Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
fracus
permo-w
the whole thing is so chaotic. I don't get the impression that Guinness World Records or anyone in the Youtube comments is aware it's a segmented run, but it is clearly stated in the original submission:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091121211238/https://speeddemo...
it's cheating for other reasons too, but it's confusing as fuck trying to figure who originally thought the record was segmented or not.
AJenbo
Being a segmented run is not a problem, the issue is that the segments are not from the same save meaning that the RNG could never produce the given levels in a single run, which is a requirement for segmented runs.
But yeah a lot of the "it's obviously cheating" comments seems to be from people not realizing that the player is allowed to re run the level and no required to go in blind, some of them may only have played it multiplayer where there isn't a save state for the game.
jolmg
Hmm... I'm not familiar with the speedrunning community. However, if I check the rules it cites, while it does say this today[1]:
> There obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game.
> manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed
If I check the Wayback Machine, it doesn't go all the way back to 2009 when the run was done. Earliest is 2012, and there it doesn't say anything about continuity or editing/adding/removing game files.[2]
[1] https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Rules
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120701000000*/https://kb.speed...
tiltowait
This happens pretty often. Karl Jobst has a lot of videos about cheaters, and it’s always interesting to see how many were ridiculously obvious in hindsight. Frequently, people won’t expect a good player to cheat, because “they don’t need to.” But cheating, at thay level, tends to be about saving time waiting for the perfect RNG.
vikingerik
There's observation bias there - the cheaters that we see are the obvious ones, we never know who gets away with it when they got everything to appear perfectly consistent without any telltales.
Like even for RNG, it'd be possible to fake that on a real console, with extra hardware writing to the bus. We'd never detect that, all we'd have would be the statistical arguments of like "one in 10^10 tries" or whatever.
wredcoll
Reminds me of the argument that rich people, given political power, won't act to harm the government/society for their own enrichment "because they're already rich!".
lawn
It reminds me of the blatant aim hacks that for example Flusha used in Counter Strike, yet people online still defend him.
Salgat
Everyone knew it was probably faked, but for the longest time there was no smoking gun that refuted the run's legitimacy without any plausible deniability. You have to remember that the speed runner gave plausible answers to many of the concerns brought up, which took a lot of concrete work to disprove (for example, proving that the map seeds they used required different runs, which required special tooling to bruteforce check against).
phire
Nobody knew it was fake before the investigation started.
The investigation didn't even start because they were suspicious. The team wanted to create a TAS and decided to recreate Groobo as a starting point, then optimise from there. First step of making a TAS was to bruteforce the map generation seed.
And they quickly encountered issues, and it quickly devolved into an investigation of just how "cheated" it was. Partly because for their TAS usecase, they didn't really care if the run was played on multiple versions, as long as it was still a single save file with a single map seed. But I assume it was mostly curiosity at that point.
Groobo's defence was didn't come until near the end of the investigation, and was more or less: "Yes, I did that. But it was all disclosed to the SDA judges, and they allowed it under the rules of that time".
fracus
Were the two inconsistencies I quoted not smoking guns?
AJenbo
The problem is that the menu is not part of the timed portion of the video and is just there for the viewer. In his response the runner said he simply used an old random intro he had when he combined the segments. The disappearing item might not have been enough either since it would not have had any consequence and could have been a simple continuity issue when redoing segments. If it was the only thinks we had pointed out it likely would not have been removed based on the response from SDA.
yifanl
The premise of being a segmented run uploaded by an amateur a decade ago provides a _lot_ of leeway.
driverdan
What's funny is that I immediately noticed the inventory inconsistency but since I'm not a Diablo speedrunner I assumed it was some kind of intended glitch that's known and allowed. Then I continued reading and saw they just noticed it.
inglor_cz
The famous Van Meegeren forgery "Christ and the Adulteress", which was sold to Goering, used a more modern blue instead of the original Vermeer's ultramarine - and for a good reason, because Van Meegeren could not, during wartime, obtain ultramarine from London, which is where the only contemporary vendor was located.
It could be detected by contemporary means, but no one thought about it in time, and there was no wisdom-of-the-crowds yet.
undefined
undefined
rollcat
Eh these kinds of runs pop up all the time in the speedrunning scene. Busting fake runners is an easy way to make views on YT.
First signal is when it's from a person who doesn't have a history of consistent achievements on the public leaderboards. It's not a rule - sometimes there are extremely talented up-and-coming legit runners who go from pretty bad times to WRs in a matter of months (e.g. Derek MacIntyre in Factorio 100%), but their past runs often show steady improvements. Many fake runners pop out of nowhere, or have few/inconsistent top times/PBs.
Second, every serious speedrunning community has people who check the video recording frame-by-frame; other rules usually include a whitelist of mods, posting the save, (for games that have RNG) the seed, and (for games that have replays) the replay. Breaking the rules just outright disqualifies a run. The frame-by-frame videos usually are enough to uncover cheating. E.g. in Minecraft any%, stronghold navigation relies a lot on luck and intuition; but there are visual cues for which room might lead to the end portal, and if a runner doesn't take the split second to look in that direction it's a tell-tale sign they've already scouted the seed.
But yeah, some formerly-respected runners actually put a lot of effort into cheating, and it takes another expert runner (or even the whole community) to bust them. More in-depth for Minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoEQ8wtawPI
AJenbo
Groobo has records in several other games, he also held previous records for Diablo, the previous runs looks like they have less issues so it seems to be something that escalated from just replacing one or two levels in the video in to making changes to the game and splicing everything together from unrelated runs.
rollcat
That's why you post the seed. If Diablo seeds the RNG from the current time, the rules should at least require posting the approximate time range (e.g. down to a minute). NTP also isn't hard.
Minecraft allows the use of an external tool that extracts the player coordinates to help triangulate the stronghold (there are runners who can do the triangulation in their heads in 10-20s (check out Couriway) but that will easily be a huge difference for a WR).
Timers need to hook into the game to trigger start/stop (WR attemps are often retimed from VOD, sometimes a close tie in a 4h+ run is resolved to single frames). If Diablo runs are to be taken seriously, a tool should exist to extract/inject the seed for verification.
szvsw
As someone with absolutely no knowledge of speedrunning community norms, it’s very interesting to see how a practice that is fundamentally about exploiting generally unintended mechanisms within a system design still develops its own notion of ethics, legitimate and illegitimate exploits, etc. Not that different than something like the Astros technology-assisted sign-stealing scandal (as opposed to legitimate sign-stealing) against the Dodgers in the ‘17 WS, at least from the perspective of needing to identify the lines between fair play and illegitimate advantage.
Edit: children have helped point out the precise notion of ethics - no exploit is unethical on its face, so long as it is disclosed, which allows the speedrun to be correctly classified and compared to others in its class.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
> its own notion of ethics, legitimate and illegitimate exploits, etc.
There are run “categories” for any given game. Super Metroid’s arguably most prestigious category used to be called “Any%”, referring to the required item collection percentage as distinct from 100% or Low%, and now it’s called “Any%, No Major Glitches” because someone discovered that you can go out of bounds with the X-Ray Scope and a door. It specifies “major” glitches because the run otherwise makes heavy use of (among others) a “minor” glitch called Mock Ball, which lets you move in morph ball form at regular form running speed. Ultimately, the community has to agree on what is major and what is minor but it’s usually moot until a new exploit is discovered.
It is interesting and it makes a whole lot of sense once you look at it from this angle. The categories actually have pretty rigorously defined rules precisely because there is so much competition involved.
zerocrates
Another good example is the Zelda Ocarina of Time any%, which progressed as new techniques allowed skipping more and more of the game, but which was still pretty broadly popular even when it was a warp to the final boss in under 20 minutes, is now way less popular now that they discovered a arbitrary code execution method that credits-warps in under 5 minutes.
This process had already been going on before, but you have this progressive sequence of the speedrun getting harder to play and harder to watch. You see some spliting out to restricted categories but even those aren't all that popular, but also something else that's recently become really common particularly in the communities for these games that have been optimized to death: randomizers. Shuffle around the positions of the necessary items, or the map itself, and you have something that's fresh for viewers and people who've played the game forever, an extra aspect of chance, usefulness of skills and familiarity with parts of the game that wouldn't otherwise be relevant... but it does split the community even more.
jordigh
It also depends on what is "fun". Major glitches in Super Metroid make you skip too much of the game and that just isn't fun to watch.
Speedrunning is a spectator sport, so spectators ultimately determine which categories are the prestigious ones.
djur
An example I'm aware of is the Lufia II No Major Glitches/No RNG Manipulation run. That game is very easy to make essentially deterministic with RNG manipulation, but like most highly technical RPG runs it's long and exhausting. The No RNG run not only bans RNG manipulation but also certain very rare drops that RNG manipulation is usually used to obtain. Why? Because otherwise, the optimal strategy would be to grind runs 10 minutes at a time until you got the rare drop from an early boss, and that's not fun. So the ruleset is designed to be accessible for runners who aren't interested in pathological optimization.
jknoepfler
And they are oh-so-contentious. If anyone wants to go down a fascinating rabbit hole, the recent conversation/debate around whether Bomb Torizo skip (a very difficult, borderline-human-impossible trick) should be allowed in Super Metroid runs was actually fascinating and ended up getting into deep research about inconsistencies between hardware polling rates vis-a-vis what runners could reasonable/humanely expect from one another... that's a thin gloss from a non-expert, but it's a great concrete example to work from.
(The debate was sparked by a runner proving that the trick was humanly possible, raising the spectre of someone actually pulling it off in a world record run, which would force all subsequent world record would-bes to replicate a trick that would kill 99.99% of runs, execution of which depending on the vagaries of how different controllers poll inputs in addition to nearly inhuman levels of sustained, frame-perfect inputs).
rcxdude
And there's generally a combination of principles involved, and different speedrunners and communities will prioritise different ones:
Fairness: generally speaking the competition wants to be fair. Part of this is just having a consistent set of enforced rules, but it also comes down to decisions about timing and allowing or disallowing certain tricks: if how fast part of a game is depends on how fast your hardware is, for example (whether by a trick working or simply lag), then most communities will try to eliminate this effect by banning hardware-dependent tricks or adjusting timing rules to remove loading times.
Competition: At the end of the day speedrunning is a competition around a game, so there's a general resistance to modifying the game itself, or e.g. use of external tools to assist the player beyond what was intended by the developer. But that will sometimes be compromised if there's some aspect of the game which badly affects other goals.
Fun: At the end of the day, speedruns are something that should be fun and rewarding to play and watch. So if the optimal run of a game becomes unfun to play or watch, then generally something will be done about it, whether by banning the trick which is unfun or by allowing something which alleviates the pain point (sometimes this even verges into health concerns: some pokemon games, for example, have very long runs with a huge amount of button-mashing to get through dialogue quickly, and RSI is a very real concern which means that turbo controllers which automate that are sometimes allowed). This can go as far as patching the game to remove particularly unfun or RNG-heavy parts, though it's rare.
And of course you can have different categories which will focus on different aspects of this, especially as different runners and watchers will have different ideas on what is fun: apart from what counts as 'beating the game' (any%, 100%, 'true ending', whatever), there's different levels of what other compromises are allowed. And it can get pretty contentious: from hardcore 'play the game as intended' purists to arbitrary-code-execution TASers, everyone has a different idea about what they enjoy in the competition, and different games can have strengths in each area of focus.
immibis
You can always play whatever you want - you just can't rank it on leaderboards if it doesn't follow the rules of that leaderboard.
TASes break every rule and are pretty cool.
NobodyNada
> TASes break every rule and are pretty cool.
There's still rules in TASing, just a different set of rules! Specifically, you have to submit a file containing a sequence of controller inputs that completes the game when played back in an accurate emulator (or a replay device connected to the controller port of an original console running the original game).
I co-authored the current fastest TAS of Super Metroid: https://youtu.be/m-Gt57ur7OA?t=2m30s We completed the game in under 2 minutes of gameplay by exploiting a race condition in the game's sprite animation system to start an exploit chain leading to full arbitrary code execution (full writeup: https://tasvideos.org/8214S ).
We used all kinds of tooling to create the run: a recording emulator with savestates, slowdown, and frame-by-frame input editing, scripting tools, debuggers, disassemblers, and memory viewers. We used memory editing tools during development to test different scenarios without having to set them up in-game first, but the actual run you submitted is completely "pure"; just an input file that beats the original, unmodified game.
And just like real-time speedruns, TASes are split into categories too. Here's the world record TAS with major glitches disallowed, by Sniq: https://youtu.be/Rr9gdQ-VkO4 Whereas our ACE TAS is more like a CTF challenge than anything else, Sniq's run is a masterpiece of gameplay that shows how far the game can be pushed beyond the current human limits. But again, it's still a true run of the game; the only difference is that you submit an input file instead of a realtime performance of the run.
recursive
I mean there can still be rules. Like using a hacked ROM or spliced video. Of course you wouldn't splice to get good performances, but different RNG states or something.
vanderZwan
It's not a particularly complex or surprising "ethics" though: the point of competing between speed-runners is an honest comparison of human skills, so all exploits require full disclosure to ensure a fair comparison and the ability to agree on which skills are actually being compared. This is why tool-assisted speedruns are separated from human speed runs, for example.
szvsw
> It's not a particularly complex or surprising "ethics" though
Yes, you are mostly right, but it’s still interesting (and positive!) that the community landed on an “anything goes so long as you are honest” set of norms.
As someone without much (well, any) interaction with speedrunning communities, it’s still fun to see how other internet communities have codified or tacitly established their operating procedures, expectations, norms etc.
dahart
What is interesting or unique about honesty as a shared norm?
You are, again here, despite trying to deny it elsewhere in this thread, claiming the “anything goes” part within the bounds of the game and within the rules of the competition is somehow reflecting on the community norms and making this “interesting”.
It’s like trying to say “Oh wow it’s so interesting that marathon runners have their own ethics; they can just run as fast as they want as long as they don’t take shortcuts”.
pdpi
An interesting peculiarity of the speedrunning community is that there is also a large component of "the community vs the game" mattering more than than "runner vs runner".
me_me_me
Just to add a bit more context.
For a given game there are often multiple categories. With rules for each. Some forbid some exploits, some complete game as fast as possible some 100% it.
When a new tech gets discovered there might be a debate if it belongs to certain categories or not.
tialaramex
Yes. All of human culture is like this.
When you do something nobody did before or are faced with a moral dilemma you've no prior experience with it's often unclear whether what's "Good" and what's "Bad" in some general sense and so the reaction may be based on "vibes".
Dick Fosbury's weird jumping style? No rule against that, but equally the committee could have seen it and said "No, that's not OK" and forbidden it by the next event. They did not, Dick seems like an athlete, this is a new technique, fine by us - and today everybody serious uses this style (the "Fosbury Flop") or one based on it for jumping.
Modern Contract Law mostly comes back to "Carlill v Carbolic Smokeball Co" in the 19th century. This is about a quack medicine (Carbolic Smokeballs don't prevent Influenza) but the legal question was: If you specifically advertise that if people do a thing (use your Carbolic Smokeballs) and an event happens (a customer catches Influenza, "flu") you will pay them a lot of money (£100 in the 1890s) - well can the advertiser say they didn't mean it when asked for the money? Mrs Carlill seems like a nice lady, everybody hates people selling quack medicine, so obvious Carlill wins - but setting out explicitly why she wins forms the basis of an important part of modern civil law. That advert is an Offer, the choice to buy and use the Carbolic Smokeballs was Acceptance, she caught flu, therefore now Carbolic Smokeball Co. owe Mrs Carlill £100.
If you've ever heard about why people would buy a seemingly worthless thing for $1, or about the peppercorn rents, or wondered why you're told you "agreed" to a bunch of legal stuff you don't care about and haven't actually read - that all comes back to Carlill v Carbolic Smokeball Co. Maybe if she'd been an awful smug Karen trying to get paid for moaning and they were selling a pretty good (but not 100% effective) cure for flu, judges would have instead figured out why she does not get paid and our case law would have turned out very differently.
[Edited to fix typo]
Y_Y
It's a good story but I think you oversell it. Carbolic Smoke Ball was heard in 1892, peppercorn rents (literal and figurative) predate that case by hundreds of years.
ricree
To elaborate on your points some more: the basic building blocks of contract law were already well established by the time Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball came about. The main question at hand was whether these could apply when the offer was made to the public at large rather than to any specific person or group.
tialaramex
That's fair. Contract law was not invented from scratch to give Mrs Carlill the win, but much of the modern formalisation around the ingredients for a legal contract does date back to that case.
Also this models what we were discussing. What exactly the rules were for contracts drifted over time as people's intuitions and experiences changed, things that everybody just accepted as normal in 1825 seem insane in 2025 - when I was born there wasn't yet an Unfair Contract Terms Act for example - if you didn't read carefully maybe you're trapped in a deal that any fool could see was abusive, but the courts can't fix it.
cbarrick
No, I think you are misunderstanding. There really isn't an "ethics" of what exploits are allowed or disallowed.
Speed running communities generally don't care what exploits you use, as long as you are up-front and honest about it. The idea is to have apples-to-apples comparisons. You did a 100% run with no exploits? Cool, let's compare that to other people who also ran that category. Your friend did an any% run with save file manipulation? Also cool, let's compare that to others in the category.
If you modified your save file mid run, but tell everyone else that your run should be compared against other runs that did not modify save files, that's clearly dishonest. The problem isn't the part about what exploit was used; it's the part where he lied to the community about which category it should be classified.
Also, the core aspect of speed running is speed: the amount of time it takes you to complete the game. If you are modifying save files outside the game after you start a run, you need to record that time.
szvsw
> Speed running communities generally don't care what exploits you use, as long as you are up-front and honest about it.
That is, precisely, a set of ethics!
> There really isn't an "ethics" of what exploits are allowed or disallowed.
It sounds like there is: disclosed exploits are allowed, while non-disclosed exploits are disallowed. This is very clearly a set of ethics. It is different than that of industry, where generally speaking trade-secrets and non-disclosure of methodology is often considered critical to business success, short of establishing protected IP; in academia, disclosure is putatively the norm but there is plenty of partial disclosure of methodology rather than complete… etc.
> The problem isn't the part about what exploit was used; it's the part where he lied to the community about which category it should be classified.
That puts it very precisely, and also highlights his unethical behavior in the context of speedrunning’s norms around ethical representation of achievements.
cbarrick
I see. Maybe we're getting too hung up on a prescribed meaning of the word "ethics" rather than the larger meaning of what we're actually saying to each other.
Your original comment talks about the distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" exploits, and the juxtaposition of ethics and exploits. My point is that this framing is a misunderstanding of speed running norms - there isn't actually a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" exploits. And this undermines the poignancy of the juxtaposition. I even refute your assertion that speed running is fundamentally about exploiting - some of the most fun categories or glitchless.
I assumed you meant the original comment in the scope of behaviors that could be triggered by the game's code. So it seemed to me that there was a misunderstanding: "illegitimate exploits" simply isn't a thing in this scope, given honesty around the recording.
But now I see you make the distinction "disclosed exploits are allowed, while non-disclosed exploits are disallowed". Yes, lying is a exploit, in a larger sense. It wasn't clear to me that this was the intended original meaning. So sure, in this scope it is valid to talk about illegitimate exploits.
Frankly, I'm still not sure this actually was your original intended meaning, and it feels like I got strawmanned into an argument about the semantics of the words "ethics" and "legitimacy", when my original intent was to add clarity around the culture of speed running. Any further debate about the philosophy of language is getting too far off topic.
Oh, and your edit about "children" is rude.
dahart
Whether someone was honest or lied in competition isn’t a unique set of ethics anywhere. Yes they use ethics, and those ethics are shared with society’s notion of ethics. You’re failing to make a case that speed running has their own norms.
dahart
You’re framing this in a very funny way.
This is not at all the same thing as the Astros scandal. Astros didn’t break the agreed upon rules (edit: I’m wrong - human sign stealing was allowed, but electronic sign stealing was not). Groobo did break the agreed upon rules.
There is no “own notion” of ethics here, and it’s presumptuous and incorrect to suggest that exploiting games during a game exploit competition somehow reflects on ethics and makes the cheating “interesting”. Cheating and ethics in a competition is defined by what the agreed upon rules are. Perhaps ironically, your comment is developing it’s own notion of ethics.
travisjungroth
> Astros didn’t break the agreed upon rules.
They did. Using electronic devices to communicate during a game (I guess besides the dugout phone) is banned. They were watching the video feed in the clubhouse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Astros_sign_stealing...
dahart
Ah, you’re right, thanks. I read that sign stealing was allowed, and missed the parts about devices being banned.
szvsw
> This is not at all the same thing as the Astros scandal. Astros didn’t break the agreed upon rules.
Sheesh, didn’t expect to re-litigate WS‘17 on HN today… I concede that there was at least some gray area in the codified official rules and the 2001 directive around electronic transmission, but it very clearly was a violation of the norms, IMO, and the Giants-Dodgers binocular incident in the 50s and its reception is good precedent.
> There is no “own notion” of ethics here, and it’s presumptuous and incorrect to suggest that exploiting games during a game exploit competition somehow reflects on ethics and makes the cheating “interesting”.
That’s not what I was suggesting was interesting to me. What interests me is the social phenomenon that is what the actual members of the community deem to be acceptable or in this case unacceptable, how the the community works to identify violations of norms, and then handle with the fallout.
dahart
> That’s not what I was suggesting was interesting to me. What interests me is the social phenomenon that is what the actual members of the community deem to be acceptable or in this case unacceptable, how the the community works to identify violations of norms, and then handle with the fallout.
You cited the exploiting as the one and only reason that cheating is interesting here, and explicitly implied that it’s somehow different from other kinds of competition. After this new comment, I don’t see how to interpret your top comment any differently.
This community competition didn’t do anything differently than any other competition. Someone entered the competition claiming to be adhering to the rules (https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Rules), they flagrantly broke the competition rules, tried to hide their cheating, and people got upset when it was uncovered. No different than any competition cheating, I don’t see what you’re implying about what people deem to be acceptable, or norms. The norms here are no different than anywhere else.
__s
Note this is what categories are for. The category sets the rules. There are glitchless categories (which define glitching, see Ocarina of Time which has restricted & unrestricted glitchless categories since the game is so broken: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2ebZ94KGlVw or how glitched categories include no-SRM & no-ACE)
sandworm101
>> a practice that is fundamentally about exploiting generally unintended mechanisms within a system design
That is true of all racing. From NASCAR and F1 to the Olympic 100m, everyone operates on the bleeding edge of "the rules" ... at least that's where winners play.
darkwater
I have your same knowledge but what you mention seems pretty normal and even human, no? You exploit some difficult to exploit bugs and you don't want easy tricks to be used instead.
Although following this logic I don't fully understand why TAS are allowed.
ChoGGi
TASes aren't allowed in regular categories (I'm sure they are somewhere), they're used to find the fastest way possible then human players try to reproduce it.
aithrowawaycomm
I think of TAS as a code competition, almost like demoscene, whereas tool-free speedrunning is more e-athletics.
__s
What do you mean by allowed?
TAS runs aren't put on leaderboards against RTA runs
nurettin
Everything is allowed as long as you cat honestly. Some present no challenge (like idspispopd and run to exit makes no sense) so nobody runs it.
darkwater
No idea, I'm no expert at all in the scene :) it's just how TFA closes its story.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
On the topic of speedrunning, DwangoAC is a name that stands out. He’s represented (possibly led but I’m not familiar) the TAS Block team for Games Done Quick events in the past (not sure about events since 2018 since I did not watch them) and they’ve put together some impressive work.
My favorite was publicly declaring that all PS2 replay files for Super Monkey Ball 2 can’t be trusted after a public demonstration as to why. Closely followed by Brain Age shenanigans. Interesting but not surprising to see the name on this story as well.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-0eM0413N8w (SMB2, declaration near the end after the run)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uXFiKuK5M30 (Brain Age)
gmueckl
He was the public figure for TASBot and TASVideos for a while (see https://tas.bot/wiki/Main_Page). TASBot is really a beautiful idea to help visualize what tool assisted speedruns are doing via the controller button lights in TASBot's hands. I think DwangoAC and TASBot represented the TAS community at multiple events, not just GDQ.
Tool assisted speedruns are remarkable to me because creating the authoring tools is hacking in the classic sense.
And then there's the sheer insanity of exploiting broken game logic to gain arbitrary code execution solely via controller inputs. The most elaborate demonstration of this that I know of was given at AGDQ 2017, eventually injecting a video player into Zelda on SNES and streaming the video through the controller port: https://youtu.be/7CgXvIuZR40?si=KR5hAv-iJHjWv8vL&t=1076 Ars Technica went into a little more detail about that feat: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super...
boomboomsubban
"Fastest completion of an RPG videogame?" You can beat Pokémon Blue in ~1 minute, and I'm sure there are countless other similar examples.
Guinness being in this area at all is bizarre to me, but it probably sells books.
autarch
Guinness is a joke. They don't really have standards for lots of their records. For example, Guinness called Ben Lee's the "fastest violinist" for his "performance" of Flight of the Bumblebee. I put "performance" in quotes because he absolutely butchered the piece. But he butchered it very quickly!
It's obvious when you think about it that these sorts of categories are meaningless. What is the fastest violinist? Surely this has to include both speed and _accuracy_. How do you measure accuracy over speed?
philistine
Publicly disowned cheater Billy Mitchell is disgraced with all record-keeping authorities. Except Guinness. They have reinstated his records years after all his cheating allegations had been thoroughly proven. Guinness is 100% pay for play and should not even be trusted with beer-making, even less record-keeping.
wileydragonfly
[flagged]
ASalazarMX
Had to lookup a video of his performance. The fastest speakers somehow enunciate all phonemes when played back slowly, but Lee just at 25% is running notes into another. It doesn't help that he keeps winking at the camera instead of fully concentrating like high-performers do.
It's as if Steve Woodmore started slurring words and claimed an even faster Guiness record. The difference is most of us have great hearing for words, but not so great for music.
autarch
I have Ben Lee beat. I've done the fastest violin performance of John Cage's 4:33, and I didn't even need a violin. I'll be calling up Guinness next Monday to have it confirmed.
xdavidliu
I'm pretty sure Ruggiero Ricci's 1947 recording (first ever) of Paganini's 5th caprice is faster
danem
Five years ago, Guinness left the following note on their video of Ben Lee's performance:
" It's worth noting that this is no longer a category that our records team monitor - the record has been rested. Our records managers are no longer able to monitor fastest musician records as it has become impossible to judge the quality of the renditions, even when slowed down. In terms of monitoring the number of musical notes, it is not clear if all notes have been played fully. "
autarch
Yeah, I think this is in large part due to TwoSetViolin, a classical music YouTuber duo who did a hilarious roast of this performance, as well as the whole concept of "fastest performance". See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvsvaCU6i1M for the original video.
devnullbrain
GWR's website's about us:
>We are the global authority on all things record-breaking
GWR website when you search "first person to":
>1 to 20 of 1691 results found
Now how do they propose I break those?
thih9
Become the first person to X+1, or the first person to X in record time, or the oldest person to X, or the first person to X while Y, etc.
Deathmax
Their primary business model nowadays is as an advertising agency, not book selling: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/business-marketing-solu...
chmod775
It mainly sells beer, but some books too.
LeoPanthera
I'm sure everyone even vaguely interested in this topic has already seen it, but hbomberguy's 30 minute video about a sound effect, and accompanying feature length meltdown about an infamous video game music composer, has a lengthy section in the middle about Guinness' involvement in video games records.
ghastmaster
Here is the full analysis that the article links to eventually:
bastardoperator
I don't care about speed running at all. The drama in this community though, absolutely top notch, it's like a technical soap opera and I love it.
memhole
Highly recommend watching this channel if you're curious about speedruns:
latexr
I don’t care about speed runs at all, but that channel always grabs me.
sesm
So, the speedrun author claimed it was RNG-edited, but it was level edited instead? The author could easily refute that by providing the RNG seed. I think every run that claims to be RNG-edited should post RNG seed for verification. If the author claimed that the run was unedited and it was 'just luck', I'm surprised that anyone believed him in the first place.
duskwuff
> So, the speedrun author claimed it was RNG-edited, but it was level edited instead?
It's worse than that - it's a bunch of separate video clips spliced together to give the appearance that it's a playthrough of the entire game, but which couldn't actually play out that way in a single game. Not just because the RNG doesn't match up, but also because the character is gaining items and levels between the splices which they never actually earned through gameplay.
Ekaros
Which is fully valid video genre. But not a valid record. Spliced runs as videos show casing best what a specific scene can do is great tool to promote scene. But those should never be presented as records.
Well apart from not being completable run...
duskwuff
At that point, that isn't even a "run" anymore, spliced or otherwise - it's just a gameplay compilation video. Which is fine, like you said, but only as long as you don't call it something it's not.
mst
> I think every run that claims to be RNG-edited should post RNG seed for verification
If I understood the later parts of the article right, that's now basically a standard or nobody believes you.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
And it encourages the community to create a “fixed-seed” category for the game, which would generally have a fastest known seed with a fastest known route.
hn-acct
The copyright notice mismatch is suspicious and the missing items is a dead giveaway away and should have made it ineligible alone.
AJenbo
I would agree with you but SDA is very picky with what they will accept as evidence against a video, since the changing inventory doesn't affect anything it could have been a mistake in replicating the segments when optimizing the run, but would not actually have affected things. In the end it was a combination of the inability to reproduce the level with item drops and the impossible end fight that got them to decide to pull the record.
taurath
This entire article is not new, and the information was posted to youtube back in November 2024: https://youtu.be/N_1su-dOUNw
ecshafer
I don't really care about speed running, but I have played a ton of Diablo. That run is so obviously fake that I am astounded it was ever taken seriously. Getting that many stairs right next to each other in a row, then getting perfect super lucky drops and just perfect everything. It would be, even if possible, a 1 in a trillion run.
Liquix
also covered by Abyssoft in video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_1su-dOUNw
anthk
That's why I prefer gameplays on Nethack/Slashem, they are pretty hard to either fake or cheat in.
You can replay these online, or with TTYREC. Also, the fanbase has values, the gameplay has conducts to reflect what kind of behaviour did you follow ingame.
You can play as a vegetarian, or as a pacifist, letting your pet bash and bite everyone.
OFC locally they can hack the game, but these are mostly done from developers to test the game, not for "serious" gameplays.
beeflet
>That's why I prefer gameplays on Nethack/Slashem, they are pretty hard to either fake or cheat in.
I wonder if you could train an AI on it and just have 1000 of em running to get the best records
anthk
They already did that; it was one of the earliest (modern) AI tests from Facebook. You can get the paper at Google.
And it was not easy at all.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
It is kind of hilarious the fraud was uncovered by some esoteric technical investigation when there was definitive evidence in plain sight the whole time.
"For instance, the "1996–2001" copyright date seen on the title screen in Groobo's video is inconsistent with the v1.00 shown on the initial menu screen, suggesting Groobo's run was spliced together from runs on multiple different versions of the game. Items acquired early in the run also disappear from the inventory later on with no apparent explanation."
It reminded me of a joke in Northern Exposure where Ed uncovers a thief by listing circumstantial evidence and then adding one piece of evidence that he almost forgot.. he witnessed the thief stealing a radio.