999.

That is the heaven. A man from Queensland, born 7 February 1986, who started on Ultima V at two and a half, who worked a chicken factory and a call centre, who treated a Nintendo 64 level as a problem you could spend a life on. As of 11 March 2022 he had set 199 individual-level world records across the two games. Nine of them still stood that day.

This is not a fan letter. It is a piece about what happens when the referee is a YouTube channel.

The work the boards did not staff

Jobst's later audience did not come for Dam Agent. It came for the prosecutions.

In January 2020 he took apart a Badabun video that claimed a Super Mario Bros. speedrun. The footage was spliced from real record holders and from a tool-assisted run. In late 2020 he covered the Dream Minecraft investigation, the 29-page drop-rate paper, for an audience that would never read a PDF. In August 2021 he published a long film arguing that Heritage Auctions and Wata Games had conflicts thick enough to inflate a retro-collecting bubble, including a $2 million Super Mario Bros. sale. Wata denied it. Heritage told Video Games Chronicle it had not broken the law. In November 2023, with Mutahar of SomeOrdinaryGamers, he showed from public filings that Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil's Open Hand Foundation had not granted on the $655,520 it had taken in since 2014.

As of 16 October 2025 the channel sat at 1.05 million subscribers and 245.4 million views. The genre is not "drama." The genre is: here is a claim, here is the file, here is the part that does not add up.

A healthy field would have had a newsroom for this. Twin Galaxies was in court. Guinness was in London. speedrun.com is a volunteer clerk. The gap filled with a man who could already read a timer.

The middle of the story is a courtroom

Billy Mitchell had been accused of fake Donkey Kong tapes since 2018. Jobst repeated and extended those accusations on camera, including a January 2023 video that put an old photograph of an apparent eight-way joystick on the 2007 mortgage-brokers cabinet.

He also talked about Apollo Legend. Benjamin Smith, the YouTuber who had called Mitchell a cheater, settled a lawsuit that required him to take the videos down. Smith died by suicide in December 2020. Jobst posted, between May and July 2021, videos that a Queensland judge later held imputed that Mitchell had, "in essence, hounded Apollo Legend to death," and that wrongly described a large payment in the settlement. Jobst put up a retraction in July 2021. Mitchell sued anyway, in September 2021, seeking $400,000 plus $50,000 aggravated.

On 1 April 2025 the court found Jobst liable. Damages: A$350,000 plus A$40,000 interest, plus Mitchell's costs. The judge said the videos "caused substantial additional damage to Mitchell's reputation and caused him distress." The same judgment accepted that Mitchell had expressed joy on an earlier occasion when he wrongly believed Smith had died. That sentence sits in the record. It did not save the channel from the bill.

Jobst could not pay. He raised about $224,000 and filed for voluntary bankruptcy on 9 May 2025. After fees, Mitchell is estimated to have received about $150,000. Mitchell's own legal costs on the suit were $686,671. On the arithmetic that is public, Mitchell lost more than $500,000 by winning.

In April 2026 Jobst filed a defamation suit of his own in the United States, saying Mitchell had made false claims about the bankruptcy and the crowdfund.

A 2021 racism pile-on around private messages, which Jobst said were out of context, also killed his Legends podcast. It belongs in the middle with the rest of the damage. It is not the last word.

What the gap actually is

None of this makes Jobst a court. It makes him a symptom.

Twin Galaxies can ban a name and then, after a settlement, put the same name on a historical shelf. Guinness can follow a ban and then reverse it. speedrun.com can publish a 29-page probability paper and still be a website staffed by volunteers. YouTube can host the prosecutor and the accused on the same recommendation rail.

The field hired a personality to do institutional work. Personality is a terrible employee for that job. It is fast, it is funded by ads, it is exposed to defamation law in every country the video reaches, and it dies when the person cannot pay a judgment.

HISCORE will not declare guilt. That is the whole point of provenance. A row is submitted or signed or measured or imported or verified. The server writes the word. A video essay is not a fifth value. If we ingest a score that Jobst, or Twin Galaxies, or a Queensland judgment has touched, we label the source. We do not put a scarlet letter on the player and we do not pretend a thumbnail is a verdict.

The heaven remains the 52 seconds. A human being looked at a 15-year-old record on a 20-year-old cartridge and took a second off it. That is the thing the Hall of Fame is for. The prosecutions are what you get when nobody else will staff the clerk's office. The lawsuit is what you get when the clerk is also a pundit.

Build the office. Pay for the paper. Leave the man's GoldenEye time on the board, with a tape if we have one, and stop asking a YouTube channel to be a judiciary.

Honesty table

Sources

• Karl Jobst: biography, records, investigations, judgment, bankruptcy, 2026 filing
• Owen S. Good, "GoldenEye 007's most untouchable speedrun record falls after 15 years", Polygon, 3 December 2017
• The Elite Rankings and Jobst player page
• The Guardian, 1 April 2025: A$350,000, the imputation, Apollo Legend
• Brisbane Times, 1 April 2025
• IGN, 11 April 2026: Jobst sues Mitchell in the US
• IGN, 14 November 2023: Open Hand $655,520
• Video Games Chronicle, 25 August 2021: Wata / Heritage
• Channel: youtube.com/@karljobst

Retrieved 18 August 2026.