They say that people make their own luck, but long-time Diablo world record holder Macej "Grobbo" Maselewski may have taken this proverb too literally when he manipulated dungeon seeds and spliced together footage from multiple runs to fraudulently claim a world record for over 15 years (courtesy of fantastic reporting by Ars Technica).
In hindsight, Maselewski's seemingly impossible time of 3 minutes and 12 seconds did seem well... impossible. Anyone with a cursory understanding of the mechanics of Diablo will understand how improbably fortunate the run is. In Diablo, you progress to the next level of a dungeon by interacting with stairs that appear on random tiles within a (randomly) seeded map. During the now infamous run, Grobbo often encountered situations where he'd enter stairs only for the "next" stairs to be immediately visible. As you can imagine, this allowed rapid progression through the level. The run also included a clutch early drop of Naj's Puzzler, a unique staff necessary for the run's completion.
Importantly, Diablo's map seeds are randomly generated when a save file is created based on a system clock that begins in January 1970 and ends in December 2038. This is the only valid date range...
