Super Pichu cheating scandal

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The Chaos cheating scandal, also known as Pichugate, was an incident that occurred in the Ohio Melee scene.

On June 24th-26th, 2016, a Smasher by the name of Chaos placed 2nd at the Alter Reality Games 2016 tournament using Pichu, a character notoriously known as a joke character. Following this, it was proven that Chaos had cheated by installing gameplay modifications on his setups to buff Pichu's attacks, resulting in lopsided matchups.

This incident is notable for being the first and only recorded case of cheating in Smash tournaments through gameplay modification.

Background

At the time of the incident, Pichu was ranked 24th out of 26th on the game's twelfth tier list on December 10th, 2015 at the time due to a multitude of weaknesses, mainly its extremely light weight, poor range, and lack of defensive options. In fact, Pichu was intended to be a joke character by the game's , emphasized in its Adventure Mode and All-Star trophies.

Despite Pichu's near-bottom tier list rankings, however, numerous players such as Mew2King, Keropi-, and Swordsaint have demonstrated Pichu's potential strengths, including a fast neutral aerial, a frame 9 up smash, and an effective grab game, at various tournaments. Swordsaint notably placed 97th at EVO 2014. With this being its best placement at big tournaments, however, most of Pichu's competitive success is limited to small tournaments.

On March 10th, 2015, Chaos (xChaos on SmashBoards) stated in a SmashBoards forum titled "Pichu isn't the worst!", that despite Marth being his most used character, he was gravitating towards Pichu's potential from a personal skill-based perspective, intending to improve hismself with the character. In turn, this would prompt mockery from numerous users on the forum.

Alter Reality Games 2016

During the Alter Reality Games 2016 Melee singles, Chaos, and another player, Remix, were arguing over whose setup would be used for their tournament match. However, both players agreed to play on Chaos's setup, where Remix won 2-1 in Round 1. However, despite Chaos losing to Remix, he would go on to defeat five opponents in a row in the losers's bracket, notably defeating Surf's up. hail satan, who was one of the best Melee players in the region. In his next round, Chaos would argue with Minnty over setups once more. Eventually, both players agreed to play on Chaos's setup, where Chaos would defeat Minnty 2-0.

After defeating Minnty, Chaos went on to loser's finals and faced off against Joeycrzl, who was ranked 9th on the Northeastern Ohio Power Rankings in the summer of 2016. Chaos went on to defeat Joeycrzl in a 3-1 upset, and would go on to face 4%, ranked 1st on Summer 2016's Northeastern Ohio Power Rankings, and notably ranked 99th on the SSBMRank 2016. Despite Chaos's previous victories, 4% beat Chaos in a very narrow 3-2 win, winning the tournament. Chaos placed 2nd and Joeycrzl placed 3rd, each of them winning cash prizes for their respective Top 3 placings.

Suspicion & exposure

Following Chaos's placement using a character largely seen as unviable, players began considering the likelihood that Chaos had been cheating. In a forum post from an unnamed tournament attendee, they claimed that Chaos had KO'ed Joeycrzl's Ice Climbers with Pichu's uncharged forward smash at 18% during a transformation on Pokémon Stadium. While Pichu's forward smash is notable for having the highest base knockback of any forward smash in vanilla Melee, it provably does not normally KO at said percentage range.

Some time later, a local event was organized for players in the Ohio Melee scene to gather together, with Chaos showing up as one of the attendees. While the attendees were playing their games, a plan was devised to expose whether Chaos was actually cheating or not. The plan involved distracting Chaos by having some of the attendees take him to a Sheetz convenience store nearby, while having another group stay behind to copy the SD card in Chaos's Wii to a separate SD card. After Chaos returned and everyone went home, the people who copied Chaos' SD card showed video footage of Chaos' Pichu down tilt, which turned out to have increased range compared to vanilla Melee.

On July 2nd, 2016, the_beanwolf would make post in the r/smashbros subreddit that confirmed Chaos had cheated the whole time.

The changes compiled are as follows:

• Pichu falls faster.
• Down tilt's range is 1.5× longer and has increased knockback.
• Forward smash is much stronger.
• Aerial attacks have little to no lag.
• Melee was running on the 1.0 release, making SDI more difficult.
• The changes could only be used by plugging a GameCube controller into the fourth controller port, then holding L and down-left on the control stick when starting a game as Pichu's blue costume.

Chaos's cheating would soon be exposed; as a result, he would be banned from attending tournaments in Ohio, while his earnings from the tournament would be confiscated.

The same day as the truth was revealed, Dan Salvato would release a response video about the subject, which would receive over 100,000 views and bring the issue to a wider audience.

Legacy

This incident is widely regarded as one of the first notable instances of cheating through gameplay modifications in competitive Smash history. However, it is far from the first case of cheating in general, with incidents such as tournament collusion happening for many years prior. The impact of Chaos's cheating raised numerous questions about hidden modifications being put into Smash setups. At the time, with mods like UCF gaining in popularity, it could even raise the question of whether any mods should be allowed at all, though little has changed in this regard. That being said, Tournament organizers now tend to be much more scrutinous about what hardware and software gets used in a tournament to make sure a similar incident never happens again.

In October 2020, Esports talk cited the scandal in their "The Difference Between Cheating in Esports vs Traditional Sports" article.

Since Dan Salvato's video, multiple others have been produced that have gone viral, mainly because of the spectacle. On 20th December 2019, ZeRo would cite the scandal as part of a video discussing cheaters who got caught in Smash overall, garnering over 900,000 views. The next year, on 10th November 2020, AsumSaus released a video discussing the incident at-length, which reached over 1,000,000 views.

A few years later, on 19th March 2023, lil homie would also release a video, which has reached over 500,000 views. A month later, the scandal would see coverage on EventHubs, possibly because of the renewed attention the scandal received.