Nintendo doesn't care if people find ACE in decade-old games (usually) and post decompiled versions of games on GitHub so people can find out how they tick, but vulnerability researchers can't do that unless they want to risk causing a legal shitstorm.
I am reminded of the top Super Mario players all congregating for a run on GDQ, only for a complete random fan to come to them and ask "So... if you were all stuck trying to optimize this one pipelfor over half a decade... Why didn't any of you just do the Devil's Spell?"
To which the speedrunner's reaction is: "Wtf is the Devil's Spell".
It happened to be a trick that was documented nearly 2 decades prior.
So they are red teamers :p
Which ironically is more like pentesting than VR.
You tend to have certain people who are more interested in glitch finding and spend most of their focus on that over actually running the game. Then you have TAS runners (often overlap with glitch hunters) who make TAS-only runs to determine what the absolute limit is in a game. Finally, you have the remaining 95% of the community, runners grinding the game over and over.
Strategies from TAS often are repurposed by speedrunners, perhaps most famously in Mario 1 any%, where several strats used by top runners were once considered infeasible for humans.
Just about every project has a bug bounty, but you'll be hard pressed to find any online discussion about works in progress towards a reportable bug.
Once you get over that hurdle, collaborating on targets is pretty common. Made $10k USD last month collaborating with someone in another country, in fact.
I want to shout out ZFG if ppl arent aware cause he has IMO done the most technically impressive real time speedrun of any game - specifically the 100% SRM run he did is inscrutably insane. But it wasn't just about him - it was an effort by so many people. The number of glitches and exploits that have been found by the community, as well as the NP hard routing and tools created for finding angle perfect setups by various people..
It's straight up community driven exploit art. And it's like yeah, the fastest way to beat the game is to practically manually manipulate memory to redirect specific function calls to give you stuff you need and float around and purposely void out facing exactly a 1/65536 perfect angle setup a hundred separate times to randomly jump around to various rooms in the game?? Wowwwww
And the community around it is so wholesome. The sheer amount of collective curiosity, ingenuity, and effort to dismantle and exploit a 20+ year old game for no other purpose than going fast.. idk. Love it.
Here's a commentated tool assisted human-like run (but not live): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8EE9FXeJnE
And the actual run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdxdwnpi-wU
here is the link for anyone curious
GDQ: Games Done Quick, the name of the Youtube channel.
OoT: Ocarina of Time, a beloved Zelda game from the 90s.
ACE: Arbitrary Code Execution. A vulnerability that lets you run whatever you want. You can use it to skip huge parts of the game, therefore achieving the fast speedrun
Of course there's also the fact that exploiting 20-30 year old games is just vastly easier than modern software, due to the total lack of mitigations in them. And that's on top of the fact that with popular games, you're building on decades of reverse engineering work rather than (potentially) starting from scratch. And the arguably superior toolset (savestates etc).
But I think a very big factor is the one this blogpost is trying to address - most people just don't know anything at all about the vuln research industry, which is not exactly searching for attention in the ways that speedruns broadcast to hundreds of thousands of viewers for charity are.
More interestingly and more surprisingly, some of the people who work on exploiting games _don't_ do any sort of tech work and have no background in compsci - they're purely self educated just for the sole purpose of breaking the one game they're interested in. This was the case for some of the biggest contributors to ACE in Zelda Ocarina of Time.
https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptana...
And for posterity, I wrote up my solution: https://grazfather.github.io/posts/2018-11-24-microcorruptio...
It was quite mind boggling. When I played the game I barely encountered a single bug or glitch - it seemed pretty polished! - but in actual fact there were 100’s of outstanding bugs, years after the game’s release and multiple updates.
If you look in the top-right corner at 0:19, the build being played is "Sep-2018 61056", strange for a Dec 2024 speedrun. Presumably that specific old version was used because the glitches it relies on have been fixed in current versions.
TeX and Metafont and other Knuth programs come pretty close.
There's also programs that have been proven correct. (And the proof systems themselves are usually fairly small and can have multiple independent implementations. Or at least the core of these systems that everything hinges on.)
This is an observation about cyber security in general, but in my experience, bug hunting and reverse engineering require a lot of tenacity at a level that writing software and other areas of IT do not. I think tenacity is a difficult thing to summon if your only tangible motivation is a salary, the target software is intrinsically boring, and you know that you'll be rewarded whether or not you find the bugs.
Though it's too bad that cyber security is not as intrinsically fun and interesting to a lot of speed runners as video games. A large part of what allows speedrunners to spend hours searching for glitches and exploits in these games is that they're having an absolute blast while doing it! Also exploiting glitches in decades old games is generally pretty accessible and doesn't have a high barrier to entry like cyber security.
EDIT: There was supposed to be a link here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnZ2NNYySuE
In the gaming world, undefined software behavior is critical to this sort of thing, we see this especially in some games like the legendary exploits found in the Ocarina of Time speedruns for example.
I mean, in Super Mario World, SethBling did code injection to manually run a version of Flappy Bird (how ironic given the origin of the pipes!) in the game. By hand. No savestates. It took forever and the run through is really and truly fascinating: https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0?si=nIP07o_fa6O9rauW
I speedrun things other than games as well -- and so the generalization is not just that we are security researchers, we are people who fundamentally learn the "shape" of a thing very, very well, and ways that this shape can be used to get from one state on that shape to another.
In conclusion -- yes, it can be something as simple as security research! But the joy and the beauty of speedrunning is something so much bigger and beautiful than that -- though it certainly is one outcome that can be had!
There's low-effort, and then there's nearly-no-effort, and 100% I assume that the text of the article is equally garbage.
They may have a set of skills and focus that overlaps with vulnerability researchers, but they are doing a different thing.
It's like saying, "hunters are photographers, they just don't know it yet" or "taxi drivers are f1 drivers..."
Resist the urge to collapse the world into the world view you already have. Resist the urge to treat every skill and hobby like a professional one for work. Let people enjoy things.
I co-authored the current fastest TAS of Super Metroid (video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=m-Gt57ur7OA, writeup: https://tasvideos.org/8214S). Our run involves exploiting a race condition in the game's sprite animation system, which under the right set of circumstances can cause the game to try to execute code from unmapped memory. We manipulate the behavior of enemies in the room to precisely control the timing of the exploit such that some hardware DMA fetches happen at the same time as the reads from the unmapped memory, which influences the results of the reads through bus capacitance & gives us enough control to redirect the program counter to the controller input registers, at which point we have full arbitrary code execution. That's not even "overlapping", that straight up is vulnerability research & building an exploit chain.
Granted, that's the extreme end -- most speedruns don't go anywhere near that deep into the weeds. But every sufficiently well established speedrun community has people who specialize in reverse-engineering, understanding the game mechanics, and figuring out exploits. Most of my day-to-day participation in the Super Metroid community isn't working on methods of full-on arbitrary code execution; but I do spend a lot of time doing things like looking at boss AI, investigating inconsistent speedrun strats to find out how to normalize them, writing tooling to help people practice, figuring on how to reproduce a weird glitch someone encountered, etc.
We should distinguish those in the community that actually discover new glitches from those who simply practice what others have uncovered, though. Those aren't always the same person.
It's strange to see many of the people I used to hang out with on AIM and MSN messenger now have legendary speed runs and entire lore threads and wikipedia pages written about them.
I think the itch you scratch doing speedruns is a lot like the itch you scratch doing any kind of creative coding and/or exploit research.
My favorite from Baldurs Gate 3 is where a speedrunner found that if you kill Shadowheart and stuff her in a box, you can quickly get through the story. Sucks for her!
You can’t look at the meta skills around speedrunning and expect them to transfer with a similar drive or interest.
What it probably indicates is that a large number of talented youth never had an outlet for their skills which rewarded them. So their most meaningful experiences became video games instead of say, electrical engineering or teaching math.
Unless you are using tools and rigorous methods you are just playing around. Just because most games are all broken in easily predictable ways doesn't mean every new game creates a hacker.
It's more correct to say "speedrunners show that almost all game developers are bad at software engineering".
sometimes good at creating fun games, but quick to say "you are holding it wrong" when you breath on the thing and it blows up.
Lots of speedrun strategies require surprisingly sophisticated tools. People will decompile/disassemble code to figure out what is going on. They'll run the game in an emulator and peek at memory values to figure out how the game works and how to manipulate it. They'll use these tools to set up their game state so that there's a sequence of bytes in RAM, then cause program execution to jump to these bytes, to run arbitrary code execution.
Here's a video of a speedrunner explaining some of the things he did to get two arbitrary code executions working together to speedrun Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MbaZY2DOW0 (it's about 15 minutes)
Here's the same runner using one of those arbitrary code executions to inject Flappy Bird into Super Mario World instead of just warping to end credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0 (it's about 6 minutes)
He didn't get to that point just by random pressing buttons until something interesting happened. He got to that point because he understands the Super Mario World memory layout well enough to manipulate it and execute the instructions that he chooses for it. That's vulnerability research any way you want to slice it.
That’s to say nothing of exploits that can only be used by TAS software. That’s like saying my car is a piece of shit because it’ll not survive being driven into a volcano.
I think if anything vulnerability 'researchers' should study speedrunners more than the opposite. They are shockingly successful and they have shown again and again that there is almost no limit to how much you can glitch software.