How the scourge of cheating is changing speedrunning

Enlarge / A familiar screen to many. (credit: Rockstar)

When an Australian gamer called "Anti" completed a full playthrough of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreasin a scant four hours, the feat almost seemed impossible. Yet any fans of speedrunning-an activity where die-hard players jockey to complete the game as quickly as possible, with different rulesets forming discrete "categories" of competition-could see this incredible "run" for themselves on the game's leaderboards. Anti had posted the entire thing online.

An old saying may be coming to mind, and yes: it was too good to be true. A fellow competitor started analyzing Anti's videos to optimize their own in-game routes, but they noticed that several vehicles in these runs left a faint smoke trail when they accelerated. Since no other runs on the GTA: San Andreasspeedrun leaderboard evinced this telltale exhaust, this competitor began to wonder: was Anti somehow messing with the game in order to pull off this record-breaking time?

In the PC versions of the GTAgames, after all, the files that control the way cars perform are easily accessible via a plain text editor like Windows Notepad. Game fans know this. And by slightly boosting certain variables to make cars accelerate ever-so-slightly faster, this fellow speedrunner was able to recreate the smoke effect in Anti's runs. Soon, several runners started complaining to the greater community; someone even created a slick montage full of evidence that Anti had modified the game in order to shave vital seconds from their records.

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