Metal Gear Rising speedrunner admits to faking world record speedrun at SGDQ 2022

During Games Done Quick’s (GDQ) annual Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) event held last week, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance speedrunner Mekarazium seemed to set a world record in the game’s Blade Wolf DLC by finishing the expansion in just under seven minutes. However, the runner has since admitted that his record-breaking run of six minutes and 55 seconds was a fake. 

In a message sent over the weekend to GDQ enforcement staff (via PCGamesN), Mekarazium, who performed his speedruns remotely at the event, confessed that the run was not a live, continuous speedrun, but rather a pre-recorded, segmented run. 

In response, GDQ has banned the speedrunner from future GDQ events. 

“This is absolutely unacceptable and attempts to undermine the integrity of the speedrunning community that we love and support,” the organization said in a statement. “We have removed Mekarazium’s runs from our YouTube archive, and will not permit him to run in the future.”

Whereas a continuous, or single-segment, speedrun involves simply running through a game in one sitting — the type of run typically featured at GDQ — segmented runs are comprised of multiple gameplay clips that are stitched together to demonstrate what a “perfect” speedrun could look like if a runner was playing at an optimal level all the time. In short, you optimize every segment (time spent in a level, time between checkpoints) of a game that you can via save states or checkpoint reloads, and then edit them together at the end to create a segmented speedrun. 

Mekarazium’s segmented speedrun was falsely presented as a single-segment run to GDQ viewers. It was also an “incentive run” — a type of speedrun featured at the event once viewers donate enough money to charity. 

The runner said to GDQ that the Blade Wolf run was supposed to be a real-time run, but after his prior run of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance — which was a real-time run — went “way better” than expected, he opted to exhibit the segmented run to “top [his prior run] off.”

“It was supposed to be a real-time run, but [I] changed my mind at the last second after switching the saves,” Mekarazium said. “I’ve done an actual bad thing and I shouldn’t have done this on the event.”

While Mekarazium’s seemingly record-shattering run was a fake, SGDQ 2022 was also home to quite a few stellar real-time speedruns, with runs of Shadow of the Colossus, Elden Ring, and Monster Hunter Rise being just some of the standouts. In addition, the event also raised a whopping $3.41 million for charity.