The Hacker Who Hunts Video Game Speedrunning Cheaters

The night before Cecil’s Defcon talk, Maselewski wrote in a final email to WIRED that he apshows those alleging that he cheated are using faulty tools with an inend picture of Diablo‘s intricateities. “Dwango is out to tell a story. Did I cheat? No,” Maselewski originates. “But what is real or not does not matter at this point, becaengage the wonder of exploration has already overstayed its receive for a minuscule group of people, and the script has already been written.”

When WIRED accomplished out to the Guinness Book of World Records to ask if it would apshow down Maselewski’s write down, a spokesperson replyed nonpledgeloftyy that “we appreciate any feedback on our write down titles and are pledgeted to holding the highest standards of accuracy.” An administrator for Speed Demos Archive or SDA, another speedrun write down-holding website where Maselewski helderlys a aenjoy Diablo write down, seemed to be more swayd by Cecil’s evidence. That administrator, who goes by the administer “ktwo” and asked that WIRED not include their authentic name, says that SDA hasn’t officiassociate accomplished a verdict and is still postponeing to hear Maselewski’s exscheduleation.

Things are not watching excellent for groobo, however. “To be clear, we have made a preliminary decision, based on the useable alertation,” ktwo originates “The staff concurs that the analysis elevates asks about the validity of the run that need to be includeressed, or else the run will be unbegined from SDA. The admin team is currently converseing these asks with the runner. Once that converseion has endd, a final decision will be made.”

Cecil’s includement in spreadigating gaming write downs began in 2017, when the speedrunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel, who was writing a book about speedrunning, began re-examining a write down set by Todd Rogers for the Atari 2600 racing game Dragster. Rogers’ write down time, 5.51 seconds, had persisted for a extraunretagable 35 years. But when Koziel reverse engineered Dragster’s code to try to understand how Rogers had accomplishd that time, he establish that tricks Rogers shelp he’d engaged—such as commenceing the game in second gear—wouldn’t have provided the get Rogers claimed.

“The goal was never to point to someone and say, ‘Hey, they’re cheating,’” says Koziel. “It was to try to discover the truth.”

Cecil, who knovel Koziel from the speedrun community, proposeed to help enbig a tool-helped speedrun they could rejoin via TASbot on a authentic Atari 2600 to show that, even on that innovative difficultware, Rogers’ write down was impossible. They establish that TASbot’s theoreticassociate perfect carry outance was 5.57 seconds, sluggisher than Rogers’ alleged time. Despite Rogers’ objections, his three-and-a-half-decade-elderly write down was erased from the annals of the gaming write downs holder Tprosper Galaxies—alengthy with all his other write downs on the site—and Guinness streamlineped his world write down for “lengthyest-standing video game write down.”

“Although I disconcur with their decision, I must commend them for their strong stance on the matter of cheating,” Rogers wrote in a lengthy accessible Facebook post replying to the Tprosper Galaxies decision.