A Spelunky Classic speedrun record that has stood for the past eight years has been proven to be a lie. Investigators have found that BarryMode's time of two minutes and 30 seconds posted in a video in April 2013 was the product of a save-and-reload cheat that allowed him to replay the exact same levels over and over to achieve an optimal and unbeatable time.
In case you've never played, Spelunky's levels are all randomly generated, meaning speedrunning the game can be very difficult. Getting a time under 10 minutes is already an accomplishment, but beating the game under three minutes takes about as much luck as it does skill.
An explainer video from shows just how BarryMode got caught nearly a decade after posting his record-setting run. The 2:30 time had long been questioned by the Spelunky speedrunning community, but the investigation into BarryMode's run really didn't get started until February of this year after community members noted that BarryMode's run featured a strange missing tile during the transition screens between levels. After diving into the game's code, they discovered that the transition screens should never change regardless of what happens in the game, so there must have been some other reason for the missing tile.
It turns out there was. A mod called Savable Spelunky removes that tile when a user saves their run, replacing the normal rocky tile with a blank space. Either it's a glitch or a deliberate act on the part of the modder, but either way the viewer can tell the game is modded thanks to that missing tile.
Savable Spelunky takes out the randomness of Spelunky, allowing the player to keep re-running the game until they've memorized an optimal path. The mod starts players on the second level, however, so BarryMode spliced in a vanilla level one using video editing software.
But why the deception? BarryMode told that he did for tha🐎t sweet YouTube money. "In 2013, I realized that being a YouTuber was a profession and many people were making a living as gamers," BarryMode explained. "I had just gotten married and was having children so games were noꦰt part of my life at all. Still, I made an attempt to start a channel because I saw the potential of it helping to support my family."
Barry's Spelunky speedrun generated over 40,000 views, but gaming never turned into a full-time gig. Instead, he switched to making conservative meme videos which are all generally pretty awful but get way more clicks.
BarryMode has since taken down the speedrun, which means is now the Spelunky speedrun champion. But more than that, we should all recognize who actually held the Spelunky speedrun record for 11 years never received any acknowledgment because of BarryMode's cheated run.