The Guitar Hero games require a unique level of skill in order to play extremely well. Due to the rhythm games requiring a player to wield a guitar-shaped controller, Guitar Hero provided a different sort of gaming experience for many, removing the concept of a traditional controller from the series. The Guitar Hero controllers have become iconic pieces of gaming hardware over the years, and the streamers and players that wield them expertly are almost as iconic to the Guitar Hero community.
Though a new Guitar Hero title hasn't been released in years, and the games are mostly considered products of the late 2000s, Guitar Hero streamers often gain an impressive amount of viewers due to the difficulty involved in the games. On expert difficulty especially, the notes can come so fast that it's a wonder how many of Guitar Hero's best players can keep up. One famous Guitar Hero streamer though, wasn't able to keep up with the speed of the game on the highest difficulties, and pretended as though they could for years.
The Guitar Hero streamer, Schmooey, was considered by many to be one of, if not the best players in the world. Not only could Schmooey clear songs that others were having immense difficulty with, but he also could do it at faster speeds. There were even bounties put on some more difficult Guitar Hero songs, which Schmooey would claim and receive real money for. However, due to a 27-minute YouTube video posted by Karl Jobst, Schmooey was revealed to be a fraud.
According to Jobst, there had always been slight suspicions around how good Schmooey was at Guitar Hero, leading to a full investigation of the player. In January 2022, the floodgates opened after a couple of glaring issues were found in Schmooey's uploads, leading him to lose every single one of his records and achievements. The most suspicious upload was one of Schmooey cleared "9 Patterns of Eternal Pain," which had problems including the player's hand movements not matching the notes being played on screen.
Due to the fallout of this controversy, Schmooey has deleted all of his videos. At first the player claimed only a few videos were faked, though upon digging deeper it was found that likely all of his most difficult runs used cheats. Despite Guitar Hero being an older franchise, from this story it's clear to see fans still care about the integrity of Guitar Hero, something that will likely continue should the franchise ever release another entry. Currently, its reported that Activision would like to see Guitar Hero and Skylanders revived.