- There's been a lot of discussion about
cheating in speed-running recently.
I did some research and was really surprised by not
only how easy it is,
but by the number of people who have been caught.
I'd like to give a giant thanks to everyone who has
helped expose these faked runs.
All resources referenced in this video
will be linked in the description,
and I highly suggest you go check them out for yourselves,
if you want more detailed explanations
of what I'm about to go over.
Now without further ado,
here are 10 speedrunners who were caught cheating.
Todd Rogers is the first ever paid pro gamer,
joining the U.S. National video game team in 1986.
He's known for holding many video game records
including the high score for centipede.
His most controversial record
is a time of a time of 5.51 in Dragster,
a game for the atari 2600,
which he set all the way back in 1982
and has yet to be tied to this day.
This time was verified by a referee,
there is no video of this record.
This time was especially impressive because the developers
simulated fastest time was a 5.54,
and the fastest tool-assisted speedrun is only a 5.57.
Todd claims he achieved this time by shifting into second gear
before the race even started which doesn't seem to be possible
Omnigamer decided to look into the validity of this run.
He looked through each line of code in the game
and from this he created a spreadsheet which shows
all possible times you can get.
He found that there is no way you could possibly get
a 5.51 during normal play.
I reached out to Todd and he told me Omnigamer
was using incorrect numbers,
but didn't elaborate further.
When I asked if he'd be willing to do an interview
he stopped responding.
In an interview with Kotaku he wrote,
"If he's basing his spreadsheets and shifting
on one particular pattern then
that's pretty ignorant and closed-minded,
because you're not factoring in the human element
of how the game would respond."
A formal dispute has now been filed
on the Twin Galaxies website and it's believed
by many this time is not legitimate.
If you watch this clip of Todd playing dragster recently
he doesn't seem like the most honest guy.
Todd: That was a bad game.
Now the cameras showing i'm doing miserably.
This is pretty strange because like
when people do interviews or media
I can't get it below 5.84 for some reason.
You know what?
This stick is really sensitive too here.
I'm pressing the left and it's not shifting.
- But this is the smoking gun in my opinion.
Todd made this post on an Atari message board
claiming to have gotten a 5.54 which is impossible.
I imported the photo into photoshop, to take a closer look
You can see this entire picture has this clear
checkerboard pattern, here's a close-up.
Now let's take a look at the numbers.
You can see the checkerboard pattern on all sides of the 5.54,
but the 5.54 itself looks completely different
than the rest of the photo.
Looking at the four you can see the same exact thing.
And just to be 100% certain I took a look at the numbers for
player two at the bottom of the screen,
and sure enough you can see the checkerboard pattern is present.
I can say with certainty that Todd doctored this photo
to claim he'd gotten a 5.54,
and if he's willing to doctor evidence
he'd be willing, to lie about getting a 5.51.
Earlier this year Retro made a really good video
about cheating and i suggest you go check it out.
During this video he talks about Akkikan and White Aris
who were both caught splicing sixteen start runs.
They were both caught because of edits you could find in the audio
But these are not the runs I want to talk about
Retro's video got hundreds of thousands of views
so this topic was fresh on a lot of people's minds.
Shortly after Retro made this video
Cheese got his 1:39:xx in 120-star
and someone by the name of Holy Moly
left this comment on his video,
"Yeah baby you can play like TAS, very impressive.
Back in 2004 I held the 16 star world record
for several years holy moly."
A prominent Mario runner, Gothic Logic,
saw this comment and decided to do some digging.
He found that run he was looking for,
and when he analyzed the audio in audacity,
using the spectrogram display,
he found the exact same blatant splices in the audio file
that White Aris and Akkikan had been exposed four years ago.
This one cracks me up because he had gotten away with this
for nearly twelve years.
No one would have ever questioned him if he had just shut up.
But no, he had to go around and randomly brag about
his fake time on someone else's video.
The videos are still up
but now everyone knows this friend is fake.
There's a time when TSA
was one of the most respected Zelda speedrunners.
I found runs of his dating all the way back to 2004
when almost no one had any idea what speed running was.
But in 2011 it was exposed that many of his speedruns
were not in fact single segment runs like he had said
but instead segments spliced together.
I was able to find one of these runs,
his Ocarina of Time any% run in 5 hours and 4 minutes.
When you pause in this game it will remember
which screen you looked at last
so when you pause again later
you'll be looking at the same screen.
But if you reset your game to attempt a segment over and over,
the pause menu will no longer lineup with where you pause last.
This is what exposed TSA'S runs as splices
and not the single segment runs they claim to be
There were also some pretty clear cuts that
anyone could notice just by watching the run.
TSA responded to the accusations on the sda forums,
which i'll now read a portion of,
"I did not cheat at speedrunning or fake runs ever.
I had to listen to a bunch of Zelda speedrunners
explain how my item drops and other inconsistencies
prove I used what they called splicing and saving quit
to make what amounts to a segmented run
masking as single segment.
This is not true and I'm gonna give you the full explanation
of why this is so.
As I explained to Radix, 6+ years ago,
back then I did not have a good pc or capture card.
I could not capture beyond a certain time limit.
Too many of my runs would end because of
a capture issue and I was fed up.
Yes I could have used vhs or dvd but i was
convinced by sda people back then that capture cards
were the way to go."
So just throw an sda under the bus for no, reason.
"Before I ever submitted to sda I submitted all my runs
to vhs and cam on Twin Galaxies.
No way i could have cheated with the set if they required.
It was all in one capture on tape with cam footage
to prove I played the game.
My capture problems led me to ask Radix
about a solution which was allowed by him.
It was to allow me to capture my runs in chunks.
However I would do multiple runs at a time"
and this is where it gets good,
"and despite my best efforts I now know
Segments from different attempts
made it into the submission files to Radix."
So somehow even though he was trying his hardest,
different segments just got mixed up and submitted
as one run on accident.
You can easily say that this means
I picked the best segments and constructed better runs."
And that is exactly what i'm saying.
Ultimately his runs were removed
and he quit speedrunning completely
From 2014 a runner named Goron Guy was caught faking
a 100% run of Majora's Mask.
This really surprised me not because he would try to cheat
but because of how terrible of an attempt this was.
All he did was make up fake splits
and then start his stream right near the end of the run.
Another runner named thiefbug called him out pretty much immediately
and Goron Guy admitted it was true.
He wrote a pastebin in response in which he really never
apologized and made a bunch of excuses for what he had done.
This prompted a lot of criticism
from the wider speedrunning community.
He still streams consistently and the good news is
he hasn't cheated again to my knowledge
and after what he went through I doubt he ever will.
Frigate Secret-agent is possibly
the most frustrating run in Goldeneye.
There are four objectives you must complete
with objective "A" being rescue hostages.
Freeing the hostages isn't enough
they need to be freed and escape off the boat.
The issue with this is hostages run around the boat randomly
and almost never escape fast enough for a world-record run
with all objectives completed.
At the beginning of 2011
the untied record for the run was one minute one second,
until a runner named Henning posted a time of 1 minute flat.
The issue with this run,
right here as the level goes to fade out bond puts away the
phantom but when entering the boat unarmed
he will always put away the pp7.
This was evidence of a spliced end screen
and after examining more of his runs
it turned out he had cheated repeatedly for years.
This led to Henning being permanently banned from the elite
and having all his times removed.
Staying on the topic of Goldeneye,
I spoke with another dirty cheater, rwhitegoose.
Out of all the runners I reached out to,
he was the only one willing to do an interview
so I thank you for your openness.
Here's what he had to say about his faked runs.
- [rwhitegoose] Yes, so I made them all at once
it was like November 2007.
Two 1 frigate double 00s.
There was first a 1:10 and then once I had it faked
I was like let's go all the way let's go 1:07 untied world record.
There was a 1:01 secret agent so it was 2 untieds
and then frigate agent 23 which is like a multi tied record.
And the thing with frigate it is like it's THE level to fake
because a completed run looks the same as a failed run.
You get to the end and hop in the boat.
You hope the hawsers escaped as you were exiting the boat
and you splice on the the cutscene and watch it fade out.
What i could have done is gamesharked it.
Waited at the boat jumping at 1:07 with all objectives complete
and now I have like a viable 1:07 end screen that I can use
to edit and what not.
I mean this is 10 years ago the editing isn't as as good either.
I was too lazy it's just like found the number seven
on the end screen somewhere else
and I just like shopped it over the last digit you know.
Then I just mimicked the you know,
because the thing with Goldeneye that makes it
a little bit easier as that will always say best time.
It'll say you're the time of the run time and the best time
So if i did get a legit 1:07 fail,
I could just copy paste that portion of the end screen
onto the best time part and make it look legit right.
So that's all I did and I did that for all.
That was that was my standard practice for all them.
It was like the end screen obviously was static right,
so nowadays people do a lot of like movement on the end stream.
Not necessarily to prove it's not fake
but that's kinda where it stemmed from to like it
was kind of like a show of like look
I can move my cursor on the end screen
it's clearly not a shopped enscreen.
But at the time the moderators and admin were
the guys I always talk about these guys,
Endgamer, and Comisor,
who like really didn't care about the rankings
they were kind of hoping the site
and they would just kind of have it a hang out
to watch nfl and play poker and that kind of stuff.
That's actually part of the reason why
I made the fakes because I wanted to like motivate people
to like take action and like kind of make rules and stuff.
Because they weren't gonna do that any other way
so I had to kind of play devil's advocate and take drastic action.
Eventually after like you know weeks of a firestorm
in the forums I think i'm in a poll.
It was like oh what should we do with Goose?
Should we ban him?
I think my times page was frozen for like a month or two,
I kinda took two or three months off of Goldeneye
and then when I came back in late January or so,
I posted it like a legit untied record.
I wouldn't say all was forgiven but we moved on from there.
- Chibi is best known for his couch commentary at sgdq2014
but he also has a decent sized following of his own on Twitch.
During 2015 he started speedrunning
Paper Mario the Thousand-year Door.
Here you can do a frame perfect jump
to make it onto this ledge which
saves a significant amount of time.
To perform the skip with a normal jump you need to enter
the fight at the exact peak of mario's jump.
If you're off by one frame this will not work.
You watch Chibi's first jump you can see
he loses a little bit of height before entering the fight.
That means there's no way he could possibly
get the skip at this point.
But chibi had used an action replay
to give his jump extra height so even with
the lost height he was still able to make it onto the ledge.
An expert in the game past, TasMalleo, was watching in chat
and knew something wasn't right.
So he confronted Chibi and he admitted to what he had done.
Chibi later responded to this and you can tell he's learned his lesson.
I don't think Chibi's a bad guy and this is just
an honest mistake.
Approximately one year ago a user named Flying
posted a San Andreas run with a time of
4 hours 1 minute and 13 seconds.
Someone named KZ made a video showing how use both splices
and scripts during his run.
If you guys want to watch his video it will be in the description.
While it's pretty easy to splice any game,
scripts are generally only used for pc games.
What they allow you to do is run exact inputs
so you can get perfect gameplay.
This is similar to how people create tool assisted speedruns
except they're mixed in with normal gameplay to make
it look like a legitimate run.
The most obvious evidence of scripts is during this section.
Watch how quickly and perfectly he lines up his first few targets.
It doesn't look like a human being moving a mouse at all
but if you have any doubts
look at the shots he fires a few seconds later
when he turns the script off, much more fluid.
You can tell these shots were made by human,
and here you can see an obvious place.
First notice the time on the top right is 10:18.
As he goes to save.
He clicks save,
then there are three frames where the game is fading back in.
Here's one, here's two, here's three.
Notice the direction he's facing
and that the clock is still at 10:18.
Now, we go to the very next frame and it's not even close.
The splice is clear as day.
I never found an official response from him
and he since disabled ratings and comments on his video,
which is always a sign that someone is hiding something.
Just, a week ago it was discovered that ExoSDA's 2012 speedrun
of Super Meat boy in 18:39 is spliced.
This surprised many because this run stood for over a year,
right around when speedrunning was really taking off
so it was this run that inspire
many of those who run Super Meatboy today.
Between level transitions the bandage girl icon will appear
in the lower left hand side of the screen.
Her arm animation runs on consistent 40 frame cycles.
She holds her arms up for 20 frames
and then down for 20 frames now the number of frames
she stays on-screen varies.
For example entering a level you may only see
her hold her hands down for 15 frames that means the next time
you see her she'll hold her hands down for only 5 frames
before putting your hands up again .
When the moderators discovered this they made these tables
analyzing many high profile runs.
This table shows data from the current top 5 runs.
You can see all the values add up to 20 up and 20 down.
Now if we look at exo's run
you'll see it isn't close at all and clear evidence of tampering.
Now let me read you his response back,
"When i was running Super Meatboy my goal
was to get published on sda which required footage that
wasn't just the stream recording.
However i ran into a lot of trouble
recording that footage with fraps.
the main issue was that the game
and the recording would freeze at random intervals
for up to 10 seconds after some minutes
due to the awful pc I had at the time.
This led to me not being able to record full runs of the game.
I ended up working on almost every day for about a year in total.
Restarting the recording mid run wasn't an option
as that led to the game stopping as well,
usually for even longer periods of time.
After countless runs being ruined by these random freezes
I simply had enough and ended up stopping the game and fraps
after every chapter just to be able to record a full run."
- As I was reading this i noticed this was
extremely similar to the excuse that
TSA made years earlier.
So I guess great minds think alike.
"As soon as I made a mistake that I felt was reset worthy
I stopped the recording and deleted the save game
to start from the beginning.
This is of course the critical part where you either believe me
or you don't." (and i don't)
After this discovery, obviously Exo's run was removed
and all runs must now display the bandage girl icon
in the corner of the screen.
All right now with everything I've learned
I'm going to attempt something which may make some people mad.
I'm gonna make my own spliced run
and see if i can get it verified on speedrun.com.
I'm gonna make a fake Ocarina of Time any % run
because it's short and easy.
I've split the run up into different segments
between each loading zone.
I'm gonna make sure there are no pause screen irregularities
like with tsa's run.
I've also kept careful track of my heart and rupee counts
to make sure they stay consistent between segments.
Okay now i've recorded each segment I needed.
This runs pretty bad for a spliced run in 18:04.
I just slapped this together quickly
but it's still better than anyone should be able to get
for their first run so hoping this sets off a lot of red flags
on a new account.
I made one big mistake
and that is my left channel of audio went out
during the recording in my final segment so I condensed both
audio channels down to one.
If anything gets me caught it'll probably be this mistake
but I think I can still slip through.
I've made sure each segment is splice framed perfectly
so there should be no way to tell the run is fake
from the video alone.
Now i'm going to export the audio into audacity,
use the noise removal function to remove all the background hum.
Now i'm going to re-import the audio and overlay my own
uninterrupted main to cover up any evidence of splicing in the audio.
Here's an example of a splice with no other editing and here's
what it looks like after using the noise removal
and overlaying my own background hum.
Now i'm going to export this whole clip and submit
It to speedrun.com and see what happens.
As pleasantly surprised when I woke up this morning
to see my run had been rejected for being too sketchy.
I'm not really sure what that means but they're not wrong.
It is fake.
I made the assumption that wouldn't scrutinize this run too thoroughly
but clearly I was wrong so big props
to the Ocarina of Time moderating team
and specifically Valiant Link for calling me out.
At this point i feel kind of bad attempting this again
since i already got shut down.
I'll throw one more run together and see what happens.
All right i made another run in 18:37
this time without any audio issues and the framerate stayed
consistent throughout the run
and it did get verified on the leaderboard.
So there you go I'm now a verified cheater,
Even though I got shut down the first time
I do think my second run should be impossible to detect as a splice
and it really wasn't that hard.
Which makes me think with so many people
(Captions by Jordan "Link584")
who have already been caught
(Captions by Jordan "Link584")
there are probably many more who haven't.
(Captions by Jordan "Link584")
