The night before Cecil’s talk 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 Devil“Dwango sets out 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 passed its limit for a small group of people, and the script has already been written.”
When WIRED contacted the Guinness Book of World Records Asked if it would remove Maselewski’s record, a spokesperson said noncommittally that “we value 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 speedway record-keeping website where Maselewski holds a similar record, said: “We value any feedback on our record titles and are committed to maintaining the highest standards of accuracy.” Devil The administrator, who uses the username “ktwo” and asked WIRED not to use his real name, said the SDA has not officially reached a 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 information available,” ktwo writes. “Staff agrees that the analysis raises questions about the validity of the execution that need to be addressed, or else the execution will not be published by SDA. The management team is discussing these issues with the broker. Once that discussion has concluded, a final decision will be made.”
Cecil’s involvement in The investigation into gaming records began in 2017, when speedrunner Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel, who was writing a book on speedrunning, began reexamining a record set by Todd Rogers for the Atari 2600 racing game. DragsterRogers’ record time of 5.51 seconds stood for 35 years, but when Koziel reverse-engineered Dragster’s code to try to understand how Rogers had achieved that time, he discovered that the tricks Rogers claimed to have used (such as starting the game in second gear) would not have given him the advantage he claimed to have gained.
“The goal was never to point the finger at someone and say, ‘Hey, they’re cheating,’” Koziel says. “It was about trying to uncover the truth.”
Cecil, who knew Koziel from the speedrunning community, offered to help develop a tool-assisted speedrun that they could play through TASbot on an actual 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’ purported time. Despite Rogers’ objections, his three-and-a-half-decade-old record was expunged from the annals of game record-keeper Twin Galaxies.along with all your other records on the site—and Guinness took away his world record for “oldest video game record.”
“While I disagree with their decision, I must applaud them for their firm stance on the issue of cheating,” Rogers wrote in a Long public post on Facebook responding to Twin Galaxies’ decision.
