6 Video Game Cons That Shouldn't Have Fooled Anyone

Look how excited he is! He could probably start his own website with that many skins! Wait, he already had one. It was called CS:GO Lotto.

TmarTn and Prosyndicate, another YouTuber who also posted breathless videos recommending CS:GO Lotto to an audience of impressionable 14-year-olds, were the site's president and vice president, respectively. They didn't bother disclosing that in their gambling videos, making it look like this was some random website they'd happened to come across and happened to win big money on. (They still maintain the second part is true.)

Better Business BureauHa, they misspelled "TmarTn" as "Martin" in their official filing.

Shortly after they were exposed, TmarTn released an apology video which could be summed up as "I'm sorry I got caught lol." He soon deleted it. But don't worry, when the FTC heard about this, they slapped the two with ... a reminder that they should disclose any such future business endeavors. Yes, their punishment was being forced to comply with the law, like the rest of us mortals.

Rogers supposedly proved his score back in the day by taking a Polaroid photo, but that photo doesn't seem to exist anymore. This whole thing also got people to take a closer look at his other records, like the one that had three more figures than the next-highest score, the one that would have taken 350 hours to achieve, or the one that ends in 8, despite the game only advancing in increments of 5.

After weighing the concrete evidence on both sides (i.e. a ton of hard data vs. nothing at all), Rogers' records were removed from the Twin Galaxies leader board, and the Guinness Book of World Records stripped away his "longest standing video game high-score" title. On the other hand, if they ever add a "holding the most obvious fake records for decades" record, they should totally keep him in mind.

We may never know how many games were ripped off by this monstrosity, but some of the main ones include Oblivion ...

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Bethesda SoftworksOnly Bethesda is allowed to shamelessly make the same game over and over again.

... Return To Castle Wolfenstein ...

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ActivisionThe working title was Return To Return To Castle Wolfenstein.

... and, appropriately, Thief 3:

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Eidos InteractiveAt least they added those skulls ... which they stole from Diablo II.

Players also found elements from Crysis, Bioshock, Baldur's Gate, Rune, and a little-known game called World Of Warcraft, among others. They also found material from movies as random as Beetlejuice, the Pirates Of The Caribbean series, and Spawn, suggesting that the developers used the $1 DVD bin at Blockbuster as their main source of inspiration. In case you're wondering what the game looks like when using only assets made by its own devs, it's something like this:

Majestic StudiosAt one point they considered making the game in anime style, it seems.

Once word began to spread, the publishers pulled Limbo Of The Lost from stores, and developers distanced themselves from the game, saying they had no idea how all those stolen assets (meaning most of the assets) ended up there. Based on their normal pace of work, we calculate they'll get around to finding the plagiarists by 2036.

Now, to be fair, that game isn't a complete copy of Clicker Heroes -- it also contains stuff lifted from other games. The problem was the name. Even though Clicker Heroes' developers at Playsaurus had been using the name in China since 2014, the Chinese company trademarked it there first. They didn't hold the trademark for other countries, but that didn't stop Apple from banishing the game from the entire world, even after Playsaurus provided evidence detailing why this was BS.

It took a Reddit thread and some media coverage to motivate Apple to get off their butts and restore the game everywhere ... except in China. We talked to the developers, and they estimate that they lost "maybe $2,000 or so" during the three days the game was down everywhere, and they're continuing to lose about $3,500 per year thanks to getting bullied out of China. That's chump change for Tim Apple, but to quote Playsaurus, "for a small privately owned independent studio like ourselves, it sucks." Unsurprisingly, getting in touch with the company behind the newer game proved unfruitful.

Despite putting a lot of effort into making the buildings and statues look like something you'd see in the game, the people behind Joyland stopped short of stealing all of the names, so visitors are left with hilariously generic areas like "World of Legend," "Fairy Lake," and "Terrain of Magic." We're almost disappointed that there's an attraction called "Path to Warcraft." They should have gone with "Road to Battle Expertise" or something.

Jeremy Thompson/flickr

Jeremy Thompson/flickr

Jeremy Thompson/flickrAt closing time, a giant lady appears and tells you to turn off the computer and go to bed right this instant, young man.

The park seems to have picked up steam over the past couple of years, but reports state that it used to be mostly empty for a very long time, populated by more workers than patrons. Sadly, Blizzard missed the opportunity to shoot the Warcraft movie there and save millions on CGI.

When contacted by The Hollywood Reporter and asked to explain themselves, the owners of the park said it isn't based on WOW at all. No, it's "based on animals." The only animals are the bootleg Garfield plush toys and a bizarre statue of a panda wearing a panda-shaped armor. Maybe "based on animals" sounds a lot like "mind your own damn business" in Chinese?

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