This page aims to document submission judgments over the years that are considered notable.
Judgments can be notable for various reasons, including setting important precedents, leading to new rulings, clarification of existing rulings, affirmation of existing rules, and more.
| Submission | Date | Decision | Judge | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #4224: amaurea, Cpadolf & total's SNES Super Metroid in 14:52.88 | 2014/03/23 | Accepted | Noxxa | Usage of debug codes can be accepted in the rare case where it has no visible or direct positive effect on gameplay, but can be used for benefit in non-gameplay means (e.g. ACE). |
| #4577: MUGG's GB Tennis in 04:51.42 | 2015/02/16 | Accepted | Nach | Establishes the ground rules of what makes sports game movies acceptable for the Vault. After this judgment, Vault rules received significant updates regarding acceptability of sports game movies. |
| #5087: Fog's Wii Gummy Bears Minigolf in 12:27.13 | 2016/05/18 | Accepted | Samsara | Originally rejected, this submission subsequently prompted further updates to Vault rules regarding sports games, allowing more of them to be acceptable under certain circumstances. |
| #5266: Alyosha's NES Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine in 04:39.02 | 2016/11/12 | Rejected | Noxxa | Established that movies that start from an arbitrary RAM state (as long as it is not confirmed to be legitimate on console, nor is the default set by the emulator) are not allowed. |
| #5617: HappyLee's NES Super Mario Bros. "PAL" in 04:55.16 | 2017/08/30 | Rejected | Nach | A PAL movie of a console game cannot obsolete a published movie or be published alongside one, if there are no major exclusive differences, even if the PAL movie is faster. NTSC is still preferred in this case. |
| #5759: qflame's SNES Math Blaster: Episode 1 in 07:53.15 | 2018/01/29 | Rejected | ThunderAxe31 | Led to clarification of the definition of educational game genre, and the reasons why it's forbidden from Vault. The relative rule text was expanded accordingly. |
| #5854: ThunderAxe31's GBC Toki Tori in 42:20.21 | 2018/03/19 | Rejected | Fog | Established the branch superseding mechanic, in the Judge Guidelines. It was the first time that a movie got rejected for having fastest-completion as goal choice, due to the existence of a full-completion published movie. |
| #5859: gifvex's GB Pokémon: Blue Version "warp glitch" in 10:12.00 | 2018/03/19 | Accepted | Noxxa | Established that version settings for Game Boy movies used for console verification (GB-in-GBC, and GBC-in-GBA) were acceptable, even in contradiction with prior rules about Game Boy version usage. Rules were updated accordingly. |
| #6023: TiKevin83's GBC Pokémon: Yellow Version in 1:36:42.94 | 2018/08/18 | Canceled | feos | Set a precedent where we may add an extra movie file to a publication if it's a resync movie that now syncs on console. |
| #6033: NhatNM's PSX Monster Rancher 2 in 58:54.55 | 2018/10/10 | Rejected | feos | Established how to use disk swapping to insert external images that may not belong to the actual game being played. |
| #6104: keylie's Linux TowerFall Ascension "all trials, 1000 fps" in 03:26.75 | 2018/11/23 | Accepted | feos | Led to a rule that regulates the PC game environment (DOS, Windows, Linux). |
| #6443: Lizstar's Arcade Bongo "maximum score" in 23:43.39 | 2019/09/15 | Rejected | feos | Resulted in allowing "maximum points" for Vault as a replacement for normal full completion. |
| #6614: The8bitbeast's SMS Zool: Ninja of the "Nth" Dimension "game end glitch" in 00:21.61 | 2020/04/26 | Accepted | ThunderAxe31 | Led to clarification of game triviality rules: if a game was previously found non-trivial, but then later a new trick is found that makes the game trivial, it will continue to be judged as non-trivial. |
| #6742: McHazard's NES Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! "clock stop glitch" in 18:52.92 | 2020/06/29 | Rejected | Memory | Established that abusing glitches that affect in-game time, do effectively make the in-game time as inappropriate for measuring and comparing the movie length. |
| #6837: Winslinator's INTV Sharp Shot "maximum score" in 04:05.24 | 2020/11/25 | Rejected | feos | Score runs of timed games, with little speedrunnable content to speak of, cannot be accepted for the Vault. |
| #6858: CasualPokePlayer's GB The Adventures of Pinocchio in 06:51.50 | 2020/09/28 | Rejected | feos | Led to improving the rule text that regulates the acceptability of prototype games. |
| #6863: ThunderAxe31's GBC Devil Island "save glitch" in 01:56.08 | 2020/10/04 | Accepted | Memory | Established that techniques that rely on uninitialized SRAM data are always allowed, as long are based on the emulator's default clean SRAM state, and not on dirty SRAM. |
| #5759: qflame's SNES Math Blaster: Episode 1 in 07:53.15 | 2021/08/10 | Accepted | Memory | Math Blaster was freed thus representing a huge change in policy on educational games. |