Glen McDiarmid
Glen McDiarmid (born March 21st, 1959) is an Australian computer software engineer that was a founding father of The GoldenEye Elite.
The birth of the rankings
McDiarmid created the earliest known instance of an online GoldenEye rankings system in early 1998.
On his own website "asgard.net" he coded en entire rankings system, that rankings was extremely ahead of it's time featuring :
A World Record Table, Individual level rankings, WR progression and a fastest proven time section, and a walkthroughs section.
It is unknown exactly when the website was created, we do know from testimonials that it was featured on N64 magazine against McDiarmid's will. At some point McDiarmid's rankings listed more than 1300+ times in 1998 according to Wes McKinney.
In June 1998 (or later), for unknown reasons the site was put up for adoption by McDiarmid, Adam English took over the rankings section and Nick Weeks took over the walkthroughs section.
In October 1998 Adam English lost interest into keeping up the site and handed it to Wes McKinney who also took over the walkthroughs section, and would manually update it all for the next few years until the GoldenEye rankings were fully automated by Derek Kisman in April 2001.
GoldenEye career
It's difficult to estimate how many World Records McDiarmid achieved in total as any bit of information about GoldenEye speedrunning that pre-dates the year 2000 are very rare and hard to verify.
But it's estimated that he probably achieved between 40 to 60, with probably 40+ of them having been untied when set.
His most remarkable achievement was the Untied World Record Bunker 1 Agent 0:19 achieved in ~May - July 1998, after an estimated 4000 attempts by Glen himself.
McDiarmid himself was a pioneer in providing proof of his achievements as many of his time were recorded and uploaded online, some of them are still viewable to this day.
This includes Glen's Statue Secret Agent 2:47 which is today the oldest known video of a GoldenEye speedrun that has an exact date (April 8th 1998).
It is unknown when exactly McDiarmid stopped playing (probably late 1998) or why he stopped.
The role McDiarmid played regarding the birth of GoldenEye speedrunning is very important and was for a long time completely unknown as all this knowledge was lost.
McDiarmid was not credited with almost all of the World Records he achieved, and was even ranked as an American player by mistake, discoveries about the early history of GoldenEye speedrunning allowed historians to correct that in 2021.
Glen McDiarmid's GoldenEye timespage
Glen McDiarmid's World Records (incomplete)
