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“World’s best” Guitar Hero player was a cheat

195 points by luu 5y ago

sclangdon 5y ago
Karl Jobst (does a lot of speedrunnig videos) has a video on this, which is worth watching and explains everything in detail. https://youtu.be/58fqNL-kvaI https://youtu.be/58fqNL-kvaI
- jmcgough 5y ago
  it's embedded in the very beginning of the article
  - 22c 5y ago
    The article is essentially just a rehash of Karl's video.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Welcome to the M.O. of every (ex-) Gawker Media site. Find something on the internet that hasn't been covered, re-post it with enough summary to masquerade as an independent post, and get coverage on aggregator sites where most viewers never even glance at the original media.
      - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        FWIW, I rarely desire to find out about something like this via a YouTube video. I'm rarely somewhere I want to listen to something with sound. When I am, I still usually would rather get to the point than listen through a ten minute narrative. Even if Gawker sites solely existed to regurgitate YouTube videos to text... I'd pay for that service.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  I second this recommendation. The article is basically just a summary of Karl’s video.
  - ahahahahah 5y ago
    And thank god for that. Karl's video is ridiculously drawn out and should've been a tenth the length.
    - uhhyeahdude 5y ago
      That’s why you speedrun it
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      Each to their own but I really enjoy the long form of his videos. I don’t find them drawn out at all.
- fenomas 5y ago
  Karl's channel is a great place to dive into. I guess he started as just a speedrunner, but in recent years he's been making terrific videos on deep mechanics of speedrunning, on cheating and cheat detection, etc. And he's done significant journalism on shady business in adjacent topics, like records-keeping organizations and the market for retro game cartridges. He's even been (being?) sued by Billy Mitchell (the King of Kong guy), whom Jobst calls the biggest conman in gaming. Really good channel to check out and support.
thriftwy 5y ago
- np_tedious 5y ago
  Real musicians frequently record things they are unable to legitimately perform live
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    And that's a good thing, because you end up with a recording which have cultural value. Guitar Hero playes, on the other hand...
    - LocalH 5y ago
      There's always someone who judges the pastimes of others, and makes value statements regarding something they're perceiving from the outside. The Guitar Hero community is honestly pretty close knit, given the size of it relative to other more popular games. Some of my absolute best friends in the world I met through Guitar Hero. Your dismissive statement has about as much cultural value as what you attribute to Guitar Hero. At this point, the Guitar Hero community is its own subculture.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      There's nothing wrong with having fun playing a game. Do I think it's wise to make a game your one big thing? Probably not. But when it comes down to it, few of us will have any lasting effect on the world, and your personal happiness has value, too.
    - fknorangesite 5y ago
      However small you feel the cultural value of Guitar Hero plays, it is still more than that of judgmental gatekeeping.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - 5y ago
danjc 5y ago
I get that this is just a game but I seriously think if you’re going to spend so much time playing a fake instrument, you might as well learn to play the real thing. As for speed - shredding anyone?
- code_duck 5y ago
  Guitar playing doesn't have visual reinforcement. It would be interesting if it did.
  - grujicd 5y ago
    You don't know about Rocksmith? Basically, it comes with a guitar to USB cable, you plug in the real thing and play something very similar to Guitar Hero.
    - xdfgh1112 5y ago
      It's not as fun and it takes longer to get good. That's why rhythm games are popular.
      - grujicd 5y ago
        You're probably right since I never played Guitar Hero. Rocksmith would definitelly be harder since you have to produce clean tones for game to recognize. Correct fretting and picking... But you'll have some real guitar skills when you turn off the game. As a not-so-skilled guitar player, I found Rocksmith to greatly improve my rhythm and to teach me a valuable lesson of "show must go on". When you play alone and make a mistake it's natural to stop and redo that last part. But that's not how you can play with others and not the way you can play Rocksmith. So it teaches you to keep playing whatever happens. Aparth from these aspects, which are important, I didn't learn much more from Rocksmith. Yes, it does have some musical lessons but my general feeling is that it leads you to follow patterns that scroll down, and not to think about notes/chords/scales involved.
    - code_duck 5y ago
cmckn 5y ago
This reminded me of this really fun story of a reporter who accidentally discovered that his wife is the best Game Boy Tetris player in the world (by a lot): https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/ https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007...
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  > She has her game face on; I didn't even know she had a game face. Hahaha, amazing! Thank you so much for sharing that. Also a wonderfully wholesome story to balance out the one about cheating. Tangent: is it just me or does anyone else feel like this article is much better written than many long-form articles we see today? I'm obviously biased because of the subject, but still.
- glandium 5y ago
  Amazing story. This makes me wonder how many people unknowingly hold world records-breaking personal best. Edit: holy f%ck, the record is 4988 lines, now. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-lines-cleared-in-tetris-dx https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-line...
  - checkyoursudo 5y ago
    Probably everyone, in some obscure thing or other. ;)
  - honkdaddy 5y ago
    That's pretty funny! The record is from a month after this article was published, and it's held by the previous champ who Lori briefly dethroned, Harry Hong [1]. Watching the gameplay is a trip - it's like watching an i9 crunch numbers when you're used to a Pentium II. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/SuPaSaYaJiN/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SuPaSaYaJiN/videos
    - vanderZwan 5y ago
      That's NES though, he doesn't seem to have his GBC records uploaded. I actually can't find any recordings of GBC records. But yeah, watching tetris pros is amazing. The "classic" is of course 2018's Jonas Neubauer vs. Joseph Saelee NES Tetris world championship match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_UPHsGR6fM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_UPHsGR6fM If you've never seen it before, you'd probably don't think you'd enjoy watching twenty minutes of two guys playing tetris. You'd be wrong.
deleted 5y ago
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lqet 5y ago
> Sure, some of his videos had the odd questionable moment—a video lag here, some dark footage there—but for the most part these queries were far from conclusive proof that he had been cheating, and so nothing ever came of them. This reminded me of the excellent documentary Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, in which at some point (SPOILER) one of the best (if not the best) arcade game players in the world submits a very suspicious VHS tape of a new record. If you want to have a deep look into the world of competitive arcade gaming, I strongly recommend this movie. It starts out quite innocent, but gets darker and more insane with every minute. The full movie is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLQqcHcJDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLQqcHcJDQ
- belter 5y ago
  Great documentary. Thanks for sharing. Those were the times. Was surprised at the low amount of views. This other one, ( spoiler warning ) that you should NOT see before watching your linked video...has more than a million :-) https://youtu.be/yJ74cr1x6SE https://youtu.be/yJ74cr1x6SE
  - crtasm 5y ago
    It's an unofficial upload in 2020 of a 2007 documentary - 10k views doesn't seem that surprising. Here's an upload from 2016 with 166k views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc-P8Kyvnz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc-P8Kyvnz4
- wnevets 5y ago
  IIRC there was a story posted here on HN about the admins of the leaderboard helping the hot sauce guy cheat as well.
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  I need to find it, but I remember reading an article that was critical - or at least complicated the narrative - of the documentary, saying that the characterizations were not very fair/were very lopsided to facilitate the "good guy vs. villain" story. I'll try to track it down. Update: https://www.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-kong-champ-billy-mi-1798213302 https://www.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-kon...
Synaesthesia 5y ago
There was a similar controversy in Trackmania nations where the famous player "riolu" was busted for cheating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw https://donadigo.com/tmx1 https://donadigo.com/tmx1
- flobosg 5y ago
  The Trackmania expose is mentioned at the end of the article: https://kotaku.com/trackmania-cheating-scandal-is-utterly-fascinating-1846960428 https://kotaku.com/trackmania-cheating-scandal-is-utterly-fa...
bambax 5y ago
One of the methods of cheating that was used was "splicing": playing parts of the song separately, and then cutting and pasting the parts together so that they appear to have been played in one continuous session. Pro musicians -- especially singers -- do this all the time in the studio though: there it's called "comping". Singers sing the same song multiple times, and the best takes for each part (sometimes very small moments of a few seconds) are put together to construct the best possible whole. Somehow this is not considered cheating, but there is an ambiguity; how the performance was produced is either not known or willfully ignored by the consuming public. Songs are like sausages. Or most things really. Better enjoy the end product and not worry about how it was made.
- manuelflara 5y ago
  > Somehow this is not considered cheating because it's supposed to be an art performance, which everyone understands is recorded and edited to produce the best result. this was supposed to be a "feat of skill", so of course using that same method is considered cheating, because you are lying about the implication that you were playing the song in one go and "perfect"
  - ar_lan 5y ago
    Pro movie directors do this too. In fact, it's so ubiquitous, there are several millions of dollars per movie project that go strictly into editing. One of the best known examples of this, from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, notably did not even have a single real Balrog appear in their raw footage. It's a shame he resorted to cheating - but what's strange is the trilogy is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time.
- Hasnep 5y ago
  It's not considered cheating because music is not a competition.
  - bambax 5y ago
    Of course music is a competition, in listeners' time, sales, streams, and awards.
anonu 5y ago
From the end of the video: 0.75 * 132.5=99.375 0.75 * 133.3=99.975 or 60 milliseconds slower over 4 minutes. Probably imperceptible if you played 2 videos over each other. Interesting they caught that difference. Wonder why he made the math error? Maybe originally he divided 2 wall clock times that weren't exact lengths and just ended up using the wrong multiplier all along.
- LocalH 5y ago
  This game is all about the tiniest differences in timing. I can feel the difference if my game is even 10-20ms out of sync. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone detected it.
  - Graziano_M 5y ago
    Back when guitar hero was big I went home to visit family and played my brother. He stomped me, but I noticed the sound wasn't synced up to the video. Once I fixed the setting to make it accurate he was horrible. He had trained in a ~100ms delta in what was shown on video. He couldn't play on anyone else's TV, either.
kibwen 5y ago
> What’s wild here is that Schmooey was a really good Guitar Hero player! This wasn’t a case of some kid sitting alone in his room faking his way to the top through video alone. I think this is a misconception. Being a good player might even make you more likely to cheat, in some ways. After going for a record and failing for long enough, players can start to assume that they're entitled to the record via any means necessary. Furthermore, as a good player you have the skills and knowledge necessary to make a fake video that passes the initial sniff test. You also may have enough clout and social standing that others may be reluctant to even consider the possibility that you cheated, or they may be afraid of the backlash from your fans that would result from any accusation (just look at what happened with Dream, who was undoubtedly a good Minecraft player).
- LocalH 5y ago
  > You also may have enough clout and social standing that others may be reluctant to even consider the possibility that you cheated This is what happened here initially. Some of the achievements Schmooey got were almost "too good to be true", but they were just close enough to what was considered feasible as to largely go unnoticed until people started looking closer. Schmooey was also friends with a ton of prominent GH players, such that he ran a fairly successful private Discord server. I was there when that place burned to the ground lmao. It also didn't help that, at the December meetup that Schmooey attended, he avoided playing certain things that, given the skill level he'd built himself up as having, he should have had no problem tackling. I didn't notice this so much while actually at said meetup, as I largely focus on the Harmonix side of things (GH2 and Rock Band), but the other players there certainly brought it up after everyone had returned home.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
It's interesting how the UI animations provided as juice by the game developer end up becoming anti-cheat devices. For those who haven't watched the vid, they discover video splices by observing a spinning animation (think circle loading animation) that plays during a full combo. If the animation jumps, there was a splice. All a developer has to do is randomize the starting position of the spinner during a full combo and it creates a non-deterministic signature for the run. Take note, game devs!
- kibwen 5y ago
  Indeed, I've long thought about the idea of persistent, nondeterministic UI overlays as an effective anti-cheat device. Stuff a widget in a corner of the screen and make it match the game's visual aesthetic and nobody would even mind (and make sure it persists from the moment the game boots, including during loading screens). Of course, this would require developers to care about stymying cheating speedrunners, which they certainly don't. :P
- LocalH 5y ago
  One of the ways he got caught was a fuckup on his part. He claimed a really high speed run of Through the Fire and Flames, and ended up taking the video down claiming copyright. This ended up being bunk, because someone saved the video while it was up and it turned out that he spliced in such a way as to "lose" something like 2,000 points mid-song. Guitar Hero has never had any mechanic to allow one to lose points they had already gained (unless it did in the earliest GH1 development days). The only thing even remotely close to that is the Big Rock Endings from the Rock Band series, where you have a series of freeform lanes to do whatever you want in order to build up a bonus, which is subsequently awarded to your actual score when you hit the final few gems after the BRE. But, those points aren't tallied to your total score until you actually hit the final gems. The score discrepancy in Schmooey's TTFAF video was a decrease in the actual score, as Clone Hero doesn't support Rock Band style BREs. It is literally impossible to have that happen legitimately, and that's why he took the video down, because it essentially was a key component of what busted him (and was also featured in the Jobst documentary).
  - deleted 5y ago
LocalH 5y ago
I met Schmooey in December, at a Guitar Hero meetup in North Carolina. He is a very good player, there's a song named Novae Ruptis with an extremely hard strumming chart. I personally watched him 100% full combo that song sixteen times in a row. But he wanted more. He didn't just want to be a great GH player. He wanted people to think he was the absolute GOAT. Kinda sad, he was really chill and cool to hang out with.
- MivLives 5y ago
  It seems like a lot of these speed runner cheaters are in this sort of boat. A lot of them can do the record they're breaking but want to skip some of the grind that comes with speed running or are just frustrated by being so close so many times.
- m1gu3l 5y ago
  so he cheats at a guitar video game and all of a sudden he isn't chill or cool to hang out with... i mean, ok.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    I didn't say he wouldn't be outside of a Guitar Hero context. But I only met him the one time, and so it is a past tense event.
    - m1gu3l 5y ago
      This seems more sensible than freaking out and throwing the whole person away over this nonsense. Sorry for misunderstanding.
  - ninth_ant 5y ago
    He cheated in order to claim world records, earn fame and admiration, and to collect cash bounties. It's not just a casual "he cheated in a video game", like it was some small thing someone did to beat an end boss. It was a fairly elaborate fraud/deception over a long period of time.
kmeisthax 5y ago
>What’s wild here is that Schmooey was a really good Guitar Hero player! This wasn’t a case of some kid sitting alone in his room faking his way to the top through video alone. Schmooey had been an active member of the community, and had even attended live events and played alongside fellow players like CarneyJared (whose exploits we featured last year). In many competitive sports, the top players will all plateau at nearly the same level of performance. Distinguishing competitors any further becomes impossible, with what is effectively random chance deciding (honest) winners. The search for an "edge" - some split-second advantage to go from being effectively tied at #2 with 30 other competitors to being consistently #1 - leads competitors to do one of two things: - Embrace superstition - Cheat Schmooey's actions are explainable purely as a way for an otherwise amazing competitor to get their "edge" by cheating "just a little". The same mechanics are why many sports not only have problems with doping[0], but organized doping rings that expend lots of time and energy on figuring out how to beat anti-doping tests. The face of sport is great athletes either making themselves very slightly superhuman with damaging drug abuse, or, if they can, lying about their performance to make it look like they did the former. [0] For the record, doping is not purely a physical athletics problem; e-sports have already been roiled by allegations of Adderall abuse.
- xurukefi 5y ago
  That is also why cheating done by actually skilled people is really dificult to detect. Schmooey is a skilled guitar hero player and therefore he very well knows the limitations in terms of the results the competitive gh community will believe him. A random kid with no skill would have no idea of what he is actually doing and would just perform some absolutely unreal run that nobody would buy into. It's a bit like cheating in chess where a grandmaster using an engine would not blindly play the best moves but rather the ones that seem barely within human capabilities. Or like a professional runner on EPO who breaks the world record in the 10000m just by a few seconds although he would have had much more left in the tank.
  - jbjohns 5y ago
    The reminds me of a very interesting story I read about "King" Richard Petty back in his NASCAR days. It was just one of many stories in some racing history book. In any case, Petty apparently always won his races pretty closely. So he obviously only had a slight advantage over his competition... except that there were cases where some mishap (e.g. in the pits) left him multiple laps down (I believe as much as 7). He'd recover every single lap and then still barely win the race. No one ever thought to check his car for cheating because he didn't appear to be crushing the competition if you didn't realise he would have been capable of winning by probably dozens of laps or more.
ben7799 5y ago
Depressing someone would get so into this and spend so much time and effort on a game and then be ruined by cheating when it wasn't even necessary. Watching the video the narrator talks about playing real guitar. I played Guitar Hero before learning real guitar and that's such a fascinating thing. In general I also find the real thing easier (sometimes MUCH) easier than the game. I think the real thing made the game harder for me, perhaps because the game is visual, not auditory. That said I played Guitar Hero I/II on the XB360 when it was popular. More recently I had tried Rock Band on the XB1, and it's possible it's just that the whole thing was just terrible on the XB1 due to the HDMI latency. I can't imagine getting so good at the game as well.. cause I found the controllers RSI monsters compared to real guitars. Mushy buttons with lots of travel. They would often make my left hand hurt.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I think Guitar Hero is harder than the real guitar in the sense that it's hard to know what you're doing wrong because the feedback isn't so immediate. For me, when it comes to really fast sections, if I start missing notes it's hard to tell if I'm going too fast, too slow, or just pressing the wrong buttons. I loved the games in their heyday and got pretty good, but I reached my own skill plateau where I stopped improving and it just didn't feel good anymore. I recently played through Thumper, made by ex Rock Band devs, and while it's not a direct replacement, it's a huge improvement in many ways. It's much less forgiving, but you at least always know exactly what you did wrong.
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munificent 5y ago
This is such a wild and kind of heartbreaking psychological loop you see people fall into time and time again: 1. Get legitimately good at some thing. 2. Become known for being better at that thing than others. 3. Have that reputation become a key part of their identity and self esteem. 4. Feel an internal pressure to keep getting even better at that thing to get more of that esteem. 5. Hit a wall where they are unable to honestly progress. 6. When forced to choose between sacrificing a pillar of their identity or their own personal integrity, crumble and start cheating. 7. The cheating buys them some time but the self esteem boost requires not just skill but continual progress. Now that they are already morally compromised, it's easier to continue to cheat. 8. Eventually, in order to appear to keep getting better, the cheating becomes egregiously obvious. 9. Downfall. It's exactly like watching a drug addict build up a tolerance to their chemical of choice.
- chernevik 5y ago
  There is a very similar cycle with a lot of financial fraud.
RomanPushkin 5y ago
Original Metallica's "Master of Puppets" was a cheat - recorded at a lower speed, which was later confirmed by the band.
- alex-korr 5y ago
  Ride the Lightning too - though mainly to beef up James’ voice.
  - musicale 5y ago
    I think it's OK to pitch a song down to help out the lead singer. Also can make it sound "heavier" and give it a more ambiguous (and perhaps menacing) tuning. Some radio stations famously (or infamously) sped up songs by 2-3% to fit in more music and/or advertisements and also to sound more energetic (though also possibly chipmunky in the era before pitch correction - now we get roboty instead.) We still have "radio edits" of songs that may cut out less exciting bits and possibly speed up the song as well. (The thing that puzzles me now is why FM radio seems to sound thin and flat compared to listening to a CD or even a decent MP3 player.)
- musicale 5y ago
  And everything by the Chipmunks as well - they weren't even chipmunks, just some dude using sped-up tape!

195 points by luu 5y ago

Karl Jobst (does a lot of speedrunnig videos) has a video on this, which is worth watching and explains everything in detail. https://youtu.be/58fqNL-kvaI https://youtu.be/58fqNL-kvaI

jmcgough 5y ago
it's embedded in the very beginning of the article
- 22c 5y ago
  The article is essentially just a rehash of Karl's video.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Welcome to the M.O. of every (ex-) Gawker Media site. Find something on the internet that hasn't been covered, re-post it with enough summary to masquerade as an independent post, and get coverage on aggregator sites where most viewers never even glance at the original media.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      FWIW, I rarely desire to find out about something like this via a YouTube video. I'm rarely somewhere I want to listen to something with sound. When I am, I still usually would rather get to the point than listen through a ten minute narrative. Even if Gawker sites solely existed to regurgitate YouTube videos to text... I'd pay for that service.
hnlmorg 5y ago
I second this recommendation. The article is basically just a summary of Karl’s video.
- ahahahahah 5y ago
  And thank god for that. Karl's video is ridiculously drawn out and should've been a tenth the length.
  - uhhyeahdude 5y ago
    That’s why you speedrun it
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    Each to their own but I really enjoy the long form of his videos. I don’t find them drawn out at all.
fenomas 5y ago
Karl's channel is a great place to dive into. I guess he started as just a speedrunner, but in recent years he's been making terrific videos on deep mechanics of speedrunning, on cheating and cheat detection, etc. And he's done significant journalism on shady business in adjacent topics, like records-keeping organizations and the market for retro game cartridges. He's even been (being?) sued by Billy Mitchell (the King of Kong guy), whom Jobst calls the biggest conman in gaming. Really good channel to check out and support.

thriftwy 5y ago

np_tedious 5y ago
Real musicians frequently record things they are unable to legitimately perform live
- thriftwy 5y ago
  And that's a good thing, because you end up with a recording which have cultural value. Guitar Hero playes, on the other hand...
  - LocalH 5y ago
    There's always someone who judges the pastimes of others, and makes value statements regarding something they're perceiving from the outside. The Guitar Hero community is honestly pretty close knit, given the size of it relative to other more popular games. Some of my absolute best friends in the world I met through Guitar Hero. Your dismissive statement has about as much cultural value as what you attribute to Guitar Hero. At this point, the Guitar Hero community is its own subculture.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with having fun playing a game. Do I think it's wise to make a game your one big thing? Probably not. But when it comes down to it, few of us will have any lasting effect on the world, and your personal happiness has value, too.
  - fknorangesite 5y ago
    However small you feel the cultural value of Guitar Hero plays, it is still more than that of judgmental gatekeeping.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- 5y ago

danjc 5y ago

I get that this is just a game but I seriously think if you’re going to spend so much time playing a fake instrument, you might as well learn to play the real thing. As for speed - shredding anyone?

code_duck 5y ago
Guitar playing doesn't have visual reinforcement. It would be interesting if it did.
- grujicd 5y ago
  You don't know about Rocksmith? Basically, it comes with a guitar to USB cable, you plug in the real thing and play something very similar to Guitar Hero.
  - xdfgh1112 5y ago
    It's not as fun and it takes longer to get good. That's why rhythm games are popular.
    - grujicd 5y ago
      You're probably right since I never played Guitar Hero. Rocksmith would definitelly be harder since you have to produce clean tones for game to recognize. Correct fretting and picking... But you'll have some real guitar skills when you turn off the game. As a not-so-skilled guitar player, I found Rocksmith to greatly improve my rhythm and to teach me a valuable lesson of "show must go on". When you play alone and make a mistake it's natural to stop and redo that last part. But that's not how you can play with others and not the way you can play Rocksmith. So it teaches you to keep playing whatever happens. Aparth from these aspects, which are important, I didn't learn much more from Rocksmith. Yes, it does have some musical lessons but my general feeling is that it leads you to follow patterns that scroll down, and not to think about notes/chords/scales involved.
  - code_duck 5y ago

cmckn 5y ago

This reminded me of this really fun story of a reporter who accidentally discovered that his wife is the best Game Boy Tetris player in the world (by a lot): https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/ https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007...

vanderZwan 5y ago
> She has her game face on; I didn't even know she had a game face. Hahaha, amazing! Thank you so much for sharing that. Also a wonderfully wholesome story to balance out the one about cheating. Tangent: is it just me or does anyone else feel like this article is much better written than many long-form articles we see today? I'm obviously biased because of the subject, but still.
glandium 5y ago
Amazing story. This makes me wonder how many people unknowingly hold world records-breaking personal best. Edit: holy f%ck, the record is 4988 lines, now. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-lines-cleared-in-tetris-dx https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-line...
- checkyoursudo 5y ago
  Probably everyone, in some obscure thing or other. ;)
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  That's pretty funny! The record is from a month after this article was published, and it's held by the previous champ who Lori briefly dethroned, Harry Hong [1]. Watching the gameplay is a trip - it's like watching an i9 crunch numbers when you're used to a Pentium II. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/SuPaSaYaJiN/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SuPaSaYaJiN/videos
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    That's NES though, he doesn't seem to have his GBC records uploaded. I actually can't find any recordings of GBC records. But yeah, watching tetris pros is amazing. The "classic" is of course 2018's Jonas Neubauer vs. Joseph Saelee NES Tetris world championship match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_UPHsGR6fM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_UPHsGR6fM If you've never seen it before, you'd probably don't think you'd enjoy watching twenty minutes of two guys playing tetris. You'd be wrong.

deleted 5y ago

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lqet 5y ago

> Sure, some of his videos had the odd questionable moment—a video lag here, some dark footage there—but for the most part these queries were far from conclusive proof that he had been cheating, and so nothing ever came of them. This reminded me of the excellent documentary Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, in which at some point (SPOILER) one of the best (if not the best) arcade game players in the world submits a very suspicious VHS tape of a new record. If you want to have a deep look into the world of competitive arcade gaming, I strongly recommend this movie. It starts out quite innocent, but gets darker and more insane with every minute. The full movie is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLQqcHcJDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLQqcHcJDQ

belter 5y ago
Great documentary. Thanks for sharing. Those were the times. Was surprised at the low amount of views. This other one, ( spoiler warning ) that you should NOT see before watching your linked video...has more than a million :-) https://youtu.be/yJ74cr1x6SE https://youtu.be/yJ74cr1x6SE
- crtasm 5y ago
  It's an unofficial upload in 2020 of a 2007 documentary - 10k views doesn't seem that surprising. Here's an upload from 2016 with 166k views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc-P8Kyvnz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc-P8Kyvnz4
wnevets 5y ago
IIRC there was a story posted here on HN about the admins of the leaderboard helping the hot sauce guy cheat as well.
Forgeties79 5y ago
I need to find it, but I remember reading an article that was critical - or at least complicated the narrative - of the documentary, saying that the characterizations were not very fair/were very lopsided to facilitate the "good guy vs. villain" story. I'll try to track it down. Update: https://www.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-kong-champ-billy-mi-1798213302 https://www.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-kon...

Synaesthesia 5y ago

There was a similar controversy in Trackmania nations where the famous player "riolu" was busted for cheating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw https://donadigo.com/tmx1 https://donadigo.com/tmx1

flobosg 5y ago
The Trackmania expose is mentioned at the end of the article: https://kotaku.com/trackmania-cheating-scandal-is-utterly-fascinating-1846960428 https://kotaku.com/trackmania-cheating-scandal-is-utterly-fa...

bambax 5y ago

One of the methods of cheating that was used was "splicing": playing parts of the song separately, and then cutting and pasting the parts together so that they appear to have been played in one continuous session. Pro musicians -- especially singers -- do this all the time in the studio though: there it's called "comping". Singers sing the same song multiple times, and the best takes for each part (sometimes very small moments of a few seconds) are put together to construct the best possible whole. Somehow this is not considered cheating, but there is an ambiguity; how the performance was produced is either not known or willfully ignored by the consuming public. Songs are like sausages. Or most things really. Better enjoy the end product and not worry about how it was made.

manuelflara 5y ago
> Somehow this is not considered cheating because it's supposed to be an art performance, which everyone understands is recorded and edited to produce the best result. this was supposed to be a "feat of skill", so of course using that same method is considered cheating, because you are lying about the implication that you were playing the song in one go and "perfect"
- ar_lan 5y ago
  Pro movie directors do this too. In fact, it's so ubiquitous, there are several millions of dollars per movie project that go strictly into editing. One of the best known examples of this, from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, notably did not even have a single real Balrog appear in their raw footage. It's a shame he resorted to cheating - but what's strange is the trilogy is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time.
Hasnep 5y ago
It's not considered cheating because music is not a competition.
- bambax 5y ago
  Of course music is a competition, in listeners' time, sales, streams, and awards.

anonu 5y ago

From the end of the video: 0.75 * 132.5=99.375 0.75 * 133.3=99.975 or 60 milliseconds slower over 4 minutes. Probably imperceptible if you played 2 videos over each other. Interesting they caught that difference. Wonder why he made the math error? Maybe originally he divided 2 wall clock times that weren't exact lengths and just ended up using the wrong multiplier all along.

LocalH 5y ago
This game is all about the tiniest differences in timing. I can feel the difference if my game is even 10-20ms out of sync. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone detected it.
- Graziano_M 5y ago
  Back when guitar hero was big I went home to visit family and played my brother. He stomped me, but I noticed the sound wasn't synced up to the video. Once I fixed the setting to make it accurate he was horrible. He had trained in a ~100ms delta in what was shown on video. He couldn't play on anyone else's TV, either.

kibwen 5y ago

> What’s wild here is that Schmooey was a really good Guitar Hero player! This wasn’t a case of some kid sitting alone in his room faking his way to the top through video alone. I think this is a misconception. Being a good player might even make you more likely to cheat, in some ways. After going for a record and failing for long enough, players can start to assume that they're entitled to the record via any means necessary. Furthermore, as a good player you have the skills and knowledge necessary to make a fake video that passes the initial sniff test. You also may have enough clout and social standing that others may be reluctant to even consider the possibility that you cheated, or they may be afraid of the backlash from your fans that would result from any accusation (just look at what happened with Dream, who was undoubtedly a good Minecraft player).

LocalH 5y ago
> You also may have enough clout and social standing that others may be reluctant to even consider the possibility that you cheated This is what happened here initially. Some of the achievements Schmooey got were almost "too good to be true", but they were just close enough to what was considered feasible as to largely go unnoticed until people started looking closer. Schmooey was also friends with a ton of prominent GH players, such that he ran a fairly successful private Discord server. I was there when that place burned to the ground lmao. It also didn't help that, at the December meetup that Schmooey attended, he avoided playing certain things that, given the skill level he'd built himself up as having, he should have had no problem tackling. I didn't notice this so much while actually at said meetup, as I largely focus on the Harmonix side of things (GH2 and Rock Band), but the other players there certainly brought it up after everyone had returned home.

somehnacct3757 5y ago

It's interesting how the UI animations provided as juice by the game developer end up becoming anti-cheat devices. For those who haven't watched the vid, they discover video splices by observing a spinning animation (think circle loading animation) that plays during a full combo. If the animation jumps, there was a splice. All a developer has to do is randomize the starting position of the spinner during a full combo and it creates a non-deterministic signature for the run. Take note, game devs!

kibwen 5y ago
Indeed, I've long thought about the idea of persistent, nondeterministic UI overlays as an effective anti-cheat device. Stuff a widget in a corner of the screen and make it match the game's visual aesthetic and nobody would even mind (and make sure it persists from the moment the game boots, including during loading screens). Of course, this would require developers to care about stymying cheating speedrunners, which they certainly don't. :P
LocalH 5y ago
One of the ways he got caught was a fuckup on his part. He claimed a really high speed run of Through the Fire and Flames, and ended up taking the video down claiming copyright. This ended up being bunk, because someone saved the video while it was up and it turned out that he spliced in such a way as to "lose" something like 2,000 points mid-song. Guitar Hero has never had any mechanic to allow one to lose points they had already gained (unless it did in the earliest GH1 development days). The only thing even remotely close to that is the Big Rock Endings from the Rock Band series, where you have a series of freeform lanes to do whatever you want in order to build up a bonus, which is subsequently awarded to your actual score when you hit the final few gems after the BRE. But, those points aren't tallied to your total score until you actually hit the final gems. The score discrepancy in Schmooey's TTFAF video was a decrease in the actual score, as Clone Hero doesn't support Rock Band style BREs. It is literally impossible to have that happen legitimately, and that's why he took the video down, because it essentially was a key component of what busted him (and was also featured in the Jobst documentary).
- deleted 5y ago

LocalH 5y ago

I met Schmooey in December, at a Guitar Hero meetup in North Carolina. He is a very good player, there's a song named Novae Ruptis with an extremely hard strumming chart. I personally watched him 100% full combo that song sixteen times in a row. But he wanted more. He didn't just want to be a great GH player. He wanted people to think he was the absolute GOAT. Kinda sad, he was really chill and cool to hang out with.

MivLives 5y ago
It seems like a lot of these speed runner cheaters are in this sort of boat. A lot of them can do the record they're breaking but want to skip some of the grind that comes with speed running or are just frustrated by being so close so many times.
m1gu3l 5y ago
so he cheats at a guitar video game and all of a sudden he isn't chill or cool to hang out with... i mean, ok.
- LocalH 5y ago
  I didn't say he wouldn't be outside of a Guitar Hero context. But I only met him the one time, and so it is a past tense event.
  - m1gu3l 5y ago
    This seems more sensible than freaking out and throwing the whole person away over this nonsense. Sorry for misunderstanding.
- ninth_ant 5y ago
  He cheated in order to claim world records, earn fame and admiration, and to collect cash bounties. It's not just a casual "he cheated in a video game", like it was some small thing someone did to beat an end boss. It was a fairly elaborate fraud/deception over a long period of time.

kmeisthax 5y ago

>What’s wild here is that Schmooey was a really good Guitar Hero player! This wasn’t a case of some kid sitting alone in his room faking his way to the top through video alone. Schmooey had been an active member of the community, and had even attended live events and played alongside fellow players like CarneyJared (whose exploits we featured last year). In many competitive sports, the top players will all plateau at nearly the same level of performance. Distinguishing competitors any further becomes impossible, with what is effectively random chance deciding (honest) winners. The search for an "edge" - some split-second advantage to go from being effectively tied at #2 with 30 other competitors to being consistently #1 - leads competitors to do one of two things: - Embrace superstition - Cheat Schmooey's actions are explainable purely as a way for an otherwise amazing competitor to get their "edge" by cheating "just a little". The same mechanics are why many sports not only have problems with doping[0], but organized doping rings that expend lots of time and energy on figuring out how to beat anti-doping tests. The face of sport is great athletes either making themselves very slightly superhuman with damaging drug abuse, or, if they can, lying about their performance to make it look like they did the former. [0] For the record, doping is not purely a physical athletics problem; e-sports have already been roiled by allegations of Adderall abuse.

xurukefi 5y ago
That is also why cheating done by actually skilled people is really dificult to detect. Schmooey is a skilled guitar hero player and therefore he very well knows the limitations in terms of the results the competitive gh community will believe him. A random kid with no skill would have no idea of what he is actually doing and would just perform some absolutely unreal run that nobody would buy into. It's a bit like cheating in chess where a grandmaster using an engine would not blindly play the best moves but rather the ones that seem barely within human capabilities. Or like a professional runner on EPO who breaks the world record in the 10000m just by a few seconds although he would have had much more left in the tank.
- jbjohns 5y ago
  The reminds me of a very interesting story I read about "King" Richard Petty back in his NASCAR days. It was just one of many stories in some racing history book. In any case, Petty apparently always won his races pretty closely. So he obviously only had a slight advantage over his competition... except that there were cases where some mishap (e.g. in the pits) left him multiple laps down (I believe as much as 7). He'd recover every single lap and then still barely win the race. No one ever thought to check his car for cheating because he didn't appear to be crushing the competition if you didn't realise he would have been capable of winning by probably dozens of laps or more.

ben7799 5y ago

Depressing someone would get so into this and spend so much time and effort on a game and then be ruined by cheating when it wasn't even necessary. Watching the video the narrator talks about playing real guitar. I played Guitar Hero before learning real guitar and that's such a fascinating thing. In general I also find the real thing easier (sometimes MUCH) easier than the game. I think the real thing made the game harder for me, perhaps because the game is visual, not auditory. That said I played Guitar Hero I/II on the XB360 when it was popular. More recently I had tried Rock Band on the XB1, and it's possible it's just that the whole thing was just terrible on the XB1 due to the HDMI latency. I can't imagine getting so good at the game as well.. cause I found the controllers RSI monsters compared to real guitars. Mushy buttons with lots of travel. They would often make my left hand hurt.

vlunkr 5y ago
I think Guitar Hero is harder than the real guitar in the sense that it's hard to know what you're doing wrong because the feedback isn't so immediate. For me, when it comes to really fast sections, if I start missing notes it's hard to tell if I'm going too fast, too slow, or just pressing the wrong buttons. I loved the games in their heyday and got pretty good, but I reached my own skill plateau where I stopped improving and it just didn't feel good anymore. I recently played through Thumper, made by ex Rock Band devs, and while it's not a direct replacement, it's a huge improvement in many ways. It's much less forgiving, but you at least always know exactly what you did wrong.

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munificent 5y ago

This is such a wild and kind of heartbreaking psychological loop you see people fall into time and time again: 1. Get legitimately good at some thing. 2. Become known for being better at that thing than others. 3. Have that reputation become a key part of their identity and self esteem. 4. Feel an internal pressure to keep getting even better at that thing to get more of that esteem. 5. Hit a wall where they are unable to honestly progress. 6. When forced to choose between sacrificing a pillar of their identity or their own personal integrity, crumble and start cheating. 7. The cheating buys them some time but the self esteem boost requires not just skill but continual progress. Now that they are already morally compromised, it's easier to continue to cheat. 8. Eventually, in order to appear to keep getting better, the cheating becomes egregiously obvious. 9. Downfall. It's exactly like watching a drug addict build up a tolerance to their chemical of choice.

chernevik 5y ago
There is a very similar cycle with a lot of financial fraud.

RomanPushkin 5y ago

Original Metallica's "Master of Puppets" was a cheat - recorded at a lower speed, which was later confirmed by the band.

alex-korr 5y ago
Ride the Lightning too - though mainly to beef up James’ voice.
- musicale 5y ago
  I think it's OK to pitch a song down to help out the lead singer. Also can make it sound "heavier" and give it a more ambiguous (and perhaps menacing) tuning. Some radio stations famously (or infamously) sped up songs by 2-3% to fit in more music and/or advertisements and also to sound more energetic (though also possibly chipmunky in the era before pitch correction - now we get roboty instead.) We still have "radio edits" of songs that may cut out less exciting bits and possibly speed up the song as well. (The thing that puzzles me now is why FM radio seems to sound thin and flat compared to listening to a CD or even a decent MP3 player.)
musicale 5y ago
And everything by the Chipmunks as well - they weren't even chipmunks, just some dude using sped-up tape!