Behind the Pokemon Red World Record Speedrun cheating scandal   

At the end of last year, the speedrun world record was broken in the “Any% Glitchless” category for Pokémon Red on the Gameboy Advance. However, this attempt by player Jadiwi was subsequently scrubbed from the leaderboard and disqualified from prize money gains after close examination revealed that cheating was involved. This incident has led moderators to reassess their verification policies for world record speedruns.  

Even today, speedrunners are still trying to beat each other in racing through the first generation of Pokémon games while achieving specific goals. In the category “Any% Glitchless,” speedrunners focus on getting to the end of game as fast as possible without worrying about their percentage of completion (Any%). However, taking advantage of in-game bugs is forbidden (“Glitchless”). 

On January 26, 2023, the Any% Glitchless world record was surpassed for the first time in 2 years. In a legitimate run, a speedrunner named pokeguy broke the record with a time of 1 hour 44 minutes 3 seconds. The Pokémon Speedrun community voiced the opinion that 1 hour 43 minutes would be the absolute shortest record possible by a human being, due to random factors that can easily affect the time as well as the degree of luck involved.  

However, the world record was seemingly broken again on December 26, 2023, by Pokémon series speedrunner Jadiwi, who completed an Any% Glitchless run in 1 hour 43 minutes and 52 seconds. 

This meant that Jadiwi was on track to receive a maximum total of $8500 USD in bounties (prize money) put up by the Pokémon speedrunning community. For breaking the world record in the Pokémon Red “Any% Glitchless” category, $5000 USD in prize money is up for grabs, with a further bounty of $2,500 USD payable to whoever the world record holder is on February 1, 2024. Furthermore, a $1000 USD bounty was to be awarded if someone achieved a completion time in the 1 hour 43 minute bracket by December 31, 2023. The rule for all three bounties was that the run must be performed live on a streaming platform.  

The short period of time and relatively low number of attempts in which Jadiwi managed to attain the world record caught the attention of the moderating team. Jadiwi started broadcasting his Any% Glitchless attempts on March 26 and was able to continuously improve upon his personal bests, going from 2:12:54 on March 26 to 1:47:39 in June after only 119 attempts. Conversely, world record holder pokeguy racked up around 2800 runs in a 6-month period prior to breaking the record and was also making attempts prior to this.  

When examining Jadiwi’s December 26 world record attempt, Pokemon Speedruns Moderation Team noticed numerous red flags that suggested the speedrunner was cheating. Firstly, evidence emerged to show that Jadiwi’s world record run was pre-recorded, which would disqualify him from the prize money. The first sign of this was that he did not respond to a message from a moderator in the Twitch chat asking him to reset his emulator to prove that the world record run was not prerecorded. Jadiwi later claimed that he did not see the message in time. 

The moderators discovered that differences in Jadiwi’s “Sum of Best Segments” score between his 10^th Twitch stream run and his 11^th run (the World Record) didn’t make sense. There was a gap of only 50 minutes between these two streams, with top speedrunners agreeing that it would be impossible for him to decrease his Sum of Best Segments score from 1:41:24 to 1:40:54 in this time. In response, Jadiwi claimed that he was doing runs on a different computer on December 25 and 26 because he was at his parents’ house, and had accidentally used an out-of-date splits file. However, this discrepancy led the moderators to realize that the world record beating run actually took place prior to his relocation. 

Lastly, the moderators noticed a slight difference in Jadiwi’s stream layout. The LiveSplit layout was exactly the same in the first 10 runs, but for the 11^th world record run, it moved a couple of pixels. This would not be suspicious on its own, but stood out in light of the other evidence against the speedrunner, adding to the evidence that the world record run was pre-recorded. 

Jadiwi subsequently confessed to cheating in this world record run as well as others. In his confession, Jadiwi states that he started out making legitimate speedrun attempts. He reveals that his decision to start cheating came from a decline in motivation after thousands of unsuccessful attempts. All Jadiwi’s speedrun records have since been removed and he has been banned from Speedrun.com and the Pokémon speedrunners’ community Discord server.  

In their report, the moderating team apologized for allowing the situation to go on for as long as it did, acknowledging that they should have gone public with their suspicions and demanded a higher standard of proof from Jadiwi earlier on. They stated that “We are reevaluating our policies for verifying the legitimacy of runs submitted to the leaderboard, and we will be vigilant to not let this happen again in future.” 

Written by. Verity Townsend based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2024-01-11 18:29 JST)