Sonic Gather Battle DRM/anti-cheat incident
Sonic Gather Battle is a fan made Sonic the Hedgehog game built on the game engine for "Little Fighter 2", that was created by Leemena back in 2009 and it is still being worked on to this day (as of December 14th, 2017). The gameplay is a mix of arcade beat em ups and Sonic Battle with various characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise being playable, along with unlockable characters from other franchises such as Super Mario, Mega Man X, and Bleach. The game received positive attention during the time it has been available online, but there has been some speculation surrounding the game's code with behavior similar to that of malware after an update on December 4th, 2017.
Reception
The game got a mostly positive reception, but after the discovery of the DRM, the game met with mutual distaste from several other fan game communities.
Post-DRM Controversy
The game has been largely avoided, and not recommended to anyone. The event has also resulted in the fan game being referred to as "Sonic Gather Up All Your Information and Fuck Up Your Computer", "Sonic Gather Your Data and Kidnaps Your Friends and Family and Steals Your Stuff", or something along those lines.
Reddit user FreXDead said this in the comments of the Sonic Gather Battle post in Reddit:
"Got more info from the developers of this game.
They said that whatsmyip was used for the multiplayer functionality of the game due to using the ip address to be able to connect to others.
The game uses DirectX, and so does LF2 for the purpose of using ddraw.dll and if the game can't access it from the system directory, the game won't run.
Big the Cat with bloodshot eyes isn't real, and everyone should've known that by now.
The game, like the original Little Fighter 2 does, gets information from websites like lf2.net, but cannot transmit information to another server.
The game being online is one-time only and runs offline for the next playing times.
I know more information, but I can't clarify because the Discord server I used for that info is gone.
But really, its pretty bad that the game had to be a keylogger of some sort, like Sonic 2 HD was, but though, I hope they're gonna remove the DRM as they said they would, because it sure does creep me out more than sonic.exe would.
And yes, the game is still being developed to this day."
Summary
On December 10-11, a post was made on the Sonic the Hedgehog subreddit on Reddit detailing about a suspicious DRM system that was put in place after an update on December 4th, 2017. If the player looked up words along the lines of "cheat", "mod" or "hack" while the game is running, the browser would instantly close on its own and the game would activate a protection stage. At first, the game's backgrounds would be black and blue making it harder to see where your character is on the level, with the levels also being populated by red Hyudoros and the song "Fakery Way" from Sonic Adventure replacing the normal music. Then on a second boot up, the game would at first startup like normal but when you get into actual gameplay, the background will turn red with added static noise, the music would be replaced with the American version of the boss battle theme from Sonic CD, red eyes would start to appear all over the screen, and then giant ghosts would start appearing from the eyes which would kill your character instantly. Upon dying the words "You Died" would appear on-screen and from that point on, the game remains unplayable.
While this is all happening, the game would locate your IP address and then send it to an online database making sure that the DRM would still be put in place even if you try to reinstall it with the only way out being to contact the creator himself and somehow convincing him to whitelist your PC.
Further research by SFGHQ has shown cases of the game requiring administrator access in order to run, the game actively checking for certain web addresses along with installations of "Cheat Engine", registry keys being edited during the installation, and the game accessing raw disk sectors.
Many people speculate that the reason this DRM was put in place was due to the creator trying to protect the custom sprites he made for certain characters after the sprites originally were stolen back in 2014. People have since found out that some of the custom sprites for characters like Vector, Charmy, and Espio come from other custom sprite sheets on Spriter's Resource.
Aftermath
After this discovery was quickly spread around the internet, Leemena was soon banned from any future Sonic Amateur Games Expos and SFGHQ made it clear that no one should download the game for the sake of their PC and personal information. At one point during the time this info was being spread around, the game was deactivated by the creator making it unplayable for anyone regardless if they are considered cheating or not. The creator claimed that they had plans to make the game open-source but other sources say otherwise including an update on December 14th blocking access to the game if attempted on a virtual machine.
Ironically, the developer's toxic effort to keep his custom sprites have been in vain. As payback for his foolishness, users from mugenarchive.com have ripped the sprites and leaked them onto the internet as a punishment, just days after the malware was openly revealed. You can download them here.