>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.
> Schmooey's actions are explainable purely as a way for an otherwise amazing competitor to get their "edge" by cheating "just a little".
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.
Sadly, I don't think we do enough to actually celebrate coming clean. I can hope this is a situation where I'm wrong on that.
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.
I think my problem is in the excommunication style of dealing with cheating. Reparation and nullification of cheat wins makes sense. Beyond that? You wind up encouraging scorched earth defence of celebrities. Or worse, when the stakes start to outweigh the actual costs.
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.
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.
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.
Billy Mitchell (the guy from King of Kong) was also actually genuinely good at Donkey Kong, definitely in the top 1% of players. But like you said, that isn't always enough to get to the top, and he resorted to cheating.
In Counter Strike, there are cheats that will adjust your crosshair to enemy head (aimbot) its very obvious when a player is snap aiming 90 deg to enemy head, but pros who cheat will adjust it to only snap at 1 pixel distance, they are good enough for it to make a difference while making it extremely difficult to detect via replays
I was cheating in War Thunder a year ago. Strangely enough, there were some players who could aim and hit targets incredibly far away just as well as I could, if not better. We’re talking tanks just a few pixels in size. There’s many cheaters.
My favourite instance of this is the Brabham BT46B, which used fans to suck the car down onto the track. Not cheating by any means — they never tried to hide it — but nevertheless a very creative interpretation of the rules!
I was at a family house party and an 8 year old came up to his mom asking for Admin rights in Roblox (we found out -- so he could cheat). He was very upset because EVERYBODY DOES IT and he felt left behind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
I think one thing to keep in mind is that cheaters in baseball, cycling, and even Donkey Kong brought more eyeballs to those games than anyone could have imagined. I'm sure a lot of people forgot GH existed before seeing this thread.
I wonder how much devs should care about this in single player, score attack type games.
Did they? I’d argue that the next highest competitor that is competing legitimately would bring just as many eyeballs to the games. People are attracted by watching the best of the best compete — I don’t think the exact score is as important.
Unless you’re talking scandals, and then I guess so? There’s temporarily more eyes on the drama but it quickly drops off.
They did. Feel free to make that argument. Just keep in mind, at one point, people thought Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong were the best competitors competing legitimately, and people came to these sports in droves, so it's not an easy line in the sand to draw. Hell, can you even name the next highest competitor competing legitimately in the Tour de France 1999-2005? It's like those races never happened because so many people were cheating, but people were watching!
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.
Given the prevalence of cheating in cycling, it's still remarkable that Lance won as much as he did. I guess maybe Team USPS had a significantly better cheating regimen. Unlike Sosa/Maguire/Bonds, juiced performance isn't obvious to cycling casuals.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :-)
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
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.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to grab a beer, let alone be friends with, Billy Mitchell. But I also think some documentarians can get a little “interpretive” with their edits at times.
Reminds me a story from my 6th grade teacher who lived with the Maasai tribe in Kenya. One day she brought one of the tribesmen named Moses to Nairobi and they happened to pass by a stadium field where some men were practicing the javelin throw. Moses said "let me take a turn" and his throw landed far beyond where all the other javelins were clustered. Turns out it was the Kenyan national team... apparently they recruited him!
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.
As far as I know, I currently hold the world record score at knife fairy. The game of knife fairy is very simple. You must sneak into your roommates room late at night and slip a knife under their pillow. My current score is 1, so it should be easy to beat. Good luck!
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.
People have found out that if you get specific enough or if you choose something people don't really care about, you can get a Guinness World Record.
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.
I met someone years ago who was an adjudicator for Guinness. I remember two stories in particular. One was a trip to Venezuela to judge a biggest bowl of soup (chicken IIRC), the other to Italy for a biggest doner kebab! (yes Italy not Greece). She said her biggest concern was that the doner kebab would fall off an underspecced trolley and kill someone, though I imagine that would probably have achieved a record of its own!
> 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.
> One of the things that interesting to me about coming to a place like Funspot is seeing things like what happened today with your score, where people start to congregate, including me, watching someone absolutely take control of a game like you did.
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)
Fascinating! When I read the WR for Tetris was 327 lines, I realised that I was in that league, too, at the time. I never knew I was that good! I never thought about competition or even world records at that time! I remember it became boring after a few hundred lines, and I am sure I never made 800, let alone the 4988 someone else posted.
Such a good read, thank you. There doesn't seem to be much content like this around: interesting, honest, non-directly-commercial, no fake news, no SEO bullshit. Really thanks was good 5 minutes.
If I bothered to actually submit my times, I'd be ranked #9 for any% and #5 for 100% for the 2014 reboot of Strider. Not because I'm any good, but because hardly anyone has submitted records.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Guitar hero players (or at least, the subset of players in who are interested in very difficult tracks) are not trying to produce melodies or jamming harmoniously ; they're doing high speed, high precision pattern matching.
This is like berating gamers playing Elden Ring where they could do HEMA instead !
> This is like berating gamers playing Elden Ring where they could do HEMA instead!
I'm going to have to say that this analogy doesn't work. The downsides of doing real HEMA are things like "you can experience what it's really like to have your head bashed in with a historically-accurate mace". The downsides of playing guitar in real life are things like "you need a guitar".
Can confirm this is extremely frequent, especially when it comes to harmony. Not everyone can be Herbie Hancock on a keyboard, but with just enough theory and a good ear, you can write complex progressions into a DAW, for example.
This subject always reminds me of Squarepusher's Music for Robots [1], which was made to be played by robots instead of humans.
For sure. If you’re into metal, you might have heard of Deathspell Omega - majority of their post 2004 material is pure studio magic. In fact it is not even clear whether the drumming is real or whether it is a cleverly disguised drum machine.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I DJ (3x deck techno and breaks too, so stuff that requires being good at rhythms and beat matching) as well as play the guitar and keyboard. I totally suck at guitar hero and other rhythm games.
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.
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%.
Some people play that way, yes. I personally play where I sync myself to the actual music as best as possible. So I have to hear both the music and my controller sounds. I don't know if I'd consider myself a pro player (although I'm a prominent GH2/Rock Band modder) but I'm much better than the average player, when you take into account all players and not just GH community members.
I agree on most games. I find it interesting that being good at simracing (with one of the proper simulation games like iRacing) does translate to ability on a track.
Not necessarily. The way you sit at a drum kit, angle your arms and even hold the drumsticks differ on real kits than they do on the Guitar Hero kit. The technique matters a lot because you use the flex in the drum skins to help with your movements and thus allow for tighter patterns and reduce the risk of RSI. This same technique isn't transferable to Guitar Hero and nor would playing Guitar Hero make you a competent drummer (due to teaching the wrong technique).
I agree it's not 100% the same thing but it's much closer than playing a plastic guitar.
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.
My point is that being a drummer, even a mediocre one, is all about technique and that technique differs on a real drum kit vs Guitar Hero drums.
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.
> It is exactly like spending time in car driving simulator instead of actually learning to drive car.
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
I used to think e-sports and games were not real things compared to their counterpart but I’ve come to feel that they are just as real. The different is subtle but let me try and explain.
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’d like to add that I think e-sports will come to overtaking physical sports in my lifetime.
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/bass, and I’ve played in bands and by myself, but this represents an entirely different and interesting skillset. Rhythm games are a skill in their own right, the visual element of what they’re simulating is somewhat inconsequential - the guitar controller could just be a stick or even a regular controller and the gameplay is roughly the same. Maybe the drum controller for rock band(?) is a close analogy, but it misses the point so to speak
IIRC the Rock Band team was borne out from part of the GH team that had a different view of the game. It's all in the title: Rock Band vs Guitar Hero. One is collaborative, the other competitive.
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.
The Rock Band team was pretty much the Guitar Hero 2 team. Harmonix made Rock Band because Activision chose to hand GH3 development to another team. Activision even had the option to use the Harmonix engine under license, and chose to allow Neversoft to fork the Tony Hawk engine and bolt a beatmatcher on top (which they did horribly, by the way, ExileLord has some videos on YouTube discussing some of the more egregious bugs).
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.
Interestingly, you could buy a midi adapter and hook up something like a roland electronic kit. Kind of a learning tool.. just that it wasn't good at teaching good habits.
If the 360/PS3 controllers didn't absolutely blow for the purpose, I'd suggest checking out Rock Band 2 Deluxe and the "pad is guitar" modifier we added, which restores GH2-style gamepad play for guitar (and for shiggles we added another that does "pad is drum", although button mappings are kinda funky).
Yea, I knew that. I was mentioning that it's possible to play RB2 in the same fashion.
"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/
Rhythm games are generally fun immediately. Real instruments are fun maybe after investing several hundred hours of practice.
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.
I didn't play Rocksmith for years, but I think it had some "level" setting for most songs. You'd get fewer notes and simpler chords on the easiest level. That said, I didn't start with Rocmith as an absolute beginner. It did improve my rhythm, correctness and speed, which is great, but didn't improve my musical knowledge about notes, chords or scales. I see it as a good stepping stone, but eventually you have to move on.
This is strange thinking. just because it's got the word 'guitar' in the title you think they should pick up the real thing. Well it's got nothing to do with a guitar other than the fantasy. They are playing a rhythm game. Why not ask them to play the piano or sing opera. Do you tell people who are good at driving games to go learn to be a race car driver?
> Do you tell people who are good at driving games to go learn to be a race car driver?
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.
The difference between a racing game and learn to be a race car driver is actually not that big compared to guitar hero and a real guitar. I would say a drum set might be more fitting to the guitar hero player. The modern racing games actually teach you some skills that a real rally driver needs.
There is a guitar hero like game for guitar and bass. It even has some basic video lessons. My partner and I played. You needed the 1/4 inch plug to usb for your instrument.(I think they’re cable)
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.
I get that Halo is just a game but I seriously think if you’re going to spend so much time shooting a fake gun on a fake planet at fake aliens, you might as well learn to do the real thing.
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?
There's a South Park episode that takes the idea that Guitar Hero players are more skilled and renowned than actual guitar players.
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.
It absolutely can be. It can even be harder at lower levels, if someone has strong muscle memory for guitar. The engines are much less rigid than one might think - GH is one of the few rhythm games were per-gem accuracy is not a consideration whatsoever. Some fan engines will track your accuracy per gem, or at least report it to the player, but the core gameplay mechanics don't take that into account at all (gems score the same whether you hit them early, late, or perfect, as long as they're still within the hit window). In fact, that creates a phenomenon known as "squeezing" where you abuse the window to hit a gem as late as possible, activating star power immediately before, and then hitting a gem as early as possible right before the star power empties. This allows one to get an extra gem under the additional 2x multiplier that active star power provides. Almost all of the #1 scores on Scorehero use this to a high degree, making the actual star power "path" (basically, the positions in the chart where activation of star power gives you the most optimal score) highly important.
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.
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.
I personally vividly hallucinate tabs, chords, shapes and scales while playing. Sometimes with it overlaying on the fretboard.
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.
Sorry, I think I gave an odd response the other day.
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.
When I hear music, I think about actual fret board and instrument playing because I have never played any sort of music video game for any significant portion of time.
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.
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"
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.
Many are compelled from within to create and they have progressed and developed to the point where their art appeals to a large audience — they do not produce out of competitive drive, but out of an intense inward force that they can only satisfy through creative expression. They are those who create because they must, not just because they can.
...where musicians are graded on how dramatically they slap comedians before receiving their awards instead of how good their performance was, and comedians are graded on how well they take their slaps instead of how much the musician who slapped them just laughed at their jokes.
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.
It's considered cheating when for example the "singer" is not doing the singing, and it's kept a secret.
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:
The big problem is when you cannot reproduce anything close to that performance live. There was this one band I used to like and on the album the singer had this deep, powerful, voice that really projected. Then I went to see them live and singer had a weak reedy voice the barely carried. It was a depressing and terrible show.
I had a recording of Paul Galbraith playing Bach on the guitar, and it was stunning. I went to a festival to hear him play live, and he really could barely struggle through the same works. He seemed on the verge of rage-quitting the performance, so maybe it wasn't going as he expected either? Hard to say, because I never went out of my way to hear him again.
Multi-segment, or tool-assisted, speedruns are legitimate. The problem wasn't that the guy made multi-segment runs--it's that he passed off multi-segment runs as single-segment.
Agreed. The concept of a "tech FC", where someone FC's all sections independently (or sometimes in groups of sections), is well understood in the GH community. There's also the straight element of deception - star power is not a mechanic in practice mode, where tech FCs are performed (Clone Hero allows you to see the SP phrases in practice mode, but you don't gain any SP and there is no way to actually activate it). The whole point of what Schmooey did was to pass these FCs off as actual full song runs.
GH has brought a ton of people into actually making music, though. There is a rich history of custom, made-for-GH songs, and a good number of them have ridiculously good production value.
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.