Speedrunning games has happened for a long time, with websites dating back to the late 90s and early 2000s. However these days with the popularization of services like Twitch and upload sites like Youtube, speedrunning has had a second breath in terms of community growth. Now more than ever people are getting into speedrunning and trying to be the best when finishing certain games the fastest. Part of the allure is world wide recognition but as the hobby becomes more popular and more eyes start to look at some of the older scored set, many are being called into question. 

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Just these last two months, two speedrunning/high score competitors from the old days have had all their scores wiped completely because they were sending in footage that didnt comply with the rules sent. People have been calling for a manual review of these high scores and the footage for years now and finally something is being done about it. There are sites that catalog high scores like Twin Galaxies, that now are forced to change the old guard so to speak because of the rampant cheating that happened in the old days.

You essentially had the site organizers and the competitors who were very closely associated and promoted fake scores because it was in their best interest to bring attention to the video game scene. Especially with arcade machines there are many different things you can do to fake a score and the recording has to be done on a secondary machine so it is filmed with a camera or phone, making the quality at times unreasonably bad. Billy Mitchell who you might know if you ever saw the King of Kong documentary has had all his scores removed because there is good proof that he was not following the rules and lying about it. He essentially used an emulator instead of an actual board which brings up the possibility of hacking or tweaking things around. 

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In the speedrunning community there is a huge problem with people splicing together multiple runs and timing it so it looks like they had a perfect one. In response many sites will only accept high quality video captured footage instead of allowing filming with a phone or camera. While many people have fought back saying it pushes people out of the game because video capture hardware costs money, it is the only real response with the amount of cheating going on these days. With hardware captured runs it is much easier to tell if someone spliced together footage as compared to a camera. You can break things down frame by frame and analyze any tampering. 

I think speedrunning is an interesting hobby that unfortunately needs to have stricter standards set in place if they want to consider it as fair and competitive. If I was someone running one of the popular sites that runs leaderboards, I would do something like manually review the top 5 runs for each game over the next year or so and discard the rest. If you want to resubmit you have to do it with the updated rules. Sadly this will kick out many high scores that were done years ago, but extreme situations often need extreme measures to make the scene truly fair. You want the people who follow the rules and actually get the high scores to get the recognition they deserve for putting in all the effort. Nothing has to be worse than spending months trying to beat a high score set by someone else only to find out later that their score was impossible to beat to begin with. I am interested to see where this scene goes and I hope that measures are taken to keep it honest and fair.  

-Calaber24p