The 20-year-old YouTuber Schmooey has been considered the best player of Guitar Hero since 2018. However, in recent weeks, doubts have arisen about whether everything was above board. He now admits: He cheated. He will delete all his videos, return prize money, and withdraw from the business.
Whyu was Schmooey considered the best player?
- In Guitar Hero, the aim is to play songs on a guitar while staying in rhythm. The more complex and faster the songs become, the harder it is to play them flawlessly.
- Even as a teenager, Schmooey established himself as one of the most gifted players of a plastic guitar the world has ever seen. As the site Kotaku writes, he could not only play the most difficult songs of Guitar Hero, but he did it faster than anyone else.
- This way, he was able to win several bounties totaling several thousand dollars that the community had put up for mastering particularly challenging tracks.
After 3 years, experts suddenly discover irregularities
This is how he got caught: For years, there were some irregularities in his videos, like a video lag or poor lighting, but everything always looked real. That changed in December 2021 when a video of the song “9 Patterns of Eternal Pain” went live.
In this very complex and fast piece, experts noticed that Schmooey’s hand movements did not match what was actually being played. At the end of the video, the overlay of Windows Media Player was also visible – this raised some skeptics’ alarms.
After Schmooey was confronted with the allegations, he initially defended himself but then admitted that “a few videos” were fake, although most were real.
However, once the suspicion was out in the open, players scrutinized every video Schmooey had ever uploaded. They found evidence of something being amiss in almost all videos, nearly a hundred videos.
Schmooey was apparently a master deceiver who recorded the songs “slowly”, but then played them back in the video faster, making it seem like he accomplished everything live.
Player is down – envy and greed drove him
This is what he says now: In a video from January 15, Schmooey has now fully admitted his guilt. He announced that he would return the prize money and apologized to the community.
He says he acted out of a mix of greed and envy. He wants to change and feels terrible now. He is now in a very vulnerable position.
He had a lot of “darkness in his life”, but he was still aware that his actions were wrong. Therefore, he does not want to justify himself either.
He says he knows he is now a fraud. But he wants to do everything so that he is not a coward as well, and therefore he is fully facing the consequences of his actions. He is ashamed of what he did, especially in front of those who looked up to him. And he is ashamed of the people from whom he stole deserved attention and recognition.
How could he deceive everyone for so long? The ironic thing is that Schmooey could only cheat because he was really good and was considered an acknowledged professional who could also play Guitar Hero exceptionally well live and even shaped the meta.
Another player explains: He could do such crazy things live in line sessions that people trusted him and didn’t look closely anymore. Schmooey evidently exploited this.
This is what it’s about: The sequence of events in the scandal resembles the exposure of plagiarism cases. Once the slightest suspicion arises that a doctoral thesis or a non-fiction book was not correctly produced, you can be sure that people will scrutinize it so closely that they will definitely find something.
Then the doctorate title is gone quickly.
Ironically, such a cheating case also hit the one who was considered the world’s best Minecraft speedrunner. However, he weathered the scandal easily and is now bigger than ever:
200,000 people watch the most famous Minecraft cheater in the world making excuses on Twitch
