I’d like to discuss this decision that the Oddworld Mods came together on and explain what happened.

On April 23 2020 at approximately 1:39 am EST a user by the name of Jakthehoff submitted a speedrun to Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee. This user wasn’t very well known and had seemingly come out of nowhere with this world record. On April 23 2020 at approximately 10 am EST the run was verified by the only Super Moderator at the time Samtastic.

There were a few issues with this run that the rules at the time did not state. The run had no audio of the game. The run had no timer. Odd audio issues with the provided voice-over occurred in a few places throughout the run. Sadly, since the game did not have proper rules at the time and also did not have a dedicated moderator who knew the game very well, the run would be adjudicated without much thought.

Later in the year sometime in June, the Oddworld Community saw a resurgence in activity. This is when Azloh, a very well known and active Munch runner at the time, started to question Jake’s run. At the time he did not have any well-known evidence as to what could have caused this run to be invalid but he knew from past experience that the run was too good to be true. Over the next few months the Munch community started to gain more and more activity, this, in turn, allowed more runners to come in and review Jake’s run. One runner in particular going by the name Lkief had noticed that during a specific transition from brewer to Fuel Fields Jake had fallen from the sky instead of teleporting into the level. In Munch specific, this falling action only occurs when a level is restarted.

This immediately set off red flares for a few runners, Azloh, Lkief, and myself included. So, a new member of the community by the name of AfterHours purchased the game on IOS to test this specific part. In his testing, he was unable to recreate this specific segment which made the moderation team suspect that the run had been spliced.

After some discussion on January 22, 2021, Azloh rejected the run with this message attached. "I believe this run is spliced/segmented due to the fact on fuel fields, Magog motors and no muds lands it seems you restarted them levels and cut them out. With this tested by another runner multiple times, I can safely say this is cheated. Unless you can prove it to an SR Mod and join the discord to talk about It, I will have to reject this run"

After this a permanent ban has been placed on JakeTheHoff, disallowing him to run ANY of the Oddworld games again.

Update 24/2/21

A thorough investigation was conducted on JakeTheHoff's run. It was confirmed by Jake himself that every level was spliced.

From this, Jake will be permanently banned from the community discord as well.