Apollo Legend

About

Apollo Legend was a speedrunner and YouTuber hailing from the Pacific Northwest United States. He's best known for his outspoken opinions on the speedrunning community and viral video takedowns of former video game record holders Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell. On December 31st, 2020, Apollo Legend was found dead in his home.

History

Apollo Legend got his start in speedrunning under the username "Frogburt," where he performed speedruns of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. During his time under this name, he obtained world record times for beating Ocarina of Time in the "Ganonless" category, wherein the game is beaten by using the "wrong warp" glitch to skip to the end credits, avoiding the final boss fight against Ganon. He also competed in other Ocarina of Time speedrun categories and performed speedruns of Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko.

During this time, Frogburt gained a small audience on Twitch where he live-streamed his speedruns. On YouTube, one of Frogburt's early Twitch viewers (fellow speedrunner ikswozol) uploaded a number of clips from Frogburt's Twitch stream in which Frogburt shared interesting personal stories from his life. This series of stories became known as "Tales of Highburt" and are affectionately enjoyed by his earliest fans.^[5] Sometime prior to June 10th, 2016, Frogburt deactivated his Twitch channel, later rebranding himself as Apollo Legend.^[1]

Apollo Legend launched his YouTube channel on June 10th, 2016. His initial video uploads mostly consisted of "speedrun highlight" videos – Apollo gathered various clips of speedrunners from their Twitch streams and then compiled the clips into highlight videos. Apollo ended up unlisting/privating/deleting a lot of these earlier videos and he moved on to a different style of video, but he inspired a number of other speedrun highlight channels such as gladJonas and Speedrun Fails.

After moving to his new video style, one of Apollo's first videos of notoriety is his thoughts and criticism of GamesDoneQuick staff banning speedrunner Bonesaw577 from GDQ events in 2017, following his well received, yet controversial speedrun at SummerGamesDoneQuick 2016. He would later upload a controversial but highly viewed critique of famous speedrunner Cosmo Wright's downfall after her transition to Narcissa Wright (both shown below).

Apollo then made some viral videos that exposed Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell, two competitive gamers who cheated a number of famous video game world records. Apollo himself did not initially discover the cheating of Todd and Billy, but his videos brought the cases to mainstream attention and did some independent investigation.

Reputation

When Apollo first started his channel with his speedrun highlight videos, he received backlash from various speedrunners – some claimed that his videos portrayed speedrunners in too much of a bad light, and others did not like Apollo using their Twitch clips within his videos. This is likely part of what prompted him to move on to different styles of videos.

Apollo Legend gained notoriety for his generally outspoken criticisms of the speedrunning community. Notable criticism has been directed towards GamesDoneQuick and the handling of their events, as documented in his videos about his non-support for the GDQ events and the alleged shady behavior of its event director (shown below).

Apollo has always been a contentious figure due to his controversial videos and the controversy around Oceanside, his planned speedrunning event. However, he generally gained significant support due to his videos that brought the cheating of "Todd Rogers" and "Billy Mitchell" to light.

Todd Rogers Feud

In 2017, Todd Rogers (one of the first competitive gamers and speedrunners) came under heavy pressure after his classic world records (documented in the TwinGalaxies speedrun/high score database) started to come under scrutiny. Todd's most famous speedrun record was his Dragster 5.51 record from 1982. In 2017, a speedrunner and computer scientist called Omnigamer was able to prove that Todd's alleged record of 5.51 seconds is impossible. This sparked an extremely long thread on the TwinGalaxies forum in which many people argued about whether Todd's records should be removed from the TwinGalaxies database or not, and many posters chose to deny the highly conclusive evidence against Todd.

Apollo saw fit to dig deeper into Todd Rogers, and he was able to uncover a number of other nefarious activities in Todd's past. When Apollo uploaded his exposé video of Todd in February of 2018, it quickly garnered widespread attention and over a million views. This caused TwinGalaxies to come under a lot more pressure – they could no longer delay dealing with the issue and finally removed all of Todd's records from their database. Todd was also permanently banned from TwinGalaxies. Apollo was interviewed by Keemstar on an episode of DramaAlert to discuss the story (shown below).

Billy Mitchell Feud

Soon after Todd Rogers was exposed for cheating, other suspicious competitive gamers started to come under scrutiny too. One of Todd's greatest friends/associates, Billy Mitchell, was soon discovered to have cheated a number of his famous Donkey Kong high score records. A post by xelnia on the donkeykongforum website revealed that Billy used an emulator (MAME) to perform his records, whereas he claimed to have used a real arcade machine.^[6] It is likely that Billy used TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) techniques to forge his records, which is notoriously easy to do with emulators like MAME.

After the success of his videos regarding Todd Rogers, Apollo Legend jumped on the opportunity to expose the new evidence against Billy Mitchell in his video titled "World's Most Infamous Donkey Kong Player Caught Cheating!" (shown below).

Just like his videos on Todd Rogers, Apollo's exposé of Billy Mitchell garnered much attention and views, bringing the story into mainstream light. Billy was very cautious about properly responding to the allegations publicly, so Apollo attempted to get answers straight from Mitchell himself at one of his public appearances at "KOK Retro Arcade Night" in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 25th, 2018. Apollo planned to make a follow-up video on the case using footage from the KOK Retro Arcade Night event. However, Apollo disappeared from all social media, and his planned follow-up video on Billy Mitchell was never released.

Then on March 15th, 2018, TwinGalaxies reported a rumor that Apollo Legend was potentially being sued by Mitchell, with the article being revised a week later.^[2] Apollo's abrupt disappearance from the internet gave credence to this rumor, but Apollo finally resurfaced on the internet again about 1.5 months later in April, and the rumor seemed to be false. On the 14th of April 2018, Apollo met Billy Mitchell again at another public appearance at Midwest Gaming Classic in Wisconsin, where he recorded more footage. At this event, Billy finally released a public statement about the allegations against him, but his statement was still very vague:

Following this statement from Mitchell, Apollo was again expected to release a follow-up video about the topic using footage from the events where they met. However, still the follow-up video was never released and Apollo soon disappeared from the internet again, until suddenly returning on the 30th of November 2018 with a new video discussing the legality of the Smash Box controller, a modified Gamecube controller with an arcade stick layout, within speedrunning.

On April 12th, 2018, TwinGalaxies released an article that announced their decision to ban Billy Mitchell and remove all of his records from their database.^[3]

Oceanside Event Controversy

Apollo Legend set out to create his own speedrun marathon event, no doubt partly because of his dissatisfaction with GamesDoneQuick. The event was called Oceanside and was planned to run from April 20-22 2018, featuring a number of high profile speedrunners. In 2017, Apollo released a trailer and a GoFundMe page for Oceanside, in which he attempted to raise $20,000 for the event. Apollo had been getting many views on some of his recent videos, but these views failed to convert to Oceanside donations as he had hoped – he was only able to raise a few hundred dollars on GoFundMe. Many people were suspicious about the ability of Apollo to organize the event successfully due to his lack of experience, and people were not confident enough to trust him with their donations. This sparked many parody videos of the Oceanside trailer, such as the following parody called "APOLLO LEGEND OCEANSIDE EXPOSED" by Speedrun Memes on YouTube:

Despite the lack of GoFundMe donations, Apollo Legend was able to gather enough funds to pay for the rest of Oceanside out of his own pocket, largely due to the profit from his hugely successful video "10 Speedrunners Who Were Caught Cheating". This video was uploaded on December 13th, 2017 and has over 8 million views as of November 22nd, 2018 (which is also his most popular video as of November 22nd, 2018). However, in February of 2018, a number of high profile speedrunners such as Cheese05 and Calebhart42 dropped out of the event. This is because they were signed by an esports organization known as beastcoast, and beastcoast did not want them to attend Oceanside for undisclosed reasons.

Also in February of 2018, Apollo entered his feud with Billy Mitchell, which further distracted him from Oceanside. The rumor of potential legal action from Billy Mitchell surely pressured Apollo further. Apollo did not release many updates about Oceanside and the state of the event became more and more unclear. Then, on April 20th, 2018 (the planned start date of Oceanside), Reddit user u/Chivesmaster made a thread revealing an email from Apollo Legend. The email was sent to everybody who donated to Oceanside on GoFundMe, stating that Oceanside was cancelled and offering a refund (shown below).^[4]

In Apollo's statement, he says "Due to a recent mistake I made, I was unable to fund Oceanside as I had previously" and "This was my big plan for the year but messed it up by jeopardizing my financial security". What "mistake" Apollo made and the details of his financial situation remains unclear, but it is likely that Apollo was referring to the possibility of having to pay for legal support due to legal threats from Billy Mitchell. This statement was his last in the public eye until his sudden return on the 30th of November 2018 when he uploaded a new video.

Disappearance and Reappearance of Apollo Legend

Since Apollo Legend disappeared from the public eye in April 2018 (immediately after the cancellation of Oceanside and the feud with Billy Mitchell, discussed above), there had been much confusion and speculation about what happened to him and if he would return or not. On August 16th 2018, after receiving many questions about Apollo, erudite speedrunner RWhiteGoose (one of Apollo's good friends in the speedrunning community) uploaded a video to explain all that he knew about Apollo's disappearance and the events leading up to it:

Apollo then suddenly returned on the 30th of November 2018 with his video "Should The Smash Box Be Allowed For Speedrunning?" Then Apollo did a stream on the following day in which he answered questions, stating that he disappeared due to pressure from the cancellation of Oceanside and legal threats from Billy Mitchell (although he was not actually sued by Billy). He stated that there was no other particular reason for his disappearance and that he thinks he should have communicated the situation better.

DarkViperAU and EZScape feud

On December 26th 2018, DarkViperAU uploaded a video entitled "Apollo Legend Lies For Ad Revenue". This was the beginning of a long-standing feud as DarkViper would go on to publish a total of 6 videos criticising Apollo Legend over the next 1.5 years.

While Apollo still had many supporters, these videos gained traction and damaged his reputation amongst some people.

Then, in 2020, EZScape also released a video criticising Apollo Legend for various things. Primarily, EZScape called out Apollo for a GoFundMe campaign he had previously launched and received approximately $20,000 from to fund a lawsuit against Billy Mitchell. The lawsuit never came to fruition but it appeared the money had not been refunded, causing speculation that Apollo had effectively stolen the money. Soon after, many people started to report that they had received refunds from the GoFundMe, so EZScape unlisted his video. Furthermore, DarkViperAU unlisted his videos criticising Apollo Legend after Apollo's death (explained in the "Suicide and Death" section).

Suicide and Death

On the 30th of December 2020, Apollo Legend uploaded a video to YouTube entitled "READ DESCRIPTION, VERY IMPORTANT" after being inactive for months. The description contained a download link to another video, which was effectively a suicide note. In this video (approximately 8 minutes long), Apollo said he was about to commit suicide due to several severe and incurable physical health problems, as well as severe mental health problems. In the description of the video, he mentioned that he had scoliosis which caused his "back, hips and shoulders to ache constantly". He also mentioned that he vomits every day, and had further even worse problems that he was not comfortable talking about. In the video, he claimed that his physical health issues had been getting worse and would continue to get worse throughout his life, and that he would "rather just leave while I still have some dignity".

Apollo also wrote in the description "Thank you to DarkViper and EZScape for giving me the final push that I needed", referring to two other YouTubers he had previously feuded with. This instigated further drama in the speedrun YouTube community, with people arguing about DarkViper and EZScape's level of responsibility for the suicide. However, it appears that health problems were by far the primary reason for Apollo's suicide, and the line about DarkViper and EZScape was simply a final jab from Apollo as he decided to let it all out in his final moments.

Soon after, various people such as @TheSpectreRep on Twitter called Apollo's local police department, after which a deputy confirmed that Apollo had been found deceased.

External Links