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The Spelunky world record for speedrunning has been revealed to be achieved through cheating, according to a report from Waypoint.
Back in 2013, a mysterious player known as BarryMode published a video of a run of Spelunky wherein he completed the game in only 2 minutes and 30 seconds, instantly raising red flags among the community for multiple reasons. Aside from BarryMode being virtually unknown at the time, the chief concern expressed by other players has always been that his completion of the game was quite literally too fast. It’s been nearly a decade, yet the next closest time has been capped at 2 minutes and 40 seconds, which is a pretty notable gap in the world of speedrunning.
It took almost a decade for the community to catch BarryMode, but one eagle-eyed player named XanaGear finally discovered that there was a single missing tile in the corner of the screen during certain stage transitions. A look into the code confirmed that something was amiss, and soon after, it was fully revealed that BarryMode had modded the game. Spelunky is a procedurally-generated title, but the mod allowed BarryMode to re-run the same stages over and over again until he perfected them, and he then spliced the clips together to create a cohesive but entirely fake speedrun.
When Waypoint reached out to BarryMode, he wasted no time in admitting his wrongdoing and apologized for his deception, saying “It was bad character and I can admit that.” He has since taken the video down continues with a refusal to state that he truly cheated, claiming instead that he merely “bypassed luck.” It seems like a weird hill to die on, all things considered, but some speedrunners have nevertheless accepted the apology as genuine.
The Spelunky world record is now held by speedrunner Groomp, who accomplished the aforementioned 2 minute and 40 second run of the game.
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