The competitive sport of speedrunning video games, which involves moving through them as quickly as possible, has evolved in recent years into a hybrid of highly sophisticated science and virtuoso finger-and-thumb sports. The greatest speedruns combine uncanny ability with glitch-enabled shortcuts to finish big games that should take dozens of hours in a matter of minutes.
Sometimes a bit too inhumane. It turns out that cheaters who splice together video footage to fabricate proof or employ software that violates rules to obtain unfair advantages are the ones who create bogus records in speedrunning. Allan Cecil, a speedrunner and hacker, has made it his duty to find them.
Bans in the past
After admitting to cheating during the 2022 marathon, Done Quick has banned a speedrunner from participating in any future competitions. Additionally, it appears that the Russian player Mekarazium set a world record by completing the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance expansion.
Mekarazium, on the other hand, presented a pre-recorded film that was assembled utilising segments of different runs rather than live gameplay. To promote the hoax, they responded to the video in real time.
While Summer Games Done Quick returned to an in-person setting for the first time since 2019, some speedrunners took part virtually. According to PCGamesN, Mekazarium was one of them that let them cheat. After reaching a charitable donation target, the player tackled the Blade Wolf DLC after first dominating MGR: Revengeance’s main campaign in a legal run.
On the other hand, spectators observed differences in the Blade Wolf gameplay. Some pointed out that while Mekarazium was playing the primary game, there were hardly any audible moments when he pressed keys on the keyboard. Mekarazium raises their right hand briefly while their persona is surveying their surroundings, despite their assertion that they were manipulating the mouse with their left hand.
Mekarazium later played down the fact that their run broke records as well. One would assume that a speedrunner who beat their own world record by 25 seconds would be ecstatic.
Mekarazium sent a message to the GDQ enforcement team that PCGamesN was able to receive.
“The Blade Wolf DLC run reward people paid for is a pre-recorded, segmented run. After switching the saves, I’ve decided to change my decision at the last minute from a real-time run,” he said.
Mekarazium stated that they wished to showcase the Blade Wolf run’s potential. They did, however, apologise and admit that they had done “an real awful thing.” They also feared what would happen to other fast runners. They went on, “I didn’t spend more time thinking about others and I acted selfishly.”
“GDQ informed Engadget in a statement that they learned yesterday that Mekazarium performed a segmented video for his DLC run at Summer Games Done Quick 2022,” he added.
Since then, Mekazarium has acknowledged this to GDQ employees as well as to certain community members. He got in touch with us and provided a paper that showed he had been planning this for more than a month, proving it was deliberate and planned.
“This is a blatant attempt to compromise the integrity of the speedrunning community, which we adore and encourage. It’s unclear from the document what precise outcome they were hoping for, but it’s obvious that they thought we wouldn’t be ready to call them out on their actions. Nonetheless, we think it is essential for the community to understand why GDQ withdrew this run. Mekazarium will not be able to run in the future, and we have removed his runs from our YouTube collection,” GDQ continued.
Unfortunately, the incident tarnished another GDQ event that was otherwise quite successful. For Doctors Without Borders, spectators and speedrunners raised just over $3 million. Still, there were a few more difficulties. The organisers had to remove a few games from the schedule because certain runs took longer than anticipated. On the last day, though, they managed to squeeze in one more Pokémon game in an attempt to maximise donations.
The diable hack of 1996
During a speech at the recent Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, Cecil intended to provide what he claims is proof that a speedrunning record for the 1996 Personal Computer game Diablo, which has been in the Guinness Book of World Records for over 15 years, was, in fact, the product of rule-breaking methods that ought to disqualify it.
Cecil will have assisted in disproving three high-profile speedruns in 2023 alone if he and the group of investigators he has been working with are successful in shattering the ostensibly unbreakable standard.
Cecil, better known in the gaming community as dwangoAC, started an equally obscure pastime that led him into this peculiar role as a speedrun debunker: Using emulator software to run a game in a controlled environment and discover the limits of that game’s speedrun, he is renowned for being an adept practitioner of so-called “tool-assisted speedruns”—a subset of speedrunning that some purists formerly thought to be a form of cheating.
Cecil contends that speed runs using tools, where competitors painstakingly rewind, replay, refine, and polish their runs frame by frame, can be their legitimate kind of competition or even art.
DwangoAC claims that part of the reason he became obsessed with apprehending cheaters was his desire to safeguard the little-known sport of speedrunning from people who would use the same tools covertly and misleadingly, thereby transforming tool-assisted speedruns into a form of speedrun doping rather than a legitimate pastime.
Cecil has established himself as a mainstay in the speedrunning community. He works as a staff member at the tool-assisted speedrun website TASvideos.org and has organised numerous epic speedrunning feats, including one that rewrote the game’s conclusion in Ocarina of Time using coding errors.
In addition, he is the inventor of TASBot, a robot that attaches to video game console controller ports to mimic controller inputs. This allows players to watch and validate recorded speed runs on actual gaming hardware. The robot is such a hit that, according to Cecil’s count, live streams of it have generated $1.5 million in donations for charitable organisations.
But the gamer has recently pushed his fixation with tool-assisted speedrunning in a new direction, using it to track down cheaters who jeopardise the credibility of his hobby. As he has done in all three of the records he has tried to disprove, if he can demonstrate that even a well-honed tool-assisted speedrun in a particular game isn’t faster than a supposed human record, then demonstration can act as a precursor to a suggestion that a record was probably fabricated. Additionally, he has discovered that the process of designing that tool-assisted run frequently yields fresh insights into the bounds of what is feasible or impractical for an unaided human endeavour.
Cecil may have embarked on his most contentious project yet with his latest record-breaking endeavour. He plans to showcase proof at Defcon that he believes should nullify the record of Maciej “groobo” Maselewski, a Polish speedrunner who currently owns the Guinness record for the fastest role-playing game speedrun of all time in addition to the fastest Diablo speedrun. Since 2009, Maselewski’s 3-minute and 12-second Diablo run has defeated all opponents.
Cecil claims that when he and another speedrunner, Matthew “funkmastermp” Petroff, attempted to complete a tool-assisted speed run for Diablo in January 2024, he became suspicious that Maselewski had broken the norms of speedrunning. They soon realised that no matter how good they became at running or how fortunate they were with the randomly generated dungeon layouts in the game, they would never be able to beat Maselewski’s time of 3 minutes and 12 seconds.
This prompted them to put together a team of investigators who eventually discovered what they believed to be a lengthy list of discrepancies in the items and software versions, missing frames, and other indications of possible tampering in the video of Maselewski’s run. They have compiled all of this information into a comprehensive document that has been uploaded to Cecil’s website.
When Maselewski was contacted for comment, he promptly refuted any such foul conduct. He mentioned in an email that his run was always regarded as “segmented,” edited together level by level, which is a widely recognized classification for speedrunning.
It was never mistaken for anything else, according to Maselewski.
It’s amazing to learn that a group of researchers has been working on this. Cecil shared a later text discussion between Maselewski and his associates, in which Maselewski called the effort to disprove his record a “witch hunt.”
Cecil counters that Maselewski’s straightforward explanation, that the speedrun was divided, is insufficient. He alleges that a piece of performance-enhancing software known as a “trainer” must have been used and that some dungeon layouts in Maselewski’s run could not have been generated even in a single segment of a run without changing the game’s data.
In a farewell email to WIRED the evening before Cecil’s Defcon talk, Maselewski stated that he thought individuals who were accusing him of cheating were employing inaccurate instruments and a partial understanding of Diablo’s intricacies. Dwango wants to share a narrative. Have I cheated? No, writes Maselewski.
“But the wonder of discovery has already overstayed its welcome for a select few, and the script has already been written, so it doesn’t matter what is true or not at this point,” he noted.
Cecil’s proof seems to have more of an impact on an administrator of Speed Demos Archive, or SDA, another speedrun record-keeping website where Maselewski owns a comparable Diablo record. The administrator, who goes under the pseudonym “ktwo,” claims that SDA hasn’t formally taken a decision and is still awaiting Maselewski’s explanation.
Ktwo states, “To be clear, we have reached a preliminary conclusion, based on the information provided.”
The staff is in agreement that the analysis presents issues regarding the legitimacy of the run, which must be resolved to prevent SDA from publishing the run. The runners and the administrative staff are currently debating these issues.
Speedrunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel started re-examining a record set by Todd Rogers for the Atari 2600 racing game Dragster in 2017 while doing research for a book about speedrunning. This is how Cecil got involved in the investigation of gaming records. Rogers has maintained his record time of 5.51 seconds for an astounding 35 years.
However, upon deconstructing Dragster’s code to attempt to decipher Rogers’s time-stamp, Koziel discovered that the strategies Rogers claimed to have employed, like shifting into second gear at the beginning of the game, wouldn’t have yielded the desired benefit.
Knowing Koziel from the speedrunning community, Cecil offered to aid in creating a tool-assisted speedrun that they could replay on a real Atari 2600 via TASBot, demonstrating that Rogers’ record was unattainable even on that original hardware. They discovered that TASBot performed theoretically flawlessly in 5.57 seconds, which was less than Rogers’ claimed time. Despite Rogers’ protests, his three-and-a-half-decade-old record was removed from Twin Galaxies’ records, along with all of his other records on the website, and Guinness removed his title for the “longest-standing video game record” worldwide.
A group of players set out to defeat every level of Super Mario Maker, and Cecil became involved in the investigation of another renowned speedrun early 2024, after taking a seven-year break to work on TASBot projects. When that Wii U game was published in 2015, players could post their levels for other players to play, that is, assuming they could upload a video of themselves beating the level. However, “Trimming the Herbs,” one of these levels, seemed unachievable. Only its inventor had been able to finish it for years.
Cecil offered to create a tool-assisted speedrun for the level in an attempt to assist this group of Super Mario Maker devotees. He discovered that, partly because of differences in the Bluetooth communications between the Wii U and its controllers, it was almost hard to clear it consistently.
In that instance, the level’s developer came forward during the investigation to admit he’d defeated the level by tampering with the internal components of his Wii U gamepad, a move he had always meant to be amusing but had never before disclosed to the public.
Cecil is not anticipating a confession or any kind of cordial agreement on the facts in his latest attempt to refute Maselewski’s Diablo record. However, he is sure that he and the researchers he has collaborated with will be able to overthrow Maselewski’s record and allow speedrunners to resume their approach to the game.
He was shocked to learn that, thanks to new Diablo strategies they discovered during their investigation, they could beat Maselewski’s record with a tool-assisted speedrun, finishing the game in 2 minutes and 45 seconds without using any of his purported rule-breaking modifications.
Cecil reports that Diablo speedrunner “xavier_sb” has finished a run of the game in less than four minutes and 40 seconds, setting a new record should Maselewski’s be wiped out.
He claims that this already demonstrates how the alleged unachievable record’s “chilling effect” is wearing off. Cecil claims that people had just given up since there was no point. The Diablo speedrunning competition has resumed.
Cecil hopes that by holding speedrunners accountable, he will contribute to the growth of both conventional speedrunning and the tool-assisted sort of speedrunning that he has helped pioneer.
According to him, the secret is to distinguish between people who utilise software tools to play games with superhuman accuracy as an honest kind of art and others who use them for dishonest purposes.
Preserving the art of speedrunning
As Cecil continues to fight for honesty in the speedrunning community, his efforts highlight a larger issue in competitive gaming: the fine line between legitimate optimisation and outright cheating. While tool-assisted speedruns push the limits of what is possible in games, they should not be confused with human achievement. Cecil believes that speedrunning, whether tool-assisted or not, should remain a space for creativity, innovation, and fairness.
The distinction between art and fraud in speedrunning comes down to transparency. Tool-assisted runs are a legitimate form of competition as long as they are presented as such. But when players use similar tools covertly to gain an unfair advantage, it threatens the credibility of the entire sport.
Cecil hopes to ensure that speedrunning continues to evolve as a thriving, legitimate sport, one that celebrates skill, creativity, and integrity.