Top Guitar Hero Player Reveals How He Cheated For Years

The video chronicled Schmooey’s world-first – a ‘flawless’ run of 9 Patterns of Eternal Pain. This instantly drew suspicion, and on further examination, the video included several errors.

Expert players noticed an inconsistency between the notes and his finger positions, but the moment that sealed his fate was a Windows Media Player overlay that appeared very briefly towards the end of the video. This was a huge red flag – it wasn’t a live video at all, but a screen capture of a previous recording.

Schmooey admitted that he had ‘spliced’ some of his videos in a Discord call in January but insisted that he had only tampered with a few of his videos. The Guitar Hero community then began combing through his previous videos and found even more evidence of video splicing… as well as proof that his game was running slower than it should be.

How did he do it? Well, his method was deceptively simple. Schmooey used Cheat Engine to slow down songs in Clone Hero – a PC port of Guitar Hero widely used by the online community. He’d play them at an easier difficulty and then speed the recording back up with video editing software, splicing it together with his webcam footage.

The results were convincing enough to fool Guitar Hero experts for several years. Although some fans noticed oddities in his videos – a few dropped frames here, some inconsistent audio there – it was largely forgiven on good faith. He had proved himself to be a decent enough player in live events.

But now, the community hopes to move on. “He did some crazy stuff live, he did some crazy stuff in online sessions,” said top Guitar Hero player, Acai via Twitter。 “It was enough to let our guard down and trust him with being legit and he took advantage of that.”

Elsewhere, Microsoft boss Phil Spencer said he’s eager to revisit abandoned Activision franchises after Microsoft purchased the company… and that’s led some to speculate that we may eventually see a new Guitar Hero game.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter。