GDQ speedrunner banned after admitting run was faked
"I've done an actual bad thing."
A speedrunner from the recent Summer Games Done Quick 2022 event has admitted he faked part of his run.
Russian speedrunner Mekarazium completed a live run of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance as one of a handful of online (rather than in-person) runs.
However, an extra run of the game's Blade Wolf DLC was offered as a charity donation goal incentive, but Mekarazium has since admitted this run was faked using pre-recorded footage, as PCGamesN reported.
"The Blade Wolf DLC run incentive people paid for is a pre-recorded, segmented run," Mekarazium later told the GDQ enforcement team. "I haven't mentioned it anywhere, neither during the submission process or the email I sent to the [GDQ] committee. It was supposed to be a real-time run, but I've changed my mind at the last second after switching the saves.
"People might consider [this] BW DLC run a legitimate run for the leaderboards, which can cause some problems later," the message continued. "I haven't been planning to submit this run to the leaderboards, and it was a means to show the maximum potential of said category, something people should strive for.
"I've done an actual bad thing, and I shouldn't have done this on the event...I acted selfishly and I haven't put more time thinking about others. I am sorry for doing the thing I've done. Truly."
Viewers noted a number of discrepancies during the run, in particular the lack of keyboard tapping sounds.
At the end of the run, the GDQ announcer stated the time was a new world record. Mekarazium responded saying "can we not, like, use the world-record stuff? It's very misleading. It assumes what happened here is the fastest time, when in fact someone else could have a faster, world-record version".
The run has since been removed from the GDQ YouTube channel and the speedrunner has been banned from future events.
"Yesterday, we were made aware that Mekazarium played a segmented video for his DLC run at Summer Games Done Quick 2022," GDQ told PCGamesN. "Mekazarium has since admitted to this, both to some members of the community as well as directly to GDQ staff. He contacted our staff with a document detailing that he had planned this for over a month, demonstrating this was planned and intentional. This was made possible because of the remote nature of this particular run in the marathon.
"This is absolutely unacceptable and attempts to undermine the integrity of the speedrunning community that we love and support. The exact result they desired was unclear from the document, but it is clear that they believed we would not be willing to speak out about their behavior. However, we believe it is in the community's best interests to know why this run was removed by GDQ. We have removed Mekazarium's runs from our YouTube archive, and will not permit him to run in the future."
The Summer Games Done Quick 2022 event ended on 3rd July, raising a total of over $3m for charity Doctors Without Borders.