Anika Begay
The night before Cecil’s speech at Defcon, Maselewski wrote in a final email to WIRED that he believes those who claim he cheated are using flawed tools with an incomplete picture of Devilthe complexities of . “Dwango is there to tell a story. Did I cheat? No,” Maselewski writes. “But whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter at this point, because the wonder of exploration has already outstayed its welcome for a small group of people, and the script has already been written.”
When WIRED contacted the Guinness Book of Records Asked if he would remove Maselewski’s record, a spokesperson responded noncommittally that “we appreciate any feedback on our record titles and are committed to maintaining the highest standards of accuracy.” An administrator of Speed Demos Archive or SDA, another speedrun record archive website where Maselewski holds a similar Devil record, seemed more convinced by Cecil’s evidence. That administrator, who uses the handle “ktwo” and asked that WIRED not include his real name, says SDA has not yet reached an official verdict and is still waiting to hear Maselewski’s explanation.
However, things are not looking good for groobo. “To be clear, we have made a preliminary decision, based on the available information,” writes ktwo. “The staff agrees that the analysis raises questions about the validity of the run that need to be addressed, otherwise the run will not be published by SDA. The administration team is currently discussing these issues with the runner. A final decision will be made once the discussion is concluded.”
Cecil’s involvement in The investigation into the game’s records began in 2017, when speedrunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel, who was writing a book on speedrunning, began re-examining a record set by Todd Rogers for the Atari 2600 racing game Dragger. Rogers’s record time of 5.51 seconds had stood for 35 years. But when Koziel reverse-engineered Dragster’s code to try to figure out how Rogers achieved that time, he discovered that the tricks Rogers claimed to have used, such as starting the game in second gear, wouldn’t have provided the advantage Rogers claimed.
“The goal was never to point at someone and say, ‘Hey, they’re cheating,'” Koziel says. “It was to try to find the truth.”
Cecil, who knew Koziel from the speedrunning community, offered to help develop a tool-assisted speedrun that they could run via TASbot on a real Atari 2600 to prove 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’s supposed time. Despite Rogers’s objections, his three-and-a-half-decade-old record was stricken from the annals of gaming record-keeper Twin Galaxies, along with all his other records on the site, and Guinness stripped him of the world record for “longest-running video game record.”
“While I disagree with their decision, I have to applaud them for their firm stance on the cheating issue,” Rogers wrote in a lengthy public Facebook post responding to Twin Galaxies’ decision.
