It wasn’t until the release of id Software’s Doom in 1993 that a formal competitive avenue for speedrunning arose. Both Nintendo Power and Activision even had sections of their publication dedicated to players submitting their fastest times or highest scores. Some of the earliest games that implemented in-game timers were Dragster, Metroid: Return of Samus, and Super Mario Kart. The concept of “going really fast” in video games obviously isn’t new. Runners for any game imaginable can submit their times to online leaderboards in an attempt to be the fastest in the world. If you’ve never experienced a speedrun, the premise is fairly self-explanatory: the goal is to complete a game or specific part of a game with the fastest time possible. It can be a wild ride to see someone beat your favorite game in the time it took you to finish the tutorial. Perhaps you’ve caught Nathan Drake walking on air in Uncharted 2 or marveled at Faith Connors phasing through walls in Mirror’s Edge. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of browsing the “Speedrun” tag on Twitch or stumbling upon a speedrunning video, you may have seen some…interesting gameplay. It’s a pretty big problem, in my opinion.Five Women Who Slaughter Speedrun Records
But as more people come into the hobby, that number only grows. “I think people have probably been cheating as long as speedrunning has existed,” Smith says. Among his videos, he often calls out other players for fraudulent runs. As such, Smith's YouTube channel has become a hotbed for controversy to say the least.
Smith, for instance, once publicly chided AGDQ and defended a speedrunner named RWGoose after that player posted Nazi rhetoric online and received a ban from the competition. YouTuber Ben “Apollo Legend” Smith is a divisive figure in the world of speedrunning, largely due to a penchant for conflict and his fiery fusillades against some of the biggest players in the space like AGDQ. Eventually, after the initial explosion of drama, Anti’s runs were scrubbed from the GTA charts, and the controversy ebbed away. That was, of course, followed by the backlash to the backlash, when the moderators decided to make the ban permanent after analysis of Anti’s older runs concluded that the speedrunner’s confession was far from complete and that the cheating was far more widespread than initially claimed.
Next came the backlash against the moderators from fans of Anti’s streams, who stated that the apology was a sign of growing maturity. Speedrunning fans know the script: first came the announcement, then a half-hearted apology, where Anti admitted that at least some of the runs were cheated. In many ways, Anti’s faked GTA runs might stand as a microcosm of the ever-present spectre of cheating that has lurked under the surface of the hobby for years now. But while it’s the behemoths like Valve that finance the glittering million-dollar tournaments for esports like Dota, on the grassroots side of the spectrum, there’s a vibrant scene of gamers who pour their hours into an entirely different competition: that of “speedrunning.” Advertisementįurther Reading How to keep a charity gaming marathon going for 160 hours straight Gotta go fastĮver since the first two hopeless MIT geeks battled it out in primitive progenitors like Spacewar!, video game players have cast their hobby as a form of heated competition. At the time, Anti held several world records in each game in the series. The decision sent shockwaves reverberating through this tiny clique of GTA speedrunners, especially since Anti was an accomplished runner in the scene. In August 2018, the leaderboard moderators finally felt compelled to act, announcing a one-year-ban for “Anti” due to suspected cheating. Soon, several runners started complaining to the greater community someone even created a slick montage full of evidence that Anti had modified the game in order to shave vital seconds from their records. And by slightly boosting certain variables to make cars accelerate ever-so-slightly faster, this fellow speedrunner was able to recreate the smoke effect in Anti’s runs. In the PC versions of the GTA games, after all, the files that control the way cars perform are easily accessible via a plain text editor like Windows Notepad. Since no other runs on the GTA: San Andreas speedrun leaderboard evinced this telltale exhaust, this competitor began to wonder: was Anti somehow messing with the game in order to pull off this record-breaking time? A fellow competitor started analyzing Anti’s videos to optimize their own in-game routes, but they noticed that several vehicles in these runs left a faint smoke trail when they accelerated. Further Reading Roam free: A history of open-world gamingĪn old saying may be coming to mind, and yes: it was too good to be true.
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