The History of Hacking in Geometry Dash

here we go, months and months of work crammed into an hour long video. this is by far the biggest project i have worked on so far and the approach to making this was very different than the usual with new music, new editing methods and new video structure. research on this video began last year and took well over 3-4 months to finish this off. this was brutal to finish, so by all means enjoy this video as much as you can

Music Used:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent/Penumbra Trilogy Soundtrack - Mikko Tarmia

Elden Ring/Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Soundtrack - Yuka Kitamura, Tai Tomisawa

Bloodborne Soundtrack - Ryan Amon, Tsukasa Saitoh, Michael Wandmacher, Yuka Kitamura, Cris Velasco, Nobuyoshi Suzuki

Amnesia: The Fugitive 3 Soundtrack - Logan Felber

Morning at the Village Square - Silentwulf4

[Stormfly]

After a few of you have pointed this out to me, I wanted to correct a mistake at the FPS Bypass section at 39:04 - 39:35

While I am correct in saying that a game needs a properly implemented deltaTime setup for the game to run properly, I didn't consider that GD already has this but it's more likely just not implemented properly. A friend of mine; Cvolton did describe the more likely issue of that is that the physics differences is caused by floating point inaccuracies in relation to the deltaTime variable. In short, the algorithm shown in the video is already implemented, just not properly.

[Desticler]

"Don't cheat for fame, you will not get away with it anymore"
Well that couldn't have aged worse

[Yvelluap]

54:58 and ofc, nobody ever used it to cheat and make his way to the top of the demonlist, overshadowing real top 1 players and faking the verification of a former top 1, and get caught by 64 pixels

[xander]

16:40 Just some extra info that isn't really publicly known that I think is relevant in my case.
Interestingly, a lot of the instructions EndLevel put in his pastebin were entirely false (75% volume made no sense, nor any difference to detectability), and the "play with smooth fix on" instruction as said by End, was intentionally put there by him to catch people out since smooth fix would make it glaringly obvious that someone was speedhacking. The main innovative thing with his method was the speedhacking of certain songs (and for those with start times after 0s; you would have to engineer so the song would start going 0.5x speed at the moment the level itself begins, or at the moment you put the start pos down, because otherwise it would be completely out of sync) and speedhacking the .ogg files such as the death sound, level complete sound, and level play sound.

He also said that you can't post comments after you beat a level on 0.5x speed, because it would mess up 50% of the time??? - also untrue and an unquestioned dogma relating to this method which I was able to manipulate to duck hacking accusations because "how else would I be able to post comments?". I also intentionally hacked levels that would be hard to speedhack (i.e. not short levels, or nine circles levels). I also edited in steam screenshot sounds at the level complete screen when beating levels to make it seem more legit, since while speedhacking the game and then speeding up the audio later in hitfilm, taking an actual screenshot would make steam screenshot sound in 2x speed (since it was completed in 0.5x speed, and I had to speed up the game audio). Ultimately, the thing that actually got me caught was the inconsistencies in jumps for my Zodiac completion when counting my attempts at the end, since in previously hacked levels I had done, they were all released levels that had victors already, so I could calculate the average jumps per attempt across a few victors to make it seem realistic but since Zodiac was a verification, my predicted average jumps per attempt was significantly off, which was apparent when comparing to Technical's and Mycrafted's current attempts at the time. The steam screenshot thing and the average jumps per attempt calculations were an addition to Endlevel's method from me. Additionally I think a big part to the believability of my legitimacy and how I even got that far in the first place was because I had a track record of beating 2 top 10s at the time WITH clicks, so it wasn't like I came out of nowhere either. After the whole controversy with me though, a few months later the list understandably added the click requirements in mid-2019 iirc.

[figmentboy]

Minor correction for 56:23: inconsistencies in the way the game is rendered or the way botted clicks are processed can be used to detect bots, as well as quite a few bots having their own watermark or detection method. I know myself (and a couple other botters) have worked with the list teams to make sure botting can't make it on to the list without significant effort!

[TrideGD]

Very interesting to hear about all this, especially the more recent botting stuff, because I didn't know much about that until now. Awesome video dude, always love the documentary type videos!

[adaf]

49:51
My old username is surely hard to pronounce 🤣

I would also like to give some extra addition to the story that you might find interesting.

After me and AndxArtZ stopped working at xBot, I ended up making my own bot, a solo project called TASBot (it was around the same time as beta testing of yBot that TASBot is actually getting beta tested aswell). It is the first bot that actually use frame by frame input method and I heavily took inspiration from TASing in SMB games. Other bots soon follow through but it ended up taking me months to finally release TASBot publicly due to me wanting to make the bot works perfectly and irl stuff. I ended up releasing it publicly 2 months after zBot is released.

[Toadstar]

Stormy: I have an endless list of ways people have tried cheating the game, but if I went through them all, we would be here all day.

Me: You have no idea how much I would want a 12 hour video talking about different cheating methods and how they were exposed.

[metarotta]

i have a small confession:
back in early 1.9 when i first heard of the empty level glitch i wanted to try it out and have a small bit of fun with it so i logged out of my account for 2-3 days, and in that time went and gained thousands of stars as a unregistered user, and by the time i reached Zephyr in stars (i dont have very clear memory but he was in top 20 and in the ballpark of at least 10k stars) i changed the in game name and my icons to match his, and took a screenshot of 2 Zephyrs with near identical stats in the leaderboards (i really wish i still had this screenshot but the phone i played on i havent used in 7 years so its probably gone)

afterwards i deleted all stats and logged back in to my account which at the time had only about 1k stars, never done any cheating before or afterwards, never told this anywhere before but since the empty level glitch came up on this video figured i might as well tell now

very nice video either way

[BloodbathV]

Chapters list: (Spoiler!)



-Intro 0:00
-Secret Ways 1:25
-Practice Mode Glitch 2:13
-Speed-hacking (SB Game Hacker) 3:44
-Blue Orb Glitch 5:02
-HMANN Server Attack 6:30
-Arduino Bot 7:50
-Video Cutting 8:52
-GameGuardian Exploit 10:39
-Cheat Engine 12:16
-Empty Level Glitch 17:14
-MgostIH Exploits 18:24
-Invisible Auto 20:19
-Anaban 24:54
-The Pizzabot 26:42
-GDBot 28:48
-TeamHax Scandal 31:13
-No-Clipping 34:15
-FPS Bypass 35:50
-Piepass 40:23
-Mega Hack 42:16
-TAS Bots 48:03
--xBot 48:46
--yBot 50:38
--zBot 54:04
--DDHOR-Bot 55:13
-Final Discussion 56:44
-Outro 57:51

Edit: Thanks for 35 likes i guess
Edit 2: Thanks for 70 likes 🗿
Edit 3: Thanks for 100 likes 🥶
Edit 4: Thanks for 200 likes 🤯

[italianapkdownloader]

Really nice video, there are small interesting things missing but overall was nice to watch

[Prometheus_Alt]

Usual documentary makers: History of *big player*
Stormfly: History of hackers

[LastPrismAlex]

what a masterpiece of a video, not only this is an incredibly interesting topic, but the way you tell things and edit it all together is just perfect, it grabs your attention, and suddenly, an entire hour passed by, i love this types of videos, and no one does it better than you c: ❤️

[gabyy]

This hour felt like 15 minutes, it's amazing how many story a cube game has
Amazing video

[bricks]

Wow another quality GD documentary... you're one of the best youtube channels on GD Stormy!

[mysticaxolotl]

I feel like the explanation of FPS Bypass completely misses the whole point of why it's a thing. I'm a poor (not really) schmuck that can't afford to drop $600 on a 360hz monitor. I want to become good at the game. Should I be prevented from that because I don't have money? FPS Bypass levels the playing field imo. Not to mention: laptops. The highest refresh rate I've ever seen on a normal, non-gaming laptop is 120hz. I prefer playing GD on a laptop, again, should I be denied the same advantages people with thousands of dollars to spend on this game? Finally, a lot of the hardest demons (Tartarus comes to mind) are straight up impossible on 60hz.

[ajmalf]

I love content creators making documentaries on GD. It allows players who are new or have never interacted in the community to learn something and thats awesome!

[Blueiro]

I think Robtop's biggest mistake is not adding convenience functions and bans against hackers. Megahack is more convenient to use than official games, so everyone buys and uses it. In addition, since bans were not imposed on hackers in the early stages of the game, there was a scene where they were caught and apologized after gaining fame while using hack.

Cause i used translatior, It might be incorrect. But I say definitely hackers are trash.

[megadubstepxd]

Such a blast to watch, really love your videos. And them coming out rarely because of research and editing time is also not a big issue as it makes them more special and always a little gift if I see it in my sub box. Thanks for making content and hope you're doing well.

[GDNEWSoff]

I can already see how great this video is going to be. Good job, Stormy! :)