A player who goes by Quinten was on their way to securing a Guinness World Record in Roblox when they were beat out at the last moment by multiple speedruns that were so good, they seemed humanly impossible. A lesser player might have gone back to gambling on the Roblox ponies, but Quinten instead set out to prove that the new records were bogus. It worked.
As PCGamesN reports, Quinten was competing for the world record in a Roblox game called Ultimate Easy Obby that has over 100,000 reviews. It’s a zany, single-player obstacle course similar to something you might find in Fall Guys and was published by Roblox in partnership with the Guinness World Record company. Last month, Quinten secured a time of 05:48:96 following an “insane back-and-forth battle” with another Roblox speedrunner. It was the result of tons of time spent “optimizing every corner and jump,” the 18-year-old Belgian wrote on Reddit.
But then something bizarre happened. Quinten’s speedrun record was quickly beaten by three other random Roblox accounts. And not just by a little bit but six whole seconds. “For context: a 6-second gap on a speedrun this optimized is physically impossible,” they wrote. “It was heartbreaking to see a week of grinding ruined by scripts.” Undeterred, Quinten decided to speedrun an investigation into the mysterious rivals to find proof of the suspected cheating.
This evidence fell into three main buckets. The first was bogus time stamps. Ultimate Easy Obby features a linear obstacle course consisting of 50 stages, but some of the mystery accounts’ timestamps were out of order. The new world record holder was also missing a “digital receipt” of ever having actually completed the race. “This proved he never actually touched the finish line trigger; he likely teleported a coordinate script to the end-game lobby, bypassing the verification check,” Quinten wrote.
But the real nail in the coffin was painstaking frame-by-frame analysis of Quinten’s own best recorded time to show that shaving six seconds off it would be impossible. “I took my best run and calculated the theoretical maximum time save possible (perfect pixels, zero drag),” they wrote. “Even with a TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun) level of perfection, the times the cheaters posted were mathematically impossible within the game’s physics engine.”
Surprisingly, it all worked. The evidence was submitted to Guinness which then went back, reviewed the records, and re-validated Quinten’s as the true World Record. “It felt amazing to successfully lobby a major organization to reverse verified records based on user-submitted digital forensics,” they wrote. The king of Ultimate Easy Obby can once again rest easy knowing at least one more small sliver of fraud has been carved out of Roblox.
