A hacker who hunts down cheaters in video game speedrunning

The evening before Cecil’s appearance at Defcon, Maselewski wrote in a recent email to WIRED that he believes those accusing him of fraud are using flawed tools that don’t give the full picture. Devil“Dwango wants to tell a story. Did I cheat? No,” Maselewski writes. “But what is true or not is irrelevant at this point, because the miracle of exploration has already overstayed its welcome for a small group of people, and the script has already been written.”

When WIRED contacted Guinness Book of Records When asked if he would remove Maselewski’s record, the spokesperson replied evasively that “we value all feedback on the titles of our records and are committed to maintaining the highest standards of accuracy.” The administrator of the Speed ​​Demos Archive, or SDA, another speedrunning record-keeping website where Maselewski has similar Devil record, seemed more convinced by Cecil’s evidence. The administrator, who goes by the nickname “ktwo” and asked WIRED not to use his real name, says the SDA has not officially issued a verdict and is still waiting for Maselewski’s explanation.

But things aren’t looking good for groobo. “To be clear, we have made a preliminary decision based on the information available,” ktwo writes. “The staff agrees that the analysis raises issues regarding the validity of the race that must be resolved or the race will not be published on SDA. The administrative team is currently discussing these issues with the runner. Once the discussion is complete, a final decision will be made.”

Cecil’s involvement in The study of gaming records began in 2017, when speedrunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel, who was writing a book about speedrunning, began re-examining a record set by Todd Rogers in an Atari 2600 racing game Dragster. Rogers’s record time of 5.51 seconds stood for a remarkable 35 years. But when Koziel reverse-engineered the Dragster code to try to understand how Rogers achieved that time, he discovered that the tricks Rogers said he used—such as starting in second gear—would not have provided the advantage Rogers claimed.

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

Cecil, who knew Koziel from the speedrun community, offered to help develop a tool-assisted speedrun that they could play with TASBot on a real Atari 2600, to show that even on that original hardware, Rogers’ record was impossible to beat. They found that TASBot’s theoretically perfect time was 5.57 seconds, which was slower than Rogers’ supposed time. Despite Rogers’ protests, his three-and-a-half-year-old record was erased from the annals of Twin Galaxies’ gaming record-holding—along with all other records on the site—and Guinness removed his world record for “longest-standing video game record.”

“While I disagree with their decision, I must commend them for taking a strong stance on fraud,” Rogers wrote in a lengthy public Facebook post responding to Twin Galaxies’ decision.