Hello old friends!

I'm glad to hear many of you guys enjoyed my video about MR's quest for 32/32.  And as some of you know by now, I've been making a lot of speedrunning content on Youtube lately, covering interesting stories in the community from the past & present.

A story I want to work on next is that of the "legend" Steven Zwartjes, and his similarities to Todd Rogers.   Zwartjes has hundreds of claimed Nintendo 64 WRs in Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, F-Zero, and maybe more, almost all of which have no proof.

I'm making this thread in hopes to collect information and be a catch-all on anything Zwartjes related that may be of interesting note to this story.

From what I've gathered so far...

1) His mkwrs page lists a lot of WRs, but only two have videos.  He seems to have a few more videos around, but not many.

2) His LR 3lap in particular, a 1'38'25 // 1'58'14 was "ahead of its time" to say the least.  Remained the WR for 775 days, was suspiciously set 2 years after his most recent previous WR, and had no video.  I learned it was backrolled fairly recently to 1'38'68; one of his rare runs with video evidence.

Any more info on these stories?  Any other stories of suspicious SZ activity?  What triggered the 1'38'25 to finally be backrolled after all this time?  What evidence did he have in his favour, for any of his insane records, if any?  Any anecdotes about him from Euro guys who met him back in the day?  Who specifically vouched for Zwartjes, and what did they say about him or his records? Literally any information about Zwartjes or his Mario Kart 64 times helps paint the picture and tell the story immensely.

For example, here's some stuff Jones shared in Discord which is helpful:

Quote:


Biff vs Zwartjes 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_IOvaHE7Vo
Biff vs Zwartjes 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_4MWLTi4E4

Thanks for chiming in, and good to be posting here again!  

(you guys have fun emotes)  

- R. White Goose

The Todd Rogers of Mario Kart is a title that's already given.  

See:




On a more serious note, I will offer my two cents below. I do realize that I will just be adding worth of mouth, which is the best I can do, as obviously I don't have any footage of the mythical WRs in question either. Ironically, that's similar to the Todd Rogers case with friends jumping to his defence (and without providing any actual proof), but the difference is that in Steven's case there is a lot more merit to the claims.

He has indeed won many gaming tournaments in the mid-late 1990s (my housemate Patrick Wessels can vouch for that). Personally, I've seen him play live numerous times (including MK64 and GE). I've spent a week with him during the retro NLG tournaments in Norway 2007 and from that I concluded that he is/was the most (diversely) talented gamer I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing live. And that's regardless of how accomplished he already was, but just judging by his heightened ability to efficiently develop superior (micro) strats for just about any challenge thrown at him.

I have an example from NLG 2008 (which he didn't actually attend) that speaks volumes. The retro tournaments of NLG 2008 were based around the premise of throwing players a set of novel challenges in classic games and giving them a few weeks of preparation time to see who could come up with the best strats / times. NLG '08 included some beastly gamers, such as Michael Jongerius (certainly no slouch in the talent department either), Illari Pekkala (a.k.a. Illu, also known for being creative with optimizing strats) and yours truly, to name a few.
One particular challenge proved to be very popular with us, which involved getting to 20 lives in Super Mario World as fast as possible, but without using infinite bounces on Koopas (and that type of exploit). So all of us present were really optimizing that one all week long, developing new strats and combining the best of our inputs to continiously reach new heights. When the tournament was over we thought we had the thing pretty well figured out. Then Steven caught wind of the challenge criteria back home and 1 day later(!) he independently crushed the time that all of us had reached (with combined forces, mind you!). It took a few days before he produced a video, so I was actually sort of skeptical about it, eventhough I had verified Steven's sick gaming ability the previous year. After some technical issues with recording he delivered the goods (a vid) and it turns out he had come up with a very ingenious strategy to farm more lives early on in the challenge that all of us had collectively missed.

Of course such an anecdote doesn't necessarily prove anything, but it does showcase that he has an uncanny ability to develop speedrunning strats that sometimes even surpass what the masses can do.

Which leads me to another reason for why I believe he is not a bullshitter: Steven Zwartjes has won everything that there is to win in gaming under the sun and more. Official Nintendo Championships, GoldenEye tournaments, you name it. If you want specifics on that I suggest contacting him or Patrick Wessels yourself. No cheating possible with those for obvious reasons (live tournos). He had also gotten countless World Records in prior years, always with proof when required (see Liem's post linked above). How much sense does it make for someone so obviously capable to suddenly turn a leaf and start cheating? I just don't see where his motivation to cheat would come from.

Regarding the lack of proof at the end of his 'career', my hypothesis is that he just started losing interest in gaming when he was nearing the end of his activity and perhaps developed an unwillingness to share his new strats only to get beaten again through his own devices. Though this state of affairs is unescapable in speedrunning nowadays, note that at the peak of Steven's power in the 90s, keeping some strats for yourself was more natural and could give you the edge. Since this particular LR WR was achieved with the so called mystery boost, to me it's very feasible that he just got the edge on the competition by finding this (like he had so many times in the past for other WRs), but perhaps he didn't feel like spilling the beans on how he did it for once.

Seriously though, if you want to 'expose' Steven for anything in a sort of Appolo vs Mitchell bandwagon hype video, at least do him the courtesy of actually contacting him yourself. He does still reply in issues related to gaming sometimes (he's actually going to visit the SMK World championships this summer for example) and perhaps he can provide you some answers surrounding the later mythical WRs. Though I'm not sure if he still cares about his perceived legitimacy as a gamer, since for him there is nothing at stake anymore (contrarily to Billy and Todd, who were making money off their reputation still). Finally, let's also not forget that the time gap between when he was active and now is around 2 decades, so it might be a bit unreasonable to demand video proof now and labeling him a cheater in the absence of it. Different from TR & BM, who were still active & claiming performances more recently and failed to produce proof when the methods for doing so were much more readily available.

Todd Rogers:
Hard proof of cheating
Claimed impossible times

Steven Zwartjes:
No hard proof of cheating
Claimed times that have been beaten

This is the important part. The other similarities exist, but if the main reason to call him Todd Rogers isn’t actually there, then I don’t think it’s appropriate. I don’t believe his LR, and I’m fine with him being punished for lying, but I don’t think we have to do this to him lol.


Edit: by lying I mean failing to submit proof to the point that everyone thinks he lied

The topic has exploded on Discord today, I recommend (or not...it's A LOT to read) going to the MK64 section and doing a search for

"Steven Zwartjes "The Todd Rogers"

And jumping to that hit.

KVD wrote on 05/18/18 at 11:17:07:


Link?

Greg_I wrote on 05/18/18 at 12:08:24:


https://discordapp.com/invite/0T7oGr0RrwPLEc2O

The question isn't todd rogers in the cheating world but if (and still a big if with the information we have atm) more of a lance armstrong, where you're clearly capable but you still push over by nefarious means.

If one of these tapes still exists in an attic/basement somewhere we can solve some of this.  We've uploaded one (thanks to greg here) but that mostly had starfox unfortunately and wasn't helpful at all to this discussion.

It's also hard to slam him for little proof from an era that is was difficult to get any.  People forget that just making and transferring one file took over a week.  Not only much slower internet, but you couldn't make a few MB video back then, they were all relatively huge files.  These tools definitely were not common things in 1996.

In other words, while todd rogers is speedrunning clickbait, a lot of the goosepond are gonna just skim that video and assume guilt where we don't have the evidence for that yet and it's unwarranted to bring up the possibility that someone (lol) actually tries to harass him for it online or live (since most people online suck).

stefankok wrote on 05/18/18 at 07:04:31:


Can someone ask Booth if he has the tape, and if he can put it online?

stefankok wrote on 05/18/18 at 15:06:25:

This is what you're looking for:
http://www.mariokart64.com/kart64/members/10best.html

Quote:


I believe that putting vids online was not very possible for most people back then, so VHS tapes got mailed to others for them to watch.

Walter wrote on 05/18/18 at 10:06:15:


wxyz wrote on 05/18/18 at 11:17:41:


You cannot just say "well the times SZ claimed were later achieved, so this gives them more credibility!"  It doesn't.  At all.  What if SZ claimed a 16 second Choco Mountain SC 3lap record back in 2003?  Yes, today, after nearly 20 years of knowledge, learning, scientifically breaking down the game, TASing and grinding, we know a 16 second CM SC 3lap is possible.  But that has absolutely zero bearing on whether or not a claim like this from 2003 is legitimate.

Imagine someone in 2003 claim "oh yeah, Ocarina of Time? Yeah I beat that in under half an hour lol, by warping from the first dungeon all the way to the end!"   Or, better yet, imagine someone who makes vague claims about the future, like a John Titor type (oh, there will be nuclear war for sure! No Olympics after 2008!)  Just because they got one or two of the predictions right does not mean they actually were a time traveler.

In the context of SZ, he was clearly a very good player, which gave his claims credibility.  But any good player today will tell you, for example, that a DKJP 3lap 2'11'50 is possible.  Of course, the era is different, and proof is expected these days, but imagine a world where one of these players claimed the 2'11'50, then ran away from the community for a decade.  When 2'11'50 actually happened years later, would this give added credibility to this claim?  I personally do not think so.

wxyz wrote on 05/18/18 at 11:17:41:


Walter wrote on 05/18/18 at 10:06:15:


What "proof" is there that Todd Rogers cheated?  Where are his spliced or gamesharked runs?  Todd simply claimed records which he had no proof for.  It's the exact same situation as SZ.  The only difference is that SZ got "lucky" and his claims all turned out to be possible.  What if LR 3lap 1'58'25 was still the WR?  And there was no current strategy that would account for this run to be possible?  Would people be so partial to believe these claims then?

His Goldeneye claim for example of Aztec Agent 1:31, "turned out to be possible," however, using the strategy he described, he, nor anyone else from his era, would have been capable of getting 1:31 with it.  If you look at him and his contemporaries equivalent times, none of them stack up to current records the way an Aztec Agent 1:31 does still today.  So even if he did actually know the strategy, it's not reasonable to believe he pulled off such a good time with it, back in an era when him and his contemporaries were getting much "worse" times by today's standards.

The comparison to Todd Rogers is absolutely fair, so long as the details & facts, such as "SZ's times were all eventually possible" are laid out there.  Which I always do, because my videos are intellectually honest and high quality  

-----

ANYWAYS

It's become apparent even after scratching the surface of this topic for 1 day, that there is a ton more to the story than I expected.  I think it would take around 100 hours of research, interviews, etc, to get all the info needed to share all sides of the story.  And then scripting would take dozens of hours, and the video would probably be about 30 minutes long, so editing it might take another 50 hours...  I've made a few 30 minute "epics" recently, but I decided that throughout the summer months, I would only make shorter, "easier" videos in order to more efficiently grow my channel.  I might work on a few 30 minute monsters like the "Legend" of Steven Zwartjes (it really is a legend in the truest sense of the word; most of the stories and evidence around him are passed down only by tongue...) in the fall when I have more subscribers and it's more worth it to put out longer videos.

That being said, I did mention in Discord how only around 10% of my video ideas get made and that often they morph or take a different direction than when I started.  That's just how the creative process works.  Right now I'm leaning towards making a quicker video where I can scratch the surface of SZ and tease the later "epic" video... something along the lines of "5 Speedrunners Who Claimed Unproven Speedrun Records" where I can talk a little bit about Aztec 131, LR 1'58'25 (within the context of his era, his support from people who saw him play live, etc).  I think this would be pretty fair and balanced, and not all of the attention would be on his records either.

I don't want to drag his name through the mud, but clearly the legend of Zwartjes is an absolute classic in speedrunning which needs to be told at some point.  And needs to be told completely, fairly and well.  One key difference between Zwartjes and Todd is how SZ never tried to make a career or claim Guinness World Records and seek attention that way from his unproven claims, and obviously I would make that distinction, among others.

I will leave this conversation open, as any information on the subject is interesting and useful, but there is a much longer road ahead than I originally expected.  So don't you all get too upset when no video is made yet and everything is still in like 1% of the pre-production research stage  

Cheers and thanks to everyone who chimed in with useful info on either side of the debate.

- Goose

When you say "time eroding what's present on the internet", do you mean his videos were available online in the past?  Or were never online, but only on tapes?

If they were only on tapes, can we find out who has the tapes?

On the "10 best" page it says "I do believe he had a tape floating around the other half of the world which showed how he did Royal."  Was it a tape of his PR, or a tape of a slower time?

Goose wrote on 05/18/18 at 21:55:41:


This single line here says it all for me. You clearly have an assumption of guilt/cheating, and I highly doubt that your video would be objective or fair in any way.

How many known cheaters met other karters in real life?