The Weirdest Cheated Speedrun World Record

in late april of 2019 the global speedrun association hosted an event titled pace 2019 this live in-person event featured the finale of the organization's three speed running leagues for super mario 64 super mario odyssey and celeste the top four players of these online leagues would battle for the greatest shares of the tournament's prize pools today we're going to look at the celeste league which featured a 5 000 developer sponsored prize pool the four celeste speedrunners who qualified for the event were tgh fladervy chai kitty and myself all four of these runners were potential world record contenders so the competition would be incredibly tight a week prior to pace tgh had claimed the world record with a time of 27.50 and the pressure was on the other runners to match similar times in person and in front of a live audience thankfully all of the other runners would deliver the four day event would feature some incredible races but the pace 2019 5 000 celeste tournament would only be the second most notable thing in celeste speedrunning history that weekend even though the first second third and fifth place celeste any percent speedrunners were away competing at xanadu games a very peculiar image was circulating amongst the celeste speedrunning community a final time of 27 minutes and 43 seconds this would be a world record time by almost seven seconds we already know it wasn't one of the top four runners who got this record so who achieved this incredible feat you might think it would be the 4th place speedrunner nero x2 but that is not the case in fact the speedrunner who performed this run had no submitted time on the leaderboards his name is phoenix 4k and he is a really interesting speedrunner while it has exploded in popularity in recent years speedrunning is still a relatively niche hobby as a result tightly knit communities develop around it speedrunners often participate in their games communities sharing their progress and broadcasting their runs some do this to grow a community and possibly become famous but most just want to submit runs and share their accomplishments with their friends however phoenix was different phoenix would rarely share his personal best times when he did upload his personal best runs on the speedrun.com leaderboards he would frequently remove his submissions later as when he deemed a personal best unsatisfactory he would delete it from the leaderboards while phoenix did stream runs on twitch the majority of his best celeste achievements were accomplished offline so for most speedrunners and viewers phoenix 4k was not a well-known name and he definitely was not in the conversation as a celeste any percent world record contender the only exception was a small group of top runners who phoenix communicated with regularly many of these runners were aware of his runs and great skill at celeste as he had claimed to have unrecorded chapter world records and many did not doubt these claims from the snippets of phoenix's gameplay that he did upload his talent and dedication to the game was very evident many people in this group of top runners were aware that phoenix was doing a massive offline grind in the month of april his goal the celeste 90 world record this would obviously be quite a feat as the top celestrons are incredibly competitive so the odds were certainly stacked against phoenix well on april 28th 2019 phoenix would shatter his goal as he achieved a time of 2743 which was submitted to the leaderboards and promptly verified phoenix was the celeste any percent world record holder a world record is obviously an incredible achievement and usually it is an accomplishment that the runner is proud of it's kind of like a virtual trophy that's displayed for everyone else to see but phoenix's run was really really weird visually the run featured a picture of a large green bird in the bottom right corner with the accompanying text long live archie the run also had no timer usually speedrunners use a program called live split to time their speed runs that wasn't present at all and celeste's in-game timer was also turned off this was actually fine for leaderboards at the time there was no rule stating you needed to have a timer on as the game would still show you your final in-game time after completing the game however it was still weird as almost no runners ran like this other than that it was just a really fast celeste speedrun the audible portion of the speedrun was even more bizarre the game audio was completely muted and in its place was a variety of grant mcdonald's ram ranch music i'm not going to play this music at all here since it is incredibly inappropriate but you might recognize this music series for its iconic line of 18 naked cowboys if you know the song you know how out of place it would be for a world record speed run of course this speed run was uploaded to youtube but with this weird speed run comes a weird title as instead of naming it something like celeste any percent speedrun in 2743 it was instead called celeste two berries world record phoenix categorized the speedrun not by its impressive feat in the any percent category but rather by the fact that it collects two optional collectibles just for the record two berries is obviously not a category that celeste speedrunners attempt to run needless to say this is not a speedrun that would go in a virtual trophy case to the average person it appeared that phoenix was not at all proud of this speed run because of the oddities surrounding this run and the general community's lack of familiarity with phoenix as a top runner some community members decided to further investigate the run's legitimacy and after less than 24 hours of investigation it was concluded that this run was illegitimate so how did they arrive at this conclusion well celeste has collectible red berries there are 175 of them in total and while there are categories that collect these berries the popular any percent category does not require any of these berries to be collected we usually coincidentally get at least two berries due to speed strats one in the celestial resort and one in the summit but other than that these collectibles are ignored in the speed run however for casual players they can pick and choose what berries they collect and the game helps them track their progress because if they pause the game at the bottom of the screen there will be a berry indicator there is a gray notch if a particular berry has not been collected yet if the bear gets collected while the player is still in the level the notch will be replaced with a red circle indicating that the berry has been collected if the player were to exit the level and then re-enter from level select the bearing notch becomes a blue circle indicating that the berry has already been collected in a previous session in a speed run the runner will pause frequently in order to skip cutscenes specifically at the very end of most chapters the berry indicator will be visible as the player skips the final cut scene of the chapter and for phoenix's run at the last chapter of the game the summit there was something interesting did you see that let me pause it for you there are actually two discrepancies here first there's a blue circle on a completely random berry not only is this a berry that phoenix didn't collect in the video but it is also highlighted blue which means that it was collected in a previous session and secondly the berry that phoenix did collect in the summit should be marked with a red circle as it is on legitimate speed runs however even though the video shows phoenix collecting this berry there is still a gray notch in place of where the red circle should be this leads us to believe that this speed run is spliced a splice is when a runner edits multiple speed runs together in order to remove mistakes and create a near perfect speed run now editing a run together isn't inherently cheating many of my favorite speedruns are segmented runs which are literally spliced runs that show off speed on strategies that would be very hard to achieve under normal circumstances however submitting a spurn like this to a leader board and trying to pass it off as a normal speed run is unacceptable speedrunners will attempt the same speedrun for countless hours just to find mistakes in the last stretch of the run this is a frustrating but normal part of the process for world record perfection editing your way around these mistakes might create an easier avenue for a satisfying end product but it destroys fair competition in the process splicing is one of the most common forms of cheating across almost all speed running games and it is possibly the worst thing that a speedrunner can do given these discrepancies in phoenix's video the only logical conclusion is that this speedrun is spliced the footage we see at the start of the summit has to be a different run from the footage we see at the end of the summit as otherwise these berry counts would line up and after even more investigation moderators noticed something else very strange about the run remember how there was a giant green bird in the bottom right corner of phoenix's screen believe it or not this bird was complicit in phoenix's cheating scheme normally when you unlock a new checkpoint for the first time a save icon is displayed in the bottom right corner showing the player that their save file has been updated however this only happens if this is the player's first time entering the screen if a runner were to be splicing a speedrun together and they were on a save file where they had already beaten the level the save icon would not be displayed the fact that this portion of the screen was covered leads us to believe that this save icon did not appear when it should have at points in phoenix's run this was not hard proof like the berries but it was incredibly compelling evidence that this run was beyond suspicious one day after the run was verified moderators officially announced that this speed run was illegitimate this was confirmed later when phoenix would admit to splicing as a result the run was removed from the leaderboards and phoenix was given a six-month leaderboard ban even when the span was removed phoenix's runs would be dealt with extra scrutiny requiring the in-game timer audio and for their run to be verified by multiple moderators because of this fake run briefly slipping onto the leaderboards some new rules were introduced that apply to all new speed runs an in-game timer was required to be on screen at all times and the bottom right corner of the screen could not be obstructed so the safe icon would always be visible 99 of celeste speedruns already followed these rules so adding these was more of a formality over anything else later on phoenix would achieve a legitimate verifiable 27.49 even though his ban has been lifted for many months now phoenix has not submitted this run and it is unknown whether he has intentions to publicly return to celeste speedrunning phoenix was undoubtedly a skilled speedrunner but this event essentially ended his career as a celeste speedrunner and unlike an actual phoenix he would stay dormant and rest in the ashes of his cheated speedrun thanks for watching

Channel: Msushi

Views: 1,949,941

Rating: 4.865715 out of 5

Keywords: msushi, msushi100, speedrun, speed run, celeste, celeste speed run, celeste speedrun, celeste speedrun world record, world record, wr, cheated speedrun, speedrun cheating, how speedrunners skip, cheated speedrun world record, celeste world record, speedrun explained, speedrun explained celeste, celeste speedrun explained, weird speedrun, weird cheated speedrun, video game cheaters, video game cheaters caught, speedrunning cheater, speedrun cheat, phoenix4k, speedrun world record

Id: s6uCc8fQ-ao

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Minirig355]

I usually just watch Summoning Salt or Bismuth, but had this recommended to me and I actually really enjoyed it, good production quality for a ‘smaller’ youtuber

[u/foremans-dog]

it's a good day to be an msushi fan

[u/J3acon]

The "weirdest" cheated speedrun cheated by using the most common cheating method?

[u/MrGhobo]

This video could easily be 1/3th the length it is. Nevertheless interesting content.

[u/Legacy_600]

Long live Archie!

[u/erikWeekly]

Ram Ranch Rocks 🎶

[u/Elendel]

For a sec I thought it was a video claiming Msushi was a cheater. :(

Also, "splicing a run is one of the worst thing a speedrunner can do", I'm pretty sure being a litteral white supremacist got that beat. Some runners have set the bar far too high for just cheating being that bad. :p

[u/iagox86]

As somebody with a pet conure, I instantly knew that if there are shenanigans afoot, the bird would be somehow involved. It always is!

[u/Cemicircle]

celeste