The Great Diablo Speedrun Scandal: How a Champion’s Run Was Exposed as a Sham
In the world of speedrunning, few achievements are more impressive than a record-breaking run through Diablo. For years, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski held the title of champion, with a blistering 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run that seemed unbeatable. But when a team of speedrunners started digging deeper, they uncovered a web of deceit that threatened to upend the entire community.
The investigation began when a team of tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) authors, led by Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil and Staphen, started analyzing Groobo’s run using outside software and analysis tools. They were determined to replicate the run, but as they delved deeper, they discovered inconsistencies that raised serious questions about the legitimacy of Groobo’s achievement.
The team’s investigation was sparked by a combination of curiosity and resentment. “We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper,” Staphen told Ars Technica. “Betrayal might be another way to describe it,” added AJenbo, another member of the team. “To find out that this had been done illegitimately… and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement.”
The team’s search for answers began with a custom-built map generation tool, which allowed them to reverse-engineer a disassembled Diablo executable and generate billions of random dungeon seeds. They then used a scanner to quickly look through these generated dungeons for ones that might be optimal for speedrunning.
The search was exhaustive, with the team conducting a distributed search across the game’s roughly 2.2 billion valid RNG seeds. Each of these seeds represents a different specific second on the system clock when a Diablo save file is created, ranging from between January 1, 1970, and December 31, 2038.
After comparing each of those billions of RNG dungeons to a re-creation of the dungeon seen in Groobo’s run, the team couldn’t find a single example containing the crucial level 9 Naj’s Puzzler drop. It was only after searching through “impossible” seeds, which could only be created by using save modification tools to force a creation date after the year 2038, that they found dungeons matching Naj’s Puzzler drop in Groobo’s video, using seeds associated with the years 2056 and 2074.
The team’s thorough search also revealed troubling inconsistencies in the other dungeon levels shown in Groobo’s run. “Normally you would only need to identify a single level to replicate a run since all the other levels are generated from the same seed,” AJenbo told Ars. But the levels seen in Groobo’s run came from multiple different seeds, which would require splicing footage from multiple different playthroughs of different dungeons.
The investigation ultimately revealed that Groobo’s run was not a single, legitimate playthrough, but rather a heavily edited and manipulated video that combined footage from multiple different runs. The team found that at least 13 (probably 15) runs were spliced into one video, which is a lot for a game with just 16 levels.
The fallout from the scandal has been significant, with Groobo’s reputation in tatters and the speedrunning community left reeling. The incident serves as a reminder that, even in the world of gaming, integrity and honesty are essential.
Actionable Insights
- The importance of transparency and honesty in the gaming community
- The power of collaboration and teamwork in uncovering the truth
- The need for robust analysis and verification tools in speedrunning
Summary
The Great Diablo Speedrun Scandal is a cautionary tale about the dangers of deception and manipulation in the gaming community. The investigation, led by a team of tool-assisted speedrun authors, exposed Groobo’s record-breaking run as a sham, revealing a web of inconsistencies and manipulated footage. The incident serves as a reminder of the importance of integrity and honesty in the gaming community, and the need for robust analysis and verification tools in speedrunning.