Speedrunning video games, the competitive field of playing through digital games as quickly as possible, has in recent years been elevated into something between a virtuosic form of fingers-and-thumbs athletics and a highly technical science. The best speedruns reduce epic games meant to take dozens of hours to single-digit minutes through a combination of exploiting glitch-enabled shortcuts and inhuman skill.
A little too inhuman, in some cases. Speedrunning, it turns out, is plagued with fake records set by cheaters who splice together video clips to falsify evidence or use rule-breaking software to gain unfair advantages. One speedrunner and hacker named Allan Cecil has made it his personal mission to catch them.
In a talk at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today, the details of which WIRED reviewed in advance, Cecil plans to present what he alleges is evidence that a speedrunning record for the 1996 PC game Diablo, which has stood for more than 15 years and holds a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, was in fact the result of rule-breaking techniques that should disqualify it. If Cecil and the team of investigators who have worked with him over recent months succeed at tearing down that seemingly untouchable benchmark, it will be the third such high-profile speedrun that he’ll have helped to debunk, and the second in just the last year.
Cecil, who is better known in the gaming world by his handle dwangoAC, came into this strange role as a speedrun debunker from an equally niche hobby: He’s known as an expert practitioner of so-called “tool-assisted speedruns,” using emulator software to run a game in a controlled environment to find the limits of what that game’s speedrun can be—an area of speedrunning that some purists once considered, itself, to be a kind of cheating. Cecil maintains instead that those tool-assisted speedruns, in which players meticulously rewind, replay, hone, and perfect their runs frame by frame, can be its own valid form of competition, or even art.
Cecil says he arrived at his fixation with catching cheaters in part out of a determination to protect this lesser-known field of speedrunning from those who would surreptitiously use the same tools in deceptive ways, essentially turning tool-assisted speedruns into a kind of speedrun doping, rather than an honest avocation. “Making a tool-assisted speedrun is a transformative work of art that humans laboriously spend months on, or even years,” says Cecil. “But you definitely do not use tool-assisted speedrun techniques and then try to pretend that it was just human effort. And seeing people do that pisses me off.”
As a staff member at the tool-assisted speedrun website TASvideos.org and an organizer of many epic speedrunning feats—such as one that famously used coding glitches in the Zelda game Ocarina of Time to rewrite the game’s ending—Cecil has become a fixture of the speedrunning world. He’s also the creator of TASBot, a robot that connects to the controller ports of video game consoles to reproduce controller inputs, so that recorded speedruns can be replayed and verified on original gaming hardware, a spectacle that gamers love so much that livestreams featuring the robot have raised $1.5 million in donations to charitable causes, according to Cecil’s count.