A year ago, one Pokemon Red speedrunner set a world record so good that big chunks of the community thought it would never be broken. Last month, a runner named Jadiwi seemingly did the impossible by claiming a new world record, but the keepers of Pokemon speedrunning have now declared Jadiwi's world record too good to be true, alleging that the miracle run was the result of cheating.
The original (and still recognized) Pokemon Red world record was set by a runner called Pokeguy on January 25, and the 1:44:03 time was quickly recognized as "the greatest WR ever set in Pokemon speedrunning." While there are technically points where the run could've been improved, the run is so dependent on luck that the odds of getting good results while playing at a world record place are astronomically low. So low, in fact, that Pokeguy retired from the category a few months after setting his record.
Jadiwi had entered the world of Pokemon speedrunning shortly before PokeGuy set his legendary record, and started setting world records across various games in the series in relatively short order. The biggest of those records was, of course, in Pokemon Red, where Jadiwi achieved a 1:43:52. Members of the community had been suspicious of how fast Jadiwi had risen to world record contention already, and this new world record prompted a quiet investigation from the moderation crew for Pokemon speedrunning.
The moderation team has since posted an extensive document outlining their investigations into Jadiwi's records, detailing why they believe they have "sufficient evidence to accuse Jadiwi of cheating and to remove Jadiwi effective immediately from all PSR [Pokemon Speedrun] leaderboards, leaderboard moderation duties, and ban him from submitting further attempts to the leaderboards."
The key bit is that the moderation team members say they found evidence that Jadiwi's Red record had been pre-recorded before it was streamed to Twitch - which, the moderators note, would have been fine if Jadiwi had said the run was recorded from the start. He did not provide that disclosure, and so he was informed that he was being banned for cheating. Shortly after, a message attributed to Jadiwi appeared on Pastebin, where he not only appeared to additionally confess to splicing his record attempts together out of various save states.
There's an extra wrinkle to all this: there was money on the line. A few members of the Pokemon speedrunning community had offered cash bounties on various record milestones to incentivize other runners, and Jadiwi's Red record alone would've qualified for $6,000 in prizes before it was thrown out. Jadiwi's apparent confession alludes to cheating in several other games and categories that did not have cash on the line, too.
"In hindsight, it is easy to say that the mod team was too lenient with Jadiwi, and that we should have gone public with our suspicions and asked for a higher standard of proof from Jadiwi earlier," the mod team writes in its report. "However, we were willing to give Jadiwi the benefit of the doubt out of respect to Jadiwi, and he took advantage of this fact. The mod team apologizes for allowing this to go on for as long as it did. We are reevaluating our policies for verifying the legitimacy of runs submitted to the leaderboard, and we will be vigilant to not let this happen again in future."
Super Mario Bros. speedrunners are 22 frames away from literal perfection.
