Do you know what the top Google search result for Geometry Dash is? Maybe it's the game's Steam page? Or the App Store? Maybe Wikipedia? Nope! It's actually this website called Geometry Dash .io. It's not a virus or anything, but I wouldn't encourage visiting it since it's definitely just a scam to make some quick money off of something popular. But in this video, that's exactly what we're gonna do. And TRUST ME, This goes so much deeper than I ever would have expected. The home page of the site is pretty straight forward. It's your average online game site, except that this one's called Geometry Dash, and that's also the game it's letting you play. But Geometry Dash isn't a web game! So what's the actual game here? Well, take a look for yourself. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of you already know EXACTLY what this is. It's Geometry Dash, recreated on the children's programming platform Scratch. More specifically, it's Geometry Dash v1.5 by Griffpatch. Griffpatch is a bit of a legend in the Scratch community. He's currently THE most popular creator on the platform, with the list of most liked Scratch games pretty much dominated by his game recreations. He's done everything from Geometry Dash, to Getting Over It, to Slither, to Hill Climb Racing, to 2D Minecraft... (oh, sorry, I was playing the wrong clip) (see, 2D Minecraft, I told you!) Griff's Geometry Dash recreation currently stands at 300,000 likes and 70 MILLION VIEWS. Which, for reference, is pretty much tied with the most downloaded custom levels in actual Geometry Dash. The game itself contains the first three levels of Geometry Dash, and while it's overall pretty low quality, it's still insanely good for a website where you make games by dragging and dropping. This is like the equivalent of using the GD editor to make minigames. So naturally, there's lots of cut corners like no icon customization, a single colored ship, fake music pulsing, you get the point. The levels themselves are pretty faithful to the original, but definitely not 1 to 1. For example, the third coin of Stereo Madness was completely changed, and I'm guessing it's because getting the camera to behave properly for it would have been too difficult. While the physics and jumping definitely feel a little clunky, the hitboxes are very generous. For example, you can jump over the four spikes in Polargeist pretty easily. I found myself constantly missing orbs due to the lack of buffering, and the only way to reliably hit them was by mashing the spacebar whenever the icon passed through one. There's also a noticeably high coyote time, which is when you're given a few milliseconds to jump even after falling off a platform. It's really helpful in platforming games, but definitely not meant for something like Geometry Dash. The cool thing about Scratch is that you can look inside and see exactly how a game was made, but... yeah hell if I know what's going on here. So overall, Scratch Geometry Dash is pretty good. For SCRATCH. The problem is when you have a site like this, that passes it off as the real thing. This is the top search result for Geometry Dash. There are probably people who think THIS is the whole game. In fact, I KNOW there are! It's even managed to trick big YouTubers like Parashock and Poofesure! So for every person who buys Geometry Dash, or more realistically downloads the lite version, there are probably a lot of people who go to this site, get plastered with ads, and think the Scratch version is all the game is. And in case you're wondering, it does work on mobile. The funny thing about this is that knowing RobTop, the actual creator of Geometry Dash, he probably doesn't even care that much. His games are still extremely popular, and since he's only one person, taking down these sites is just too much of a hassle. So you know what, boo hoo, fake Geometry Dash at the top of Google search. End of the world, I know. ...But here's the thing. That barely even scratches the surface of this rabbit hole. (get it? scratches?) (please cut that out when you're editing) Geometry Dash .io isn't a game. It's a website that hosts a whole bunch of games. And most of these are just fake versions of other games. Like Splatoon 3, the Dino game, Cookie Clicker, Zodiac by Bianox and More, Slime Rancher, Kenos, Word Wi- Wait. wait back up BACK UP Zodiac? Kenos? Cataclysm? Astral Divin- What is going ON here? These are GAMES on the site!! Yeah so naturally... I tried one. "Geometry Dash Zodiac is an Extreme Demon and Mega-collaboration is hosted and uploaded by Bianox in 2019, and hack-verified by xander." Actually, the game's description is literally just pulled from the Geometry Dash Fan Wiki. (although come to think of it, that IS a good way to learn a new thing or two) Anyways, let's try it and see what happens. (extremely loud clicking)
AAAGH what the hell is that noise??? Okay, so it's still Scratch Geometry Dash... kinda? I'm not exactly good at extreme demons, let alone recreations of them on Scratch, so don't expect me to beat these. My hardest demon is like, Decode. But luckily I know how to cheat. So yeah, if you look through this level... it's definitely Zodiac. Mind you, there's a... couple of details missing, and the Scratch physics make it pretty much unplayable. But it was clearly made with the intent of being Zodiac, and there's a surprising amount of effort put into it. Especially for a game made in Scratch. Recreating 1.0 Geometry Dash is extremely easy, in fact even I've done it. But something like Zodiac? With all these new portals, and orbs, and blocks AND EVEN SLOPES! SLOPES ARE SO HARD TO PROGRAM!!! Seriously, at this point it's so much easier to just code the game than to be stuck with the limitations of Scratch. There's no way this was done by Griffpatch, he probably doesn't even know what Zodiac is, but it's clear that someone took his recreation of Geometry Dash and added so much more to it. And then it somehow found its way onto this website. Tell you what, let's try a few more levels. Here's Nine Circles. Same deal. YouTube thumbnail before playing... Game description is taken from the Wiki... Same low quality menu with this horrendous noise... Although this time there's also some collectibles now. And of course, the actual level. Which again, is pretty faithful, except that it uses old 1.0 blocks and has physics that make it pretty much unplayable. Obviously I couldn't make it to the iconic wave part legitimately, but here's what it looks like. And it's beautiful. But also look they even got the little Zobros at the end, awwww!! So yeah, there's no denying that this is Nine Circles... But maybe it's more like... eight... squares? The more I looked around the site, the more I could find. Bloodbath... Killbot... Kenos... Sonic Wave... Astral Divinity... Slaughterhouse... it's not even just demon levels, here's... Fish Toaster by Bizarre? This is a real level, what??! Interestingly enough, there's also some official levels, like Blast Processing. But they're always actually the V2 versions created by Neptune. I guess it's also worth noting that there's Geometry Dash Unblocked, which is your more traditional Geometry Dash copy and not something made on Scratch. This one's got some absolute bangers like "Let's go!" "Data after Data", "Never Give Up", "Drought", "Xpart". The levels are actually recreations of the Geometry Dash ones, like "Associations" is actually Clubstep, with the monsters and everything. As hilarious as this is, I wanna focus on the Scratch games in this video. But if you want me to dive into other games like this one, then let me know in the comments. I feel like it would be really fun to break apart how exactly these games are made, and maybe even who's responsible for them. But back to all the Scratch levels. I didn't realize it at first, but they're surprisingly search engine optimized. This means that if you Google something like Geometry Dash Bloodbath, it'll still be pretty high up. Usually it's overshadowed by the wiki page or a video of the level's actual completion, but pretty much every level on the site shows up near the top of the first page of Google. So, why does this work? Well, the answer's pretty hecking obvious. Children! There's lots of people that are too young to grasp the idea of platform exclusives, which means that they think they can just look up "Geometry Dash Free" on Google and start playing the actual game. And if they aren't super familiar with GD, they probably won't even realize it's not the real thing. When I was really young, I remember getting upset because I'd watch videos of Super Mario World, but I couldn't find the website where you play it. (without having to enter your credit card number first, that is) Keep in mind the internet was a different place back then, because nowadays... Screw you, Nintendo. Long story short, this site makes its money by using keywords to get to the top of Google, and then taking advantage of people who are too dumb to realize that it's not actual Geometry Dash. But the real mystery is, where are these levels coming from? There are HUNDREDS of them, and as of writing this video, there's new ones constantly being added to the site. Well, to answer that, we gotta head back to good old Scratch. (sighs) ...the other Scratch. (Cut every Scratch joke. Please.) But before we get to that... If you like what you've seen so far, why not subscribe to the channel? My upload schedule is basically nonexistent, so there's really nothing to lose. (yes, I'm seriously making that a selling point) Did you know that only 5% of people who watch my videos are Canadian? I dunno, I just thought that was an interesting statistic. By the way, thank you so much for 400,000 subscribers. That is, INSANE to me. YouTube's not a job, I just do it because it's fun. And that's also why I don't force myself to upload so often... or else I'm gonna get super sick of it. Did you know that we're not too far from passing Sakurai in subscribers? I think we can take him on. And what about Yrimir, this guy's got a worse upload schedule than I do! But yeah, if you wanna see more of this stuff or just want to help the channel out... you know what to do. Anyways, pretty much every custom level on this site traces to a single mysterious person. A person who has recreated over 2000 Geometry Dash levels in Scratch, with new ones releasing pretty much daily. A person who has dedicated the past five years of their life... ...to recreating Geometry Dash levels on Scratch. And his name, is I don't know how he does it, but he's done pretty much every level you can imagine. From demon levels, to map packs, to dailies, to just random stuff pulled from the featured tab. They're far from perfect, but more than enough for the level to be recognizable. And the gameplay matches up pretty well too. From what I could find, he doesn't seem to take requests and sort of just makes whatever level he feels like. Either way, I'm absolutely fascinated by this. While I wouldn't say that I enjoy playing all these levels on Scratch, especially since they don't sync that well, I definitely see this as more of an art form, because again, making this on Scratch is INSANELY hard to do. You're welcome to check out the account for yourself, but I just ask that you please don't be a jerk to him. There's nothing wrong with what he's doing, so either say something encouraging or don't say anything at all. I'm not gonna dig TOO deep into who iPhone is since I don't really feel comfortable with that, but at the very least I wanted to get in contact with him and ask a couple of questions about his work. Because deep down I was wondering if maybe he's a team of people, or some kind of AI, or wait... What if he's making these levels... So that he can put them on the fake GD site? (ok that one's definitely not true, but can you imagine?) I couldn't find him on any social media, but while looking around I did notice this video by Krisz about, you guessed it, Geometry Dash on Scratch. Although sadly I don't think he appreciated this beautiful art form nearly as much as I did. Also I asked if I could steal the phrase "fake Geometry Dash" from his thumbnail and he said sure. (thanks for the ad revenue Kris!!!) Anyways since I couldn't find iPhone on anywhere other than Scratch, I decided to just leave a profile comment asking if he was on Discord, and pray that he'd see it. ...yeah I got banned for asking for personal information. Okay, the thing about Scratch is, it's a site for kids. I mean, I was looking through the
profile comments and they're all like "where do u download the music from" "the internet" "Newgrounds in specific, I don't recommend going to it though." "Unless you're a tennager" "sorry, teenager" Also wait, this guy's profile photo looks... kind of familiar. Yeah, I already like this guy more than all of you. Since iPhone was seemingly out of the question, I decided that the next best thing to do would be to get in touch with some other notable people from this Geometry Dash Scratch community. Oh yeah, did I mention this is an entire community? Yes, I'm so emotionally invested in this now. You have no idea. The first person I got in contact with was CrystalKeeper7, who's #2 in views on Scratch, only behind you know who. This is all thanks to his extremely popular recreations of GD SubZero, Meltdown, and World. Each with about ten million views, and yes they are indeed on the fake site. He's not as active on Scratch anymore, but he's got a really cool YouTube channel centered around game design, so if you like that kind of stuff then I definitely recommend checking it out. I hit him up on Discord and he helped me get in touch with the other person I was looking for, hoppingicon. Who's also made a lot of popular GD games, but more importantly, is credited in pretty much everyone one of iPhone's levels. And so, they began to tell me everything. Long story short, it all started with the original Geometry Dash demake by Griffpatch, which was released on April 19th, 2016. Scratch gives you the ability to "remix" a game, which basically means making whatever changes you want and then uploading it as your own project. And so four months later, hoppingicon came along and expanded on the game by adding levels 4 5 and 6. Then one month later, he did 7 and 8. And this pretty much continued. This was actually really impressive, because not only do you have to build the new levels in Scratch, but you also have to program all the new portals and game mechanics. After several months, CrystalKeeper would eventually go on and make levels 9-13, and from there the two of them just kept making new levels. Another user by the name of chikomastr helped with the later ones. While some gamemodes like the wave were coded in without any problems, others like the ball seem to be completely missing. So it's possible that iPhone coded this himself, or just used code from another person's remix. (also look, you can use my icon in one of the games let's gooooo) In Griffpatch's recreation of Getting Over It, he actually says a few lines which perfectly describe how I feel about these games. (I'm not crying... I'm just...) (...shedding tears) So here's something we haven't discussed yet. How do you actually build these levels? Well, if you press the Z and M buttons at the same time, you'll enter editor mode which allows you to tweak the level and even save it. This was actually present all the way since Griffpatch's game, and because of that it works with literally every level that uses his code. Go to any level on that fake website, and boom, editor mode. From there, you can use the number keys to cycle through objects, then just click and drag to place them. You can only have one object per grid space, but there's a lot of interesting ones to pick from, like long walls or blocks that are offsetted a little bit. The editor features vary depending on who's game you're playing, so some editors might have more stuff in them than others. But that doesn't change the fact that I have NO IDEA how people have the patience for this. This is not an easy editor to use, so the fact that people can actually make working levels with it is insane. And also, this was all made in SCRATCH. WHAT??! I tried making my own level, and immediately gave up because of how difficult it was. Oh and just a reminder that iPhone has made 2000 levels with this thing. Yeah, this guy's an absolute beast. So with two GD scratch legends by my side, we worked to try and get in touch privately with iPhone, but ultimately just ended up talking with him through Scratch. I started off by asking him how he got into making levels on Scratch, and if he ever programs new features for them. He told me he started in 2017, and makes the levels for the people who can't afford the full version of Geometry Dash. His English wasn't too great, so he didn't actually answer the second question. I asked him how he picks which levels to make, and he said he uses his mind. (rimshot) As for how long each one takes, about 1 hour. I asked him about the process of decorating the levels, but no response. But then I decided to hit him with a big one. How do you feel about scam websites that reupload your games? "Is scam websites bad?" "Are they going to block the scam websites?" "Are they going to block me too?" I told him "You're safe, don't worry." "*cuddles you with my soft tails uwu*" So yeah, safe to say iPhone has nothing to do with that scam website. And I already knew that, because it's made pretty obvious by the fact that not all of his levels are there. And when the site adds new levels, they're usually ones that he made years ago. So safe to say that this site is probably just run by some bad actors that are looking to make a quick buck by tricking people. Tell me something I didn't know. But I wasn't ready to stop quite yet. At the bottom of the website is a link that says 'contact us'. It gives you an email with no search results except for some Government of India page. I really wanted to email them, but I didn't want to look too suspicious. So I made an alt and went undercover. "how do you add new geometry dash levels to your website?" "i want to play my favorite level sunset sandstorm but i dont see it anywhhere" Okay yeah I never got a reply to that. I don't know what I was expecting. I also took a look at the site's terms of use, and I found a pretty interesting line in there. Wait, what, is this like Coolmath Games where people are on this site in class because it has Geometry in the name? I kind of assumed that the terms were copy and pasted from somewhere, so that gave me an idea. If you use quotation marks when searching something on Google, you'll only get exact search results for it. For example, typing "Geometry Dash UwU" will only give you results that actually use the phrase. wait, what? oh my god it's the same website. Ohhh man iPhone you really did make everything. I took a long line of the terms of service that doesn't mention Geometry Dash or anything oddly specific, then searched it up on Google with quotation marks. And what I found was shocking. Sure enough, literally HUNDREDS of sites were all using the same line, but the actual websites were, well, Fake Wordle Fake Poppy Playtime Fake Gartic Phone. Fake Full Guys Happy Wheels Among Us Cookie Clicker IT JUST GOES ON!!! All of these websites look different from one another, but the one thing that always stays the same is this bar at the bottom. About Us, Contact Us, DMCA, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use. All of these sites are just built off of the same template, and then painted to look a little different from each other. (much like iPhone's levels) (THAT WAS A JOKE) Obviously they don't all have hundreds of Geometry Dash games on them, but a good chunk of them have Griffpatch's original one at the very least. I didn't even notice at first, but some of these sites ALSO appear on the first page of Google when searching up Geometry Dash. I've been talking about geometrydash .io in this video, but there's also Geometry DASH dash .io. As well as Geometry Dash Free .com. Again, all on the first page of Google. And actually, you'll get this with pretty much any popular indie game. Friday Night Funkin'? Check. Poppy Playtime? Absolutely. If it's popular, there's probably a fake game site specifically for it. The sad truth is that there's nothing we can really do about this. As soon as one site dies off, two more are gonna grow back. The best thing you can do is just, not support these websites. Instead, support the original game, or better yet, the games that they're stealing and putting on the website. The internet's a dangerous place, and people WILL take advantage of you if they get the chance. It's something that happens constantly, from elderly people being scammed by popups to little kids trying to get free Robux. You could program a free game for the fun of it, and next thing you know it's reuploaded to a random game site and covered with ads. In fact, this even happened with my own game, Treacherous Trials. Which is a Nine Circles themed game I made in a week for my friend's birthday. (you should play it, it's good) But you know what, I didn't make this video because I wanted to magically shut down these websites. I made it because while most of these sites shove random games in your face, the Geometry Dash one promotes, well, actual custom levels. Sure, they're stolen from a really passionate Scratch creator, and the people running the site probably don't even know anything about Geometry Dash, but something about this is just, so cool to me. Because you're not playing those stupid fake Geometry Dash games on this site... you're playing watered down versions of real levels, made by a person who genuinely wanted to make Geometry Dash accessible to a larger audience. It may not be the real thing, but the names and creators and even information about the original levels are always there in plain sight, so even if you play the fake version of Sonic Wave you're still gonna walk away thinking "damn, Cyclic did a good job with this". At the end of the day, this site is still awful, and nothing can change that. They're stealing games and profiting off of innocent Scratch creators, and lots of people constantly fall for their tricks. But on the other hand, thanks to the incredible work of Griffpatch and iPhone and the rest of the Scratch community, the site is so much more ridiculous than what you would find on any other scam website out there. And I, for one, think that's pretty damn cool. Thanks for watching, and be careful on the internet. And remember that just because something is worse, it doesn't mean there's no love put into it. Unless it's Geometry Dash shorts
