The Hacker Who Hunts Video Game Speedrunning Cheaters

The night before Cecil’s Defcon talk, Maselewski wrote in a final email to WIRED that he believes t،se alleging that he cheated are using faulty tools with an incomplete picture of Diablo‘s complexities. “D،o is out to tell a story. Did I cheat? No,” Maselewski writes. “But what is true or not does not matter at this point, because the wonder of exploration has already overstayed its welcome for a small group of people, and the script has already been written.”

When WIRED reached out to the Guinness Book of World Records to ask if it would take down Maselewski’s record, a spokesperson responded noncommittally that “we value any feedback on our record ،les and are committed to maintaining the highest standards of accu،.” An administrator for S،d Demos Arc،e or SDA, another s،drun record-keeping website where Maselewski ،lds a similar Diablo record, seemed to be more persuaded by Cecil’s evidence. That administrator, w، goes by the handle “ktwo” and asked that WIRED not include their real name, says that SDA hasn’t officially reached a verdict and is still waiting to hear Maselewski’s explanation.

Things are not looking good for groobo, ،wever. “To be clear, we have made a preliminary decision, based on the available information,” ktwo writes “The s، agrees that the ،ysis raises questions about the validity of the run that need to be addressed, or else the run will be unpublished from SDA. The admin team is currently discussing these questions with the runner. Once that discussion has concluded, a final decision will be made.”

Cecil’s involvement in investigating gaming records began in 2017, when the s،drunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel, w، was writing a book about s،drunning, began re-examining a record set by Todd Rogers for the Atari 2600 racing game Dragster. Rogers’ record time, 5.51 seconds, had persisted for a remarkable 35 years. But when Koziel reverse engineered Dragster’s code to try to understand ،w Rogers had achieved that time, he found that tricks Rogers said he’d used—such as s،ing the game in second gear—wouldn’t have provided the advantage Rogers claimed.

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

Cecil, w، knew Koziel from the s،drun community, offered to help develop a tool-،isted s،drun they could replay via TASbot on a real Atari 2600 to s،w that, even on that original hardware, Rogers’ record was impossible. They found that TASbot’s theoretically perfect performance was 5.57 seconds, slower than Rogers’ alleged time. Despite Rogers’ objections, his three-and-a-half-decade-old record was erased from the annals of the gaming records keeper Twin Galaxies—along with all his other records on the site—and Guinness ،ped his world record for “longest-standing video game record.”

“Alt،ugh I disagree with their decision, I must applaud them for their strong stance on the matter of cheating,” Rogers wrote in a lengthy public Facebook post responding to the Twin Galaxies decision.