They say that people make their own luck, but long-time Diablo world record holder Macej “Grobbo” Maselewski may have taken this proverb too literally when he manipulated dungeon seeds and spliced together footage from multiple runs to fraudulently claim a world record for over 15 years (courtesy of fantastic reporting by Ars Technica).
In hindsight, Maselewski’s seemingly impossible time of 3 minutes and 12 seconds did seem well… impossible. Anyone with a cursory understanding of the mechanics of Diablo will understand how improbably fortunate the run is. In Diablo, you progress to the next level of a dungeon by interacting with stairs that appear on random tiles within a (randomly) seeded map. During the now infamous run, Grobbo often encountered situations where he’d enter stairs only for the “next” stairs to be immediately visible. As you can imagine, this allowed rapid progression through the level. The run also included a clutch early drop of Naj’s Puzzler, a unique staff necessary for the run’s completion.
A Decade-Long Fraud
Importantly, Diablo’s map seeds are randomly generated when a save file is created based on a system clock that begins in January 1970 and ends in December 2038. This is the only valid date range that Diablo accepts. This will be important later.
A group of sleuths from within the game’s speedrunning community invested significant time and effort into investigating Maselewski’s run. Interestingly, this wasn’t the original intention of the team. The community never suspected Masewlewski of cheating, so nobody saw any reason to investigate the run further. What these runners intended to do was replicate the human luck of Grobbo by using tools to discover and generate the world record seed. Using custom-made analysis tools, the group automatically checked “billions” of valid Diablo seeds. As it turned out, Grobbo’s impossibly lucky seed didn’t even exist.
Or rather, it doesn’t exist legitimately. The team used software to force a game creation date outside the allowable range and discovered seeds that included the same Naj’s Puzzler drop, from the years 2056 and 2074. However, that wasn’t the end of Grobbo’s game manipulation. The run’s levels aren’t consistent with one specific seed, even the illegitimate ones. Rather, these levels come from multiple different seeds spliced together to create an incredibly fast run. The team told Ars Technica that it suspects that over 13 runs were spliced together to create the world record run.
After this bombshell, additional evidence of game splicing in the run was uncovered which suggests that Grobbo was using different versions of Diablo on different patches to create the run. After this evidence was published, Maselewski reportedly claimed that he never hid the spliced nature of the run. The description of Grobbo’s video of the run does mention “27 segments” and “luck manipulation.” However, the methods employed by Grobbo circumvent the rules of Speed Demos Archive, and the record has been removed as a result.
One of the investigators, Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil told Ars Technica that there was a real harm in Grobbo’s actions. “This big running community just stopped trying to run this game in that category,” he said. “For more than a decade, this had a chilling impact on that community.”
