Pasando Super Mario en 5 minutos
(What's the point of making fake speedruns if you get caught and hated?)
Pasando Super Mario en 5 minutos (Passing Super Mario in 5 minutes) is an infamous YouTube video uploaded by Mexican YouTube channel Badabun. In the video we see Tavo Betancourt supposedly "speedrunning" Super Mario Bros. The video is better known for its analysis done by Karl Jobst.
Background
On December 17, 2017, Badabun uploaded a video called Pasando Super Mario in 5 minutos (Passing Super Mario in 5 minutes), which featured member Tavo Betancourt allegedly playing Super Mario Bros. and clearing it in 5 minutes. Despite the obvious points that would raise skepticism like the weirdly pitched audio, the video would go on relatively unnoticed compared to Badabun's other content at the time, possibly because it didn't appeal interest to its main audience and because 5:00 in SMB wasn't that much of an accomplishment at the time.
Tavo Betancourt's charade was going neutral and innocent for 2 years, until January 10, 2020, when Karl Jobst uploaded a video called The Worst Fake Speedrun on YouTube, which broke apart Badabun's video and exposed how laughably faked Badabun's speedrun was. The video covered all evidence of spliced footage and not only that, it even questioned why making such a video instead of one celebrating and explaining the speedrun community's achievements which could have gotten him more views as demonstrated by Karl showing a video of Bismuth on the matter which got the double of views, even without Tavo's millions of subscribers.
Por qué no es un speedrun (Why It's No Speedrun)
- Between the stolen footage they used lots of TAS footage, which was a terrible idea since the TAS uses frame-perfect and (humanly) impossible tricks which include:
- Fast acceleration, where you have to press left and right at once, an impossible circumstance given Tavo was clearly "playing" with a D-Pad controller - a NES controller specifically, as can be seen here.
- Flagpole glitch, which allows speedrunners to skip the "flag fall" sequence of the end of the level, saving a potential framerule. Problem is, he does it without any previous setup, which is unfeasible in real-time speedruns. Flagpole glitch will stand for no-setup flagpole glitch for the rest of the article.
- There's a whopping lot of evidence of spliced footage across all the levels:
- In general, Tavo/Badabun always kept the TAS' status bar when changing footage. Due to bad timing, this made the status bar disappear before level graphics on warp pipes instead of at the same frame as it should, among other issues that will be seen later, so keep this dumb splicing in mind.
- WORLD 1-1: First instance of fast acceleration and flagpole glitch. Particularly on the shortcut, Tavo/Badabun changed the footage to speedrunner Darbian's speedrun, which led to 3 issues:
- Tavo collects 11 coins but the counter increases to 13, despite initially marking 1.
- The flashing from the coin counter sprite and the level coins is out of sync, unlike in actual SMB.
- The top of the level graphics looks warped, due to Tavo/Badabun cutting the TAS footage's top at 25px instead of 24px (the height of the status bar in NTSC SMB).
- WORLD 1-2:
- During two frames, graphics appear warped on a certain scanline, which allowed to identify the footage as Darbian's speedrun.
- You can hear buttons; these come from Darbian's speedrun.
- As a product of the spliced status bar, the elevator platforms are desynchronized and Mario is completely obscured when going to the top of the stage, which is not the case on the actual SMB.
- WORLD 4-1: Fast acceleration and flagpole glitch again.
- WORLD 4-2: Fast acceleration again, on the warp zone. Now footage comes from speedrunner Kosmicd12, spawning a coin and a block at the top, because the TAS hits a coin block and a brick block there, product of splicing issues.
- WORLD 8-1: Fast acceleration and flagpole glitch... again.
- WORLD 8-2: Fast acceleration... once again. On a dumb move, Tavo/Badabun choose to use the TAS footage for that level, which was filled with frame-perfect backward jumps and a wall clip/jump at the end. Keep in mind the Bullet Bill glitch performed at the end is humanly possible.
- WORLD 8-3: Fast acceleration... but no flagpole glitch at least. Also the timer finishes at 244, only possible via fast acceleration.
- WORLD 8-4:
- Cheep-Cheep tops are seen on the status bar, reflecting the different events on the TAS. Again, product of the spliced status bar.
- Mario's sprite is messed up in the underwater section. This happens when fast acceleration is used underwater.
- The final section contains frame-perfect backward jumps, like in WORLD 8-2.
- The timer says it was 5:12, while the actual time of the speedrun was 4:54. There's two possible reasons as to why the timer is wrong:
- It's a self-made timer and it sucks at being accurate.
- The footage was so fast that it could be deemed impossible by a human, so they changed it to seem more natural.
- The heart rate monitor, besides being fake, is pointless, since it often only switches between 85 and 89 even on the last moments of the speedrun, and is overall not accurate.
- The desync between Tavo's button presses and the gameplay (pssst, stolen footage) are so evident it's embarrasing, especially during WORLD 4-2's intro.
- Tavo made a complete mockery out of the entire thing by drinking coke and eating pizza, to make viewers think that it was easy.
- The audio has a weird flanger/pitch filter, possibly to cover audio cuts that could reveal it's faked.
- It actually did hurt the SMB speedrun community: before Karl Jobst stepped in, there was still people believing the legitimate runs were stolen footage from Badabun video, which is ironic and moreso infuriating considering it was Tavo/Badabun who stole the TAS footage.
Aftermath
The speedrun received 713K dislikes after it was exposed, with the added irony that Karl Jobst's video got more views than Badabun's, with a difference of 13,5M views VS 6M views as of August 31, 2021. It also became Karl's most viewed video, with The Biggest Cheating Scandal In Speedrunning History behind at 3,5M (a big differennce of 10M views) as of August 31, 2021. The nature of the video, as well as the now laughable faking speedrun antics, led to different parodies being made of it, including Kosmic himself (one of the authors of the stolen footage, as demonstrated by Karl).
Finally on January 13, 2021, 3 years after the original video, Tavo uploaded PIDO PERDÓN A LA COMUNIDAD GAMER (Speedrun de Mario) ("I ASK FORGIVENESS TO THE GAMER COMMUNITY (Mario Speedrun)") on his own channel, where he apologized for the fake speedrun, claiming he made it out of inexpertise, immaturity and for the views, recognizing he didn't achieve that with the video during its 2 year long innocence period and that it was very bad of him to steal something that doesn't belong to him (the speedrun footages). Comments on the apology video were negative and skeptic on whether the apology was being genuine or just for the clout, especially since Tavo has been aggresively answering to some comments that doubted him until finally disabling the comments.[1] As of August 31, 2021, the video has 47K dislikes over 5K likes. We could say the apology was not well received.
Videos
Badabun's videos
Response videos
References
Comments
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