Why The Biggest CHEATER in Mario Kart 64 Wasn't Caught

over the years speedrunning has had its share of players that faked runs or were caught cheating using one method or another one of the earliest instances of cheating took place in the mario kart 64 community between 2003 and 2005 and went undetected for the entire duration without any suspicion of wrongdoing or misconduct from community members or the moderators for this video we're going to look at the timeline of events as well as some of the more common methods of cheating to see if we can find any inconsistencies that would have outed the cheater finally to make things more interesting i'm not going to reveal who the cheater is right away instead i'd like you to try and catch the guilty party as well while we look at the evidence so when you think you know leave a comment down below back in 2003 the internet and speed running were very different places as there were only a handful of games that had communities of the few that existed mario kart goldeneye and doom were the largest and it's important to understand their proof requirements to grasp how this cheat was pulled off doom had perhaps the best method of proof for two reasons it was a pc game which made capture easier and the game would write out input files that could be played back in video form allowing players to share runs easily goldeneye and mario kart were a bit different as full game speed runs weren't a thing in this era players competed based on the time you would achieve on each level of the game times achieved were normally posted to a forum with communities largely using the honor system aim chats and email chains were the record-keeping technology with some players even mailing polaroids of final times back and forth video proof wasn't exactly a requirement but was always appreciated and as youtube and other video sharing websites became popular in 2005 you would see more mario kart times with video populating the leaderboards until it became mandatory for top runners as the mario kart community grew so did the need for moderation and there was nothing that divided players more than how to handle the version differences between pal and ntsc the fundamental difference is that the two regional releases ran at different frame rates with ntsc running at 30 fps and pal running at 25 fps your first thought might be that five frames a second isn't that big of a deal but when we're talking about world records every frame counts and the difference although small meant that ntsc records were 1.2024 times faster than pal in gameplay this translates to a huge advantage if you're playing on pal as the slower frame rate made it slightly easier to optimize tracks when lining up mini turbos and race lines you might be thinking why didn't north american players just buy a pal cartridge to level the playing field but 2003 was a much different time than now hardware wasn't as accessible and it wasn't as simple as obtaining a pal cartridge you'd need a pal n64 a pal crt and a pal cartridge if you wanted to play it 25 fps without input lag due to these reasons a divide formed in the community as the ntsc players became increasingly incensed at the ease the pow players seemed to set new world records with their best efforts being bested overnight by the european players among the players back in 2003 one stood out above all the others michael yangarius who would start a career that brought the mario kart community to its knees submitting his first world record on march 30th of that year on the rainbow road three lap it wouldn't take him long before he challenged for the title of champion the champion distinguishment is the highest honor you can achieve when it comes to mario kart 64 time trials the champ title is awarded by an equation that weighs things such as your average finish across all tracks and number of world records to determine who is the top dog to become champ it requires mastery of a majority of the tracks on both fast lap and three lap versions with most champions pouring thousands of hours in to attain the coveted title through march to june of 2003 mj would take seven more records with both bowser castle times falling to him on june 25th which is impressive since he set the three lap record on that track just the previous day and cut it by .28 in less than 24 hours this put him just one record away from the title of champion which was currently held by sami chetten a well-known super mario kart runner and the godfather of the smk speedrun community it didn't take mj much longer to set his next world record either because seven days later he took the royal raceway flap record from sammy which gave him the edge he needed to become champion to say that mj's rise to champ was meteoric is an understatement as he went from having his first world record in march to becoming champ in just over three months if we look at previous champions we see a different picture with sammy setting his first record in april of 1999 but not taking the champ title until mid-2002 and a similar pattern with steven jortis setting his first record in 1997 but not becoming champ until the end of 1999 so you're probably thinking was mj the cheater to find out let's have a look at one of the more common methods of cheating splicing a splice is an edited segment of video where a player would take multiple instances of play and piece them together inside of a video editor to present them as a single instance of play usually with the spliced video showing a world record achievement speed running has seen its share of splicers over the years with the earliest known instance coming in 2005 with a 16 star run in super mario 64 claimed by holy moly 2207 his 16 star run was proven to be spliced in 2017 after he decided to brag in the youtube comments on cheese's 120 star record which got the attention of the mods upon analysis of the audio it was found that gaps existed during transitional portions of the run where the audio would abruptly cut out and then resume which is one of the largest telltale signs that a run has been spliced so the question remains were any of mj's runs spliced there's only one record with video proof from mj's run to become champ his calamari desert 3 lap time the video is a replay of the record run recorded on a camcorder so the video quality is very poor and it lacks audio altogether catching a mario kart 64 splice doesn't require audio however as there are certain gameplay elements that make splicing this game almost impossible first time trials are a constant video feed with no loading screens or cut to black meaning that splices would have to be seamless but the gameplay ui provides almost impossible challenges to pull this off for three reasons here's a spliced run i've created have a look at the screen as it crosses the finish line going into the second lab did you catch that to successfully splice a time trial run you would have to line up the position of your character pixel perfect between transitions otherwise you see that noticeable jump additionally look at the course timer and speedometer to get away with a splice not only would you need to be in the exact same position but you would also need to be going the exact same speed and be on the exact same time if that wasn't bad enough all of these need to be in perfect alignment on the same frame or your splice will get caught so the simple answer is that splicing in mario kart 64 is next to impossible if we do look at mj's run it shows him going into the menu after the run to hit the replay so the chances of this being spliced are very low for an additional reason as he would have had to splice the run together then get his n64 to play it somehow and the technical knowledge for that wasn't readily available in 2003 there's no conclusive proof or even a suspicion that these early runs of mjs are cheated or tampered as mentioned previously some had video proof and it was common at the time to post your personal best to the forum since the honor system was by and large how the community operated this is where the next person to challenge for the champ title would come in havrick an ntsc player with exceptional skill but his rise wasn't quite as meteoric as that of mg's let's have a look havrick would join the mario kart time trials community in 2002 when he started submitting his first runs to fill out a timesheet on the website it wouldn't be until 2003 on august 12th that he would achieve his first record a 2 23 68 on the royal raceway 3 lap after he set his first record it would be a month to the day when he set his next this time on the f lap of royal raceway beating mj's time by just two hundredths of a second the royal raceway track is a good indicator of just how good these two players were for the time as their f-lap times were almost a second ahead of the rest of the pack they would skirmish for the three lap record here with habrik taking the lead before the end of september and that's when he set his sights on other tracks the luigi raceway flap both koopa troopa beach records and the wario stadium flap would all fall to habrick before the year was over coming out of 2003 he had a total of three world records as mj would take back the luigi raceway and ktb f labs before the year ended but this is where things get interesting after several weeks of inactivity hadrick would take the ktb f-lap back in february then through to june he would slowly gain on total records getting all the way up to eight despite losing two to mj earlier in the month then on june 17th something spectacular would happen for the second and last time in mario kart 64 non-shortcut history fabric would set a three lap and flap record in the same run the track wario stadium the previous record to accomplish this feat sami chettin's three lap record of 2 24 52 which had an f lap time of 1 27 45 on the opening lap the track wario stadium and it was this very record that habrick broke back to back double records wario stadium is a difficult course for a few reasons it has multiple tight corners and hill sections that are hard to line up and due to its length there are lots of places to pull off mini turbos where you perform a drift to build charge then release it for a small boost which add more complexity to an already challenging track these factors make it physically and mentally tough to grind out attempts but this didn't stop havrick crushing sammy chetan's three lap record by half a second and improving the flap by a tenth of a second with so much raw talent habrick would claim the title of champion just two months later on august 13 2004 exactly one day over a year after he submitted his first record taking the bowser castle and toad's turnpike three lap records to seal the deal given that so many amazing feats were happening you're probably wondering if habrick was submitting fake runs and there's another method of cheating that we should look at tassing tas stands for tool assisted speedrun and they are completed using external tools such as input files and macros that perform pre-arranged inputs to play the game they are more used for exhibitions of what's possible in a game often showcasing strategies not possible by humans or showing the absolute limit of what a player could achieve sometimes players with less than honorable intentions will submit a task to a leaderboard in an attempt to claim world record sometimes going so far as pretending to play the task run live in an attempt to appear legitimate as was the case with lee sda in yoshi's island to task mario kart 64 you would need two things an emulator and a piece of software to prepare the inputs for the emulator these did exist back in 2004 but they were very scarce and only a handful of people knew how to create them as the first task videos were just starting to get published by bisquit on the task video's website he founded for the sake of argument let's assume that habrick did understand how these tools work and that he could task runs could his runs with video in 2004 be tasked the answer again is likely no for two reasons if hamrick did create a task back in this era he would have to capture the video feed from the emulator which would have been very high quality as you can see from the on-screen example playing now this would have immediately flagged the video as suspicious as most videos submitted back then were copied from vhs tapes and weren't of the best quality there is a potential workaround create the tas on pc then transfer the data to the n64 and record the footage there with a vhs or camcorder this would create the quality of footage moderators expected back in the day but there's one problem with this to get the footage from the emulator to the n64 you'd need a dex drive dex drives were third-party peripherals that allowed you to read memory card data from n64 and ps1 memory cards on pc they were first produced in 1997 so they did exist when habrik was running but you then run into the same problem as before even if he had a dex drive he'd need the technical knowledge of using a task to produce the cheated run which wasn't readily available beyond what i just outlined there were other ways to catch an emulated or tasked run from back in the early era as they were submitted to the leaderboard but these are secrets the mods keep to themselves to easily identify would-be cheaters and i won't be going into them here after havrek became champion in august mj would take the title back just a month later when he set six records in a week with three occurring on the same day tabrik would continue to set records but he'd never regain the title of champion setting a few top times in 2005 but never enough to edge out mj for the top spot if you're wondering who cheated and can't quite figure out who it was don't worry the community at the time had no idea or suspicions that anything was amiss since neither runner had anything suspicious in their video submissions and even under today's scrutiny nothing has been found so if nobody was cheating runs what happened when mj reclaimed the title the rivalry appeared to be over and everything seemed to be quiet in the community until july 2005 one of the most infamous days in mario kart 64 history because the cheater was revealed habrik would release a video where they confessed to cheating that's right they because hambrick wasn't a single person but rather three people we're all eric consisting of three real life friends the hab trio as they came to be called were all submitting times under one name allowing them each to specialize on a few select tracks to increase their chances of amassing world records quickly the confession video is filled with comedy jokes copyrighted music and this iconic line mj's a chunk it was certainly crafted to be entertaining unless you were mj where you learned that your biggest rival was actually a collective they do cite the pal advantage as the reason why they did this as the burden of skill required for one person to beat mj's records on an ntsc version was so great that they didn't feel it was possible but we're left with one big question what happened after this video was released the fallout from this stunt would be large as the community was left with a few problems to deal with what would happen to the times that were driven as none of them were fake and each was a legit world record in its own right and what should happen to the championship reign of habrik observing the breakdown of who drove on which track tabrik himself only drove the two moomoo farm records with troy and luke driving on the other tracks it was clear that these two were the powerhouses of the trio if you look at the record set between these two a few of them stick out first troy's royal raceway 3 lap of 223.99 is the longest lasting three lap non-shortcut record and it's just 76 days behind mj's ktb f lab for total duration meaning it's the second longest lasting record for non-shortcut overall troy's 136 68 on the choco mountain 3 lap is also considered to be one of the most impressive times ever driven when you regard the era it was driven in and the fact that it was on ntsc as it lasted for 7 years before mj would take it back let's also not forget luke's mario raceway f lap record as well a time that he came back to defend over the years with his final record coming in 2008 which remained unbroken until 2015. it seemed too harsh to banish these amazing times from history given how strong they were so the community reached this decision the players that drove the times were given credit for them but hadrick's reign as champion was stricken from the record books restoring mj as the unbroken champ since he first took the crown the big question left was how do we prevent this from happening in the future as assuming an identity was an undetectable crime in this era streaming didn't exist yet so the mods couldn't place an all times must be driven live requirement on them for future records and the question of how do we prevent this was on everyone's mind that question wouldn't get an answer and surprisingly no one would try it again or if they did they didn't have much success as mj's reign would continue until 2013 when matthias roostermeyer would dethrone him if you want to hear that part of the story check out the documentary i made on matthias and dan burbank the two current top time trailers in today's landscape pulling off this type of cheat would be almost impossible as world record level players are generally required to live stream their attempts with the further optimization of times it's also incredibly unlikely that three new players could even come close to pulling this off as it takes tens of thousands of hours to attain the skill required to perform world record level runs if you took a look at the current record history boards you may have had a guess as to what happened since habrik's name isn't on the tracks we looked at and if you guessed correctly that havrek was the cheater let me know below and bonus points if you figured out the method ahead of time i do release shorter videos exclusively on twitter periodically so be sure to follow me there for exclusive updates and if you'd like to join the community be sure to join the discord or consider subscribing on patreon until next time

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 876,432

Rating: 4.8795543 out of 5

Keywords: Mario Kart 64, MK64, Mario Kart, Habrich, Habtrio, MJ, Time Trials, Champ, PAL, NTSC, MR, Booth, Cheating, Scandal, Cheater, TAS, Splice, Fool

Id: R-0F5l5vUQA

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/rageofbaha]

I also cheat at mario kart, always peaking at other dudes screen

[u/-ndes]

That was a plot twist I didn't see coming.

[u/alexpenev]

Imo one of the most interesting things to come out of the Hab Trio was that three seemingly random dudes who were friends IRL could all become record setters in a game that already had very high level of competition. Similar story with Richard & Andreas (cousins, spent a while as #1 and #2 in one kart game) and Paul & Sean Tanney (brothers, both reached #1 in two different kart games).

[u/8ight_9ine_3hree]

Did he get 32/32, though?

[u/alldogarepupper]

I like to imagine the thumbnail is someone who doesn't know anything about speedrunning trying to answer the question in the title, knowing that they can't give a proper answer but wanting to be as helpful as possible