Oh no More Plagiarisms

As the previous post about HtheB is getting more complete, his other activities have been scrutinized by the Ant1/Strobe detective team over here. HtheB has released music in a number of NintendoDS-games. Since these games use MOD-files and there are massive MOD-archives around, it is possible to search for MOD-files that has exactly the same filesize. It paid off, because HtheB did not change anything in the songs (except for the author name).

The game MancalaDS uses:

• mod.Aghrrmy Tuuns by Beathawk
• mod.Glassbilens Glassar by Mr Death

The game MegaEtk uses:

• mod.Intromuz-6.hb by Heatbeat
• mod.Intro Numma (70) by Dalezy (cover of Maniacs of Noise)
• mod.Naturvetarna 1b by Azazel

The game No Place to Hide uses:

• mod.Intromuz-2.hb by Heatbeat
• mod.## syntune ##.mod by XTD

The game Blubb 3D uses:

• mod.Epic (title) (2nd version) by Oistein Eide
• Crusader – no remorse – military.ft by Basehead
• mod.Introtune by Ramosa
• mod.Wild Perspective by Greg Tuby
• mod.Trancelation 2 by Otis
• + one unknown

This is an interesting consequence of ‘open source’ tracker music. All the sounds and sequences are available in the file, as opposed to recorded music. With recorded music, you would instead analyse the frequency spectrum, like the spectrum analysis that Nitro2k01 made with Crystal Castles. This is, of course, a glimpse into the future when we won’t be so hung up on recordings of music but have found more interesting ways of distributing music.

Anyway. As Strobe points out – please note that the game developers are not to blame here. Just like when Laromlab gave Kentucky Fried Prophet one of my songs, they probably assumed that the music wasn’t made by other people.

UPDATE As Strobe briefly mentions in the forum thread, HtheB has apparently done many of these things before. Aleksi Eeben found this thread about him using other people’s code, and I guess there’s plenty more to be found.

UPDATE2 And now for the final straw that atleast made me laugh.

So Clémence found this clip here, where it says that the song is made by Achim89. Others say that it was made by Firestorm. HtheB prefers it like this, so he files a copyright claim. I think it’s hilarious :-)