Spelunky World Record Holder Found To Have Cheated On Their Run

The main character from Spelunky

Image: Spelunky / Kotaku

A participant by the title of BarryMode has, for the very last 8 many years, held the entire world document for a run by Spelunky. Not any more, while, right after lovers learned that he’d cheated, with the evidence plainly obvious in the video he’d recorded of the run.

As Vice report, whilst BarryMode has now taken off his video clip from YouTube, though it was even now up supporters and fellow speedrunners recognized before this yr that a thing was off about it. In distinct, there was a one tile that was regularly missing from BarryMode’s footage that should not have been missing, and he stored producing selections on the place to go next that really should have resulted in him failing to publish a great time, because the odds of him picking the suitable path every single time were being extremely unlikely.

And it’s not like this suspicion was new some users of the Spelunky speedrunning community have had critical doubts about BarryMode’s run for a long time now, considering that his time of 2:30, posted eight years in the past, has still to be beaten, even by admirers placing countless numbers of hours into the pursuit, and pooling all of their speedrunning knowledge.

Then, in September of this yr, neighborhood member saturnin55 found a mod from 2012 that that described why that tile was missing: the mod allowed players to preserve and reload their runs, and placing the item that loaded this mod in the activity would…eliminate that identical solitary tile that was lacking from BarryMode’s run.

The only matter remaining to demonstrate now was why that tile was there at the incredibly start of BarryMode’s run, but lacking in subsequent levels. The community’s response is very simple more than enough for the reason that the mod he was utilizing skips the opening display screen, BarryMode spliced two different sets of footage with each other, the initially number of seconds from a vanilla edition of the activity, the rest from his modded run.

This terrific video below from Xanagear provides a excellent breakdown of what the mod was, and what led to the discovery of BarryMode’s cheating, while the comprehensive interview at Vice has comment from Spelunky designer Derek Yu, as properly as the revelation that Barrymode—who quickly confessed to the dishonest when confronted—is now chaotic generating extremely undesirable conservative memes.