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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

Everyone knew it was probably faked, but for the longest time there was no smoking gun that refuted the run's legitimacy without any plausible deniability. You have to remember that the speed runner gave plausible answers to many of the concerns brought up, which took a lot of concrete work to disprove (for example, proving that the map seeds they used required different runs, which required special tooling to bruteforce check against).

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Nobody knew it was fake before the investigation started.

The investigation didn't even start because they were suspicious. The team wanted to create a TAS and decided to recreate Groobo as a starting point, then optimise from there. First step of making a TAS was to bruteforce the map generation seed.

And they quickly encountered issues, and it quickly devolved into an investigation of just how "cheated" it was. Partly because for their TAS usecase, they didn't really care if the run was played on multiple versions, as long as it was still a single save file with a single map seed. But I assume it was mostly curiosity at that point.

Groobo's defence was didn't come until near the end of the investigation, and was more or less: "Yes, I did that. But it was all disclosed to the SDA judges, and they allowed it under the rules of that time".

Were the two inconsistencies I quoted not smoking guns?

The problem is that the menu is not part of the timed portion of the video and is just there for the viewer. In his response the runner said he simply used an old random intro he had when he combined the segments. The disappearing item might not have been enough either since it would not have had any consequence and could have been a simple continuity issue when redoing segments. If it was the only thinks we had pointed out it likely would not have been removed based on the response from SDA.

The premise of being a segmented run uploaded by an amateur a decade ago provides a _lot_ of leeway.

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