Super Pichu cheating scandal

The Super Pichu cheating scandal, also known as Pichugate, was an incident that occurred in the North East Ohio competitive Melee scene. This incident revolves around a Smasher by the name of Chaos, who suddenly achieved high placements in tournaments using Pichu, a fighter notoriously known for being a joke character. It was eventually proven that Chaos had cheated by installing gameplay modifications on his setup to buff Pichu in various areas to an absurd degree, with the egregiousness of the buffs leading it to being dubbed "Super Pichu".

This incident is notable for being the first and currently only recorded case of cheating in offline 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. This ranking resulted from Pichu's bevy 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 developers, emphasized in its Adventure Mode and All-Star Mode trophies.

Despite Pichu being a bottom-tier character, however, numerous players such as Mew2King, Keropi-, and Swordsaint have demonstrated Pichu's potential strengths, including a fast neutral aerial, a strong 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 supermajors, however, most of Pichu's competitive success is limited to small tournaments.

Chaos picked up Pichu in 2014, aiming to become the best Pichu player in the world. On March 10th, 2015, Chaos (xChaos on SmashBoards) replied to a SmashBoards forum titled "Pichu isn't the worst!" He stated that despite Marth being his most used character, he was gravitating towards Pichu's potential from a personal skill-based perspective, intending to improve himself with the character. In turn, this would spark arguments with users on the forum.

Affected tournaments

This tournament article or section lacks a complete results table. You can help SmashWiki by adding the missing results. The editor who added this tag elaborates: Compile more tournaments to illustrate scale; one player named X is on some and places highly, but it's unknown whether this is Chaos.

This list compiles tournaments Chaos attended before he was caught and thus possibly cheated at, though it remains uncertain when he started cheating.

Tournament	Date	1v1 Placement	Notes
ARG 7	September 14th, 2015	9th / 14	0-2
ARG 8	September 21st, 2015	9th / 15	0-2
ARG 9	September 28th, 2015	7th / 18
ARG 10	October 5th, 2015	4th / 6	Round Robin
ARG 11	October 12th, 2015	7th / 14
ARG 12	October 19th, 2015	7th / 18
ARG 13	October 26th, 2015	4th / 11
ARG 16	November 9th, 2015	13th / 22
ARG 16	December 22nd, 2015	17th / 30
ARG 38	June 6th, 2016	13th / 33
ARG 45	June 20th, 2016	7th / 36
ARG Melee Monthly #2	June 25th, 2016	2nd / 24	See below
ARG Melee in Medina 45	June 28th, 2016	2nd / 19

ARG Melee Monthly #2

During the ARG Melee Monthly #2 2016 Melee singles, Chaos, and another player, Remix, were arguing over whose setup would be used for their tournament match. Both players soon 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' 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' suddenly high placements over ranked players using a character largely seen as unviable, and players noticing things about Pichu in his matches that seemed unusual, players began considering the likelihood that Chaos had been cheating. The suspicion was further stoked by Chaos refusing to play friendlies and to play on any other setup but his own. 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, even if DI'd the worst way possible on the absolute edge of the stage. Despite these suspicions, players were hesitant to voice them publicly, as they felt it would be seen as them making excuses for losing, especially with the seeming absurdity of accusing someone of utilizing gameplay mods to cheat at an offline tournament.

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 Melee, several players devised a plan to investigate Chaos' alleged cheating. In the plan, one group of players invited Chaos to a Circle K convenience store nearby, while another group stayed behind and copied the data on Chaos' SD card 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 a post in the r/smashbros subreddit that confirmed Chaos had cheated the whole time by playing with a modified Pichu.

The changes compiled for the "Super Pichu" are as follows:

• Pichu's weight was drastically increased from 55 to 90, making it much more difficult to KO and significantly reducing its vulnerability to throw combos.
• Pichu fell faster.
• Down tilt's hitboxes were much larger, making its reach about 1.5× longer, and had increased base knockback.
• Forward smash dealt much more damage and had much stronger knockback.
• Aerial attacks had their landing lag reduced to being nearly nonexistent.
• Neutral aerial's hitboxes were much larger.
• Up aerial's hitboxes were much larger and it was given full body intangibility.
• 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 the L button and down-left on the control stick when starting a game as Pichu's blue costume.

As a result of being publicly exposed, Chaos would be banned from attending tournaments in Ohio for an undisclosed period of time, and he was required to return his winnings from tournaments and money matches he won using the Super Pichu.

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 the first known notable instance of cheating through gameplay modification 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' 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.

On 3rd August 2017, the University of Advancing Technology covered the incident in reference to rising security issues like BlackHat and Defcon.

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 viral videos have been produced covering the spectacle of the situation. On December 20th, 2019, ZeRo would cite the scandal in a video discussing competitive Smash players who got caught cheating, garnering over 900,000 views. The next year, on November 10th, 2020, AsumSaus released a video about cheating in competitive Melee, where he discussed the incident at-length, which reached nearly 2,000,000 views.

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