“World’s best” Guitar Hero player was a cheat
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
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.
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.
Playing slower and then playing a sped-up video to pretend it is live is the epitome of cheating, not "just a little" cheating to get an "edge."
What's refreshing here is the fact that he seems not at all interested in attempting to rationalize his own behavior. The article says he refunded the bounties he collected. Someone who admits to this kind of public mistake like this has a good opportunity to come out the other side a better person.
And to be fair, I get why it can be hard to celebrate the admission of something without celebrating that something. So, celebrate is probably not the right word.
Note that I'm not clear there is any path free of ego based hiding of behavior. Not do I really have actionable ideas. About the only faith item that I still have is redemption. And it is crazy to me how hard the modern world seems to try to block that off. Worse still, when allowing for redemption is mistaken for endorsing the previous behavior. Often in bad faith discussions.
Mercedes with their "not rigid enough" rear wing springs to mind. The sporting rule makers later clarified exactly what was and was not allowed.
And yes - I note the other responses mentioning the difference between bending the rules and breaking them.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f...
The guitar hero guy was outright cheating - speeding footage up etc. Mercedes rear wings were 100% legal.
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.
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.
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!
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).
I wonder how much devs should care about this in single player, score attack type games.
Unless you’re talking scandals, and then I guess so? There’s temporarily more eyes on the drama but it quickly drops off.
Of course I'm not talking about scandals, because anyone who who has lived through this or even looked into this a little bit knows the scandals were devastating for the sports.
Really good channel to check out and support.
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:
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 :-)
Update: https://www.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-kon...
https://www.thegamer.com/billy-mitchell-lawsuit-twin-galaxie...
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.
Edit: holy f%ck, the record is 4988 lines, now. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-line...
Watching the gameplay is a trip - it's like watching an i9 crunch numbers when you're used to a Pentium II.
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
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.
[0] https://www.twingalaxies.com/content.php/2614-Lori-Baker-Gam...
e = $('.article.postcontainer > font[size="2"]')[0]; e.innerHTML = e.innerHTML.replace(/(LB:|TG:)/g, '<br><br>$1');People love seeing people be competent. I miss this in modern TV series, btw. It's one of those things that makes the older Star Trek series so compelling. Or for a relatively recent example: The Martian. I wonder why it's so rare to see stories like that in fiction though?
(thanks to the other commenter for pointing out how to fix the article)
I've never had much faith in 2000s-era Twin Galaxies scorekeeping, ever since I saw their recorded scores for Pokemon Pinball in the first Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition and realised that they were lower than my own (not especially good) scores.
In this particular case, it turns out that if you count unofficial records, Japanese player Koryan (who incidentally is still active) recorded over 5000 lines in 2001 [1]; compare the TG verified record of 4988 set by Harry Hong one month after this article in 2007 and the current TG record of 5164 set by Tao Kitamoto in 2016 [2]. It's likely that Harry Hong could have beaten his previous record at any time if someone had contested it earlier.
For example: there's a guy who had a record invalidated for "fastest time to build the Lego UCS Millenium Falcon (75192)" because he forgot a piece. That's not the point. The point is that he clocked a time of right around 16 hours. Which I found weird. Because that's about what I clocked as well. Now, I wasn't super rigorous. When I started, I started a timer, when I finished for the day, I stopped the timer. At the end, I added all the times together.
And I wasn't trying to build fast. I was just vaguely interested in how long it would take me to assemble a 7500 piece set.
There's a guy on Penn Jillette's podcast, Michael Goudeau. He's a clown. Like, professionally. He has the Guinness World Record for most bites taken out of an apple in a minute while juggling. Dude Perfect holds the Guinness World Record for most ping pong balls stuck on a person's head using shaving cream.
Remember, Guinness doesn't approach people, people approach Guinness. Then there's a whole process about getting the record verified. If it seems like a lot of work for a piece of paper and to be an answer to a trivia question, you'd be right.
Weird...
I just Googled this and lo-and-behold: https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVA898C58S9MG8CMJB071BCI...
https://www.twingalaxies.com/game/tetris-dx/game-boy-game-bo...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Arguably this depends on how you learn and memorize, but I don't think you can discount the visual element of playing instruments. We do have the dots in the fretboard after all.
What I meant to say is that I looked at the guitar a whole lot when I was starting, but then I spent years playing without looking at the fretboard, often while laying in bed. At first I -had- to look at the fretboard and strings to play properly.
Still, it's not as lush feedback as a video game.
That's cool. Uh... Who's "we"?
"We" are a small team of people who make mods to older Harmonix games. RB2 Deluxe is a free patch for modded 360/PS3 that adds a lot of quality-of-life features to the game. https://rb2-deluxe.neocities.org/
The RB team had this vision that the game was a mind trick to maybe get people into music, with a low barrier to entry, ramping up all the way to RB3's pro guitar (the one with 6 strings and the full fret board, that ends up showing actual chords on screen), pro keyboard, pro drum set, and so on. Of course it's useless to pretend this makes you learn the real instruments, still you get to approach key things like pacing yourself, rhythm, strumming, song structure, pattern matching, rehearsing, talking to your band members... all while having a damn fun time.
And dare I say, this was a success, at least for one of my friends and his family. I showed him RB1, he enjoyed it so much that the next day he bought a X360+game+accessories, started playing it, and pulled along his wife and two daughters, where they rotated instruments in turn. As they ramped up through the whole RB saga up to RB3, they thought "it's so fun playing this game together, kinda like being a band!". Next thing you know they picked up real instruments and started an actual band.
I myself picked up the guitar much more easily, not because of any technique learned (because the game is incredibly different from the real thing still) but because it made me raise in confidence that this was approachable.
It's entirely possible that, had Harmonix developed GH3, it may have been a full-band game. We do know that they considered drums as early as post-GH1 development, there exist a whole array of drum gems in the 4-song OPM GH2 demo, as well as some leftover code fragments (for example, there is an entire DrumTrackWatcher class with several functions like AddFills and AddLanes, and the OPM demo build itself actually also at some level checks for Konami/Topway drums for PS1 DrumMania, and has controller detection script that recognizes Topway drums).
GH2 also has leftover "band_version.dta" files that, across all builds of GH2 and GH80s that we have, always contains the same contents: "Build: 060302_A" (HMX dated these builds YYMMDD, best we can tell). band_version.dta is the file later used in the Rock Band series to contain the build date. There is also a separate file "gh2_version.dta" that is different between PS2 4-song, PS2 10-song, PS2 retail, 360 retail, 360 10-song, PS2 GH80s press review, and PS2 GH80s retail. I'm pretty sure there exists within Harmonix, a disc with that very build date written on the label (including the A, which I feel signifies that they'd burnt a second distinct build that day), and my feeling is that if we had that disc, it would have whatever drum support active that they had at the time. Perhaps 060302 doesn't have drums active, but 060302_A was a branch that did? No way to know unless someone steals those binders from HMX and leaks them to us (fat chance lol) or HMX themselves decide to open up their archives to our dataminers.
You could argue the same with almost every other game thats a copy of real life actions. Racing, Soccer, Martial Arts games... the list is long and does not even end with FPS games. There was lots of arguing the early days of "killer games" if they actually make people violent. No they don't. Competitive FPS games were and are about skills and being better, faster and able to outplay your opponent.
My GFs sisters family was all about classical music education and her sister is already known international for playing her instrument. She also plays guitar hero (and competitive FPS shooter). Its just an entirely different skillset. Guitar hero needs absolutely no education in any music stuff, therefore the entry level is much much lower.
You cannot really compare it. Guitar hero is like mastering any other video game like tetris or pong. Mastering a music instrument is another level of education. At least yet. Sooner or later it will comparable maybe. When children start to play a video game with the age of like 4 and keep doing it basically their entire life 6+ hours a day - that's the amount of time a professional classical musician invests in their profession.
Still, there's an important rhythm element to it. I'd assume musicians or people who have a good sense of rhythm are at an advantage.
Well. You could say timing =~ rhythm. So yes and no. I'am pretty sure - correct me if iam wrong - that guitar hero pros watch the screen and don't listen to the music. Makes it also easier to adapt to (way) higher speeds than 100%.
I'm not saying there isn't any transferable skills what-so-ever but being good at one doesn't automatically mean you have an advantage at the other.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.f1-esports-gradua...
With a plastic guitar, you're right. But plastic drumset skills are transferrable to a real instrument.
Being an excellent GH drummer might make you (a mediocre) drummer IRL. Being an excellent GH guitar player won't make you even a beginner guitar player IRL. It's not "an entirely different skillset", it's a relevantly close skillset as long as drums are affected.
While superficially it might look the same, drumming isn’t just about hitting objects in time. How you hit those objects is what really matters but GH doesn’t train that skill.
It is absurd to say you can not compare these things. Utterly absurd.
It is exactly like spending time in car driving simulator instead of actually learning to drive car.
Your point makes zero sense. I don't even think you believe this because comparing video game soccer or martial arts to actually playing soccer or fighting is just stupid.
Thats not remotely comparable with playing guitar trying to replicate what you see on a screen with a few buttons. But I will not argue with a guy that just called my opinion "just stupid".
Also:
> because comparing video game soccer or martial arts to actually playing soccer or fighting
Thats not what I did.
In many cases the more simulation-focused games are used by people who really like racing cars, or flying planes, or driving tractors, or whatever, but can't do it as much or in the expensive equipment they'd physically prefer.
There is a lot of variance in games as to the fidelity of what they're representing. Most shooters won't teach you anything about real firearms or bows and arrows and most racing games have little to do with real cars, but there are flight sims that have physics and controls directly modeled on real equipment.
There have been real piano training games. I'd imagine any instrument could be with modern audio sampling and analysis if people wanted to pay for it.
I don't know if they've fixed it but I did try version 1 of Rocksmith, a game that's supposed to teach you actual guitar. Unfortunately, the first song was playable by a noob. The 2nd song was impossible for a noob. And that was the end of that.
Maybe they've fix it, or maybe I suck, or maybe some people plow on anyway.
There's a scene where one of the kids plays an acoustic set of guitar hero, and people listen deeply and applaud him tapping on an unplugged guitar hero controller.
He is playing “real guitar hero” not fake guitar hero or simulated guitar hero. Playing the guitar and playing guitar hero are not the same despite containing similar looking elements. In one case the target is to produce music, in the other it’s to produce points or a high score. He doesn’t care about producing music, he cares about producing a high score. Likewise, the musician’s aim isn’t to be better at scoring points, it’s to be better at producing music.
To use another game, one could say “why play Madden when you could play ‘real’ football?” Madden IS real. Is it football, no. It’s a game. But that’s OK. Football is a game, Madden is a game, but they are different games. The aim of playing Madden isn’t to become the next great linebacker for the Chicago Bears, it’s to be better at playing Madden.
Chess is an example outside of video games. It’s said that chew is a simulation of war. But people don’t play chess to become better generals and generals don’t play chess to become better at winning wars. They are each their own thing.
I really enjoy watching sports (pretty much every sport, although I’m a partial to college football) and played sports as a kid but it’s much harder to do as I get older for the obvious physical reasons and the fact that adults don’t have the coordinated free time and schedules of children.
Video games are a much more accessible medium. I see my 8 year old nephew play video games and watch streamers. He can then play the same game for himself. As much as I loved watching Michael Jordan as a kid I could never, and will never, be able to dunk a basketball. There barriers to entry for video games is much lower, almost anyone can do it, such that it’s practically zero. It’s much more relatable and as he gets older I think he’ll choose to watch people compete in the things he grew up with and relates to. Given the shear number of people to game it’s not unimaginable to see how e-sports could surpass professional sports one day.
I play Guitar Hero for the flow state it can induce for me. It's one hell of a way to enjoy a remarkably wide range of music.
It’s actually pretty fun. Though I haven’t played in a few years. You could buy new songs once you finished the initial ones. They’re at various difficulties and you get more notes as you level up.
“Rocksmith”
Now on steam apparently https://store.steampowered.com/app/221680/Rocksmith_2014_Edi...
For drumming /finger drumming/keyboard there is
Which is pricy / less game like but I did it for a year.
Sarcasm aside, most people can’t just pick up a guitar, find a full band, book a gig, etc. That’s one of the main reasons we even have video games. To “do” stuff we can’t do in our lives.
I love Stardew Valley. Should I sell my possessions, leave my family, and go start a new life in a small town as a farmer/dungeon diver/beer brewer?
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.
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"
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.
If you just listen to the music at your home, it's ok. If you go to the show and the performance is poor, you feel you're missing something. If the singer is just dubbing, you'll feel fooled if you expected the real thing.
Some say that even in this case what's worth is the performance, the "experience". But if you find out that they were stunts with pre-record music, your "experience" vanishes.
Cheating is one of those things that depends on your expectation.
There was a big scandal in France in 2006-2010 when the public learned that a 1977 hit record "ça plane pour moi" by Plastic Bertrand, was in fact sung by somebody else; see:
https://www.expatica.com/be/uncategorized/plastic-bertrand-a...