World’s Best Guitar Hero Player Exposed as a Cheater

Schmooey is has been known as a legendary Guitar Hero player and the best Guitar Hero player in the world as a result of his impressive feats which others have thought impossible. However, last year, many notable figures in the Guitar Hero community had begun to doubt the validity and credibility of these achievements.

Schmooey started gaining attention from the community when he was just a teenager. He beat songs with immense difficulty and Fc’d maps that were seen as inhumanly possible. Rhythm games such as Guitar Hero have combo systems: playing a map without missing once is called a full combo (fc). Over the years, Schmooey has been dishonestly making money by completing bounties for difficult songs. He did so by splicing up videos very subtly.

While Schmooey did have suspicious moments in these videos such as subtle video lags and dark footage, his legendary status kept suspicion at bay. This was until December 2021, when Schmooey had uploaded an fc for 9 Patterns of Eternal Pain.  While the video did garner large amounts of initial hype, fellow top players found inconsistencies in the footage Schmooey had uploaded.

Firstly, there were small sections in which Schmooey’s fingers did not line up with the correct key inputs on the guitar at all. This was followed by an odd ending of the video which displayed the Windows Media Player overlay. If the first part did not catch many people’s attention, the last part certainly did.

Following this incident, many key members of the community confronted Schmooey with these accusations. While Schmooey initially denied the accusations,  he eventually came clean about splicing the footage for 9 Patterns of Eternal Pain. However, he claimed that the rest of his plays were all real. This was, in fact, not the case.

An investigation was conducted to find out if there were more cheated plays by Schmooey. Now that players knew what to look for in Schmooey’s footage, they found that nearly all of his legendary plays (around 100 clips) were faked. He used numerous methods of cheating such as time warp (making the game slower) and the aforementioned technique of splicing footage.

With his name tarnished, Schmooey made an apology video on January 15 in which he returned all of the bounty money he had earned over the years and disappeared off of social media for good.

When asked about what he thought of the situation, Richie L., an 11^th grader at AISG said, “I think the guy’s not that bad. There are always tons of cheaters in any competitive scene whether it’s sports or gaming, but I doubt most cheaters would have issued a public apology and returned all of the bounty money they dishonestly made.”

Ashanty G., an 11^th grade student who used to attend AISG, said the same thing: “Out of all the cheating scandals in gaming, this wasn’t that bad. Most cheaters wouldn’t come clean even when faced with undeniable evidence.”

While Schmooey was an undeniably good guitar hero player, he had essentially faked most of his career to the top of the leaderboards. For more information on the topic, check out Karl Jobst’s 27-minute YouTube video which goes into great detail about Schmooey’s career and his faked runs.