10 Speedrunners Who Were Caught Cheating

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 5.5 won 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 point 5 7 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 5.5 won 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 now the cameras showing I'm doing this really this is pretty strange because like what people do interviews or media it's like a kinky little five eight four four five but this is the smoking gun in my opinion Todd made this post on an Atari message board claiming to have gotten a five point five four 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 five point five four and if he's willing to doctor evidence he'd be willing to lie about getting a five point five one 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 Aki Khan and white heiress 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 retros 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 139 in 120-star and someone by the name of holy moley left his comment on his video yeah baby you can play like tasks very impressive back in 2004 I held the 16 star world record for several years holy moly a prominent mario runner gothiclogic 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 heiress and aki khan had been exposed for 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 line up with where you pause last this is what exposed TAS 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 [Applause] 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 explained out my item drops and other inconsistencies prove I used what they called splicing and saving quit to make what amounts to a segmented Ron masking is a single segment this is not true I'm gonna give you the full explanation of why this is so as I explained to radix six-plus 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 SD a into 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 and 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 goronguy admitted it was true he wrote a paceman 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 seems 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 friggin 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 yes so I made them all at once it was like November 2007 to 1 frigate SS there was first a 1:10 and then once I had it faked time fly off let's go all the way let's go 107 untied world record there was a 101 secret agent so it was 2 untied and then frigate agent 23 which is like a multi tied record and the thing with free it is like it's it's the level to fake because a completed run looks the same as a failed run right you get to the end of the 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 oh yeah what I could have done is gameshark did waited at the boat jumping at 107 with all objectives complete and now I have like a viable 107 n scream that I can use to edit what not I mean this is 10 years ago the editing isn't as as good either I was I was too lazy it's just like found the number I found the number 7 on the end screen somewhere else and I just like shopped it over the last digit you know and then I just mimicked the you know because the thing we call that 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 107 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 N 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 oh look I can move my cursor on the answer it's clearly on a shop industry but at the time the martyr is an admin were the guys I always talk about these guys and gamer and Comus or who like really didn't care but gold mine didn't care but the rankings they just wanted to like they were kind of hoping the site was going to die and they would just kind of have it a hang out to watch NFL and play poker and that kind of stuff and that's actually part of the reason why I made the face 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 that was like Oh what should we do with you should we ban him I think my times page was frozen for like a month or two and I cut it took two or three months off of gold night and then when I came back in late January or so I posted it like a legit Untied record and I wouldn't say all was forgiven but we moved on from there yeah 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 TV'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 Malaya 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 she was 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 well 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 the week ago it was discovered that EXO SDA is 2012 speedrun of Super Meat Boy in 1839 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 he had 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 speed run calm I'm gonna make a fake achtung 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 is 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 splice Brown in 1804 I just slapped us 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 on now I'm going to re-import the audio and overlay my own uninterrupted main song 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 comm 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 1837 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 who have already been caught there are probably many more who haven't

Channel: Apollo Legend

Views: 10,330,263

Rating: 4.6995254 out of 5

Keywords: speedrun, top 10, cheating, splice, Todd Rogers, Twin Galaxies, Dragster, Fake, 5.51, 35 year record, OmniGamer, Kotaku, Atari, TSA, SpeedDemosArchive, GoronGuy, Majora's Mask, Ocarina of TIme, theifbug, Henning, Frigate Secret Agent, Golden Eye 007, RWhiteGoose, FLYING, GTA:SA, Super Meat Boy, exoSDA, Apollo Legend

Id: JdvFSQFZfK8

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/PM_ME_UR_ANKLES]

I couldn't help but notice your tone of voice change drastically mid sentence just after 14:07, I suspect this video is spliced and invalid.

[u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

The question is, do we actually catch most of the splicers, or do we only catch the bad ones?

Also, I hope that if the run you had submitted had been a world record, it would have been much more tightly scrutinized.

[u/jediyoshi]

Oh damn, I didn't realize rwhitegoose had a cheating past

[u/UnderThe102]

"Other inconsistencies 'prove' I used what they call 'splicing'" "You can easily say that this means I picked the best segments and constructed better runs"

So you did splice your runs "No, no. I just picked better segments." So you spliced your runs.

[u/ReadsStuff]

ohgod the TSA splice clip always cracks me up. That splice is so fucking bad.

[u/6oliath]

"I don't think Chibi is a bad guy and this was an honest mistake" what?? uh, no, cheating is synonymous with dishonesty.

I am also baffled at how he just casually flings the word "dirty" at some of the cheaters, but not at others.

[u/Eulers_ID]

I know that people will cheat at anything, but it's still weird to me considering the type of people that speedrunning tends to attract.

[u/jcelflo]

I can't remember where I read this, but I remember someone saying that combining recordings of the run was common practice in the early days of speedrunning becauses of limitation of recording methods and was not considered to be cheating.

That wasn't a problem for 'highscore' runs, which was most of the leaderboard activities, as the tracking was done by the game. But that might be why the TSA run didn't come under scrutiny.

He was obviously slimy for trying to pass it as a single segment run and giving excuses though.

[u/Not_A_Master]

Good video, I'd love to see more content like this on the sub.