Sonic Fan Game Holds Computers Hostage if they Suspect Cheating

Sonic Gather Battle is a popular Sonic the Hedgehog fan game, except if you were to try and search for it now, all you will find are news reports, video postings, and forum listings talking about how malicious it secretly is. This is because the developers have implemented a number of processes that will hold your computer hostage if they believe you cheated or stole the game.

Discord user LISTAR told everyone they could about the severity of the situation



To simplify, if you use cheat engine or abuse certain glitches, the game will butcher itself into a blue and black version of the world full of invincible ghosts, leaving the game virtually unplayable. If you try to uninstall and reinstall the game, the problem remains. Let's say you try and go into the Windows Registry to resolve this - well, now you'll have made it worse. The game will display everything in a static red filter, and large eye monsters will attack you. Reinstalling will at least revert things back to the previous broken blue state.

Okay, that's kind of drastic, but not the worst thing ever, right? Wrong. If you move a save file to a friend's PC, they get the static red problem. But wait, there's more!

If you go to Google and type in "sonic gather battle" followed by Mod, Hack, Cheat, or other such items, the browser will force close. This game installed a listener that will track what you're doing so that it can slap your hands down if it doesn't agree with it.

Let's say you want to undo all this still, be it intentional cheat attempts or just an accidental glitch. You have to contact one specific person, convince them that it was a glitch and that you are innocent, and then that person will tell the creator to unhand your PC.

This is the most outrageous abuse of developer power I have ever seen. Cheating is bad, but this is going too far. If you had any interest in trying this game, don't follow through with it.