Diablo hackers tore apart billions of possibilities to debunk 15-year-old Speedrun, no one thinks it can be beaten

SpeedRunning has been a long tradition for video game enthusiasts for years, with some of which not only take months or years, but even decades. However, a special legendary Diablo run was conducted, a fierce investigation, and now a thorough debunking of the subject matter.

In 2009, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski recorded any percentage run of the wizards composed of 27 segments. The last time appeared on two-thirds of the time, appeared in the Speed ​​Demos file, without any concerns, and was released on February 26, 2009. It will receive two Guinness World Record entries, while Diablo attempts will decline and will continue to decline. With running it seems impossible to challenge.

But as the years go by, skeptics have aroused doubts. In 2024, Speedrunner FunkmasterMP approaches Allan “Dwangoac” Cecil, creating Diablo's tool-assisted Speedrun or TAS. Fast Games Fast viewers will recognize Dwangoac as team leader Tusbertan interesting mascot that will appear during the TAS neighborhood during the GDQ charity event.

The team started working, As detailed in the lengthy writing of Dwangoac and other team memberswhen they try to copy Groobo's run, they start to find inconsistencies.

“We just had a lot of curiosity and dissatisfaction that drove us to dig deeper,” the team members said. ARS Technica in a report detailing its investigation.

Since Diablo uses seeds to generate maps, it should theoretically be possible to replicate Groobo's run. To discover seeds that use seeds, the TAS team Build a custom map tool This can reverse engineer the game seeds and determine the possibilities of maps, projects, and tasks within them. The scanner tool built on top of it can then filter all seeds and look for dungeons that might be suitable for Speedrunners.

The team searched about 2.2 billion RNG seeds to try to reproduce Grobo's running, unable to find anyone who imitated all the seemingly perfect generations. This seems to indicate that this is not composed of a single file or a fragment of running, but of different runs.

The deeper they dig, the more strange things they are. Strange version tags in the main menu, inconsistent inventory, tasks, and more.

Summarizing the final conclusion, the team said its findings suggest that Grobo used “illegal means to produce results displayed in running”, including combining gameplay from different runs, modifying memory and using “gameplay controllable video stitching” .

“Overall, the team's analysis ultimately revealed the impossible unqualified modifications described by Grobo, which is impossible,” the team said. “So, the run should be withdrawn immediately from all rankings.”

The article continues to introduce Grobo's response in detail, he told wired: “My run is a segmented/splitting run. It has been, and has never been eliminated like anything else, nor has it been part of any competition or rankings. The page of speed analysis points out this very different content.”

The investigation team introduced its analysis to the Speed ​​Demos archive and then discussed the discovery independently with Grobo. On September 10, 2024, SDA released an update announcing the removal of all Diablo runs from Grobo. Meanwhile, Diablo's Speed ​​community is back in the archives and begins to create new records.

According to ARS Technica, Dwangoac said in his speech that he conducted an investigation because it was “very harmful.”

“Grube allegedly cheated in 2009 completely blocked interest in this category,” Cecil said. “No one tried, no one could.”

Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.