How Melee's Biggest Cheater Was Caught

In 2016, a Melee Pichu Main bursted into the scene with huge upsets in the Midwest region. Although he never beat players like Mango or Hungrybox, he ultimately defeated his opponents... by cheating. This is the story of PichuGate 2016. The Night Of The Living Pichu... Chaos.

0:00 Intro
1:58 A Pichu is Born
2:44 Low Tier Shennanigans
3:05 High Ambitions
3:44 The Tournament begins
4:18 A Fox Approaches
4:30 Ready, Set, Go!
6:28 The Eye of the Tiger
6:51 Achieving the Impossible?
7:20 Pichu's Bane
8:12 Arguments begin
9:00 A Gauaranteed 3rd Place
9:36 Anonymous DMs
10:14 Pichu vs Ohio's Elite
12:34 Winner Takes The Tournament
13:13 The Champion Is Crowned
13:49 Things Take A Dark Turn
14:13 The Plan
15:13 Hiding In Plain Sight
15:28 A Major Discovery
16:10 Super Pichu is Born
17:15 Lost Media
18:48 Thoughts

Songs in order:
Filaments - Scott Buckley
Synthwave New Retrowave - Alexi Action
Chill Synthwave - Arcadia
Defense Matrix - Vyra
12 - iSAi
Retro Horror Synth Music - Mysterious Green Fluid - Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
Dark 80s Horror Music - Intruder - Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
Cyberpunk Dark Synthwave Music - Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

[paolosworld]

"The worst part about all this is; he could have just played Pikachu."
- Ken

[douglasgraham]

I can’t believe he changed the weight from 55 to 90 that is INSANE how was no one like “how tf did he survive that for the 60th time”

[AdemFoster]

Honestly props to 4% for taking the win even against such a busted character

[KeijiKotaro]

Ngl, this left me even more impressed with 4%'s skills in beating a hacked character. No shade to the other players who lost to him. Goes to show cheaters never win.

[Jayluna]

I'm Joeycrzl and when I ended up playing him he was complaining about how broken ICs vs Pichu is for Pichu, and ended up just rocking me with his invincible Nairs and buffed forward smashes

[PokeDude]

"So can we play Melee on my GameCu-"
"NO! We have to play on my Wii!"
"Okay okay, we'll play on your Wii."

[KiraSlith]

What I'm curious is why nobody noticed how fast he falls, or that every win was on his hardware, not the site gear.

[mr.dr.kaiser]

The biggest thing that surprises me about how long it took to catch this guy was the weight change. Fox, which is a character that is seen _everywhere, _ uses shine _all the time._
It has fixed knockback.
It either knocks your character down, or it doesn't.
If your character is over 85 weight, shine will not knock them down. Buffing pichu to 90 weight means he wouldn't get knocked down, which should've screamed "something's not right here" to anyone that saw it.

[NightKev]

Someone being insistent on only playing on their own Melee setup is *extremely* suspicious; that many/most people thought there was no issue there is crazy.

[Maryeet]

I just think it's absolutely hilarious the dude "saw potential" in Pichu and wanted to see it in actual tournaments/comp play, but went on to play as a hacked Pichu. What happened to seeing potential?? Genuinely, why would the dude complain about nobody using Pichu and claim it has potential but then not even use it legit himself. Obviously I know the answer is clout but still, not even HE had faith in Pichu because he had to hack its kit. Thank you for sharing this story with us! Btw your editing is really nice, very well done!

[itsbigbad]

I was his main training partner before I left to join the military. He lived about twenty minutes away from me in Ohio and we’d play often. He was a fox main and talked a lot about viewing the game like m2k. I found out about this after I got out of basic training and was shocked. He was a good kid but I was just so upset with him.

As far as I know you messed up or missed a couple things. It wasn’t a button combo you had to press. You just had to be port four with the blue goggle pichu. He also made it so pichu f smash was impossible to SDI out of. He said publicly to someone in the scene “I couldn’t beat 4%. It would be too obvious and I would get found out.” He basically made sure he didn’t beat 4%.

He had a mental illness issue, a lot of depression mostly. I know for a fact he had really dark thoughts and especially after getting banned. I still feel bad for him. He found a place in the melee community when he had few friends before it. I’ll always love the dude, but wonder what made him want to do it to the community that accepted him…

[xxxxx]

What I have never understood about this story is what was Chaos's end goal? If he wanted to get banned then sure this was a fun way to do it. The only other goal I could think of is he hoped to not get caught and wanted to get people working on pichu tech? But people would quickly realize that his pichu was wrong. Or someday he would have to play on the stream setup or on someone elses setup. IDK its such a weird story but these are the stories we love and at the end of the day it was mostly harmless.

[spnda]

fun fact: this is one of the weirdest scandals i'd been a part of. i remember going with Pichu Kid to circle K while my friends copied the ISO over to another SD card 😂

I also guarantee I was the first person to play on the super pichu setup but I was essentially gaslit into believing I just "didn't know enough about Pichu" LMFAO

The two things that gave away the hacked pichu was actually how quickly he'd act out of aerials (no end lag) and the angle at which dtilt would send at (shine spike angle.) Pichu Kid would claim it was a 1.0 Melee thing, but we did rigorous testing to find out this was total BS

[WinterShorts]

By far one of the most detailed information pieces on this player. Talks about things like the name of the player, the details of the tournament and how specifically the other Melee players got the files from his SD card, things no one else talks about for this player (although arguably to try and keep certain personal details out). While I'm much moreso an Ultimate player, I am from the same region and I do remember seeing a detailed facebook post coming out of this guy explaining why he cheated from way back when (maybe something else as well). This was a good video!

[samskott]

Thank you so much for putting in so much work to tell this story. I started in 2016 and am from the Midwest and even back then there were stories of a Pichu main who was apparently very good but something seemed kind of off about him. Even back then, nobody really talked about *how* he did it (we just knew he had a modded Wii) and people didn't even like to mention what his tag was (I think it was because he was so young and they didn't want the community to bully him). Thanks for doing the due diligence to put this all together.

[lynxfirenze]

4% performing so well even against someone who was cheating is a good demonstration of skill in my opinion.

[FrekyD]

Appreciate all the effort and research into this video! I always wondered how I got 2-0d by a pichu at that time. I honestly just thought they were a god LMAO. I was the main NEOH TO that was in the room at the fest when the SD card was looked at. We pretty much immediately put it into an md5 hasher (for the uninitiated, basically a computer program that's an easy way to tell if the ISO is genuine or not) and my heart sunk when it didn't match. It was a moment in TOing I'll never forget; my first instinct was just to think.. "what now?"

I always get very nervous when talking about this story; I think often times it gets blown up into a massive personal issue, there was a lot of vitriol thrown around at the time around them taking money from players. It can be listed as one of the reasons that Northeast Ohio and Pittsburgh, two scenes that were critical working together to make Melee big in the region from 2010-2016ish started to drift apart. I like to think a lot of the vitriol has calmed down somewhat; it's been 7 years and we've all grown as people. I'm really glad this video strayed away from a lot of that noise and focused on the video game aspect of things

I hope this story can be used as a lesson for all TOs in the future; ALWAYS check your setups before a bracket starts. Even at your 10 person homie local. I don't think it'll ever happen again, but it's the job of the TOs to make sure of it. It's a lesson I learned then and now, even when I work at events as big as Genesis or Big House, I take with me through all of it.

Great video, thank you for making this and telling this story!

[toshi]

Rule to thumb: if someone is REALLY insistent on playing on their own console etc, DON’T play on their console.

[SBaby]

This kind of makes you wonder how many cheaters DON'T get caught. We hear about cheaters getting caught all the time, but then when we remember the Rule of Hundredths, it really is kind of staggering.

[seanb]

4% should really be proud of himself. Not only did he win the tournament, he took GF over a bullshit Pichu! It's like playing a game against someone who uses Action Replay or Game Genie cheats for an advantage without you knowing and beating them anyways.