Mario 64 has such an incredibly detail-oriented speedrun and glitch community. You guys watch blinking, count single frames, and travel through parrallel universes. Mario 64 quantum theory being a real thing is crazy enough
parallel universes are a consequence of converting Mario's position from a 32 bit floating point number to a 16 bit integer for the purpose of floor calculation. nothing to do with anything quantum! also I recommend you look into quantum physics, the basic concepts are not so complicated it is only their application that complicates things. The basic idea is that light operates in "quanta" meaning that it can only be added or removed in discrete chunks based on its frequency. if you learned about electron "levels" in high school, that was quantum physics! this basic concept is how we know what stars were made of that are hundreds or thousands of light years away. we realized that the spectrum of light emitted by stars (you just plot intensity vs frequency) had very clear "peaks" that are indicative of the elements contained in those stars which are constantly sending out photons. It's also the backbone behind modern computers & atomic clocks!
In Mario’s defense, he’s not trying to not blink and probably isn’t aware of how fast he’s blinking. We don’t know how good he is when he’s trying to not blink.
Almost exactly like Super Meat Boy speedruns where they discovered the Bandage Girl icon on the loading screen had a consistent animation involving her raising and lowering her arms at 20 frame intervals that carried between the screens, so for example if the loading screen ended on her having raised arms for 6 frames, the next would start arms-raised for 14 frames - and of course, caught a cheater with it.
Didn't a spliced Clustertruck run also get caught with the loading icon animation because it had very specific timings for fading in and out between levels, and a Minecraft one get caught over the first frame of world gen for a new world VS a previously loaded world? Here's to all the weird animation quirks outing splicers!
@NeetuSingh-gl1ue the argument in his video is based on a run where people initially thought a cosmic ray caused the player to teleport up, but it has been shown that it has not been caused by a cosmic ray
Honestly the increasingly insane and niche ways cheaters are caught is fascinating. I don't speedrun so my understanding of just how hard the tricks are is limited but I love hearing about the technicalities of how both legitimate runs and cheating/cheat detection work
This reminds me a lot of a similar cheating detection method in Minecraft. One day someone realized that once your character becomes hungry, the icons in the hunger bar bump at a steady rate. They found several records where the runner spliced when traveling between dimensions; hungry before, not hungry after. It's hilarious seeing someone get caught because of something obscure like blinking or a hunger bar.
Hunger bar should be way more obvious. You have to be pretty stupid not to check the bottom of the screen for matching icons while splicing cheated runs. That's just as bad as having different inventory or health.
as Karl jobst said "never try to cheat past speedrunners, they have a hyper fixation and will catch you out eventually" honestly man...blinking? that's something else, it's like the super monkey ball one
Speedrun cheating analysis videos are like true crime documentaries, but nobody dies (usually). Criminal investigations use all sorts of forensics techniques, but to convict cheaters in video games, usually only clever digital forensics is required- it's always interesting to hear explanations of the specific details in a game's implementation that allow false runs to be found. Love this stuff.
This is exactly what I love about videos like these! I really enjoy true crime documentaries, the analysis of how crimes happened and how they were solved. But as much as I like watching those, it does get draining to hear about so much violence and suffering. That's why speedrun cheater analysis videos are so great for me! The same intrigue is there, the flow of the story is always presented in a very similar way, but the stakes are much lower.
I almost wonder if the blinking after 64 frames was a super subtle easter egg, not unlike how the results music changes in Mario Kart 64 on the 64th loop.
More likely they just wanted mario to blink at all and checking frame number modulo 64 in code happens to be easy and very fast - code roughly like "if ((frameCount&63) == 0)" (no actual modulo/division, just simple bitwise "and")
This is why I will always love mario speedrunning. No other franchise has crazy turns and discoveries like this. Great vid, and I hope your channel grows rapidly!
Mario 64 speedrun but a bar is placed over Mario’s eyes to protect his identity Though I guess to really protect his identity we’d have to change the name of the game to just 64
It never ceases to sadden me that TH-camrs and video gamers are more thorough in detecting cheating and enforcing consequences than our own government is in finding and prosecuting criminals.
As you can see here your honor, I left the bathroom and immediately entered the garage on the next frame. Therefore, I never passed through the hallway where the murder occurred. No, this isn't spliced footage. (blinks)
This is kinda similar in the Clone Hero community where they check how fast the golden circle (that indicate no missed notes) is spinning. It will spin at the same rate the entire time, so footage that is sped up (from playing a song at a slower speed) is noticeable.
@@thechugg4372 That's a good point. I suppose you could do that, but knowing the community, they'd be able to figure out other methods to verify runs/FCs.
@@thechugg4372 I went and watched a video to see what the UI element looks like. You definitely *could* do what you've suggested, but it's a unique enough animation that lining it up perfectly would be a pain, especially if you couldn't play well long enough to get the combo multiplier inside it maxed on normal speed. You can get around audio splicing detection with clever background noise manipulation, but it's still a useful tool because hardly anyone is that sophisticated. This is similar I imagine. A lot of games are also just harder to detect cheating in, unfortunately. If I ran my own leaderboard I'd likely require handcams. It does add up front cost, but it makes cheating borderline impossible under scrutiny, and cameras are getting cheaper every day.
Thank you for putting the music used in the video! I really appreciate when creators take the time to do that. Very much appreciated. Thank you for all of your other contributions to the gaming community as well
Mario's blinks don't line up anymore if you come out of a loading screen with Mario already in second gear, it's a secret technique that only Todd Rodgers knows.
I like learning about new cheat detection methods. I think there should be a category for competitive cheating to improve cheat detection. Literally anything goes in this category. Runs are disqualified if evidence of cheating is found. There would be no shame in cheating in this category because that's the whole point of it. It can also be a fun exercise to figure out how exactly a run was cheated.
Thanks a lot for your acknowledgements, I'm glad I could help! Let me perhaps share my thoughts on some of the questions you brought up and address some points I've seen in the comments. Some people don't seem to realize that "Hasu64" went inactive in 2011, that he was a Japanese runner who - aside from the confrontation with SilentSlayers in 2010 - had nothing to do with the Western community ever, and that the Japanese community used different leaderboards at the time than we do now, so the runs were never even submitted to "our" community but had just been carried over. That's also why debating a ban is a bit silly. He just isn't around anymore. Though while otherwise inactive, he actually did delete his TH-cam channel (with some uploaded runs) a month after the discovery was made, and probably because of it. In my mind, there's nothing more to act upon. The runs were removed and that was it, the rest is history, literally. How do you punish a Japanese guy that wasn't seen in 12 years, and why would you? Since he deleted his YT channel, I'd argue that this was the end of everything that's gonna come from the identity that's tied to his username. He only ever did a few runs but it doesn't seem like any of them were legit, so there's no way he's ever gonna return where we would recognize that it's him. Can he redeem himself? Sure. You can never plan this. It always depends on how a former cheater goes on to conduct himself and then these things will play out in an organic way that's never quite the same. From experience, it'll take care of itself one way or the other. In this case, I Imagine "Hasu" will never return. I don't see why something from 2011 matters other than to give a factual report on it. Personally, I want a true WR progression because I'm maintaing them, but I'm not quite emotionally invested. I don't believe anyone has a reason to be outraged because nobody would have cared much about "Hasu", or have known about these two runs we've discussed, prior to this video. It's really no big deal, so I'm fine that not much happens in response. How would that even look like? The situation for SM64 is also nowhere near as grim as some people think it is. The last cheated WR is still from 2013, and there have been very few cheated runs since, almost none of which were notable. And no, this method hasn't opened the floodgates to where half the community turned out to have cheated all this time. We haven't done checks of the whole leaderboards (that'd be insane) but it doesn't look like there's really any cheaters around. It was mostly just this guy, who I always thought was sketchy anyway. And the only thing that made it so hard to catch him is that all his runs were old. The only footage to work with was the 16:11 in a comparison with another run (fusing both runs' audio tracks), uploaded to a Japanese website where I needed an account to view it. Such a submitted run would straight up be rejected today. He had been on my radar since 2018 though, it just had to remain ambiguous.
And while this one is a fair point, it's not really like public knowledge of this method is a game changer. If you cheat your 2893rd placed run, chances are you get away with it in any case, because nobody can spend a week reviewing it in-depth. Good job. But chances are you make one tiny mistake and get caught and it's all over for you. If you're a top runner and spliced a run, you were already quite unlikely to get away with it due to the mains hum method that's been reported on in abundance. That's cyclical in much the same way. As a top runner, you were already wise to opt for something else than splicing if you wanted to cheat. I never once thought cheating "undetectably" was out of reach. It's a sad reality, but I'm rather looking at what is than be paranoid about what might be. Again, virtually nothing happened since 2013. I don't suspect we've been sleeping on a big scandal either. If you get too paranoid, no 200 IQ anti-cheating method can ever realistically redeem speedrun competition to you.
I agree that it's important to uncover cheated runs to the extent that the world record history is accurate but not really much beyond that. I also agree we don't need to bring out the pitchforks unless a runner is actively harming the scene either by denying or continuing their cheating behaviour. If a cheater decides to move on and learn and grow that's great but it's not really our concern as long as the speedrunning scene continues to be a place for honest and fun competition.
Because theyre digital and almost always solo accomplishments. Anything else that falls into those two categories also usually is not done live. Speedtyping for example. Im assuming by live you mean livestreamed and not in person, but many top runners will live stream their attempts, but its not like that is fully cheat proof either. Top level runners of any game probably have the knowledge to cheat undetectably no matter the ridiculous proof burdens that you could implement. Forcing livestreaming as a requirement for all speedrunning would take away so much of the accessability of what makes it a popular endeavor in the first place.
It's incredible how insanely detail oriented things have gotten in terms of cheat detection. Not just in terms of tracking them, but the ability to understand the performance inputs and small technical quirks of games that I would wager the Devs themselves weren't fully aware of.
@@DG-mi2mc Yes. The name is reqlly easy to find; however, I just thought it was funny how you could see the name in the video, despite the creator wanting to not disclose it.
The one thing i have always loved about speedrunning is once impossible gaps and people always finding a way around them. Even brand new techniques to remoderate old runs like solving a cold case! The speedrun communities never cease to amaze me and I genuinely adore and appreciate all the work and effort everyone in the community puts in. Love this !
I appreciate the way you kept this about the method of catching the cheated run in question and didn't bring the runner's identity into it. Classy approach. From one teacher to another, I respect that intention a lot.
I remembering watching that exact video on blinking and thinking that such a consistent timer could be useful for verifying speedruns, because I remembered hearing about a similar thing happening with Super Meat Boy speedrun verification.
i actually thought that this video was gonna be one of those joke videos where like obama is in it somewhere and mario is like exploding or something idk
You know, this is the first time I've ever where it's virtually impossible to cheat in a game. With this new detection method, its actually just impossible to splice runs now.
They really need more methods for a lot of games really. If you want to take a speedrunning a game seriously then you need serious counter measures to be able to detect that. Blinking though is absurd but probably the best idea I have heard of for any game! Great detailed video 🏴☠️ 🦈
I agree. The best way to validate and have confirmed speed runs is to have players travel to select locations where they use systems and controllers that are pre-set for them while under supervision. Maybe have a few locations per country so it's easily accessible. They could also be sponsored by local gamestores / hobbystores.
Danke, dass du das so einfach für uns erklärt hast! Normalerweise habe ich öfter Probleme, so technische Dinge gut zu verstehen, hab natürlich gleich abboniert für zukünftige Videos! Good job, fantastic video!!
It always amazes me how in-depth the SM64 community is about their game. I would have never even imagined a cheating detection such as this could have been developed.
I think part of it is because it's been dismantled extrremely thoroughly thanks to both the glitch hunters and the modders who escalated to full on disassembly to rewrite the whole thing, and a lot of speedrunners overlap with playing hacks (and speedrunning them) so the end results are inevitably that people end up documenting WAY too much about the game. It's impressive
It's kinda scary to think that we now have to find out how often Mario BLINKS in order to catch cheaters, and we're only now uncovering these cheaters. Who knows how many good times are up that are cheated and we've just never found a way to prove them.
The depth of this investigation was insane - not in that it was high level math or required statistics analysis, but that a few pixels went blink-blonk a little earlier or later. Such simplicity, such a shallow tell. Beautiful!
I feel like there could be a way to automate this process by using a machine learning model to recognize frames where non-"ingame frame" periods start and end, and a script that cuts those parts out of the video, then with an additional model which recognizes Mario's blinks, and creates a time-series of blink values and compares them against the expected time-series for the gameplay video and returns a confidence value on whether the gameplay is legit or not.
I'm very disappointed that nobody caught this cheater before. I know it may have been harder without this new technique, but I also feel like there's this HUGE bias online where if something has circulated long enough it is treated as fact by mere custom. I know it's a different context, but I see this a lot with research on videogame lore, how if something gets written on a Wiki and manages to escape an initial fact-checking, then it makes its way into common knowledge and nobody dares challenge it any more. For example: in Mortal Kombat Wiki, fan sites, videos about MK characters, and even Wikipedia itself, the character of Tremor was stated to have been originally intended to appear in MK Trilogy... but doing first-hand personal research I couldn't track this to any official source and when I begged people to provide it they would just say "everybody knows this!" Only recently, with Tremor coming to MK1 as a kameo, has Ed Boon stated that he was never intended for MKT, that's a mistake, and I was like "THANK YOU!" ...I'm going off on a tangent but what I'm saying is that it's so rare for people to actually go back and check the validity of something that has been considered valid for years.
@@Drogiebedankt om tijd te nemen om het juiste uit te spreken. Je hebt het gesproken als een egte Nederlander/belg thank you for taking the time to say it the right way. You spoke it like a real Dutch/Belgian
@@MalooMF9Pannen pronounces his own name like an American, so to him, the “grating” way is his real name. But i totally understand why it is hard to take as a native speaker 😅
Thanks for the video! I love hearing about these cheating detection methods. One tip for video editing - consider making your voiceover mono, not stereo, so it's evenly split between both ears!
It's really neat to see how these sorts of persistent cycles (either a programmed one such as the blinks or and fundamental electronic one such as the main hum) underlying a single run can be so helpful in verification. Hiding the name felt jarring because I know the drama-loving lizard brain part of me clicked the video for that, but with your justification and more rational thought, a rehabilitative stance such as that you've presented is wayyy healthier for everyone involved, so thank you!
The fact that you are younger than probably many people in the comment section, yet you not only made a funny point, but in a grammatically coherent way, gives me hope. Good luck in the future, kiddo!
8:09 this reminds me of a lil thought experiment from a teacher's coding analogy we got a scenario where we had 2 "make sure carboard boxes in a small factory line werent empty". sooo we said stuff like "machine arm puts em on a balance, removes from line if too light" or "depth scanner above them. machine arm removes empty ones" ...only for em to go "place a fan in its direction so it blows away the empty 1s"........ obvs, some stuff needs/benefits from complex ways. but aside that, there is a reason why priorize simplicity. (unless ur a mad hobbyst ofc. feel free 2 go wild👍)
FYI, your audio balance is pretty off when listening to this with headphones. It goes back and forth throughout the video, but there are large sections of it where uour voice is louder in the left ear than right which just makes this entire thing a bit difficult to listen to without literally changing my computer OS settings to force mono audio.
That's a really interesting find. I'm all for the most creative methods of analyzing gameplay footage, and this shows how not only creative people can get, but how much more information is available for these games that isn't released. That's a ton of attention paid into the gameplay recordings. Well done, great find.
I noticed that your audio settings may need to be tweaked. In some parts of the video you came out louder in the left speaker, but then you were louder in the right. It's not too distracting, just something I noticed. Mario 64 flipped though... Blimey that's gonna be fun to see
I noticed this too. It almost seems like he has one of those microphones where it will record audio on the sides and he might be facing his head towards the left of his microphone so it's louder on the left. Sometimes the audio is equal in both ears, which sounds like he talked straight at his mic instead of off to the side. At 4:40 it looks like he's angling his head to the right (his left).
I’ve always been curious if moderation teams consider withholding this information and keeping the cheating detection methods secret to prevent future cheaters from working around them. Nonetheless, amazing video and glad this was shared
Being transparent is better policy. You wouldn't want evidence in a real life court hidden when someone is being tried to prevent others from potentially learning from the mistakes that were made.
I think a detection method like this is safe to publish, because it's very difficult to account for. You can't just make Mario's blink cycle line up to splices at will.
The benefit of being open with the community about cheat detection is that it encourages people to keep their eyes open & raise concerns if they see odd things. Speedrunning is different to a developer addressing cheaters in their game, because a dev doesn't want to give away the gaps in their game design or security.... with speedrunning, it only hurts the community to keep cheat-detection a secret because it undermines their trust in the moderation teams. The reality is that the more cheat-detection methods are known, the harder it is for someone to circumvent them because they don't just have a handful of mods to trick... now they need to get past the keen eyes of other players & the internet as well.
Drogie: I will not name the cheaters Jobst: So anyway Tsukushima cheated all these different ways. He also cheated his world record SR. look at all these other people that cheated too!
"Mario, blink twice if the person controlling you is cheating"
lmfao
Instead you get T-O-R-T-U-R-E
(he starts reciting the cheater's exact location in Morse code)
@@bigPoeWasn't there a guy who actually blinked in Morse code to say that on live television?
@@AururaDergy yup i forget who tho
"Mario blinks every 64 frames."
Oh, so that's why the game is called Super Mario 64.
They wanted to call it Blinky Mario 64 but the board of directors wouldn't approve it.
Lmfao
He's making up for his lack of blinking in Super Mario World. 😂
@@Waterishloki100um alcutlallu 🤓🖕 it's calld dmarioy 64 becuase ot the comsol e i t aass smde for k vdqibgwrwt
@@thewhitefalcon8539lmaooo thank both of you
Mario 64 has such an incredibly detail-oriented speedrun and glitch community. You guys watch blinking, count single frames, and travel through parrallel universes. Mario 64 quantum theory being a real thing is crazy enough
truly impressive what autistic individuals can achieve when they come together as one
The real way you speedrun any game is to just shatter the concept of time, reality, and consciousness
parallel universes are a consequence of converting Mario's position from a 32 bit floating point number to a 16 bit integer for the purpose of floor calculation. nothing to do with anything quantum! also I recommend you look into quantum physics, the basic concepts are not so complicated it is only their application that complicates things. The basic idea is that light operates in "quanta" meaning that it can only be added or removed in discrete chunks based on its frequency. if you learned about electron "levels" in high school, that was quantum physics!
this basic concept is how we know what stars were made of that are hundreds or thousands of light years away. we realized that the spectrum of light emitted by stars (you just plot intensity vs frequency) had very clear "peaks" that are indicative of the elements contained in those stars which are constantly sending out photons. It's also the backbone behind modern computers & atomic clocks!
@@nicholasmitchell6025The know-it-all strikes yet again
@@nicholasmitchell6025 okay but can you point out every issue in SADX 2004 PC port?
without looking it up and using your memory
“Mario blinks every 64 frames, his eyes operate on what we call a framerule. Imagine Mario’s eyes as a bus stop…”
If a bus arrives every 21 frames, and Mario blinks every 64 frames, does that mean every 1344 frames he blinks and he miss it [the bus]?
This is the best comment ever I'm pretty sure
An framerule is a framerule, you can't say it's only a bus stop
@@zym6687But is a framerule soup? 🤔
Are you going through parallel universes though
Imagine getting caught for a speedrun you cheated 13 years ago because Mario fuckin blinked a little earlier than he should have had
the autistic sentinels that discover this a decade later are impressive, I wonder what more they'll find in the years to come
@@picklebond157bruh 💀
Marios eyes itched 14 nanopixels too much to the left, the run was cheated.
@@picklebond157well, the video explaining blinking is 7 years old at this point
@@picklebond157Autistic sentinels is such a compliment
Imagine you wake up one morning and the speedrun you cheated 13 years ago was retired from the leaderboard because Mario blinked too late
Copied comment bro,it's literally the next comment
it's not an exact copy, and if it was, people would find out for themselves. you dont need to say it's copied
@@thatonemetalhead666 yeah I think I was the first one to post the comment
@@Ginto_OI said that mount everest is a mountain. You can ne longer call it a mountain without crediting me
nah you straight up copied it
This video only proved to me that I can kick Mario’s ass in a staring contest
Okay but Mario can still kick your ass in general
@@RedTHedgehe wouldn't just kick your ass, he'd toss you and pick you back up before you can land and use you to gateclip
@@RedTHedge He donst attack for no reason .
@@AsherTheModderi dont think thats correct
In Mario’s defense, he’s not trying to not blink and probably isn’t aware of how fast he’s blinking. We don’t know how good he is when he’s trying to not blink.
Almost exactly like Super Meat Boy speedruns where they discovered the Bandage Girl icon on the loading screen had a consistent animation involving her raising and lowering her arms at 20 frame intervals that carried between the screens, so for example if the loading screen ended on her having raised arms for 6 frames, the next would start arms-raised for 14 frames - and of course, caught a cheater with it.
Didn't a spliced Clustertruck run also get caught with the loading icon animation because it had very specific timings for fading in and out between levels, and a Minecraft one get caught over the first frame of world gen for a new world VS a previously loaded world?
Here's to all the weird animation quirks outing splicers!
@@neoqwertyheres to the devs adding consistent visual cycles vs resetting them on load times 🔥
yeah. exo got caught like that I think.
@@neoqwerty Not to mention the stage loading order between hardware and MAME for Donkey Kong, a real classic
Rip apollolegend
But, consider the following: What if an ionizing particle from a cosmic ray hit Mario's eyes, making him blink early?
Cheating
Costs a grand to find out.
Well, it is still plausible theory because cosmic rays do affect such cartridges. Veritasium has a video on it. (jk I'm not justifying cheating)
@NeetuSingh-gl1ue the argument in his video is based on a run where people initially thought a cosmic ray caused the player to teleport up, but it has been shown that it has not been caused by a cosmic ray
@@baconofburger8784 TheGamer had cited false information, which he believed was true. You are also right.
I too blink every 64 frames, so i can make sure noone is cheating on me
Nobody would be.
@@DJIncendration sounds like somebody blinked faster than 64 frames
but that means you never saw Mario with his eyes closed???
@@miniropI didn't know Mario could blink in SM64 until today, so checks out
🔥🔥🔥
No wonder this method took so long to figure out. It's really a blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual cue.
I'm literally going to rip my eyes out from this.
If it were more obvious they'd have caught the cheater in the blink of an eye
Eye can’t believe you would make such a bad pun
Eh, it's in the eye of the beholder.
Whye must you do this
Honestly the increasingly insane and niche ways cheaters are caught is fascinating.
I don't speedrun so my understanding of just how hard the tricks are is limited but I love hearing about the technicalities of how both legitimate runs and cheating/cheat detection work
It should have not been discovered
@@Stefan2010a
Why?
@@CatBxtchNami Catching cheaters via obscure methods is kinda hypocritical and taboo in my opinion
@@Stefan2010a?
@@Stefan2010a -Quote from the guy who got caught with the method
So every 64 frames a bus comes to pick up Mario's eyes
LOL
incredible comment
why this have me so dead
no every 64 frames a bus drops off 2 eye lids. you got it backwards :P
lmao
catching someone for inconsistent blinking is the most big brained thing this game has provided
This person does NOT know about the A button challenge
*Have you heard about parallel universes?*
@@mikuenjoyerXD “i am four parallel universes ahead of you”
To verify this claim, we first need to talk about parallel universes
It reminds me a lot of the clustertruck rotating wheel catch.
Dude I sincerely applaud your pronunciation of pannenkoek2012, especially the dedication to also say “2012” in dutch.
@@bogeymanbear dankjewel!!
@bogeymanbear dankjewel!!
@@Drogiedankjewel sounds like a meme weirdly enough
Language is weird and funny
I almost thought you actually were Dutch when I heard you say it
pretty funny that Pannen is not even dutch and doesn't pronounce it like that :D
This reminds me a lot of a similar cheating detection method in Minecraft. One day someone realized that once your character becomes hungry, the icons in the hunger bar bump at a steady rate. They found several records where the runner spliced when traveling between dimensions; hungry before, not hungry after. It's hilarious seeing someone get caught because of something obscure like blinking or a hunger bar.
Shame these methods are even found for any game.
And now you can even use the blinking method from Mario 64 in MC:BE because Microsoft for some reason decided Steve needed to moisten his eyes!
@@notsusanna7485 Omg, I thought you were trolling, but it's true. Can't believe they blink now.
Hunger bar should be way more obvious. You have to be pretty stupid not to check the bottom of the screen for matching icons while splicing cheated runs.
That's just as bad as having different inventory or health.
@@B3Band this is not hunger as in the bars necessarily, but saturation
That cheater really had a “blink and you miss it” moment
Didn't expect Grom to be here lol
3 big balls
as Karl jobst said "never try to cheat past speedrunners, they have a hyper fixation and will catch you out eventually"
honestly man...blinking? that's something else, it's like the super monkey ball one
RIIIGHT?? that’s what I was remided of as well!
oh god wbat was the super monkey ball one
@@Benefard if it's the one I'm thinking of, a cheater got caught because of the sounds the monkey makes when almost falling were inconsistent
@@capitaljjenius that's another cool way to catch cheaters, thanks for sharing
@@capitaljjenius yeah
"as indicated by ðe dancing cheese" my beloved
(He blinked)
(he blinked1)
(he blinked182)
@@tibby4503(he bowled)
bobert
Show more
Speedrun cheating analysis videos are like true crime documentaries, but nobody dies (usually). Criminal investigations use all sorts of forensics techniques, but to convict cheaters in video games, usually only clever digital forensics is required- it's always interesting to hear explanations of the specific details in a game's implementation that allow false runs to be found. Love this stuff.
This is exactly what I love about videos like these! I really enjoy true crime documentaries, the analysis of how crimes happened and how they were solved. But as much as I like watching those, it does get draining to hear about so much violence and suffering. That's why speedrun cheater analysis videos are so great for me! The same intrigue is there, the flow of the story is always presented in a very similar way, but the stakes are much lower.
...usually?
usually?
Can you elaborate what "unusual" event you are referring to?
@@xyrongonzalez3833 THATS WHAT IM SAYIN
I almost wonder if the blinking after 64 frames was a super subtle easter egg, not unlike how the results music changes in Mario Kart 64 on the 64th loop.
More likely they just wanted mario to blink at all and checking frame number modulo 64 in code happens to be easy and very fast - code roughly like "if ((frameCount&63) == 0)" (no actual modulo/division, just simple bitwise "and")
It's most likely because 64 suits the blinking cycle well, and is also a power of 2 (=1000000 in binary), which can make coding easier
Wouldn't believe if someone on street told me, that they got caught cheating by a blinking animation.
I could after something similar was used to catch cheaters in Super Meat Boy.
why would someone tell you this
@@mooj269people tell me all the time "they got caught cheating by a blinking animation" and im always like, no way
Yeah i would go "Sir, i dont have any money pls leave me alone"
Id be excited someone talked to me about speed running stuff in real life
“We both stared into the void, but when it stared back at us, you blinked”
-Mario (crisis on infinite cartridges)
Wario wanted to destroy original earth
Good job little blinking mario chief investigator. Now crucial speed running records are preserved in truth for eternal posteriority.
crisis on infinite PUs
This is why I will always love mario speedrunning. No other franchise has crazy turns and discoveries like this. Great vid, and I hope your channel grows rapidly!
Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and FF7 all have insane histories for speedrunning and glitch discovery.
"Give us a sign if you're being controlled!"
Mario: blinks every 64 frames
Now I'll only be submitting runs where the camera never shows mario's eyes
same
:trol:
Mario 64 speedrun but a bar is placed over Mario’s eyes to protect his identity
Though I guess to really protect his identity we’d have to change the name of the game to just 64
You can't help it, though, because Mario is shown every time he jumps out of a painting after collecting a star
I'll find a way@@WTheW_gaming
It never ceases to sadden me that TH-camrs and video gamers are more thorough in detecting cheating and enforcing consequences than our own government is in finding and prosecuting criminals.
It's easier to detect cheating in a video game then it is in the court of law...
@@SuperBluesphere Depends on the game, and depends on the crime.
Criminals don't generally submit video evidence of their alleged crimes.
As you can see here your honor, I left the bathroom and immediately entered the garage on the next frame. Therefore, I never passed through the hallway where the murder occurred. No, this isn't spliced footage. (blinks)
@@Tetragramixyour honour, this footage is spliced. My client blinks a couple frames too late in this.
he spelled "this guy is cheating" in morse code by blinking
Why just why...
Why just why…
Why just why...
Why just why…
Why just why…
This is kinda similar in the Clone Hero community where they check how fast the golden circle (that indicate no missed notes) is spinning. It will spin at the same rate the entire time, so footage that is sped up (from playing a song at a slower speed) is noticeable.
Shouldnt that be easily faked by editing part of the UI from another run?
@@thechugg4372 That's a good point. I suppose you could do that, but knowing the community, they'd be able to figure out other methods to verify runs/FCs.
@@thechugg4372 I went and watched a video to see what the UI element looks like. You definitely *could* do what you've suggested, but it's a unique enough animation that lining it up perfectly would be a pain, especially if you couldn't play well long enough to get the combo multiplier inside it maxed on normal speed. You can get around audio splicing detection with clever background noise manipulation, but it's still a useful tool because hardly anyone is that sophisticated. This is similar I imagine. A lot of games are also just harder to detect cheating in, unfortunately. If I ran my own leaderboard I'd likely require handcams. It does add up front cost, but it makes cheating borderline impossible under scrutiny, and cameras are getting cheaper every day.
Thank you for putting the music used in the video! I really appreciate when creators take the time to do that. Very much appreciated. Thank you for all of your other contributions to the gaming community as well
now imagining a Mario 64 hack that has Mario not blinking at all and staring at the player the whole time
I accidentally made every character in Star Fox Adventures blink every half second
@@renakunisakiThat sounds awful, wouldn’t happen to have a recording of it?
That's kinda what monster hunter world expansion last boss does
Is the head pointing towards the player the whole time?
you dont need to be a teacher to give people 5 chances of forgiveness just have to be obey Allah and be a good muslim
Mario: *has dry eye so blink*
Speedrunners: CHEATING
Except not, because it was every 64 frames.
@@DJIncendrationYou… Don’t take sarcasm, do you?
The pressure that the community puts on Mario is frankly disgusting
@@lerikhkl your joking right?
@@theblitzblader3967 No.
The amount of people dissecting SM64 to this day makes me so happy, it’s like there’s a never-ending trove of secrets
3024: Hidden luigi model in the game files 😱😱😱
@kendrickroblo62 I can't remember which video it was, but I swear they did find a Luigi model or something in the game 😅🤣
@@kendrickroblo62They already found that
Mario's blinks don't line up anymore if you come out of a loading screen with Mario already in second gear, it's a secret technique that only Todd Rodgers knows.
I don't think there are any gears in this game.
@@DJIncendration It's a joke about the infamous Dragster record.
Just gotta call a random rep about it :) totally legit todgers moment.
@@DJIncendrationthere are but only todd rogers knows about them
Todd Todgers*
The fact mario's blinking animation can catch a cheater is absolutely insane what is this community
No surprise that Pannenkoek was involved :D
The same community that figured out parallel universes just to avoid opening doors.
This is not even that bad.
If you want to know how weird speed running can get, we need.to talk about parallel dimensions
@@neoqwerty or astronomically rare sun rays to hit and alter your game binary code
@@-Me_ That's a myth.
I like learning about new cheat detection methods. I think there should be a category for competitive cheating to improve cheat detection. Literally anything goes in this category. Runs are disqualified if evidence of cheating is found. There would be no shame in cheating in this category because that's the whole point of it. It can also be a fun exercise to figure out how exactly a run was cheated.
The unstable mic really screwed with my sense of hearing before I realized it was literally how the audio is
Idk i didnt notice it
Thought my headphones were finally dying
yeah same XD
My ears are blinking as we speak
Thank you for the feedback, I'll definitely pay more attention to that in my next video!
Thanks a lot for your acknowledgements, I'm glad I could help! Let me perhaps share my thoughts on some of the questions you brought up and address some points I've seen in the comments.
Some people don't seem to realize that "Hasu64" went inactive in 2011, that he was a Japanese runner who - aside from the confrontation with SilentSlayers in 2010 - had nothing to do with the Western community ever, and that the Japanese community used different leaderboards at the time than we do now, so the runs were never even submitted to "our" community but had just been carried over. That's also why debating a ban is a bit silly. He just isn't around anymore. Though while otherwise inactive, he actually did delete his TH-cam channel (with some uploaded runs) a month after the discovery was made, and probably because of it.
In my mind, there's nothing more to act upon. The runs were removed and that was it, the rest is history, literally. How do you punish a Japanese guy that wasn't seen in 12 years, and why would you? Since he deleted his YT channel, I'd argue that this was the end of everything that's gonna come from the identity that's tied to his username. He only ever did a few runs but it doesn't seem like any of them were legit, so there's no way he's ever gonna return where we would recognize that it's him. Can he redeem himself? Sure. You can never plan this. It always depends on how a former cheater goes on to conduct himself and then these things will play out in an organic way that's never quite the same. From experience, it'll take care of itself one way or the other. In this case, I Imagine "Hasu" will never return.
I don't see why something from 2011 matters other than to give a factual report on it. Personally, I want a true WR progression because I'm maintaing them, but I'm not quite emotionally invested. I don't believe anyone has a reason to be outraged because nobody would have cared much about "Hasu", or have known about these two runs we've discussed, prior to this video. It's really no big deal, so I'm fine that not much happens in response. How would that even look like? The situation for SM64 is also nowhere near as grim as some people think it is. The last cheated WR is still from 2013, and there have been very few cheated runs since, almost none of which were notable.
And no, this method hasn't opened the floodgates to where half the community turned out to have cheated all this time. We haven't done checks of the whole leaderboards (that'd be insane) but it doesn't look like there's really any cheaters around. It was mostly just this guy, who I always thought was sketchy anyway. And the only thing that made it so hard to catch him is that all his runs were old. The only footage to work with was the 16:11 in a comparison with another run (fusing both runs' audio tracks), uploaded to a Japanese website where I needed an account to view it. Such a submitted run would straight up be rejected today. He had been on my radar since 2018 though, it just had to remain ambiguous.
And while this one is a fair point, it's not really like public knowledge of this method is a game changer. If you cheat your 2893rd placed run, chances are you get away with it in any case, because nobody can spend a week reviewing it in-depth. Good job. But chances are you make one tiny mistake and get caught and it's all over for you. If you're a top runner and spliced a run, you were already quite unlikely to get away with it due to the mains hum method that's been reported on in abundance. That's cyclical in much the same way. As a top runner, you were already wise to opt for something else than splicing if you wanted to cheat. I never once thought cheating "undetectably" was out of reach. It's a sad reality, but I'm rather looking at what is than be paranoid about what might be. Again, virtually nothing happened since 2013. I don't suspect we've been sleeping on a big scandal either. If you get too paranoid, no 200 IQ anti-cheating method can ever realistically redeem speedrun competition to you.
I agree that it's important to uncover cheated runs to the extent that the world record history is accurate but not really much beyond that. I also agree we don't need to bring out the pitchforks unless a runner is actively harming the scene either by denying or continuing their cheating behaviour. If a cheater decides to move on and learn and grow that's great but it's not really our concern as long as the speedrunning scene continues to be a place for honest and fun competition.
It's a shame the runs were removed, even from TH-cam.
There is a lot of things to get mad about in this world. This isnt one of them. haha
why isn't speedrunning done live, like every other competitive activity that has ever existed?
Because theyre digital and almost always solo accomplishments. Anything else that falls into those two categories also usually is not done live. Speedtyping for example.
Im assuming by live you mean livestreamed and not in person, but many top runners will live stream their attempts, but its not like that is fully cheat proof either. Top level runners of any game probably have the knowledge to cheat undetectably no matter the ridiculous proof burdens that you could implement. Forcing livestreaming as a requirement for all speedrunning would take away so much of the accessability of what makes it a popular endeavor in the first place.
Investigator "Mario blink twice if you're okay! Blink once if you're being manipulated!"
The mirrored cartridge is a very cool idea, crazy that even cheaters from back then are still being caught out.
Now I want someone to make a romhack where Mario experiences allergies like I do, so the blinking is frequent and unpredictable.
I like that idea. Or better yet, no blinking.
what's up allergy buddy
"Your Honor, might I present to my evidence: Defendant blinked 0.16 seconds earlier than he should have."
Defendant: "Frick! I admit."
That pannenkoek video has been burned into my brain for so long and I never even considered checking it, absolutely ingenious move
Every copy of mario 64 has personalized blinking
only if the run was spliced !
blinking timing is definitely a good addition to cheating detection
Mario: Wants to blink normally
Nintendo: BLINK EVERY 64 FRAMES
Blink every 64 frames whilst defeating bowser of course. 😉 You can do it.
“ItsameeeMario”
Maybe this is why the game is named Super Mario 64
It's incredible how insanely detail oriented things have gotten in terms of cheat detection. Not just in terms of tracking them, but the ability to understand the performance inputs and small technical quirks of games that I would wager the Devs themselves weren't fully aware of.
I had a strong suspicion the blink was on a global timer from the thumbnail. I've watched enough mechanical breakdowns I'm starting to see the code.
He would've gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling blinks
That sounds like some fictional racial slur when you say it like that. 😂
This really shows that the top speedruns in general might be full of actual cheaters, crazy it took 13 years to find this out.
I would be laughing if that's the case.
None of the top SM64 speedruns nowadays are cheated.
Not really, it was unverified at the time and other runs have been confirmed non-spliced due to blinks
This shows your assumption. SM64 top leaderboards aren’t full of cheaters. This wasn’t even verified meticulously the way it’s done nowadays.
There should be lots of cheaters, but mostly legit runs. Cheats get better times though...
4:47 During the fade transition, the blur effect over the runner's name recedes nearly entirely, such that the name becomes easily readable.
You mean TsukishimaHato ?😅 😂😂
@@DG-mi2mc Yes. The name is reqlly easy to find; however, I just thought it was funny how you could see the name in the video, despite the creator wanting to not disclose it.
This dude has been caught cheating years ago. Anyone following speedruns on youtube has known of this guy for a long time.
whenever the badabun video is on screen the name is only blurred on the bottom, not on the shirt lol
What an amazing video Drogie! This method is amazing, and I really appreciate how big names like pannen and weegee are pillars of tehse method
The one thing i have always loved about speedrunning is once impossible gaps and people always finding a way around them. Even brand new techniques to remoderate old runs like solving a cold case! The speedrun communities never cease to amaze me and I genuinely adore and appreciate all the work and effort everyone in the community puts in. Love this !
Missed opportunity to call it the "Blinking Detection Sequence Method" or "BDSM" for short
You taught me how to do speedkicks and now you're teaching me about cheat detection years later, cheers to you, and thanks weegee
lmao wasn't expecting that. surprisingly reliable tool to check for splices tbh. speedrunneres never cease to amaze me.
great video, man.
I appreciate the way you kept this about the method of catching the cheated run in question and didn't bring the runner's identity into it. Classy approach. From one teacher to another, I respect that intention a lot.
Blink once for splice. Blink twice for clear.
I remembering watching that exact video on blinking and thinking that such a consistent timer could be useful for verifying speedruns, because I remembered hearing about a similar thing happening with Super Meat Boy speedrun verification.
Shame you didn't act on it then. It would be your name up there in the video
i actually thought that this video was gonna be one of those joke videos where like obama is in it somewhere and mario is like exploding or something idk
wow Mario is really bad at staring contest
hi gtm😀
@@Tristan-pt4dt hey
Real
Small world, I remember you from Zakkujo’s streams, happy to see how far you‘ve come!
Mario: *_blink blink_*
Everyone: thats a cheater.
*leo pointing meme*
You know, this is the first time I've ever where it's virtually impossible to cheat in a game. With this new detection method, its actually just impossible to splice runs now.
Nope, it it still possible to splice. It is just even more pain in ass to do it without mistakes.
They really need more methods for a lot of games really. If you want to take a speedrunning a game seriously then you need serious counter measures to be able to detect that. Blinking though is absurd but probably the best idea I have heard of for any game!
Great detailed video 🏴☠️ 🦈
I agree. The best way to validate and have confirmed speed runs is to have players travel to select locations where they use systems and controllers that are pre-set for them while under supervision. Maybe have a few locations per country so it's easily accessible. They could also be sponsored by local gamestores / hobbystores.
This video is super well made and edited, it explains everything in a way easy to understand. Loved this video totally! Keep the great work!
Danke, dass du das so einfach für uns erklärt hast! Normalerweise habe ich öfter Probleme, so technische Dinge gut zu verstehen, hab natürlich gleich abboniert für zukünftige Videos!
Good job, fantastic video!!
Everybody's talking about mario blinking, but nobody's talking about Drogie not blinking through the whole intro
I noticed this immediately and was kinda creeped out but then it clicked 🤣
It always amazes me how in-depth the SM64 community is about their game. I would have never even imagined a cheating detection such as this could have been developed.
I think part of it is because it's been dismantled extrremely thoroughly thanks to both the glitch hunters and the modders who escalated to full on disassembly to rewrite the whole thing, and a lot of speedrunners overlap with playing hacks (and speedrunning them) so the end results are inevitably that people end up documenting WAY too much about the game.
It's impressive
Naw, a lot of games have something like this , I remember super meat boy and Celeste have something similar with the save symbols iirc
Great video! I can honestly say I've never been more invested in the blinking habits of a fictional plumber.
It's kinda scary to think that we now have to find out how often Mario BLINKS in order to catch cheaters, and we're only now uncovering these cheaters. Who knows how many good times are up that are cheated and we've just never found a way to prove them.
That mirrored sm64 copy looks so cool, i hope it is an actual romhack
What else could it possibly be?
@@arkadyshersky8704video editing
The depth of this investigation was insane - not in that it was high level math or required statistics analysis, but that a few pixels went blink-blonk a little earlier or later. Such simplicity, such a shallow tell. Beautiful!
I feel like there could be a way to automate this process by using a machine learning model to recognize frames where non-"ingame frame" periods start and end, and a script that cuts those parts out of the video, then with an additional model which recognizes Mario's blinks, and creates a time-series of blink values and compares them against the expected time-series for the gameplay video and returns a confidence value on whether the gameplay is legit or not.
That would not work very well, at least as of now. Machine learning is still abysmal with video
@@LilacMonarch it's bad at generation, but simple object recognition in single frames has been entirely possible for years
I'm very disappointed that nobody caught this cheater before.
I know it may have been harder without this new technique, but I also feel like there's this HUGE bias online where if something has circulated long enough it is treated as fact by mere custom.
I know it's a different context, but I see this a lot with research on videogame lore, how if something gets written on a Wiki and manages to escape an initial fact-checking, then it makes its way into common knowledge and nobody dares challenge it any more.
For example: in Mortal Kombat Wiki, fan sites, videos about MK characters, and even Wikipedia itself, the character of Tremor was stated to have been originally intended to appear in MK Trilogy... but doing first-hand personal research I couldn't track this to any official source and when I begged people to provide it they would just say "everybody knows this!" Only recently, with Tremor coming to MK1 as a kameo, has Ed Boon stated that he was never intended for MKT, that's a mistake, and I was like "THANK YOU!"
...I'm going off on a tangent but what I'm saying is that it's so rare for people to actually go back and check the validity of something that has been considered valid for years.
Dude, the fact that you actually pronounced pannenkoek2012’s name in the Dutch way is very commendable! Thank you for putting in the extra effort
@@ibuprofencompactor lmao dankjewel and you are welcome!
Mario standing with another Mario on a desolate planet.
"We both stared into the abyss, when the abyss stared back... You blinked."
then you stab the one saying that because they're the impostor
10:31 i love the dutch pronounciation 😂
Dankjewel, vriendje
@@DrogieHearing everyone butcher that name in videos really gets grating after a while! En mijn Nederlands is slecht!
@@Drogiebedankt om tijd te nemen om het juiste uit te spreken. Je hebt het gesproken als een egte Nederlander/belg
thank you for taking the time to say it the right way. You spoke it like a real Dutch/Belgian
@@MalooMF9Pannen pronounces his own name like an American, so to him, the “grating” way is his real name. But i totally understand why it is hard to take as a native speaker 😅
@@Michael-kp4bd Drogie is not native though, but he trained himself well. I'm proud of my Drogerie :)
There's a strong chance this guy does not give a shit that he got caught at this point and may well have completely moved on from speed running
Damn cant even blink without gets in trouble, only in mushroom kingdom
Thanks for the video! I love hearing about these cheating detection methods.
One tip for video editing - consider making your voiceover mono, not stereo, so it's evenly split between both ears!
“So, how’d you get caught?”
“Mario blinked.”
It's really neat to see how these sorts of persistent cycles (either a programmed one such as the blinks or and fundamental electronic one such as the main hum) underlying a single run can be so helpful in verification. Hiding the name felt jarring because I know the drama-loving lizard brain part of me clicked the video for that, but with your justification and more rational thought, a rehabilitative stance such as that you've presented is wayyy healthier for everyone involved, so thank you!
Thanks for making me manually aware of my own blinking
that's crazy! i always love watching these videos, my favorite is learning about how the ways to catch cheaters develops. youre awesome !
Mario is like **blink** then the console is like "IM OUTTA HERE"
Always fun seeing how speedrunners can take the most obscure mechanics and find uses for them. In this case, cheat detection. Great video!
Respect for trying to say pannenkoek2012 name with your best dutch! Good attention to detail.
Dankjewel!!
nice to see new vid from you. Cheers from Germany
brother please centre your audio.
*center
🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
@@sniddler9114🫵🦅🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
@@sniddler9114 center is the correct spelling regardless... so...
center* welcome to earth alien
Didnt realise I have ignorant people trying to correct me
Imagine you just go on with your morning and a speedrun you made 13 years ago is removed because mario blinked a bit late
The fact that this run is older then me and it is now only being exposed 💀💀💀
youngling 😶
The fact that you are younger than probably many people in the comment section, yet you not only made a funny point, but in a grammatically coherent way, gives me hope. Good luck in the future, kiddo!
8:09 this reminds me of a lil thought experiment from a teacher's coding analogy
we got a scenario where we had 2 "make sure carboard boxes in a small factory line werent empty". sooo we said stuff like
"machine arm puts em on a balance, removes from line if too light"
or
"depth scanner above them. machine arm removes empty ones"
...only for em to go "place a fan in its direction so it blows away the empty 1s"........
obvs, some stuff needs/benefits from complex ways. but aside that, there is a reason why priorize simplicity.
(unless ur a mad hobbyst ofc. feel free 2 go wild👍)
"you blinked"
- withered bonnie
FYI, your audio balance is pretty off when listening to this with headphones. It goes back and forth throughout the video, but there are large sections of it where uour voice is louder in the left ear than right which just makes this entire thing a bit difficult to listen to without literally changing my computer OS settings to force mono audio.
No wonder it took so long to be caught. Blink and you'll miss it!
That's a really interesting find. I'm all for the most creative methods of analyzing gameplay footage, and this shows how not only creative people can get, but how much more information is available for these games that isn't released. That's a ton of attention paid into the gameplay recordings. Well done, great find.
I noticed that your audio settings may need to be tweaked.
In some parts of the video you came out louder in the left speaker, but then you were louder in the right. It's not too distracting, just something I noticed.
Mario 64 flipped though... Blimey that's gonna be fun to see
I noticed this too. It almost seems like he has one of those microphones where it will record audio on the sides and he might be facing his head towards the left of his microphone so it's louder on the left. Sometimes the audio is equal in both ears, which sounds like he talked straight at his mic instead of off to the side. At 4:40 it looks like he's angling his head to the right (his left).
it was extremely distracting for me, could barely focus on the video lol
I’ve always been curious if moderation teams consider withholding this information and keeping the cheating detection methods secret to prevent future cheaters from working around them. Nonetheless, amazing video and glad this was shared
Being transparent is better policy.
You wouldn't want evidence in a real life court hidden when someone is being tried to prevent others from potentially learning from the mistakes that were made.
It's good to know them, so that you know how not to do it.
I think a detection method like this is safe to publish, because it's very difficult to account for. You can't just make Mario's blink cycle line up to splices at will.
The benefit of being open with the community about cheat detection is that it encourages people to keep their eyes open & raise concerns if they see odd things. Speedrunning is different to a developer addressing cheaters in their game, because a dev doesn't want to give away the gaps in their game design or security.... with speedrunning, it only hurts the community to keep cheat-detection a secret because it undermines their trust in the moderation teams. The reality is that the more cheat-detection methods are known, the harder it is for someone to circumvent them because they don't just have a handful of mods to trick... now they need to get past the keen eyes of other players & the internet as well.
Is funny how no one notice the coin difference in the beggining, but the blinking test is next level check
Drogie: I will not name the cheaters
Jobst: So anyway Tsukushima cheated all these different ways. He also cheated his world record SR. look at all these other people that cheated too!
😂