Defcon 24: On the trail of Diablo cheaters
At Defcon 24, Allan "dwangoAC" challenged a gaming record that had stood for 15 years and showed how speedrun cheating can be uncovered.
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Allan Cecil alias "dwangoAC" does everything he can to uncover speedrun fakes. At the Defcon 24 hacker conference in Las Vegas, Cecil explained how to uncover cheaters. He cast doubt on the Diablo 1 speedrun record, which even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. In his presentation, Cecil explained his suspicion of cheating on the existing record. Allan believes that the established speedrun record for Diablo 1, which has stood since 2009, can only be based on rule violations. He showed what clues and testing methods there are to uncover speedrun cheats.
Speedrunners aim to reach certain levels, complete runs or difficulty levels in the shortest possible time. The fastest solo playthrough in Diablo 1, for example, is 3 minutes and 12 seconds according to the Guinness World Records. The game Diablo is a classic from the US game developer Blizzard Entertainment, which has since been released in several parts. Diablo 1 was first released in 1996 for the PC, Mac and Playstation. Diablo 4, the last part for now, was released on June 6, 2023.
Exhausting cheating
If he succeeds in proving the cheating, it would be the second case this year that he and his team have proven. So far, however, he has only been able to prove his suspicions plausibly in front of an audience. His presentation "Diablo 1 World Record Speedrun Exposed" is available on YouTube.
Before the conference , Cecil had already made his concrete suspicions about the Diablo 1 record public to Wired and referred to the planned Defcon 24 presentation. He acknowledged the cheaters' efforts to achieve perfection and timing as an achievement in their own right. "Doing a tool-assisted speedrun is a transformative work of art that people spend months or even years painstakingly working on," Cecil told Wired.
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Cecil, better known in the gaming world as dwangoAC, found his way into the unusual role of speedrun debunker through a particular hobby. As an expert in tool-assisted speedruns, he uses emulator software to test and analyze games in a controlled environment.
(anw)
