Metal Gear Speedrunner Fakes World Record At GDQ, Banned For Life
The momentary increase in fame doesn't seem quite so worth it now.
In this year’s Summer Games Done Quick, one of the two major yearly speedrunning events hosted by GDQ, the world record was broken for the Blade Wolf DLC of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. A user by the name of Mekazarium, performed the speedrun remotely, finishing the DLC campaign in only six minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Except that… they didn’t. In fact, not long after the event ended, Mekazarium contacted a GDQ head and informed them they had cheated. Instead of performing the run live, they had actually pretended to, while playing a pre-recorded video of a segmented run. That basically means an edited run in which you take the quickest sections of your prior runs and splice them together in a seamless manner.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a Metal Gear spinoff developed by PlatinumGames, which was released in 2013. The game had you play as Raiden, and involved combo-heavy sword-fighting gameplay, which heavily diverted from the series’ stealth and shooting, but it was a good match for PlatinumGames’s style. The game sold over 1 million units, was received positively by critics, and evidently nurtured a strong speedrunning community around it.
In the screenshotted message, which you can see here, Mekazarium stated the reason they did this was that another run of theirs went better than expected and they “needed something to top this off.” They also helped in pointing out how to tell that the run was fake, detailing that the Blade Wolf DLC run had no keyboard sounds and an abrupt audio cut near the end of it.
Mekazarium went on to apologize to the GDQ head, stating “I’ve done an actual bad thing and I shouldn’t have done this on the event. I don’t want to be one of the reasons online runs will be forever cut for everyone else.” Indeed, online runs would seem to have a higher potential of attempted cheating, however, it is the only way for certain foreign speedrunners to be able to participate. In a Reddit post discussing the issue, user coolmatty, a GDQ organizer, affirmed that they would not stop doing remote runs, but that this situation “taints the idea of them for many. And that’s the most unfortunate part of this.”
Coolmatty further elaborated on the incident, providing information that contradicted the screenshot of Mekazarium’s admission of guilt. coolmatty stated that Mekazarium later gave them a document proving they had planned this for over a month, and that it was intentional. Though it’s unclear to the GDQ organizers what result Mekazarium was looking to obtain, all their runs were removed from the GDQ archives, and they will not be permitted to participate in any future events.
Jose Garcia
Jose is an experienced video game analyst and reviewer, who earned his chops producing long-form video essays about the industry, those getting him his first bit of online recognition. His thousands of hours into Smash and Pokemon earn him the well-deserved title of “Nintendo Nerd” (he likes to say expert), but at heart, he, like many of us, is someone who appreciates the art of games in all its forms.
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