Jake Rossen, Mental Floss:

“Nickelodeon kind of made a mistake,” Russell says. “I don’t want to call it a mistake, or if it was not a wise piece of instruction that they told me, because they told me the items don’t have to necessarily get into the cart. They just have to touch the cart and it’s yours. It didn’t have to stay in the cart, either.”

“So then my dad was like, ‘You heard what they said, right? That means all you got to do is take your hands and put it to the very back of the peg that they would store games or anything on. Pull them all off with the cart near you and just have them be knocking the cart so they don’t have to even get in there.’ ”

It was good advice. On the day of the spree, Russell was given the go-ahead. He darted through aisles, adhering to the strategy. Entire pegs of games were swatted to the ground, collapsing in a cacophony of plastic and cardboard. Russell acted like a human tornado, following the rules and having stuff bounce off his cart.

“I basically cleared out the entire game section of the store in about two minutes,” he says. “The whole thing was gone. And then, I took out the action figure aisles, and this was when the first wave of X-Men figures were out. I was literally just reaching to the back of the peg line and just taking the entire row of action figures.”

Just in time for a season where kids would be excited to see their hauls from Santa, an incredible, in-depth look at the ins and outs of what it was to win Nickelodeon’s Super Toy Run. Including the strife that met the kids at the schoolyard later.