Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance speedrunner admits to faking run at SGDQ 2022

A speedrunner set a new world record for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance DLC - before admitting the entire thing was faked.

As first reported by PCGamesN, speedrunner Mekarazium set a new world record for the Blade Wolf DLC in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance over the past weekend, beating it in just under 7 minutes at Summer Games Done Quick 2022. 

Since speedrunning at the charity event, however, Mekarazium came forward to the event's enforcement team to admit the run was faked. Rather than completing the DLC live, as is standard for speedrunners at the charity event, Mekarazium pre-recorded their run and then stitched individual parts together, to make the run look much shorter than it actually was.

While some speedrunners made the journey to Minneapolis for the Summer Games Done Quick event in person, Mekarazium opted to broadcast from their home. This allowed them to broadcast the pre-recorded and edited segment from their own PC, and make it seem as though it was live.

It's worth noting that Games Done Quick does actually feature a category for segmented runs, which are runs where the timer is paused at specific points. What's key here is that Mekarazium didn't notify the event's enforcement team that their run was pre-recorded and segmented, presenting it instead as though it was performed live.

Now though, Games Done Quick has confirmed to PCGamesN that Mekarazium has been banned from all future speedrunning events under the charity's banner, and their Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance run has been taken down from the charity's YouTube channel. 

"This is absolutely unacceptable and attempts to undermine the integrity of the speedrunning community that we love and support," the organization wrote in a statement. "We have removed Mekazarium’s runs from our YouTube archive, and will not permit him to run in the future."

Disingenuous speedruns aside, Summer Games Done Quick 2022 managed to raise just north of $3 million for the Doctors Without Borders charity over the past week. You can head over to the Games Done Quick YouTube channel to watch some fantastic speedruns from the past weekend, including Elden Ring, Final Fantasy 10, Metal Gear Solid 2, and many more.

Head over to our new games 2022 guide for a complete look at all the games coming out over the remainder of the year.