Why The Biggest CHEATER in Mario Kart 64 Wasn't Caught
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 มี.ค. 2021
- The most outrageous scandal in Mario Kart 64's competitive history, but nobody suspected anything even after it had been pulled off. So how was it uncovered, and what was this undetectable method of cheating?
Big thanks to Kevin Booth, Dan Burbank, and MR for helping me research this video.
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Footage and Credits
NOTE
MR had nothing to do with the Habtrio, he was kind enough to let me use footage to talk over and fill in the gaps. His links are below.
MR
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Booth
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MJ
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Weatherton
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Forest
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All of the Habtrich videos are on this WR archive channel
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The Special Habrich Video: • Hab's Confession Video
Note: The emulated video I showed is a ghost file Abney recovered from Wonn's cartridge, I wasn't sure who to credit so I'll link them both below
/ abney317mk
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/ davidwonn - เกม
The epitome of “three kids in a trench coat “
This is the only time that scheme has actually worked!
@@kimaboe Muppet Man in the 2011 Muppets movie almost worked!
@@davidspraguedragonman6479 if your plan is to become three kids in a trench coat, then your plan works
...This is absolutely right. Damn!
loooooool
"Are you seriously cheating by yourself?"
"Nah. I'm with my boys!"
You had two choices:
"NO, I'M WITH THE SCIENCE TEAM!"
or
"OH MERRYMEN~!"
you chose neither.
@@starplane1239
"Nah I'm with my boys" is the original and far superior version
@@starplane1239 ayop is that a projekt melody reference
@@theblues993 No. Its a meme format. Memes were not invented by vTubers...
I can't believe I actually had to say that.
I love speedrunning because I get to hear such great sentences as "Crushing the former record by half a second!"
This also happens in sports.
@@alicered4198 especially auto racing, where half a second is still an eternity and moreso at the top level
I think about this all the time in speed running history videos. They're always like, "this trick was insanely hard to pull off. It required 4 frame perfect inputs, but if you could do it you would save .2 seconds. A massive time lead over the record."
It's... not just a speedrunning thing though
Wait till you discover real racing
MJ watching Habrich's confession video is like Batman finding out there's three Jokers from the mobius chair.
Yeah baby. You can play like TAS. Very Impressive. Back in 2004 I held the 16 star world record for several years. Holy Moly
Underrated reference
@@itsneryssa I have the quote in the video!
@@Abyssoft Yeah I commented before watching hehe, great video though
Holy moly
aint tas where you can rewind and program each frame so the game looks like a flawless god played it?
Basically, in order to splice Mario Kart 64, you'd need to be able to perform it WITHOUT splices.
ikr couldnt wrap my head around splicing it without altering what the times are themselves lol
a decent amount of cheating is like that where the run is not very segmented so stuff does not match easily
If the time is the important thing you could just manipulate/splice the timer very slightly .. it probably couldn't be done with 2004 tech very easily though
@@abelicio3586 Yeah I mean back in the day, that would have been the way to do it. I know my mate had a video capture device back in the early 2000s. If you recorded it back to VHS it would be near impossible to do frame by frame analysis back then
Oh hey! Long time no see pal
I guess you could say, he used his pals to combat the PAL advantage.
omg this one is too good
He used the pals the destroy the PAL
Pal vs PAL
"you may have pal, but I have pals!"
Just got back from the doctor. I'm sure you don't care but your cringe gave me a malignant tumor
I’m mostly shocked that three real life friends all happened to be insanely talented at Mario Kart speed running. Not many people can get as good as them and MJ, and the fact that three of them were real life friends is just crazy to me. Like what are the odds that they are all talented enough to even form a speed running collective
@@makingadjustments well it plays a massive role getting to see firsthand what they do and being able to ask for advice with your friends. I learned to do many things many people around me consider not feasible or rare for my age, context or whatever. And most of it is due to knowing a guy who knows hahah
@@makingadjustments And just to add, I would recommend the book 'Bounce : Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the science of success' by Matthew Syed, a former pro table tennis player. It's been a long time since I read it, but I recall that he provides an example in his own case, where 5 of the top 10 British table tennis players at one time all came from the same *street*. The reason was that a local community centre installed a table tennis table, and made it available 24 hours a day, and the coach was super enthusiastic which lead to these kids playing each other a bunch and all 'levelling up' at the same pace. Syed's dad then installed his own table in his home, and Syed became the best of all of them.
He also provides similar examples, like a small tennis club in Moscow providing more top 20 female tennis players than the US combined, over a 10 year period. It was a real eye-opener for me. There are probably millions of people out there that could be successful in a bunch of sports, but they are just never introduced to them or given the opportunity to pursue them.
@@johnbull1568 we had the same thing in pool tournaments. about 5 of us friends used to just play occasionally after uni lectures, and there was one guy who was very talented, so intially he kicked our butts every time. the rest of us were not talented, but, we were all competitive and wanted to beat him and each other, and not be the worst. so we kept playing, kept pushing each other, and any time one of the group seemed 'the best' everyone else pushed harder to catch up and surpass them. Within a few years we were all good enough to enter national tournaments and place decently well, despite only him having any real natural talent and none of us realising how good we'd actually become at the game until we entered some local tournaments assuming we'd get destroyed and doing it for a laugh. It was simply that friendly competitiveness and constantly learning from each other that pushed us that far.
@@makingadjustments That actually makes sense.
When I was I'm high-school I play CoD4 A LOT with 4 other people, one of them just kinda fucked off and the 3 of us would just decimate everybody we came across.
So many times full clans would play us full 6 on 3 and talk shit and they'd all leave before the match officially ended.
I'm not sure who was actually the best out of us, but what you said actually makes a lot of sense with what I've experienced.
That's because it's not talent, but effort. Getting good at these games just takes an insane amount of time and dedication. Just not that many people put the effort in. The shocker is that three people that crazy decided to all come together and speedrun the same game. You also have to be fit enough to have held onto your reflexes. If you turn 30 and haven't religiously exercised, then your reflexes degrade.
When your rival is 3 people, and their confession is a comedy where they call you a chump
If it weren’t so high level, everyone would’ve gotten a kick out of it
Still it's an unfair advantage for all PAL players. The community should have split the times at the start due to the lower skill level required in the PAL version(not saying it doesn't require skill).
@@wakannnai1 I was so confused as "They run at different speeds, so we have PAL and NTSC boards" wasn't the solution at second 0...
Like, Why?!
@@SodlidDesu It seems like early speedrunning communities in general didn’t think of having different categories for types of speedruns. Which is also why glitchless vs glitch-based vs TAS speedruns was such a controversy in the early/earlier days of speedrunning.
But yeah, the modern speedrunning community handles these things a lot better.
@@femboyroxas Noooo, HE had the version advantage. That was the entire reason for the three of them to pull off the stunt. He was essentially getting to play easy mode compared to them
They cheated but the times are still ligitamit
The real cheaters were the friends we made along the way.
Wait no-
LOL
lmao
If we think that the cheater was not one, but three people, yeah... friends .-.
NANI?
This is by far one of the craziest and funniest "cheating" stories I've ever heard. It's an amazing twist that got willingly revealed in a humorous way. It's so simple, yet so unexpected that it had been more than one person all along.
"Nowadays, records have to be streamed live."
Identical triplets: "Challenge accepted."
All in all, a pretty entertaining story and intriguing slice of history.
They would look the same and when for example guy number 1 can't speedrun a track he would ask to go to the bathroom, then he would switch places with the brother that specializes in that track and speedrun it lol
Well, you just stream the game screen, the face and the hands on the controller. All you need is 3 record material players with sufficiently similar hands and the face of 1 person who is sufficiently good at acting like they are playing. Also 2 identical controllers for when you want to lift it up into the face camera (needs to be timed correctly, though).
The controller inputs line up perfectly with what's happening on screen and the facial reactions don't need to much to be convincing. If the reactions of "the face" lag behind a bit too much, you could always put a fraction of a second of delay on the game screen and hands.
And we can even call Nolan to make a movie out of it!
The funniest bit? A lot of games don't have stream reqs and the ones that do don't always have input reqs (some of them do require you show the controller or have controller inputs on screen) long as you pick the right game you could totally still do this today, but I can't imagine that'd be nearly as fun or rewarding
I have DID so get on my fucking level -
I wouldnt even have to try this would just happen, except itd probably kill runs as our skill at the game drop massively 😅
It's funny, they didn't even really cheat the runs, just the "champ" title.
Oh, so this video was actually useless and clickbait?
Thanks man, saved me 20 minutes.
I wish this sh!t had tl:drs...
Honestly, if i were MJ, i wouldnt be mad
Dude basically had 3 amazing runners he kept defeating
He had 3 rivals instead of 1
Joseph vs the pillar men
Imagine needing 3 people to challenge you at once in order to be defeated. That implies you're skilled no matter what.
Two, the guy himself only was good enough for moomoo lol
@@alexursu4403 i mean, not really
He had the hardware advantage no matter how you look at it, and the other two runners were as good as him
I like how speedrun debunking has sort of become it's own community
Nice pfp
And that will become a Speedrun of debunking speedruns and the cycle will continue
Gotta wonder if its bigger than the actual speedrunning community itself.
MJ: DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY NEED TO MIMIC A FRACTION OF MY POWER?
Tfw your rival is actually three people in a trenchcoat.
It's more of a flex when you beat them then
Read top comment
@@ComradeHax It wasn't even close to top comment when I wrote that.
I feel like it is extremely suspicious. 3 idiots could beat a genius, but three geniuses to beat just one? Either MJ is literally the best Mario Karter that has ever lived or something strange is happening.
@@blastimbre Weren't they all playing on PAL though?
This is Hab...the times were legit. We would sit around for HOURS watching each other play. Troy was the best of us followed closely by Luke. The funny part is I was actually the worst 😂
You three certainly made for quite the entertaining story to be told. Interestingly enough, a lot of the people active back then are still involved in the community today. MJ has even seen the video. Really cool that you commented, but I've gotta ask, how did you find the video? Troys CM time has only been beaten by 3 people since it was set as well, it's quite the benchmark run in the history of that track.
Lol Hab, we had a discussion on a whatsapp group on why your name was picked as you were the slower of the 3. Was there any reason? Were you the fastest one in the early days, and then they surpassed you? Good to see you are somewhat still around.
Watching someone else go at WR attempts for hours at a time... seems like you guys created twitch long before it came to be a thing.
Honestly that's the funniest form of cheating I have seen.
@@gasasmk honestly when we first started playing we never thought it would go anywhere and we just used my email to submit the times 🤷🏼♂️
I love this, a very wholesome cheating moment, exposed a method of cheating that couldn't be caught, did it with the full intention of admitting to cheating, and pushed a runner likely much further than they ever would have gone by themselves
That confession video is absolutely iconic I lost it at "MJ's a CHUMP!"
"This would be impossible to pull off in modern times due to the requirement of streaming"
I hate to break this to you, but I am part of a factory of 700 people who do Cheese's SM64 speedruns.
Can confirm. I'm part of that, too. We call ourselves "The 700 Chosen" or Cheese for short.
could some1 explain that joke to me lol
this is a lie. we do not do any such thing.
Hey *Number 274,* you might want to get back to work soon.
@@ConanVictor that's a lie. Our codename is actually "the curds".
cheating or not, i cant even be mad, that's just hilarious.
That plus they were young
Me at the first mention of any names: "That's him, he's the cheater"
Hah! Stupid.
me too
I'm not even a speedrunner and the first thing that came to mind when talking about the difference between PAL and NTSC was "Split the leaderboards". If I could figure out a solution in a fraction of a second, I don't know how these experts couldn't handle it properly.
yeah, it's a really simple+obvious solution today, but back when speedruns were first getting started they probably didn't really have leaderboard splits at all
The old problem with that is that they aren't so different where one can't compete with the other. Games with split boards are usually for "if 1 player plays input perfect, and still can't crack the top of the board in the other category." When it comes to one just requiring more skill or grinding than the other, then usually you keep one board.
A couple games have seperate board and a couple games have figured out the math to translate the results.
Also feels a bit cry baby-ish from the ntsc-ers because in other games they had advantages like the loading faster etc. And I've never heard the PAL people making such a hue and cry about it.
@@painless4785 Lol you just claimed that being a crybaby is a regional thing.
I like how you didn’t even mention the fact that if you had to match the time for the Splice then the entire point of splicing would be useless
You could splice a SC lap 1 into a non-SC record.
@@bwburkeGaming wat?
You can have a good first lap followed by 2 shit laps, but go back and redo the second lap until you get a good one, then the third, then splice together. Obviously, as stated in the video, this would be insanely precise to pull off, and basically impossible without using save states
@@illuminati7ov373 That still wouldn’t work, because you would still have to match the previous lap’s time going into the next lap. In order to get a convincing lap 2, for instance, you would have had to have a good lap 1, otherwise the timer would be off.
Ok I thought I was missing something when he went over that. I just couldn't see an advantage.
Dude what are the chances that you and two dudes down the street are capable of holding multiple WR runs. My friends struggled against the cpus.
Well, if you all agree to practice for over a year, I'm sure everybody would get better.
@@hhaavvvvii better and world record holder are different stories though. The record competition had already been going for awhile, WRs take longer than a year to grind for most people, the guy who had 2 maps was the normal amount for a year of grinded. However the friends down the street had shit they looked like 3 years of hard work. So either they were making attempts and got the third guy in late, or by random fucking chance two very naturally talented people were born right next to each other.
Haha good point. They were like the beatles of mc64-right place @ the right time and able to inspire each each-other's talent and dedication.
Depends on the game and when. Back in the mid 2000's I found out about Twin Galaxies and beat a number of world records, but never submitted them. It was more just to be able to say I could do it then it was to have any official status. Now there has been another 15 years of people improving upon earlier records and the skill threshold has gone up considerably.
@@EcnalKcin Sure you did.
The reason it hasn't been done again is... who has one friend let alone two who can achieve world record times?
What I don't understand is, if it was known that the two versions had such a striking difference, why the hell not make separate leaderboards for NTSC and PAL?
That is the standard today (that or they share a leaderboard, but you can filter versions), but back then people were a bit stubborn.
And for certain communities, a large portion of said community's top people would often conveniently consist of people within the advantaged region or with the funds to ship in a console from another region so they had little incentive to split the leaderboards when they're the ones who were at an advantage.
That's one weird way of cheating to say the least
It’s kinda cool though and smart like this is gonna be such a cool story for their kids/grandkids
Is it really cheating if you think about it
@@liam6170 yeah exactly, what if you and I have the same tag and speedrun the same game
@Wakssbm I would be more express if I discover my rival was 3 people I mean just the fact it took 3 people to rival him saids a lot well 2 scene it was mostly 2 of them that did the records
Really just highlights why PAL and NTSC records need separate leaderboards with a third ‘comparative’ board for fun. Running at different frame rates makes them different games with the same layout and structure, but unique gameplay experiences.
I really don't understand why PAL was even allowed in the same bracket as NTSC. Like if I was just for fun sure but seeing as people suddenly got upset over the Three musketeers they clearly took this seriously just not seriously enough to think critically it seems.
@@lastmelon952 same reason European speedrunners of pretty much any other retro game has to get out of their way to import an NTSC console and games. I hardly hear anyone complain about that, but if PAL has the advantage it’s apparently a problem
@@Quirino26 because Pal game ports are dog shit and extremly need their backward 50hz power to run.
@@snintendog nah it's because Amerifats are whiny crybabies who want to have their cake and eat it too.
@@snintendog hey, at least the resolution is bigger and the colors are more accurate. you win some, you lose some.
Man, I can't believe he dodged everyone with his micro turbos 😔
The main things I got from this were "early Speedrun communities were really dumb and didn't understand why hardware differences needed to be accounted for despite knowing why they needed to be accounted for" or "early speedrun communities were really blatant about their favoritism/elitism."
Agreed, but I think it helps to explain it if you realize that early speedrun communities were actually REALLY small. I don't know how many people exactly but we're talking hundreds, maybe dozens of people, not thousands.
@@ZeroKitsune It's not just that they were small, we take access to knowledge/info for granted, you wanna learn anything today, just a few clicks around and you have detailed videos explaining even the most trivial or niche shit. Back then, the community was small, and even fewer were people who knew what things like TAS, splicing, how to even capture screen or transfer from vhs camcorders to pc etc etc were. You were considered a god among your friends for even knowing how to hack dial-up/email using simple trojan/back office emails. Sigh, feel like an old person telling kids 'back in the good ol' days...' I'll stop.
In the future: "It is the official decision of the mods that world record attempts by cyborg players must be played on EXTERNAL hardware."
Due to input lag from external inputs over internal inputs
"Any cyborg players with class C or better dexterity-enhanced fingers, a class B or better internal processor, and/or class A or better eyes must submit their runs as TAS"
I had no idea Michael Jackson was so good at Mario Kart
Or Michael Jordon or Magic Johnson or Michael Johnson
@@Thiscouver Or Mary Jane....
But MJ is Michael Jackson, just google MJ and see who pops up first
@@newphilmz3605 you sir won the internet for the month 👏🙌 🏆
@@1upgamez353 Cool, I promise I will abuse the power
Yeah ik right
This is prolly the most wholesome cheating I have ever seen
Making the cheater a mystery until the end is honestly what kept me hooked in whenever I felt like skipping ahead or leaving the vid for later. Really loved making guesses as you revealed more information and was a bit surprised by the result! Great video all around!
hi rube goldenberger, i did not know you followed mk stuff as well
I love these videos made by creators with less than 10k subs. They're just so pure, like someone really just wants to talk about his passion but he didn't expect 100k+ people to tune in to listen.
Good stuff man, earned my sub
Holy crud. That is the most impressive and unorthodox cheating method I’ve seen. And honestly, it makes sense that Mario Kart would be the game to do it in, given how it plays and how world records were shared at the time.
I feel like none of that would have happened if they had just put the runs in to separate PAL and NTSC categories in the first place. Hell, why DIDNT they?
Yeah that was my thought as well.
Honestly, the most calming cheating story in speedrunning. The runs weren't cheated. The only thing that was false is the identity of the runner(s).
These sorts of documentary-style videos are so important if we don't want the history of these games to be forgotten.
I enjoy your content, and I believe your channel is on the way to be on par with the likes of Summoning Salt. Stay motivated and keep pumping out the quality content!
Comments like this keep me motivated to stick with it.
@@Abyssoft if that's the case then you will do this for a long time cuz your content is awesome
@@Abyssoft this is my first video of yours, but I'm definitely checking out some more. I love the topic and the style, keep up the great work!
@@Abyssoft is the troy then play Mario kart wii Chanel did The Royal raceway record no way
I feel like a grade A dumbass because when you said "that's right, 'they'", I was thinking "what does transitioning do for your speedrunning performance"
This got a genuine lol from me. 🤭🍍
"They" means multiple humans therefore it cant mean one person.
@@AdamFJH That's not true.. it is not exclusively plural. For example if somebody keys your car, you may say "If I ever find out who did this, they are going to get their ass kicked." It can be used to refer to a person without including their gender.
@@rumham7631 "They" is exclusively plural. The example "If I ever find out who did this, they are going to get their ass kicked." is a very common example of both "they" and "who" being incorrectly use if the person intents to use "they" with a singular person meaning. While "they" is exclusively plural, "who" is not exclusively plural so can mean one person or a group of people. Since you intended to use "who" to mean a single person to try to show that "they" can be correctly use to refer to a singular person, you are incorrectly using "who". The correct use of singular "who" is "If I ever find who did this, he/she is going to get their ass kicked.". The "they" in the first example qualifies "who" to mean a group of people while the "he/she" in the second example qualifies "who" to mean a single person. It is stupid to use "they" to mean both singular and plural as there is a need in languages to refer to a single person and a group of people without ambiguity. In Cantonese (my first language) we use "ku" to refer to a singular person and we use "ku-dee" to refer to a group of people. In English, the grammatically correct way to refer to a singular person is to say "he or she" ("he/she" for short) or to say "that person" so there is no need to incorrectly use "they" to refer to a singular person. Both "he/she" and "that person" is used to refer to a singular person without specifying their gender so there is no issues there.
@@AdamFJH So what are you supposed to say if you don't know the person's gender, or they dont identify as either he or she? Genuinely curious what you are supposed to do in this situation if "they" is grammatically incorrect.
The real cheater is anyone that claims they figured out the method of cheating before being told in the video.
"You would have to transfer the data to an N64..."
Wait, why? Would it not be simpler to set the emulator to the default resolution then use a video adapter to hook up your PC to a television?
I know the practice of using a TV as a PC monitor wasn't common back then, but I'm sure it was still a thing. VGA -> RCA conversion isn't too difficult.
Some of the gpu's of that time even had s-video/composite out.
I remember borrowing a big tv from a friend and playing fallout 3 from my pc on it.
I've had tv connected to a pc from 1998 (I had matrox millenium g200 with tv out) and also I could record console games to my pc via cpmposite video input in my analog TV-card...and I played emulated console games with pc. Of course with the tv.
n64 emulators back then (and even still now) have obvious graphical oddities that would be very easy to catch
So you got the signal from the emulator to the TV, then you would record the TV with a camcorder to get the footage for the run?
I mean I still use my ancient TV tuner card to play old consoles, but the issue is more getting the footage from the TV in an acceptable quality.
Yeah, this is what confused me about that too - the method outlined in the video didn't even occur to me as a method that one would think to do it, as this seems to be the immediate and obvious answer. It's massively over-complicating the process with only drawbacks.
I didn't expect that three person reveal
"What a twist!"
Very compelling video, this style of storytelling is hard to come by.
Honestly, if I were MJ, I'd be a little honored to have my 'rival' actually be 3 friends working together to compete against me.
This guy, Summoning Salt, and Karl Jobst are my favorites
"You might be thinking 'why didn't north american players buy a PAL cart '" No. I'm thinking "Why the hell would anyone expect someone to play on inferior technology just to compete" and "Why were they not separating PAL and NTSC runs, knowing full well those consoles ran at different speeds". A 5fps difference is highly noticable, especially to speed runners, 10 is leagues apart. And to the lesser educated, the fps most people look at is just how fast the graphics is updated. Consoles usually check input far faster than that, and yes PAL consoles also have a different timing for this due to the difference in the power standards in regions that use PAL. The difference between a PAL console and NTSC console for input checking alone makes it an completely unfair comparison.
"Speedrunners are required to live stream" ... No. They are only required to record their runs in a single segment, and demonstrate that they performed per the rules during the run. Runs that allow emulation require a reset during gameplay at the beginning of the run to show a TAS recording is not loaded, and that emulator messages are recorded to prove no script is loaded after the reset, and that no save states are used.
touch grass
@@skotonoentomo8 huh?
I knew it was Hab because I was active when it happened and saw their video when they released it. It blew my mind what they did.
Ok? So you’re better than us because you already knew it? Grow up.
@@OTcrochet he didn't say anything about being better than those who didn't know
@@OTcrochet Was he TALKING to you? Funny that you tell people to grow up when you're amazingly butthurt over this.
I did guess habric because of the ntsc vs pal justification I expected that to be a justification for a TAS though. the method surprised me for sure
See what these guys did is actually legit and not cheating
If PAL can share a leaderboard. Then friends can share a console and time cards
@@donovanulrich348 no
@@donovanulrich348 pal leaderboard isn't shared, it's calculated differently
I will say, I'm not convinced that the live-streaming requirement would truly make such a "collective" approach impossible. More of a hassle sure, but it certainly could done without being detected .
Yeah. Like you show the console, you have a webcam showing the runner and you have a hand cam. But who says that they are all from the same person.
This is one of the first memories I have of having my mind blown on the internet. I had a couple of nintendo power records in the 90s when MK64 came out. I left the game, and came back - at the same time discovering that there was a healthy online community....who all made my times look like garbage lol.
Do you know what issues you were in?
I knew who it was because summoning salt never once mentioned their name in his mk64 vids.
"I'd like you to try and catch the guilty party as well while we look at the evidence, so when you think you know, leave a comment down below."
*mentions Steven Zwartjes
It's him.
I read this right as that part of the video was going by.
It felt strange.
I had a video card with composite video out back in 1999, and basically everything ran full-screen. I recorded things to VHS. It required no technical knowledge or skill.
From there, pointing a camcorder at the screen would mask any of the visual differences you could see between the then-available emulation cores and actual hardware.
The only method of spotting that, I believe, would be to look for abnormal performance metrics such as abnormal framerates.
That's also what happened with the #1 on the Maplestory leaderboards for levels back in the early days. "Tiger" was actually a group of i think 5-10 people who effectively took turns no life grinding to get as high as possible, was crazy when we found out.
That's actually pretty common in multiplayer games now. A group of friends who probably don't have to work, play all day to get high on the leaderboards.
Given the amount of pixel and frame perfect precision and repetition that speed running requires very very few people are both a speed runner and have 3 friends who they know in person who are also speed runners.
So unless a few speed runners from different parts of the world are prepared to join together and then travel internationally and meet up so they can produce a confession or gameplay session video together it is unlikely this will ever happen again.
That said, the increasing popularity of speed running does make it more likely.
I had heard of the trio, but not the details, thanks for putting this together!
He dodged everybody 😂
I wonder how well Troy could’ve done on his own if he was playing PAL
I thought he was gonna talk about Dan Burbank since the intro oddly related to his incident of WR Hoarding
At the beginning of the video, I wonder more about why they didn't just split leaderboards.
Cuz baby’s bitch 😂😂
If you gave the hardcore NTSC players a PAL setup. The original PAL players would fade into the background it’s that big a difference
@@donovanulrich348 Not really. As someone who has played on both systems, I've discovered it takes some serious getting used to thanks to the muscle memory.
Europeans knew how to import NTSC games and equipment which usually had the advantage over PAL.
I never do time trials when I play Mario Kart 64, so when he was like "Try to guess who the cheater is and tell me in the comments below" I immediately was like "Of course this dude us cheating! He starts with 3 mushrooms!" I'm a lil dumb...
the idea that anyone _could_ be mad at such a surreal and comedic reveal for something like cheating in a competition with no prize of any sort is weird to me. I'd laugh my ass off if my rival literally turned out to be 3 kids in a trench coat.
The trouble is, speedrunners are major spazzes across the board
@@Bobo-ox7fjwith this scenario you just cant be mad at them, its such a special circumstance, but for other games where its a salty runner who cheats its a lot different
The idea that you would only be concerned if there was a prize involved speaks volumes of you as a person
Whenever I can't quite figure someone out at work, I ask myself if they are secretly twins.
This is absolutely fascinating thank you for framing the video as a mystery too it made it so satisfying
Splicing Mario Kart be like:
I DIDN'T USE THE SPLICING TO CREATE THE SPLICING.
honestly, if I were that good that a collective of individual needed to be formed to beat me, I'd be honored. I mean, that speak volumes about your skills.
Honestly the difference in difficulty of PAL vs NTSC running is what actually gets pointed out by shenanigans like this. To have to pay the game in 80% the speed of your competition is a world of difference.
This shit has to be frustrating for the guys that get rejected for nothing at all, like the spongebob runners whose xboxs were just slower/faster.
it is looking at the gamergunk fiasco just because of scratched disks they DQed people that were able to get first without cheating and in the face of all the evidence video and everything needed. the Speedrunners practice guilt before innocence best part is even when proven innocent they REFUSE to restore times. They are the CCP of games.
Finding out you were fighting and holding your own against 3 guys in a trenchcoat. Pretty sweet
We all know what were back to this for!
15:54 my first thought when he said "that's right, they" was "Oh no, not those pesky non-binaries cheating on MarioKart 64 runs again"
dexdrives were sick. i had one for the ps1 back in the 90's, cause memory cards were pricey and they only held 15 saves (if i remember correctly). being able to go online and download saves seemed like magic as well. i even put together a collection of saves for 'rogue trip' (one of the greatest, barely remembered games that never got a sequel ever) that i had planned on upping to gamefaqs. it had a save file for each character at the start of each of the story level... almost. i never quite finished cause my copy of the game got too scratched to load, and, since i was in middle school, i couldn't afford to replace the disc. i was like 90-95% finished as well. oh well. #RogueTrip2Now!!!
I thought I'm the only one who knew about Rogue Trip! Such an awesome Twisted Metal but not really game, created by OG Twisted Metal devs. I especially remember the Airport arena and the Hot Dog car.
Funnily enough, I never played any PS1 Twisted Metal game, so Rogue Trip is my first experience with Twisted Metal experience.
@@ZX3000GT1 i think you may be the only other person, though. such a fun, forgotten game. #Remaster?
This is coming from someone who doesn't speedrun at all, but I feel like combining the PAL and NTSC versions of the game is absurd. PAL players have an objective advantage that has absolutely nothing to do with skill.
16:29 I was expecting “…your biggest rival was _actually_ three kids in a trench coat”
the thing i find impressive is that finding 2 other people in real life that are equally skilled as you and willing to put in the time is still impressive
Feels wierd that things like PAL vs NTSC are allowed, which is essentially slowdown, but having real people doing real runs isn't if it's multiple people. Not saying it should be allowed, but PAL does seem kinda unfair, as it's essentially like a slowdown mod compared to NTSC.
I agree that they should be in different categories..and for the championship title top from both win together.
I don't know if its fair to call them cheaters. I mean, technically there were no rules that were broke. Since they honestly came clean about HOW they did it, I would have afforded them the opportunity to create 1 name per runner, have them all agree on who did what runs and let the cards fall where they may. Its kind of unusual that 3 people would give up the limelight for the sake of three. Unfortunately there was no good answer on how to fix this problem at the time but I believe they came up with a decent resolution.
The issue was the "champ" title, which conglomerated the three separate people's scores into one rating, and having three different people devoting energy to different tracks is a clear, unfair advantage over one person specializing in all the tracks simultaneously. The runs individually were all legitimate, but the title of "champ" was illegitimately achieved.
@@ferociousfeind8538 I'd argue that MJ using the PAL version gave him just as much advantage as they got by specialising.
るーちゃん That's a really weak argument.
@@Tuulos how so?
@@ichigo_nyanko the advantage PAL gives you is minuscule. The time advantage is math'd out, and the frame window that 25fps versus 30fps gives you is a very mild width larger
Going at 5/6ths real-time is not as much an advantage as putting three kids in a trenchcoat is
I did not see the twist of Habrich being three people coming at all! Great video very entertaining.
I am a newcomer to your channel, but I have to say, I think the way that you presented this video and audio is nothing short of brilliant. I’m going to like and subscribe to your content just based off of how you put this together, it is that good.
Ooh, got me by surprise for sure. Honorable for them to come forward like that
Personally i don't see a problem with it, the records all where legit, the only broken rule was having more than one person by username which is very minor if you ask me
@@rompevuevitos222 it's misleading and unsportmanlike. Back then, records were all based on trust, and lying about things make people not want to trust you (although the records were legit as far as we know, granted). It was just a shitty thing to do regarding the main leaderboard. These three people weren't the best singular player, and shouldn't have been given praise for that.
I've probably explained myself badly
@@leftysheppey Yeah but... at the same time. They "confessed" their *truly undetectable* "crime" of their own volition. They were never CAUGHT cheating. So to me that's not even worthy of any distrust. The deceit was temporary and to make a point.
@@TheMiracleMatter A crime being uncatchable doesn't make the confesser more noble for confessing, it makes their initial mindset sh*ttier for having poured a good amount of brainpower into how not to be caught, all the while being aware that what they're doing is wrong.
@@familiayoutuber4769 You made so many wrong assumptions in so few lines, how do you do this ??? You assumed...
A. That they believe what they did to be wrong, they justified their acts on the fact that PAL had an insurmountable advantage.
B. That they put "a good amount of brain power into how not to be caught". It's literally the simplest fucking idea ever and none of it requires making any effort to not get caught. *They shared an account, nothing else.* ...If anything, what your bringing up is just a shit excuse at demonizing these guys like they plotted for an actual crime.
*And C. That the conversation was in anyway about being noble... IT'S NOT.* It was all about them being trustworthy which remains debatable but most certainly put them above people who actually cheat speedruns. They are a lot more akin to "white hat" hackers in that respect. The fact that they are forthright about it is very meaningful whether you like it or not.
Your videos are super high quality, you better take off soon
awesome! First video of yours I’ve seen and I’ll definitely be checking out more of them
The sad thing is, given how good live video editing is nowadays, you could have 3 different people submit live feeds as one person, it would just take a lot of skill. I guess it would be even more difficult if the livestream had a camera covering the controller input as well as the person playing, but even then there are ways to get around such things. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn't mean that someone should do it. I'd suggest spending more time getting good at something rather than spending the time trying to cheat.
It's a great video, thank you for taking the time to make it :)
Thanks for making me nostalgic for the DexDrive. I had them for both PS1 and N64, and remember being absolutely anal about backing up my data with how many stores I heard about losing saves and the hundreds of hours that went into them. That tech was way ahead of its time.
I did one cheat, but not in a speedrunning capacity; on The New Tetris for N64, you could earn a bunch of lines to put towards the game's main goals, bank them to your memory card, save that memory card file, then dump the lines and replace the save through DexDrive. I sure as shit wasn't going through the amount of gameplay they wanted to unlock everything. ...joke's on me, as I'm still playing Tetris 99 and that game's grind is even more ridiculous.
As soon as you finished talking about the NTSC vs PAL advantage and the jealousy in the community, I knew it would be a collective effort. If anything, I figured more people would have been involved. As you discussed, there was no real way to fake MK64 records at the time the way a person could fake Doom or Goldeneye records.
I remember back in the 90s hooking my PC to a TV via a S-Video port, I even had a VHS player with a VGA port on it which then connected to the TV via Scart. One computer I randomly acquired at one point had a TV Card in it where it could send signal via coaxial RF and receive RF via analog aerial.
They didn't technically cheat the races, just the leaderboards. They didn't even wait to be outed, they admitted it. AND they made fun of themselves and other runners. Absolute chads.
I only guessed habrich because I’ve never seen a summoning salt video mentioning him lmaoo
I am... unsure what to think about it. On the one hand it was certainly breaking submission rules, on the other hand I supect the other guy enjoyed the rivalry and in the end it's driven him to be more motivated than it could have ended otherwise. But that's just my assumption.
He also had a massive advantage for using the PAL version compared to them though (thats why they did it).
When you said Troy I was worried TWD98 had some sort of chequered Mario Kart past, but fortunately not. I do kind of admire the effort that the trio went to collectively maintain a champion title.
3:13 on that note, even if they had the console the cartridge and the CRT, the AC power here runs at 60 Hz instead of 50 Hz. Meaning, he wouldn't be able to plug in that CRT or possibly the N64 at all.
Assuming the voltage was corrected, the 60v50Hz would only really be a problem if the TV didn't have an internal clock(which is definitely possible) afaik
Abyssoft, keep doing what you're doing. Your videos are great and you deserve more views. Keep it up :)
My first thought of the 25 to 30 frame per second is that it is a huge difference!
Wait until you see the visual difference. Composite output doesn't do any of the games justice compared to scart rgb. 😆
I love these random videos about very specific old feuds in gaming. So much history you end up not knowing about, it's specially awesome when it happened before TH-cam existed.
Its so funny to hear phrases like "the knowledge wasnt readily available at the time" as if people in the early 2000s were ancient peoples that had never encountered technology before.
The Hab trio’s antics remind me of Qwer from Geometry Dash, which was also several high-level players under the same name.
Dude, Spoilers!
... hang on, this is actual history and not an episodic TV show. My bad. 🤦♀️🍍
Well put together, man! Nicely done! Glad to see you’ve started to stack up the views and subs!
the sturcture of this video is genius. It asks the viiewer to see it from the mods' perspective without realising it
"Try and catch the cheater"
I barely even know what's going on. This is interesting, but so over my head.