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Homophobia, transphobiaedited by Hal Y. Zhang
On October 19th, 2019, Stonewall Productions released Coming Out to Your Parents on PC and PlayStation 4. While it was the studio’s first major title, it took the gaming community by storm, selling nearly 500,000 units within the first month of its release. In a review published on Kotaku, video game journalist Sarah McKinsley wrote that Coming Out to Your Parents “combines next-generation graphics with time-tested game design fundamentals.” In a year filled with fantasy and sci-fi releases, COYP’s choice to focus on a more grounded storyline caught the eye of many, with the game eventually receiving the “Best Queer Bildungsroman” award at the 2019 Game Awards. The award was accepted by the game’s lead designer, Sanya Weiss.
I recently interviewed Weiss for this retrospective. When asked about the experience following this achievement, she said that, “At first, it was nice. We even got some calls from Nintendo. They wanted to see if we could make Mario gay. But eventually it all tapered off. Less new players. Less eyes on us.” By mid-2020, the game averaged only 75 concurrent players.
However, this wasn’t the end for COYP. On November 21st, 2020, a speedrunner going by the username ChipperKipper03 uploaded a speedrun of the game to YouTube, claiming a time of forty-five minutes and seventeen seconds in its ‘Any%’ category, defined as finishing the game at any level of completion, often omitting optional side quests or achievements. Records show that the average time to complete COYP is somewhere between fourteen to fifteen hours. Kipper’s attempt here was the first breakthrough of COYP speedrunning.
Upon uploading his run, Kipper went to the subreddit r/ComingOutPS5 to spread the word of his attempt. There, his post would receive 6,500 upvotes and become the highest rated post on the subreddit at that time. In his post, he explained some of the tricks and exploits he’d used in his run. “I didn’t want to break the game,” wrote Kipper. “I just wannted [SIC] to see it bend.”
In this attempt, the game begins as normal, with the player starting in their college dorm room. For the player to achieve their goal of (as the title suggests) coming out to their parents, they would normally have to make a cross-country road trip back home to tell them in person. COYP‘s initial notoriety came from its intricate simulation of the player character’s trip. Every bus ride, every night at a Travelodge, every oil-slick floor in a gas station bathroom was rendered in intimate detail, all in service of what GameSpot described as “the Odyssey retold by Judith Butler.”
While normally the process of driving from South Carolina to Utah is time-consuming, Kipper found a way around this. Plane tickets are far too expensive upon beginning the game, with prices being procedurally defined using the game’s simulated economy, which accounts for the weather, the current political climate, and the flight’s proximity to any in-game holidays. As the most common way to acquire funds is playing music gigs during the journey, most players wouldn’t have enough for a one-way ticket until they were already at the Parents’ Level. Kipper’s solution, however, was to steal money from the player’s roommate, an NPC named Doug. Upon starting a new playthrough, a random number between one and ten is generated, then multiplied by two hundred. This becomes the amount of drug money Doug has stashed in his mattress. If Doug has $1,000 or more, the player can steal this money and purchase a plane ticket, completely circumventing the travel portion of the game. This technique would go on to be known in the COYP speedrunning community as ‘DougSkipping’.
With the first innovation in COYP speedruns made public, it was only a matter of time before another contender would take up the challenge. That came only four days later, when user H1bac1 uploaded their own attempt, achieving a time of forty-two minutes and eight seconds. While H1bach1 used the same tactic of DougSkipping as Kipper, their run saved on time due to their deep understanding of movement mechanics and in-game systems, such as skipping the ‘Call an Uber’ questline by catching a ride from a friend and their usage of TSA PreCheck.
For the next few weeks, Kipper and H1bach1 would continue to upload further attempts, each one claiming the title of world record from the other. Though neither exhibited any open hostility for the other, the community split in who they were rooting for. Both players would eventually start streaming their attempts, with each of them gaining a sizable audience, averaging 7,000 concurrent viewers during their streams. Eventually, Kipper would upload a run that would become infamous in the community.
“36:15, Coming Out to Your Parents Speedrun [NEW WR]” was uploaded on December 2nd, 2020. The run resembles the average attempt at first, with Kipper rolling high on his DougSkip, allowing him to get an extra bag of gummy worms at the airport. However, where he diverged came at the Parents’ Level. Rather than entering the house and coming out in the living room where the player’s parents are watching Jeopardy, Kipper chose to yell it from the front lawn, saving a sizable amount of time and avoiding the ‘What are you wearing?’ side quest. Following this attempt, the community broke out into a debate over the validity of Kipper’s run. Since there was no way of explicitly confirming if the parents had heard the player come out to them, could it be considered coming out?
The answer came from an unlikely source. Weiss herself made an appearance in the COYP Discord to answer questions about the game’s design. She said that the player’s mother was designed with “a hearing stat that’s about 50% lower than other NPCs.” As such, any sort of coming out attempt made from the front lawn would have an incredibly low likelihood of being heard by the mother character, let alone understood. ‘Kippering’, the strategy of avoiding entering the house, became discredited in the speedrunning community. ChipperKipper03 never uploaded another attempt, leading the title of world record holder to default back to H1bach1. This development in the speedrunning community would go on to receive widespread media coverage, creating a rare moment in which IGN and GLAAD converged.
H1bach1 and Kipper are married now, living in an apartment in downtown Renton. The two met in person for the first time at the charitable speedrunning event Awesome Games Done Quick, where they recognized each other from their speedrun attempts. “It was nice. Seeing him talk about something other than framerates,” said Shawn “H1bach1” Lopez. “Did you know I’d never seen him laugh until then?”
On February 11th, 2021, a new world record speedrun of COYP was uploaded, this time from a new challenger. ThymeLord had completed the game in exactly twenty-nine minutes, obliterating H1bach1’s previous record of thirty-one minutes and thirty-three seconds. ThymeLord had discovered an exploit in the game that allowed her to circumvent half of the coming out sequence. Normally, a player would need to maintain the anger and confusion meters of both parents. However, ThymeLord was able to drastically cut down on this. They called their strategy ‘Dad Fragging’.
The father NPC is always situated on the couch when the player enters the Parents’ level. Unlike the mother, he is stationary throughout the entire sequence. ThymeLord realized that a major exploit could be utilized by climbing a tree, entering the player’s childhood bedroom, then clipping through the floor at the exact same Y-axis as the father NPC. This causes the player to be teleported inside of the father’s model, an overflow that forces the NPC to despawn. Following this, ThymeLord would only have to come out to the mother character. “The game is called Coming Out to Your Parents,” the runner stated. “I technically came out to all of my remaining parents.”
Weiss has denied to speak on the existence of Dad Fragging in any of our interviews. Hypothetically, it would be possible to use the same technique employed in Dad Fragging to despawn the mother character. However, as her pathing cannot be consistently predicted, players have chosen to prioritize despawning the father character.
The only problem was that emerging from the father NPC would cause a status debuff to be applied to the character. The closer the player got to the father NPC, the more likely they would receive the ‘Sins of the Father’ familial trauma status effect. Dad Fragging made this a certainty, and while the technique took less time than coming out to both parents, Sins of the Father caused the mother’s coming out sequence to be incredibly strained. As the effect caused association with the father NPC, this would make it difficult for the mother NPC to accept that the player was a transgender woman.
Players spent many weeks searching for ways to avoid the Sins of the Father delay. The open-ended dialogue tree that had garnered so much adoration from reviewers had become the worst nightmare of speedrunners, its estimated 1,540,000 endings serving as both a colossal obstruction and thrown-down gauntlet to those willing to accept the challenge. A tool titled Mother’s Matrix was developed for testing new dialogue options. Mother’s Matrix used a large language model AI to test various scripts to see what would most quickly allow for the mother character’s interaction to be completed. Even with these tools, it would be weeks before a consistent script could be located.
During this time, fans asked both H1bach1 and Kipper to return to the game in hopes that they could solve this dilemma. Replying to a tweet requesting that they livestream their attempt, Kipper stated “Nah. I’m good.”
Here was the beginning of a lull in the Coming Out to Your Parents speedrunning community. With Mother’s Matrix fruitlessly searching for the optimal dialogue path and the main voices of the community having retired, some felt that COYP had reached the end of its time in the public spotlight. It was during this period that Stonewall Productions released a teaser trailer for their next game: Parents: A Coming Out Story. This installment would follow the father character during his late teenage years, particularly his experience in 70’s San Francisco. While initially praised as an ambitious spin-off, the game sold poorly due to the deluge of negative reviews following its release. Kevin Lochlin of Polygon remarked that it “felt strange as a follow-up to Coming Out to Your Parents. The player character [in COYP] felt lived in. But the main character here feels hollow. It’s hard to believe these are from the same developer.”
Due to the poor performance of COYP’s sequel, Stonewall Productions was shut down in January 2022. While Weiss would go on to ship a handful of independent titles in the years-long wake of the studio’s closure, she no longer works in the games industry, having taken a position at a community college teaching coding classes. “Every once and a while, one of my students will mention that they played one of my games,” she said. “Which is an odd feeling. Everything I made then was so intimate. It’s like, ‘What other secrets of mine do you know?’” This coming April, she’ll be taking a position as an associate professor of computer sciences at University of Portland.
Mother’s Matrix eventually created a useful script, one which would be applied by novice speedrunner AliceInThunderland. Alice was able to use the tool to uncover the perfect responses and questions to expedite the mother’s coming out encounter. It was careful, not using any loaded terms associated with queerness. Gentle for the mother’s conservative sensibilities. With the total run taking only nineteen minutes and four seconds, Alice became the new world record holder, able to use DougSkipping, Dad Fragging, and the Mother’s Matrix to come out to the mother without hurting the NPC’s feelings.
Players did not accept it. They could see that, yes, Alice had come out to the mother. But they argued it didn’t feel right. This was not something that could cause the run to be disqualified, as whether something felt right or not couldn’t be verified by Speedrun.com moderators. But it seemed to shatter the core structure of Coming Out to Your Parents. Kipper claimed that he only wanted to bend the game. To see the columns that upheld it begin to bow. Alice had taken a sledgehammer to it. She’d spent months of her life ensuring that she understood every last detail, even if that meant playing the game over and over with inhuman precision. It would be perfect. It was perfect. It was not real.
Attempts to replicate Alice’s run by other players have been unsuccessful. Not even Weiss was able to do so. When I asked her about this, the designer said, “When I first saw [Alice’s run], it felt strange. Like, she was saying words to the mother. But it wasn’t talking. Have you ever seen someone speak in tongues? I think that Mother’s Matrix thing, I don’t know. Somewhere down the line, it lost something real in its iterations. When I came out to my mom, I remembered feeling like my lungs were on fire. She was screaming at me. Throwing things. Dad wasn’t there. Not that he could be. Actually, I remember this bit. She told me that her ‘son is dead’ and I said ‘Finally, we agree.’ She didn’t think that was funny. I guess I thought humor would help. If I could make this a pleasant experience for her, then it would be worth it. But I remembered trying to do what Alice did. To say the exact right thing. Mom was spitting blood in my eyes and I just wanted to see her happy.”
Shortly after this, Weiss requested we take a brief break from the interview. As I waited outside of her community college office, I imagined what it felt like for her, to see thousands of people examine this facsimile of your history under a microscope and dissect it in these graphic ways. When she returned, her eyes slightly red and puffy in their sockets, we didn’t continue our discussion of COYP. Instead, Weiss spoke highly of her students and shared their most promising demos. “Everything I create is for them now,” she said. “I see myself in them, and I hope they see themselves in me.”
On October 19th, 2021, a time of forty-seven seconds was uploaded by user Guest_C18H24O2. The run is as follows: The player creates a group chat with their mother and father, then informs them that they have a daughter now. As both parents have read receipts on, the run is completed once both see the message. No further speedruns have overtaken this attempt. There is debate in the speedrunning community over whether to count this, with some claiming that this attempt mocks the speedrunning community at large. Despite public outcry, the moderators of the COYP speedrunning page have announced they will uphold the validity of this run.
I asked Kipper what he thought about this. I’m sitting outside their apartment right now. One of their dogs is barking from the window. It’s a little gray Scottish terrier. I think its name is Harry. When I asked Kipper, he was holding H1bach1 with one hand and petting the dog with the other. They didn’t hear me. They look so peaceful, and I decide it’s best to not interrupt a moment like that. Some things deserve as much time as you can give them.
© 2026 by Jubilee Finnegan
Author’s Note: After spending a summer obsessively watching YouTube videos about the history of speedrunning, I couldn’t get the concept of it out of my head. This repetitive, iterative process where seconds equated to monumental achievements was fascinating to me. So, I did what I tend to do and connected it to queerness. I may never hold the record for completing Pokémon Platinum, but working on this story made the speedrunning process feel worth it.
Jubilee Finnegan is a writer based out of Seattle, Washington. They graduated from Chapman University’s English literature program after writing about Frankenstein in many, many essays. They hope their work will surprise, delight, confuse, and/or please you. Their writing has appeared in The B’K’, DiGeSt, WordGathering, and The Elpis Pages. You can find them on Bluesky @FinneyFlame.bsky.social or on Instagram @JWFinnegan.
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