Sam Hughes

At 6'4", Sam Hughes is slightly taller than Ely Cathedral.

Samuel Derek "SamSim" Hughes (born November 12, 1983) is one of this wiki's administrators, representing The Elite. First and foremost a Perfect Dark player, he has never been noteworthy for his gaming skills, but is nevertheless well-known for penning Defection For Dummies, the first and most detailed guide for the famed Defection glitch, as well as numerous other contributions to the videogaming community. He is perhaps best-known for being the author of How To Destroy The Earth.

Biography

Perfect Dark

Sam joined the Elite in July 2001 and played Perfect Dark continuously between then and his first retirement in early July 2002, just short of a year after joining, having peaked at rank 53rd in points and 51st in time. His notable PD times include 1:15 Villa A, 3:01 Investigation PA, 0:16 Chicago A and 0:27 War A, the latter two of which were world records at the time. He is a proud member of the 3-4-5 club (Agent times all under 3:00, SA all under 4:00, PA all under 5:00), and has also pulled off an 11-0 win in Challenge 30. However, he was mainly known for his intensely detailed strategy guides, and his community contributions, such as:

• designing the current appearance of the Perfect Dark Elite records page
• creating The Totalizer for PD and GE
• creating One On One for PD & GE
• running the Ultimate GE vs PD poll (side note: GoldenEye is winning, barely)
• making and contributing to so many great topics it ain't even funny
• founding the annual l33t Awards in 2001
• writing the future history of the PDE
• fabricating an IMDb page about Perfect Dark: The Movie
• fabricating an entire ezboard thread about Perfect Dark Zero, and accurately predicting one of the level names ("Demolition") FOUR YEARS BEFORE IT WAS RELEASED

Later career, 2002 to 2005

Sam spent several years playing PD extremely intermittently after "retiring", devoting his attention to (approximately in order):

• GoldenEye 007
• Super Monkey Ball
  • peaked around rank 53
• Astrolander
  • peaked at rank 1 with all three world records
  • first person to discover you could go under certain levels
  • penned the definitive AstroLander FAQ
• Ikaruga
  • peaked around 50th on the UK national rankings
• Sonic Mega Collection
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
  • scored 34 in Letter Sorting
• Half-Life 2
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
  • obtained a single-segment time of 5 hours 41 minutes
  • masterminded the route for Mike Damiani's 5 hour 4 minute world record run and devised many of the tricks he used en route, including the optimal Water Temple route
  • claimed Twin Galaxies' 2005 OoT bounty for completing the game as fast as possible while collecting all 100 Gold Skulltulas and the Mask of Truth, with a time of less than 7 hours

Sam drifted away from the videogaming community over this period, playing videogames less in favour of maintaining his personal website (then known as Sam's Archive), writing for Everything2 and concentrating on his studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. He stopped posting at the Elite message board entirely in May 2004.

2005 to present

Sam graduated from Cambridge with a 2:1 in Mathematics in June 2005, and returned to active status within the Elite community soon afterwards.

He has recently picked up the controller again to play Perfect Dark in an attempt to get all his solo times under 4 minutes, and is also an avid player of GridWars. He occasionally creates Elite-themed Dinosaur Comics.

He is currently an administrator and major contributor at speedrunwiki, and partly responsible for coming up with the whole idea of a wiki about speed runs in the first place.

Oh, and his personal hygiene is above reproach.

External links

• Things Of Interest, Hughes' personal site
• How To Destroy The Earth
• SamSim's Perfect Dark records page