SGDQ speedrunner admits to cheating by airing pre-recorded Metal Gear run

Metal Gear speedrunner Mekarazium’s record breaking run at the recent Summer Games Done Quick event has been taken down and has since been confirmed to be due to forgery and misrepresentation. Summer Games Done Quick is an annual event in which gamers come together and give it their all to speedrun through games, break records and most importantly, raise awareness and money for a charity cause. Many games were played, however Mekarazium’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengance run turned a lot of heads at the time.Mekarazium blazed through the game’s Blade Wolf DLC campaign, breaking the world record. Unfortunately, it was quickly revealed that his run was not in fact done live but was a pre-recording run that had spliced together previous speedruns.

In an official statement made by GDQ, the organization revealed Mekarazium’s speed run was not only forged but had been planned months prior to the event. “Yesterday, we were made aware that Mekazarium played a segmented video for his DLC run at Summer Games Done Quick 2022. Mekazarium has since admitted to this, both to some members of the community as well as directly to GDQ staff,” they stated. “He contacted our staff with a document detailing that he had planned this for over a month, demonstrating this was planned and intentional. This was made possible because of the remote nature of this particular run in the marathon.”

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GDQ officials then went on to add that they will be cracking down on this issue moving forward and that they will work to support the speedrunning community. “This is absolutely unacceptable and attempts to undermine the integrity of the speedrunning community that we love and support. The exact result they desired was unclear from the document, but it is clear that they believed we would not be willing to speak out about their behavior.”As a result of the incident, Mekazarium’s runs from GDQ’s Youtube archive have been removed and he will be unable to compete or run in the event in the future.This statement was obtained by PCGamesN, on July 5. The 2022 SGDQ began on June 26 and ran for a whole week before coming to an end on July 3. Prior to the global health crisis, the event was typically held in person in Minneapolis. Due to travel restrictions as well as general health and safety precautions, SGDQ changed up the format of their event so that players would be able to live stream their runs remotely. 

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This year the event aimed to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. By the completion of the event, SGDQ reported that they had raised $3 million for the cause.