Speedrunning glitches vs cheats: where the community actually draws the line
Any-percent runs allow arbitrary code execution but ban savestates. That distinction is not obvious — here is why it exists.
If you have ever wandered into a Super Mario 64 speedrun and watched somebody clip through a wall by walking into it backwards for two frames, you might reasonably ask: how is that not a cheat?
The answer is one of the more interesting rulebooks in gaming, and it is worth spelling out — because the same principles decide what CheatBook lists and what we quietly leave off the site.
The community's rule, in one line
A speedrun accepts anything the game itself does when given valid inputs from the standard controller. It rejects anything that requires external tools.
That's the core of it, and every apparent contradiction dissolves once you apply it.
- Clipping through a wall by holding two buttons at once? Legal — the game shipped with those buttons and that collision code.
- Backwards long-jump for infinite speed? Legal — same reason.
- Loading a savestate mid-run? Illegal — that requires the emulator, not the game.
- Modifying a memory address? Illegal — that requires an external editor.
- Using a turbo controller for rapid inputs? Category-dependent — some communities allow it, most do not.
The rule is not "no exploits". It is "no external assistance". Every legendary speedrun trick — Zelda's Wrong Warp, Pokémon's Missingno glitch, Ocarina of Time's arbitrary code execution — comes from valid controller inputs that expose bugs the developer never patched.
Why the line is drawn there
A charitable reading of the rule is: it is the only line you can enforce.
If the community allowed anything short of arbitrary code execution, but banned tricks that "felt cheat-y", the definition would collapse into taste. Two runners submitting the same technique could end up with different verdicts. The controller-inputs-only rule is verifiable. If a video shows real button presses on a stock console producing the effect, the effect is legal.
This is the same reason CheatBook draws the line between an in-game console (in-scope: it shipped with the game) and a third-party trainer (out of scope: it modifies the game from outside). We are not making a moral judgement about which one is more "authentic". We are picking a line that we can defend consistently across a database of 1,000+ entries.
The categories, briefly
Modern speedrunning has splintered the old "any-percent" verdict into a menu of ruled categories. You do not need to memorise all of them, but the taxonomy is:
- Any%: reach the credits by any legal (controller-only) means. Most glitchy category.
- 100%: collect everything the game tracks. Slower and cleaner.
- Glitchless: any-percent, minus a curated list of banned tricks. Communities argue endlessly about the list.
- No-major-glitches: same as glitchless, softer definition. Bans wrong warps and out-of-bounds, allows minor movement exploits.
- TAS (tool-assisted speedrun): an entirely separate category where any external assistance is allowed. Not a competitor to human runs, but a research tool.
The distinction between TAS and human runs is instructive. A TAS is not considered a lesser run — in some communities it is considered a form of research, showing what the game is theoretically capable of. But it is filed separately, because the tools change the game.
Where CheatBook lives on this spectrum
Everything we publish on CheatBook falls somewhere in the "controller-inputs-only" zone of the speedrunning taxonomy. The difference is that speedrunners then race each other with those inputs, while our readers just want to enjoy the ride.
Concretely:
- Cheat codes — a fixed input sequence the developer built in. Universally legal in every speedrunning category that allows codes at all.
- Tips and strategies — legitimate ways to use in-game systems more efficiently. Legal in any category.
- Walkthroughs — descriptions of a path through the game. Legal in any category by definition.
- Glitches and exploits — case-by-case, depending on category, but reproducible from a stock controller.
Anything that requires a memory editor, a trainer, a save-file editor, or a custom firmware falls outside both the speedrunning rulebook and our submission policy.
The one place the rule bends
Randomiser and rando-adjacent categories complicate the picture. In a Zelda randomiser, the game itself has been modified before you start — item locations, sometimes music, sometimes text. That is external modification, and by strict speedrunning rules, it should not be legal.
The community's answer has been to file randomisers as an entirely separate ecosystem with their own leaderboards. Nobody pretends a rando run is competing with a vanilla run; they are just different games at that point. It is a nice example of the community picking a consistent rule and then building parallel infrastructure for the exceptions.
Why this matters to anyone who isn't a speedrunner
Even if you have no interest in racing a game, the speedrunning rulebook is one of the clearest live examples of how gaming communities settle "what counts". The rule is arbitrary — nothing in physics requires that clipping through a wall be legal and savestates be illegal — but it is consistent, and consistency turns out to be more important than any particular verdict.
CheatBook borrows the same instinct. Our submission review process is basically a shorter version of the same rulebook: does this effect come from the shipping game, or does it come from outside? If the answer is "the shipping game", it gets a page. If the answer is "outside", it does not.