Derek Kisman
Derek "SnapDragon" Kisman, better known as "Snap" is a Canadian computer science major and founding father of the Perfect Dark Elite.
He is a former champion of the game and played actively from June 2000 to April 2001
Education
Derek holds two bachelor's degrees (B.Sc. in computer science and a B.Sc. in Pure Math) from the University of Waterloo, he is generally considered to be one of the brightest minds in the Elite. In addition to his stellar academic career, Derek has a history of competing in intellectual competitions, he has represented Canada on numerous occasions for a variety of competitions, including the World Puzzle Championships, and as a high school student, at a Math Olympics event in India.
Additionally, Derek competes in programming competitions. Derek is highly regarded as one of the best coders at TopCoder, consistently ranking in the highest percentile and earning multiple big paydays through contest wins. He has also served as a judge at the prestigious ACM-ICPC, and has written questions that have been used in the finals.
Derek Kisman's role in the birth of the Perfect Dark Elite
Derek first started to speedrun Perfect Dark shortly after the game was released, and took part in some of the earliest known competition after joining the pdark.com rankings on June 14th 2000 and becoming it's 5th member.
After Jon Barber created the first ever individual Perfect Dark timespage, all of the other members of that time that formed a small group, (Matthew Yakobina, RaydenEG, Jonas McCammon and Kisman) followed and did the same thing.
On June 20th 2000, the pdark.com forums would crash, but the small group would keep each other in touch through emails about the most recent scores while the competition was still going on during the forums crash, this incident strengthened the bond of the group.
In late June 2000, before leaving for vacation, Derek would make a post on the forums wishing good luck on all the times to his newly made group of friends ending the sentence by "[...] you guys are more than Elite." this single sentence gave the idea to Jon Barber's to have each member's times page link to each other's to form a big webring, and call themselves The Perfect Dark Elite.
On July 10th 2000, Kisman came back and released the first ever automated Perfect Dark rankings, this system took the data of all the individual timespages and immediately added it onto the rankings without the need of manual work, this new rankings was not meant to be an official one, but the competition happening in the Perfect Dark Elite was far more advanced than the one on pdark.com by this point.
pdark.com also suffered from limitations from their rankings not being automated, needing players to email their times to the site and moderators to manually update the rankings. With the inferior quality of the pdark rankings moderation and upkeeping, and the pdark.com forums continuously going offline, players started to migrate from pdark.com to The Perfect Dark Elite.
On August 1st 2000, Kisman adapted the existing point system of the GoldenEye rankings, and implemented an automatically updating version of it onto the Perfect Dark rankings.
These major rankings additions from Kisman would greatly help the community flourish, by early October 2000 the Perfect Dark Elite would welcome its 100th member.
On April 6th 2001 Kisman adapted and released the same rankings system for the GoldenEye 007 competition.
Perfect Dark career
Kisman had a short but very prominent Perfect Dark career, he actively competed for less than a year (June 2000 - April 2001) but his contributions to the competition were huge.
Kisman was one of the best Perfect Dark players of his era, along with Ben Gorman and David Gibbons, when the point system was first released on August 1st 2000, Kisman was ranked first with a short lead on Gibbons. He would be overtaken on August 3rd by Gibbons before taking back the lead later that month after specializing on the Agent difficulty. Kisman probably held all of the Agent World Records simultaneously at some point during that month (early August 2000) but this fact needs to be confirmed.
Kisman was passed again by Gibbons on August 17th 2000 and made it very back briefly to first place for the last time on September 17th 2000 after improving some of his Perfect Agent times, this last reign only lasted for a few hours before Ben Gorman passed him again.
Kisman was the Perfect Dark Champion on 3 different occasions, it is estimated that he achieved around 130+ WRs with 100+ of them being untied when set. Some of his more notable achievements are his domination on the Agent difficulty, including a legendary streak on Pelagic II Agent, being the only one to hold the World Record and lowering it 7 times in a row, from 1:21 to a 0:56 that would become the Longest Standing Untied of Perfect Dark.
He was also great at providing proof of his achievement, having the majority of his times provided with endscreen pictures and videos recorded on VHS, many of them have been preserved and are still viewable to this day.
The last time Kisman achieved was Infiltration Agent 1:14, achieved on April 23rd 2001, one of his best times achieved.
Other games
Derek is a very accomplished gamer for his time. Outside of Perfect Dark, Derek has completed many challenges on countless games.
A full (but currently outdated) list of all his videogame accomplishments, complete with entertaining stories and background information, can be found at his website, but a small listing of his most notable achievements are below:
- Tetris Attack - For years Derek was considered the best in the world at this great puzzle game.
- Pikmin - Derek was the first to prove that the game's minimum completion time was 9 days, complete with video. He also maxed out many difficult levels in Challenge Mode, holding untied records on these levels for months - some of his runs have found their way onto a Pikmin DVD!
- Amplitude - Derek used his computer savvy to build a program which would find the optimal path through a song with a given powerup configuration. Derek used this to improve the world record on 20 of the game's 26 songs, creating untouchable world records many thousands of points higher than the next score. Examples of this are his Kimosabe run and Infil's Synthesized run.
- Super Monkey Ball - Derek was the first in the world to reach the Expert Extra and Master level stages. He also achieved a no-continues run of the entire game, from Expert through to Master. He later received an email from SMB's level designer, commending him for being the first in the world to accomplish a feat the game designers thought unachievable!
- Conker's Bad Fur Day - Derek completed a no-deaths run of this difficult game with video proof, it is currently posted on SDA.
- Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Derek was the first to conceive that the game could be completed in as few as 6 in-game days (referred to as the 6-day challenge; only resetting the game clock on the one mandatory instance). His initial strategy and video paved the way for a community around the 6-day challenge.
- Donkey Kong Country - Perhaps Derek's most famous speedrun is his DKC1 101% run in 50 minutes, breaking the old record by a substantial margin. Derek also has a 102% run of DKC2 in 1:33, a record which stood for several years on SDA.
- Prince of Persia - Derek completed a speedrun of PoP1 (2:10, single-segment) for SDA - perhaps his most downloaded video. Derek also thoroughly played the sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, by beating the previous time on SDA (which was done on easy difficulty) by over 20 minutes, all while playing on Hard, single-segment, and acquiring the "good ending", none of which the previous run had done. Derek considers this his best speedrun.
- Ikaruga - Derek played this game competitively and exclusively for several months while training for an Atari-sponsored competition. By the end, he was ranked 4th, and was the 2nd best non-Japanese player to submit a score, completing the notoriously difficult game without dying and chaining nearly every level in the game with ridiculous high-end strategy.
- Ninja Gaiden - Quite possibly Derek's biggest videogame achievement, he was flown to Japan to play in a Tecmo-sponsored Ninja Gaiden tournament at the Tokyo Game Show after winning a tournament which spanned several months of intense competition. He finished in second place (apparently due to a rule confusion), and won a signed ninja sword from Tomonobu Itagaki, the game's creator.
Derek Kisman's Perfect Dark Times
Derek Kisman's World Records (incomplete)
