helloyou absolutes legends as I've said before cheating exists in every single competition and speedrunning is no exception we've even covered some examples of speedrunners doctoring videos and demos in order to try and fool people into believing their claims of impressive feats it may seem counterintuitive but you'd be surprised at how often it's some of the best players that inevitably try to fake runs you might think that having the talent to achieve a world record would make someone less susceptible to cheating but it often works against them having talent tends to make people feel entitled they
feel like they deserve the world record and when the game they play doesn't give them the luck they need they become increasingly frustrated on top of this having talent and deep knowledge of a game makes you a better cheater you know what tools to use and how to hide your edits you understand what does or doesn't make sense what is or isn't possible and what's believable when top players cheat it's almost always detected by other top players looking much deeper than a normal spectator might in Super Mario 64 multiple world record holders have been caught
splicing runs by using audio analysis combined with a healthy knowledge of what the Nintendo 64 can and can't output but these runs went under the radar for years because the discrepancy is so slight that to any normal viewer it looks exactly the same as any of the run the fact that better players make better cheaters means that arguments such as he's such a good player he has no reason to cheat are fundamentally flawed when Billy Mitchell and Todd Rogers were exposed as frauds this was one of the most common arguments their defenders try to make
if anything having a better understanding of a game makes you even more likely to cheat which is why at the top level proof standards are so important I myself could craft a fake speedrun that I'm sure 99.9% of you would completely miss because I know enough about the games I play to make it believable but what would happen if I tried to fake a speedrun for a game I didn't play this would make it much much harder to do it would perhaps make it impossible if you don't play the game you're probably going to have
to steal the footage from other players once you've done that you'll have to combine them in a way that makes it seem unique but then you're leaving yourself open to continuity errors as a speedrunner i know generally how splices should or shouldn't be so I could pull off some pretty fantastic edits but I would have no idea if what I'm stringing together makes any sense what about if you weren't a speedrunner at all but we're still hell-bent on trying to fake a speedrun well it just so happens we have an example of this very thing
and it's one of the worst abominations of a fate speedrun I've ever seen now generally some random noob trying to look cool by editing together a fake speedrun isn't that interesting but the monstrosity we will examine today was crafted by a YouTube channel with over 14 million subscribers and the video in question has millions of views the video contains every sin Under the Sun stolen speedruns impossible gameplay terrible baffling editing it's truly a work of art and today we will break it apart the video in question comes from the Mexican channel by Dublin it is
one of the largest channels on YouTube with over 42 million subscribers according to their Wikipedia page they specialized in the creation of original and viral content keep the word original in mind throughout this video on the 17th of December 2017 they uploaded a video titled asunder Super Mario and Cinco minutos which translates to passing Super Mario in five minutes the description states join us to see how our friend Tavo Betancourt in a relaxed and fun way plays this legendary 80s super mario video game incredibly in just five minutes he has a pretty nice layout containing
the essentials like a timer and heart rate monitor I wonder where he got the inspiration to include those the premise is simple taro is going to finish Super Mario Brothers in five minutes which honestly isn't that crazy of an accomplishment over 100 speed runners have already done it so it's really nothing too amazing but the problem is that taro isn't a speed runner and despite not being incredibly difficult beating Super Mario Brothers in five minutes does take some time to learn how to do taro has his own YouTube career to worry about with his personal
channel having almost 5 million subscribers so I assume he is pretty busy as I mentioned earlier if you are not a speed runner and you want to try and fake a speedrun your only option is to steal footage from somewhere else which is exactly what Thabo does the choice of footage doesn't seem too make a whole lot of sense though and this might be because he has no clue about Super Mario speedrunning but he chooses a tool-assisted speedrun the TAS was made by KLM Z in 2008 and from the first moment of the speedrun we
find out why it was a bad choice the test uses a technique known as fast acceleration which is performed whenever Mario starts from a standstill in order to get to max speed in the quickest manner the problem with this technique though is that the inputs require you to press left and right on these same frame while the software does technically allow these inputs to happen they aren't possible to do on a regular Nintendo controller because of the way the d-pad functions it is for this reason that the technique is banned from using speedrunning so aside
from the fact that fast acceleration is too difficult to pull off even if it were possible Tavo is using a regular controller and wouldn't be able to do it even if he had the talent this task only fast acceleration isn't to be confused with the difficult maneuvers speedrunners do actually use in runs which is also called fast acceleration this is a much easier albeit still difficult set of inputs that are at least possible to execute one really bizarre thing about this video is the sound and music it has been pitched weirdly so it doesn't sound
anything like it should there might be a couple of reasons this was done the first being the fear of the music triggering YouTube's copyright protection the other might be a way to make it seem different from the footage that was being stolen either way it just sounds strange when turbo takes the shortcut in the first level it seems normal at first glance but there is something that is not quite right I'm going to play the shortcut and then pause it for a few seconds see if you can identify what's wrong with the run if you
want to try and work it out you'll probably need to watch it a few times [Music] congratulations to those who managed to figure it out the problem here is that Tavo collects 11 coins in the room but the coin counter goes up by 12 for some reason he decided to use footage from a different run for the shortcut my only guess is that he wanted to make it less obvious that the run was stolen so he figured if he spliced different runs together it would be less traceable the problem with splicing different runs together is
that the points and coins went match up between levels Tavo was keenly aware of this so his solution was to crop the top display from the original task speed run throughout the entire run the display will be from that same TAS the crop was really poorly done though and this brings some pretty funny consequences as we'll see later if you are really astute you would also have noticed that the cropped display includes some of the texture underneath causing the top of the graphics to appear distorted as they aren't properly aligned if you were really really
astute you would have picked up on the fact that the display appeared a couple of frames later than it should have the display should appear on the same frame as the level textures but in the video it lags behind if you were really really really astute you would also have noticed that the flashing of the coin in the display does not align with the coins in the level these are always on the same cycle so there should be no difference in brightness between the two at any point I have an inkling about where this footage
might be from that will come back to this a bit later at the end of the level the task performs the flagpole glitch which skips the lowering of the flag this trick is definitely doable by a human and is even performed in the world record runs the difference though is that there is a specific setup that a human must use if they want to get this trick consistently the TAS essentially euros it without any setup at all which is not feasible in any way by someone actually playing the game in 1-2 different footages again stolen
and this time there is some pretty clear artifacts that help us identify exactly where it is from as a couple of moments you can see a line appear through the graphics also throughout the level you can actually hear a clicks from a controller indicating that the footage has been extracted from a live video the run was stolen from the world record holder at the time known as darbian one of the all-time great Super Mario players specifically it's from his run of four minutes 56 seconds and 878 milliseconds set on the 5th of September 2016 the
same lines can be seen in his live footage and the audio clicks are exactly the same I'm guessing it was this video that gave battling the inspiration to make their video given that Derby ins run has millions of views if they likely saw the opportunity to recreate it and to try to make another viral video from it this is probably why they included a heart rate monitor as well speaking of which is completely pointless it just switches between 85 and 89 for the entire run I mean it's obviously fake but they could have at least
tried to make it seem realistic at the end of 1-2 is where one of the more egregious errors caused by the terribly cropped display happens when running on the top of the stage to get to the warp pipes Mario is completely obscured this is definitely not what is supposed to happen when he enters the warp pipe the display at the top disappears before the graphics do which again is not normal the display should disappear on the exact same frame as the rest of the level of graphics the reason they fade early is because the display
is still going by the timing of the TAS which does a much faster strategy for 1-2 therefore it finishes the level early causing the display to vanish this ends up making the loading times between levels much faster than they otherwise should be as that lost time has to be made up to catch up with the TAS going back to the short cutting 1-1 I said I had an inkling a few the footage belonged to and it's probably Derby ins as well the video in the short cut matches up with the same run that was used
for 1-2 but the sound of the control the clicks are pretty bad in Derby ins run during the short cut and I think butter burn thought it was a bit too much so they tried to fix it by keeping the audio from the TAS run during that section the audio from the coins that I collected in the room do not match up with what is happening on screen and the audio matches perfectly with the TAS honestly the short cut in the task doesn't even look inhuman so I'm not sure why they would have changed it
if anything he just seems like they're going to as much effort as possible to try and disguise the fact that they are ripping off the people's videos oh and I haven't even mentioned the fact that Tahoe is making a complete mockery out of the entire thing by sipping coke and eating pizza between levels I'm not entirely sure what the motive behind this creative choice was because one might think they are trying to make it obvious this entire video is a joke but I'm not too sure about that given all of the effort they're going to
to make this footage seem original and hide the fact that they stole it it makes it seem as though they are playing this one straight the original runs weren't credited there was no mention that this was a parody or fake or anything and as you'll see later he really tries to sell it as real so I can only take the coke drinking and pizza eating as him trying to be under on eclis cool by playing at such a top level while eating and drinking in my opinion it just comes off as really douchey though back
to the run in 4-1 he goes back to the original task with all of the same issues including the TAS only fast acceleration and the flagpole glitch with no setup to illustrate turbos cluelessness before 4-2 begins he reaches for a slice of pizza but doesn't even know if he has time or not the indecisiveness results in his hands being off the controller when Mario starts moving in 4-2 he steals footage from a different speed runner this time it's cosmic another one of the all-time greatest super mario players the run that was taken was cosmics 456
point 9 9 4 set on the 30th of May 2017 again we can hear the audio clicks from cosmics controller as the video was ripped from the livestream at a couple of moments there are some pretty bizarre things happening in the display a coin here a brick there this is because the task hits a coin block here and a brick here the task finishes 4-2 way quicker because it uses a much more complicated strategy in order to change Mario's position which allows the wrong warp to be performed you can see how far it is ahead
because of how quickly the display disappears compared to the level textures when Mario appears in the warp zone we transitioned back to the original tasks and the loading time between 4 - 2 and the warp zone is way quicker than it should be a - 1 through - 8 - 3 is just the test run with no other runs mixed in the funny thing about 8 - 2 is that Mario is facing backwards for the entire time in order to do this mario has to perform a frame perfect to jump every single time he lands
it's kind of baffling why they would go to the trouble of splicing in realistic runs for other levels but keeping 8-2 from the tasks when it's so obviously unrealistic but also includes a crazy wall jump right before the end he finishes 8-3 with 244 left on the clock something that's impossible to do without the TAS only fast acceleration at the beginning of the level going into Bowser's Castle his heart rate is still chilling at a cool 85 by comparison when darbian reached this stage of the run his heart rate had climbed to 130 the first
three rooms of Bowser's Castle are just Derby ins run again all of the previous issues appear due to the cropped display it appears and disappears at the wrong times and you can even see the tops of flying fish appear when it gets to the underwater portion it transitions back to the tasks this is also pretty funny because Mario sprite is all messed up this happens when the TAS only fast acceleration is used underwater Mario is stuck in a state of facing both left and right and we are able to maintain that state for the entire
duration of the swim because you don't actually need to keep holding right in order to keep your momentum underwater and ruiji hilariously demonstrated this by juggling while swimming during an agdq run heading into Bowser the TAS faces backwards until hitting the bridge switch maintaining frame perfect jumps in order to do so his heart rate skyrockets to a blazing 95 beats per minute afterwards when mario gets to the princess there is a nother splice in the footage I'm guessing this was because they needed to extend the end screen so that tava could milk his reaction as
much as possible speaking of which Tavo gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen you again I'm confused is this supposed to be a casual run or a terrific achievement why play the entire thing cooled by eating pizza only to then act like you've done something amazing the entire presentation is just so incongruent what's possibly the weirdest thing of all though is the fact that the timer ends up being 5 minutes and 12 seconds even though the actual time of the run was 4 minutes and 54 seconds as that was the final time for
the TAS I am clueless as to why the timer doesn't match up with reality one reason could be that it's obviously just a self-made timer and sucks at being accurate that is probably the case the other reason is that they knew the actual time of the TAS run they were basing the display off was faster than the world record and they thought that beating the record by 2 seconds would make the fact that the run was fake a bit too obvious but that begs to the question if the final timer was so slow why did
they use such fast runs they could have just stolen any hundreds of runs that were faster than 5 minutes and 12 seconds and just used an accurate timer this would have been actually believable another weird to think about the video is that he doesn't even start or stop a timer he clearly hasn't watched any speedruns and has no idea how the speedrun has actually used their timers the entire video is so strange and weird and his cluelessness just makes it more bizarre the saddest part about all of this is that if the channel actually did
a video celebrating and explaining the real speedrunners and their achievements they probably could have gotten similar or even more views a few months later the speedrun at bismuth made a youtube video explaining the world record and his video received double the amount of views he didn't even have the millions of subscribers but abun had either instead he chose to steal footage from legitimate runners that actually put the work in and tried to claim them as his own there was no credit given whatsoever it was just a shallow pathetic attempt at creating a viral video original
content my ass believe it or not the real speedrunners still get comments on their videos suggesting that they stole footage from bada-boing it's insane even in the event the creators of this video thought everyone would take it as a joke they still should have given credit where it's due I really do think this was an honest attempt at trying to fool people in order to get views now I want to give a huge shout out to cosmic for helping out with this video I found out about this video because cosmic made a tweet about it
after getting yet another comment suggesting that he stole his run from bata blonde if you want to watch legitimate Super Mario gameplay you should definitely follow cosmic on Twitch and subscribe to his YouTube channel I will put a link to both cosmics and Derby ins channels in the description please go and support real speedrunners thank you so much for watching you legends I hope you are having a fantastic day and I will see you in the next video [Music] you [Music]
