The Biggest Scandal In The History Of Racing (Games)

TrackMania is an extremely popular racing series, and as such, it has attracted a bunch of digital Dominic Torettos vying to be the best.

But, YouTuber Wirtual recently revealed compelling evidence pointing to the likelihood that one of TrackMania's best players may have been Lance Armstronging it the entire time. But with video game cars, instead of a real bike. Unless Lance also cheated at whatever bullshit cycling video game Grandmas buy disappointed kids.

TrackMania legend Riolu seemingly achieved leaderboard-topping times not just in an illegal manner, but worse -- in one that's boring as well. He allegedly did not use hacks that made his car go faster or explode his opponent's tires, but through a legitimate feature within TrackMania that slows down the game itself. By playing the game in slow-motion, cheaters gain way more time to execute complex inputs with precision and later cover their tracks by submitting the in-engine recording at regular speed. Imagine the challenge of beating Max Payne if you could do an entire playthrough with bullet-time mode on. The tampering is impossible to spot with the naked eye, but there's a program that gives away cheaters by capturing and showing their inputs during the game. Their inputs come at much higher speeds than what we assume possible from anyone outside the Speed Racer family.

Wirtual questioned another big name in the scene, technoTM, whose twitchy inputs are similar to those of Riolu. 

Surprisingly, he took it like a champ (of mischief) and quickly admitted to using bullet-time. technoTM specifically cites the pressure to keep up with Riolu as the reason why he copied Riolu's techniques to regain his world records. This should probably get you worried about how honest players in the scene might be feeling. Just kidding, it seems like there aren't that many honest competitors anyway. This mess has been a thing for so long that it's likely most players atop the leaderboards have been doing it for nearly a decade.

But the weirdest part is that Riolu is a genuinely talented player, one who's achieved amazing results in live competitions where he sure as hell couldn't have been cheating. A cool theory is that Riolu could have achieved his fake-ass scores in a legitimate manner but just couldn't be bothered to waste the time needed to become good enough to pull them off. That's not the need for speed we like, but it sure as hell is some sort of need for speed.

Top Image: Nadeo