That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level, so The Last Dance was the last, already beaten level. This article is fairly outdated for a developing story.
He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.
The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid.
That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy.
But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise.
Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision.
There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction.
Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.
The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level.
Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow”
When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway.
The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs.
Took more googling than expected to figure that one out, probably should have gone with a GPT.
Thabeast was pretty close to mid-way I think, and he wasn't the person who'd spent most time attempting this.
Has it? There's a confession, but this was an issue of major public significance (within a limited sphere). Do people never confess to things they didn't do?