Sonic Gather Battle - Summary/History

Now, you might be wondering; how did this Sonic fan game exactly become a virus/malware? What if I told you, Sonic Gather Battle doesn't only prevent you from stealing OCs by preventing you from using a cheat program or anything of the sort, but also reports your browser history and your personal information off to it's server for the creator to potentially blackmail you with?

Does it sound like it's out of a crazy nut-house conspiracy? Yes. But did it actually happen? You bet it did! This game doesn't really lock your computer, it's a game DRM. One that didn't show up in virus circles or scans because it was newly created by the developer. No one's ever seen anything like it.

There was a popular Discord post made from an individual named LISTAR, who says that while the game is pretty good for what it is, it does have a DRM that is close to being malware. People complained about Sonic Mania and Denuvo, a third party DRM that is commonly used by recent games to prevent piracy. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but it does it's job pretty well.

Though, lots of people hate it because of some shady things it does, such as decryption on the fly, which can attack your drives or whatever. I'm not an analyzer, but people just don't like Denuvo, and it's been that way for a while. LISTAR goes on to explain more about the DRM used in Sonic Gather Battle. There's a DRM in the game that can be triggered in various ways, either a bug or if you try to run Cheat Engine.

Cheat Engine is a program that can be used to get down to a game's memory addresses. You can theoretically change a game's values, such as HP, money, and so on. You can do this with games that calculate things client-side, but not server-side. So, that's basically what Cheat Engine is.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the sprites used in this fan game are taken from a GameBoy Advance title called Sonic Battle from 2003. More so, I believe the game runs on an engine called Little Fighters 2, I know it's not that relevant, but I think the gameplay is from there.

The game's DRM will then make the background and foreground change and spawn in invincible enemies. Once it happens, there's not much else you're able to do. If you attempt to modify your Windows registry, the game's super-protection will be triggered. At this point, the game will look like something out of a Creepypasta. Even the music that follows is the creepy Sonic CD boss theme. Reinstalling the game doesn't do anything, by the way.

Also, what's interesting is, I found out that you can't share a save file between computers. The computer receiving the save file will be stuck in the super-protection mode. It may likely be because the DRM is tied to hardware tags, Windows ID, OEM flags, or anything of the sort. But beyond that, it's even worse after that.

However, you also can't type the name of the game, followed by "cheat/hack/mod" on Google, as this closes your web browser, whatever it may be, and instantly enables the protection. Now, you may be wondering how to remove the protection. You have to talk to a specific person and prove that a glitch caused the protection. Then they will tell the developer to whitelist your computer again.

The developer of Sonic Gather Battle can store your computer's information in their databases, even being able to check your browser history. Yet people complained about Sonic Mania and Denuvo. It seriously sounds more like ransomware than a fan game, where the payment is your computer's information. That's just not right. Basically, if you try to do any of this stuff, the game then opens "WhatIsMyIP," then packages the information off to the developer.

This is actually so bad that, if you use a virtual machine, the game would not be able to run. But even so, there are a couple of red flags; for example, it needs administrator privileges before it can run properly. Never give a program administrator privileges, ever, unless you're sure the program's trustworthy. It's literally like handing someone the keys to your stuff and letting them do whatever they want with it.

It also looks for raw disk sectors, which is not something that a "game" should ever need to do. I personally recommend giving such privileges to a self-made program, a program you made and know the inner workings of. Not to some mad Sonic fan that made this game because someone stole their OCs/sprites. And that's really the only reason the developer made something like this.

Like, seriously? If stealing this person's OCs is what caused many computers to be blacklisted and their information/browser history being compromised, then the Sonic community sure is mental. Not to mention that when the game was discovered to be a trojan, the developer got banned from the SAGExpos, the game no longer runs to this day, and the Sonic fan game reputation was damaged. SEGA's image was potentially damaged by this as well.

Not to mention that it's a criminal offense under the U.S. jurisdiction. Yes, I know this even though I live in Japan. Do you see everything that's wrong with this situation? It just annoys me to no end! Forget it, I'm not going to talk about this issue any further. Anyways, farewell, DeviantArt. This is Aika, the little girl, signing out.