DLUTI 228 - Mini ARGs: Volume 2

It's just Mike and Matt this week. We discuss a few small ARGs that peaked our interest.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:16

Don't look under the internet.

SPEAKER_07 0:31

Holy fish paste.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

We're recording. We are recording. We are recording.

SPEAKER_05 0:41

We're recording. We are recording.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

We. You got your car in the garage so you that you don't get hailed?

SPEAKER_08 0:47

I sure as shit do. Hello, all you little freakers, and welcome to Don't Look Under the Internet, the podcast where this episode might get weird because I'm under a massive thunderstorm warning. Uh that's Matt. New Month new me. And I'm Mike, where it's new monthbius new me.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

New month PS. I swear to God, 50% of the time that I've seen Mike in my life, he's been wearing that t-shirt.

SPEAKER_08 1:15

It's month BS for the rest of us.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

I'm not convinced you don't have just like a whole closet of month BS t-shirts.

SPEAKER_08 1:22

You'll never know. They're all the same quality.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

It's like Dexter's Dexter's lab when he opens his closet and it's just lab cuts.

SPEAKER_07 1:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Just month BS t-shirts. I've really wanted to do that. If I'm ever rich, like super duper rich, that's 100% what I'm gonna do. Is my main closet is gonna be it's I'm gonna like Steve Jobs it. I'm just gonna have a whole closet full of just like black sweaters in the same pants. Also, tragic story for everybody. I was working on my car the other day. It was my mistake for wearing the jeans while I was doing it, but I was working on something with a box cutter. Totally cut a hole in my favorite pair of jeans that I've had for like 10 years. So real upset about that.

SPEAKER_08 2:03

I get that. I had to retire my favorite pair of jeans because the holes in the knees got way too bad to the point where it's like these are about to be jorts soon. Hell yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Actually, I cut them right at the knee, so I could do that.

SPEAKER_08 2:15

You could make some jorts.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

You might be onto something. You may be on to something.

SPEAKER_08 2:19

There you go. Yeah, I I'm very picky with my jeans because it's hard to I'm I got such a weird figure. It's hard to find a pair that fit properly.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

It's impossible for me, honestly. Like I don't like the trend, the trend of like the return of baggy jeans because I'm a little on the shorter side and I'm a little like I have a wide frame. So baggy jeans on me just make me look like a blob. I don't look good.

SPEAKER_08 2:47

You're not into the jean goes.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

No. So I have like to look like I have any sort of shape at all, I have to wear a slimmer cut. But like I can't at this point, you look a little ridiculous if you're wearing like real tight skinny jeans. So I can't do that. So it's like finding this middle ground between like just like a normal straight leg jean that doesn't look blobby on me and not skinny jeans. And this is like one of the only pairs I have that I feel like toes that middle line that fits really well. I don't know. It's a struggle, man. This has absolutely nothing at all to do with what we're talking about today.

Patreon Updates And Merch Plans

SPEAKER_08 3:23

RIP in peace, Matt's jeans. In the arms of an angel. In the arms of yeah, I so Duluth housekeeping, little housekeeping, I suppose. Uh, first and foremost, I did drop um the second episode of uh Duluthy Does a Big Halo. So episode two is out uh on for patrons, five dollars and up. Uh, you expect some more fun stuff coming up later this month as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

There will hopefully be a new bonus by the time you hear this.

SPEAKER_08 3:54

Yep, exactly. So uh for those of you that may have missed it, we've talked about it for the past couple months, but I'll say it again. We are kind of restructuring our Patreon and our website structure. So uh you're gonna see I would say better quality uh bonus episodes, more reliable bonus episodes. Um, and we're gonna start eventually rolling out new merch. So get if you like anything in the shop, get it while you can, because it may or may not be there soon. And by soon, I mean, I don't know, half a month, month-ish. So we're still getting the art pieces together. But uh, we're we're seeing some big things in the works here, and I'm very happy with it. So um no new patrons to shout out right now, which is a little not upsetting. I get it. Ever since that I ever since that Iran strike, man, you know, oil prices through the roof, they can't afford to grease those server wheels and everything's expensive.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

That was gonna be my thing at the end. You're jacking my stees, man.

Why Mini ARGs Today

SPEAKER_08 4:57

I'm sorry. But don't worry, people will forget about it by then because our attention spans. Um but that's all I gotta say. So uh just be on the lookout. If you're ever if you're interested at all in our uh in our bonus content, you know, it's diluti.com or patreon.com slash dilutipod. Uh go take a look. And it there might be something worth your while there. That'd be cool. If you don't like it, I'm sorry. That's all I got. Um no refund. No, no refund. Um housekeeping. Clap clap, quick clap. Uh for today's episode, it's just Matt and myself.

SPEAKER_05 5:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_08 5:33

And that happened a little on the spontaneous side. So we decided, hey, we're just gonna cut it loose today on these next two episodes and just have a little bit of fun, you know. So today we're talking about a couple mini little ARGs that we found. Uh, I do want to start getting us more into the track of talking about bigger ARGs sometime in the future here. That'd be kind of cool. Uh, and this was gonna be my little like one of mine.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

I think honestly, I'm still gonna cover it today and go over it, but I think we could honestly do an entire episode on it if we wanted to cover all the little details and stuff.

SPEAKER_08 6:12

I I was going to full full disclosure, I was gonna cover the I Love Bees ARG, the Halo 2 one. I thought it was simple more simple than it is, way more and way more. And I wouldn't mind if we covered that someday. That'd be really fun.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

That's what happened with one of mine. One of mine is one that I was just kind of vaguely aware of and thought was fairly straightforward. And then as I got into it, I was like, oh no, this is a thing.

SPEAKER_08 6:34

Yep, same. I think that not to spoil it too much for anyone that didn't know too much about it, but I'm pretty sure the I Love Bees one. I know it's for Halo 2, but Nathan Fillion's in it, and a lot of the voice is for ODST. So I'm wondering if it's got themes. I never listened to all the audio clips for it. I wonder if there's themes that roll into ODST. Like they they they scrap for like Halo 2 and they used an ODST because they have these audio files or something. I they use the same premise because the premise for the the ARG TLDR is that like you find these random payphones around the area and you go to them at a specific time and there's a phone call, you answer it, you get an audio message, and in ODST. That's the same thing that happens in ODST. Yep. So I like that. I like that they kind of rolled that concept over.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

It could we're not talking about that. Derailing again. We found out that despite Mike's claims that ODST is one of the better Halo games, it's actually really tedious and boring.

SPEAKER_08 7:34

It's one of the better concepts in a Halo game.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Uh, aesthetic is cool, but that's really where it ends.

SPEAKER_08 7:40

I enjoyed the concept, the execution was kind of bland. I still like it though. I still think it's a fun game, but it does have its issues, which is I'm setting on a replay. Um, I should have just left it alone. It was I had the memory, it was perfect. Right.

SPEAKER_05 7:59

That's okay.

SPEAKER_08 8:00

But whatever. It'd be what it do. Um, but today, uh, like I said, we're just covering a couple little mini ARG, ARG-esque things that we might have found and uh see what we think about them. Uh, do you want me to go first or do you want to go first?

Portal’s Radio Puzzles And BBS

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Uh I'll go first.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So I'll I'll shoot right off the bat with a pretty big heavy hitter that I think a lot of people have probably heard of. So this one is the portal ARG. So um if you didn't already know, there was a a fairly high profile ARG back in the day for the release of Portal 2. Um, and this is like it's a rare I love it when Valve does ARGs because they have this ability to like make their because they have an entire platform and games, they have this ability to like spread clues and stuff out over like multiple games and across their platform and stuff, which I think is super duper neat. Um, but this one was pretty isolated to portal. So what had happened was on March 1st of 2010, there was there's a little bitty update to Portal 2 or to Portal 1. Portal 2 hadn't come out yet, obviously. But um this added some radios to Portal, 26 radios to be exact, and people started like messing around with these radios, and they pretty quickly figured out that if you take the radio, like these little radios, and you put them in a specific spot in the test chamber that they're in, they give you a clue. And these clues came in the form of audio, and it was uh encoded in different ways. Some there were some that were fairly straightforward that were just Morse code messages. Um but the cooler thing is some of them were actually images that were transmitted through something called slow scan television, which is basically um a way of encoding image data into sound, and so these files, audio files would play, and if you use something to convert them from this SST V format into an image, it would give you a clue. So the players used that, figured that out and used that to convert the audio into different images, and when they were decoded, there was a bunch more clues inside them. So they found some phone numbers, they found some login credentials, and then there were just like some cryptic images and documents. Now, what they figured out with the phone numbers is they they tried calling them first of all, and nothing happened. So somebody had the bright idea to try to dial into one as if it were a BBS or a bulletin board system from way back in the fucking day. So what you had to do was take a 56k modem or a BBS software emulator and plug the phone number in, and it would dial in to the bulletin board system, and then within the bulletin board system, there was more clues. Some of it was ASCII art, some of it was documents that just like gave information about aperture science. Um, and then there was a bunch of stuff that was just corrupted data or encrypted data that they couldn't figure out how to get into. Um, but on March 3rd, uh there was another update to portal, and it added a bunch more um it added some cryptic stuff, and then it added three new audio files. So there was one called Dinosaur Fizzle, Dinosaur Fizzle 2, and Dinosaur Fizzle 3. There were also some changes that were made to the file dump that was found on the bulletin board system, and decoding some stuff led them to a bulletin board post on the system that just gave them a countdown timer, but didn't really tell them what the countdown timer was all about. So they just kind of watched this thing click click down until March 5th, 2010, when Portal 2 was officially announced on Steam. And you would think that would be where the end of it was. Uh except it wasn't. There was more stuff to happen. So uh most of this leading up was just kind of a teaser for uh Portal 2. Um but on March 11th, which is a little over a week after this started, there's this little thing called the Game Choice Awards. And Gabe Newell gave a presentation at the Game Choice Awards Awards, and while he was doing that, the screen behind him blue screened of death. And uh initially it was played off as like, oh no, the geek the PC that's running the presentation blue screen. But there was codes inside the blue screen. So if you took a look at the blue screen, um GLaDOS's name appeared in the blue screen, and then there was a message that was hidden behind some hex code, and it resulted in the text string suspend until E.

SPEAKER_02 13:34

Do you have a guess of what I know what E is?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

A date? It's three E's, my guy. It's E3, oh my god. Yeah, suspend until E3. And so everybody took this as suggesting that there wouldn't be any more information about Portal 2 until E3 of 2010, which wasn't until June of that year. Um June rolls around and an email gets sent to the press claiming that uh the Portal 2 premiere, which was a scheduled for June 14th, at E3 was actually canceled for a surprise.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

What a surprise, you might ask.

SPEAKER_08 14:19

Um was it a Half-Life 3?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

No. Actually, on the second day of Portal uh E3, they announced Portal 2 anyway, and the surprise was that Portal 2 was coming to PS3. That was kind of the surprise. Oh um, but and really that's kind of the end of it. There's a bunch of information in here that's just like uh just like information about aperture science, like some background lore and shit like that. But if you want to dig into like more information about this and like go through all the puzzles and shit, you can do that. Most of it's archived and out there. There's a wiki on it. You can check that out. But that's pretty much the the gist of it. Some updates were added to portal, the original one that gave clues that were really just provided a bunch of cryptic information until Valve was like, here, here's the fucking game.

SPEAKER_07 15:12

We just leave us alone. There's a sequel. Leave us alone. We're tired of your emails. Gabe won't leave us alone.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

It was really just a build hype just to get people talking about this thing.

SPEAKER_08 15:26

Kind of a disappointing ending if the whole thing was just it's on PS3, yay!

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah, there wasn't really anything. As far as I can tell from reading through this stuff, it doesn't really seem like there was anything where, like, oh, you unlock this thing and there's a bunch of information. It was like you just hunt around in these clues and you get art and documents, like classified documents, which I guess is kind of cool, but it none of it actually led up to like a reveal that anything was gonna happen because all they got was a countdown timer, and then the countdown timer basically just told them that there was gonna be an announcement, and then the announcement was that there wasn't gonna be an announcement until June, and then in June they just announced the game.

SPEAKER_08 16:13

They did it, man.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 16:16

Um how much money do you think the marketing team gets for setting up an ARG? And do you think they understand the concept? Like, do they have people on the team that are just like, oh yeah, I want to do this ARG? Or are they just like, you know, it's really hot right now? Apparently this wasn't called ARGEs.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Apparently, this wasn't done by any sort of marketing team or anything, and was completely done by the developers of the original game.

SPEAKER_08 16:37

Oh, that works. Just Gabe in an office by himself, just and I'll put three E's in it, and they'll know it means E3.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

I think he probably didn't have anything to do with it. The developers probably just came up with this idea, put it in the game, and then told him probably just told him. They were like, hey, we did this thing. And he's like, Alright, sure, whatever. Maybe that's why he has so many yachts.

SPEAKER_08 16:56

Maybe that's why he has so many yachts, is uh he he those are his rewards for such a good ARG. He's like, I've earned this treat now. I'm gonna go buy a$400 million yacht. Buy some that man, doesn't he doesn't he own like the most yachts or something? He owns like an insane amount of shit.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

There's stuff that I don't even know that he's I didn't know until recently that he owns a racing team.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Yeah. He owns a sports car racing team.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

What an interesting man.

SPEAKER_08 17:25

I would love to just sit down and be like, who are you? You seem like an enigma of a man.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

I think he got stupid rich and he got fuck you money and fucked off, basically, is what happened.

SPEAKER_08 17:39

Well, I just mean like what are his hobbies? Because so far the only thing I know from the man is he likes boats and now he likes NASCAR. So what do you what does Gabe do on his days off? What do you do?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

He doesn't have a NASCAR team.

SPEAKER_08 17:50

Oh whatever.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

What does Gabe do? I don't know, hangs out on his fucking yacht.

SPEAKER_08 17:56

Plays fucking he plays Half-Life 3 on his yacht because he's the only one that has a copy. He made it just for himself.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

I don't know. I mean, he still does some sort of management of Valve, I believe. Yeah. Well, it's probably I mean, it probably runs itself at this point. As far as I understand, the way Valve works now is all the developer, it's actually a super small team still, because it's really not that difficult to run a store. And like in terms of their I I'm pretty sure they bring in the most money per employee of any company on the planet. Because they bring in billions of dollars a year, and they only have like it's like a couple hundred employees or something like that. So I think I think Valve's income like per employee is something crazy, like two million dollars a year or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Damn.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Um, yeah. My my understanding of how Valve works at this point is that there's like a core team that runs the store, and then all the developers that actually work at Valve just show up to work and just do whatever they want.

SPEAKER_08 19:03

Hell yeah, living the dream.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Which apparently is why nothing ever actually gets done because like projects projects will get like 75% of the way done and then like they'll get bored and then just move to something else.

SPEAKER_08 19:15

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

But it doesn't matter because like they don't need to ship games to make money, they just they shovel in money from all the sales on their platform. Yeah, and the only expenses they have is the infrastructure behind the store.

SPEAKER_08 19:29

So yeah, I was gonna say they're not making they're they're not they're not making uh the the Left 4 Dead series isn't their money maker, it's just a piece of fun that they wanted to do. Yeah, it's no equivalent. Yeah, that's fair. Which probably why you don't see them making that many games anymore. And they didn't to begin with, but they haven't put out bangers like they used to, I feel.

unknown 20:01

Nope.

Valve Lore And Gabe Newell Tangent

SPEAKER_08 20:02

Anyway, nope. I'll talk about mine. Uh unless you have another one you want to do.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

I do have another one, but you go.

Dead Grumps And Grumps Conspiracies

SPEAKER_08 20:09

Okay. So I'll talk about my only one. I have another one. I don't remember too much of it, so if we need time, I could talk about it, but uh this one should take up a bit of time. So I have something that I don't know if it constitutes as an ARG, but the video I found on it called it an ARG. So I thought that's good enough for me. So I'm talking about the Dead Grumps YouTube channel. So first and foremost, I want to give a shout out to a YouTube channel called uh Mikeon, M-E-I-K-K-O-N. Uh, they are the only video I could find with information on this. Uh, and it's a very well done video. All the information I got for this bit of uh uh stuff that I'm talking about today is from that video because again, there's really nothing about dead grumps that is active anymore, and we'll see why. So what is dead grumps? The name should sound a little familiar to you. It is a game grumps uh affili affiliated quota big quotes around the word affiliated channel. Uh, and you if you're not familiar with the game grumps, I guess how for one, uh, but also Game Grumps is a let's play channel with uh Aaron Hansen and Dan Avidan. Uh it started with Aaron Hansen and John Jafari. Uh I'm grump. And they just do let's plays of videos. Uh I'm not so grump. Yeah, hey, I'm grump. I'm not so grump. I used to love them, they were my favorite back in the day, and I just do not watch them anymore.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

I'll be perfectly honest with you. I never really found them funny.

SPEAKER_08 21:48

I loved them back in what they even call their what fans call their golden age. I loved them from like 20 2014 to 2016 was like prime. They had like Two to three years of just banger material. And then I think I just grew out of the type of humor that they do. But yeah, if you want to go check them out, go check them out. It's just a Let's Play channel. But they're they were pretty popular back in their heyday. That's why I'm talking about this right now. So the key aspect that I want to talk about is that Game Grimm started in 2012. John, one of the original hosts of the show, left in 2020, uh 2013. I keep saying 2020. He left in 2013. A year in he left. And he provided a very vague reason why he left. This caused a bunch of the fans in the community to theorize on what happened, spawning arguments, disagreements, and even uh creating subreddits like r slash conspiracy grumps, r slash uh goodbye, my sweet prince, and r slash bring John back. There's a bunch of them. R slash conspiracy grumps is the only one active. But before all this, before all the chaos, there was one before there was one who may have predicted the downfall. Uh oh. And that is Dead Grumps. So Dead Grumps is a YouTube channel that posted its first video on April 23rd, April 23rd, 2013, two months before John left the show. People are like, oh, dead grumps, as in like oh, the game Grumps died when John left. Because a lot of people, a lot of the OG fans didn't like when Dan took over. They thought it was dead once John left. Because people are weird and they have uh weird relationships with people they don't know on the internet. Um, so a lot of the videos on the Dead Grump's YouTube channel have weird references to death, and they put like weird red filters all over the Game Grump's like gameplay and other grump content. So there'll be like live action stuff, uh like skits for like their they for like their merch and everything. They'll put this like red filter over it, slow it down where it's like kind of make it all like glitchy and shit. You know, that classic Ooh, lightning, that classic horror trope. Ooh, big lightning at my house. Uh so other videos use this like creepy imagery and scenes from like nature that seem a little like uh like creepy. I I don't know how to explain it. Like there's like footage of you know those birds that like they'll move all weird in like a group together and make weird shapes and shit. You ever see that? Ginehand? Yeah, but they'll be like flying around and they'll make weird shapes. It's that's like it's really cool. Yeah, there they'll there'll be like scenes, yeah. There's like scenes of that stuff, along with like weird descriptions on some of the videos that say things like lay some flowers on the gravestone or get a grip. Other videos like later on, as the dead grumps channel keeps posting, they get more reflective than creepy, kind of like their mourning, uh, which adds to the whole the game grumps is dead type of thing, and the the name, obviously. When John announced his departure, the Dead Grums channel even posted a video of John with the description dead. So Dead Grums seems to have posted all the way up to 2020, but I cannot find the channel anywhere. Either it's been deleted or it's been buried so deep because there's so much Game Grumms content that it's just I cannot find it anymore. Uh now here's where it gets a little weird. Like I mentioned before, it's just well, it gets weirder. Okay, which is hard to say how, but anyway, there were many, like I said before, there are many offshoots of subreds for John leaving uh the show, but the conspiracy grumps was the one that stuck, like I mentioned before. In some of the threads on Conspiracy Grumps, they found John's old Twitter account that he used to use, that his username was The Onion King, which, while it didn't give too much info on why he left the show, it did give subtle clues on what might have happened. And this is where people started digging more, and where I think the ARG-esque aspect came in. I don't again, I don't know if I would count this as an ARG as much as I would just people butting themselves into other people's business. But again, the the video called this an ARG, so I am too for the sake of this video. All right. Um, so there's a big post on the Conspiracy Grumps sub that attempted to pinpoint the reason that John left the the channel and they narrowed it down to the quote unquote incident that occurred at an E3 panel, which John and his girlfriend at the time confirmed was the case in the Reddit, the Reddit thread. In other conspiracy content during a Game Grumps playthrough of Super Mario 3D World, where the Grumps played a special Grump themed uh like level pack. A bunch of a bunch of fans came together, they made a bunch of uh uh levels because you could do that in Super Mario Maker. They made a bunch of uh levels that the Grumps could play, they're all themed around episodes I used to do, uh references, things like that. And for context, after winning a level in Mario Maker, you can see messages from other players that have won. They can type in text, they can doodle, and it'll show up at the top.

SPEAKER_03 27:45

Right.

SPEAKER_08 27:46

Uh a message popped up when the grumps won one of the levels from a user named Chuckles, which it went by, but it was a blank message. And Aaron's mood shifts wildly once this message pops up. Almost like he saw something he didn't like. People then decided to dig through uh Mario Maker message history because apparently you can do that. I I I believe it's like Nintendo's website, or you can like figure out. I don't exactly remember how they did it, but it you can find the message history on the thread to pull on.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

You felt like this kind of mood changed, and that meant meant that you should look into the message. I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 28:30

Right. And so people did find a message that was on that level that they did not see in the Grums playthrough from a person named Sam. And that message said, Game Grumps acknowledge Jon Tron. And it's assumed that the Game Grumps edited the playthrough and edited over Sam's message and his name, replaced his name with Chuckles, and just made his message blank.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Now, as in like they didn't want to spoil.

SPEAKER_08 29:02

Like so when when John left under vague terms, and everyone assumed that. Yeah, I'm I'm kind of getting into it here, but yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Everyone assumed that um this is a level of parasocial weirdness that is it really is just but everyone assumed that John left under bad pretenses, like it was it was not mutual.

SPEAKER_08 29:21

Okay, and the and that that rumor basically got not confirmed, but highlighted here because Aaron saw this that said acknowledge John Tron. It said, Game Grumps acknowledge John Tron. And because of Aaron's mood switch, everyone's like, oh yeah, that that that probably confirms that there's some sour feelings between the two.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Acknowledge it as in like talk about why he left or whatever.

Theories On Who Ran Dead Grumps

SPEAKER_08 29:44

Yeah, exactly. Like why did he leave? Okay, and we're gonna kind of kind of get into it a smidge. So, Susie, who is Aaron's wife, she goes she has a YouTube channel herself called Mortimer. She is seen to be the catalyst for everything in the Conspiracy Grumps channel on why John left. Susie is also the only one to acknowledge the Dead Grump's YouTube channel. Uh, in a post on Conspiracy Grumps, she comments directly about a guy, quote unquote, reposting and editing her videos and making money off them. She later claims that the Dead Grumps channel reached out to her directly after her last post to apologize, and they told her not to worry about them and not to pay them any attention. They will stop making videos. That didn't happen. Uh now people think that Susie is a catalyst for this because there's rumors that like uh John got into an argument with Susie, which caused Aaron to get an argument with John. There was rumors that John like hit Suzy. Nothing is confirmed. At this point, a lot of things are kind of denied because it seems like John and Aaron are on good terms again. I'll get to that maybe at the end. We'll see. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I know. But uh uh she is the catalyst for a lot of this, and because the running theme was something happened on that E3 that night at E3, and Susie was the prime, she was right in the center of it all of whatever happened. Um now there are some theories on who runs the Dead Grump's channel. And the uh my Micon has boiled it down to four people. I I do not believe in one of these, so I'm barely even gonna scratch on it. I I believe I found who it might be. So here's who they think runs the channel because this dead grumps channel, like I said, they've been posting since 2013 regularly up until 2020. So that's seven years of them posting, and every single post has this vague, like uh this like vague description, vague titles for the uh the the videos. Some of them do have codes that people have deciphered. Uh, one of them I'll go into later uh matters the most, but the other ones are just kind of just thrown in there just to be silly, I guess. There's some binary and some like hex code that people uh uh uh decoded and it just says some more bland stuff. But the first person that people think it is is Barry. Now, for those of you who don't know who Barry is, Barry Kramer was the Game Grumps first editor, and he would be on some of their uh their let's plays as well. The Game Grumps used to have a separate let's play channel, or not let's play channel, but let's play genre they called Steamrolled and uh Steam Train, where on Game Grumps they focus more on console games, Steamroll and Steam Train did Steam games, and Barry and another person named Ross Donovan were the two hosts of Steam Train and Steamroll for the most part. Dan Avidan was also on Steam World, I believe. But and and Steam Train, but anyway, um there is a video on the Dead Grumps channel called So Glad, which is a code in the description. When decoded, it says, and this is where the ARG shit really comes into play. When decoded, it says, at the end of the month, there's a song in the video as well, and the song is called Nessun Dorma, and I believe it's an Italian song. And if you translate it, the ending of the song says, I will win three times in a row. And guess what? On the same month that this video was posted, Barry won the he won three times in a row in each of the last three video games that were played on that month on Steam Train. He won every single game when he was playing against other people.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

So are we saying Barry's running this entire account?

SPEAKER_08 33:41

They believe so. Other evidence of the fact there's another gamer called Peanut Butter Gamer. I never watched him, never thought he was funny, looked kind of a douche, turns out. Probably is kind of a douche from what I've heard about the guy.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

But I have so many people like that through the history of like internet stardom where I I have seen somebody on who was like really popular for like five minutes and been like, this is a bad person. I can tell this is a bad person. And then like later on, they find out that they're like the most recent example of this is uh Pirate Games. I knew from the first 30 seconds of watching that dude stream that he was a douchebag. Yep. And now everybody's surprised. Uh anyway.

SPEAKER_08 34:23

Yeah, peanut butter gaming. He you what gave it away for me is I I learned about who he was in like 2016, 2017, which is way after he was already kind of popular, but he has the just the he has no facial hair except just like this beard bit. And I'm like, yeah, only only like like the shaggy from Scooby-Doo look. And I'm like, yeah, no normal people wear that. You're something's wrong with you. And apparently it turns out he's an asshole. But um, anyway, for those of you don't know, Peanut Butter Gamer, it's a Let's player who at one point hosted a Minecraft Battle Royale-esque playthrough, which included Barry. Now, during this playthrough, um, I guess how it worked was there's like nine players in it, and they basically just tried to either kill off or trap the other players in some sort of uh making of their choice. And Austin, who is peanut butter gamer, fell into one of Barry's traps, which was just like this building under uh ground. And inside the trap door was a message, and it said it's secret, or it's a secret to everyone, which is a quote in the description of one of the dead grump's videos. So another reason it might be Barry. He's quoting, he's quoting descriptions from the Dead Grump's channel. Two who else it could be, maybe Jon Tron. This one I don't believe, because the only bit that people think that this is Jontron is in one of the videos, Jacques's voice is used. And for those of you who don't know, haven't or haven't watched Jontron, John is a content creator, um, and he owns a pet parrot, or not a parrot, it's like a parakeet or something named Jacques, and he'll have it prominently in some of his videos, and he gives it like a robot voice, and he has it like talk back to him and get sassy and stuff. And one of the videos, uh it it speaks as Jacques. It's like, hello, this is Jacques. Uh, you know, John's dead. This is happening. Aaron's got a big secret that I'm gonna reveal. But it's not that hard to use a voice changer and just duplicate that voice, it's all digital anyway. So I don't think it's John. That one is out. The third person, and this is where this one, I don't understand this one too much. There's a there's a a person online named Pressfart to continue. And apparently, this is an account, right? Uh, but TLDR, this is an account run by some creep who is mocking a lady's account, and her account name is PressArt to continue. Now, Press Art to Continue apparently has ties to John, and Press Fart to continue is some stalker creep who stalked Press Art to the continue to the point where to the point where his accounts, all his accounts got banned and blocked from YouTube and Twitter. He tried to make new accounts under his real name, Nick Monroe, and he went down that like alt-right pipeline, which all fucking hacks do. Um but why do people think it's him? I guess he's a really big fan of the Game Grumps, and he's a notorious shit poster in the notorious in the Game Grumps like Reddit threads and everything before he got banned. That's really about it. Uh number four is a person named Nathan Wellman who runs his own channel that has nothing to do with anything. The only reason people think that it's this Nathan Wellman person, uh, he runs a channel called Um Anthology of Horror, which he just does like breakdowns of horror movies. It's actually pretty interesting stuff. But people just think it's him because the Dead Grums channel follows this person. I don't think it's him. I think maybe the person that's was signed to the Dead Grums channel forgot they're signed into it and just followed this Nathan Wellman person just because they were like, oh shit. Um now here's the thing in the last episode, Dead Grumps, they upload uh an episode. Their last one is called Flow. And it has a description that says it's all backwards. There were so many people that theorized what this could mean. They play they started playing videos backwards in reverse to see if that did anything. Like if it if there was like a hidden story or something they missed. They tried watching the videos in a backwards order to see if that did anything. Nothing makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

I assume this has got to be like a bunch of teenagers working this right because no, surely no adult has this looks at the free time that they have in their life and decides this is what they want to do with it.

SPEAKER_08 39:06

Oh, it was probably some high school kid or like junior high kid for fucking sure. But nothing that they tried makes sense. After a while, users figure it out, figured out, and it was so simple.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

Flow and it's all backwards. What is flow backwards, Matt?

SPEAKER_03 39:29

ALF or Wolf.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Oh, okay. Sorry. See, I see when you said flow, immediately in my head I thought, oh, the girl from the address is a girl. Yeah, and her name is FLO.

SPEAKER_03 39:41

So instead this is all just an ARG to scout car insurance. Anyway, it's wolf.

SPEAKER_08 39:51

You nailed it.

SPEAKER_03 39:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_08 39:53

Do you know how the game grumps came to be? I don't know. Aaron Hansen and Jon Tron stated in interviews that Game Grumps came to be because those two were playing Smash Bros one day and got into a very, very heated argument about the character Wolf. Okay. From the start to the end, Wolf, right in the middle of it all.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 40:19

But at the end of this video, you also see images of the person that runs the channel themselves. Now it's heavily edited and it's pretty blurry. You can't really see where they are, and everything's like it's a zoom up of his eye. And the other one is like them walking away, so it's the back of their head. So you can't really tell who it is.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

But my guess on who it is it's Ross, that son of a bitch.

SPEAKER_08 40:45

Yes, and my reasoning. Okay. Ross. That son of a bitch. That's your reason. Um Ross, Ross, uh Ross O'Donovan, I believe his name is on uh on Game Grumps. Uh he was known in the Grumps community and on Game Grumps itself to be the like sadist. He he he was a potster and a really, really good one. He would do things that would piss off, like intentionally do things to piss like the others off that are playing games with him to basically like uh to like what's it what's it called to tilt them and aggro them and make them upset and shit. Yeah, antagonize them.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

And so they're Chris. Yeah, basically because that's exactly how he is.

SPEAKER_08 41:34

Yeah, uh, and like all the grumps are like this dude's a fucking sadist, but they all love him because he's he's he's friendly at the same time about it. But he's just really good at just doing one little thing that just fucking always pisses them off and just keeps doing it. And it was very funny back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

Yeah, that's that's pro tip. Don't ever let Chris know that something annoys you. Don't ever do that.

SPEAKER_08 41:56

He'll he'll do it all the time.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_08 41:59

Um, no, I don't think it's Ross, but I think it'll be really funny. And the the back of the head shot we see does kind of look like Ross back then, not anymore, completely different guy. Um, he's also known as Rubber Ninja. Uh, he does uh animations and such too. Um but yeah, I I I like the concept or the theory that it's Ross is because the fact that he's known as like the sadist through all this, for him to make some like mocking YouTube channel would be pretty funny. In real life, it's probably just some like junior high kid that stumbled across yeah, some junior high kid that stumbled across the game grumps, and at this time like creepypastas were getting very popular, so they just want to make their own like creepypasta slash ARG thing.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

I think the only thing is kind of lined up coincidentally, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 42:46

Exactly. The only things that really I guess constitute this as an ARG, and it's like broadest term is the fact that there are minor puzzles in here for you to solve, but they never go anywhere because there is no real mystery.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

Are they actually puzzles or are they just like accidents, like happy little accidents?

SPEAKER_08 43:04

No, they're they're like like things you hit they intentionally make you decipher. Like some of them are in like um um what is it called? Like uh base 64 and shit like that. Like they they have intentionally made something, but they don't do anything. Like there's no mystery here for you to solve. The people are the the people that see dead grubs were just curious about who runs the channel, but that never was the mystery. So it's not like there is no mystery, they're just doing puzzles, just I think because they realize people are watching them and paying attention, they're like, so they're like, we want to do something to right, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

So kind of like how Valve started adding puzzles to shit in the Steam Store once people thought that that ARG that I covered a long time ago was deeper than it actually was.

SPEAKER_08 43:46

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. They're just like, well, here's something to keep you occupied for a minute. They're just jangling keys in front of you often. Um yeah, that's the game grumps, that's the dead grumps. A R G asterisk. What else do you got? Ah. Ah.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

That's pretty fun.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

That's like I said, that's a level of fucking like parasocial weirdness. Touchgrass, like I said.

SPEAKER_03 44:17

Touchgrass.

Bring Me The Horizon Hidden Website

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Touchgrass, people. Um, okay, so here's where I'm gonna level with everybody. Alright. I already leveled with Mike, but but um I started looking into this ARG because this is something I was just like I said, I was only tangentially aware of and thought was gonna be fairly simple. And then as soon as I started looking into it, I realized it was way deeper than it actually than I thought it was, and I did not put all of this together and make like comprehensive notes because I honestly think that would take an entire episode. But the other thing that I have to talk about is the Bring Me the Horizon ARG. So if you're not familiar, Bring Me the Horizon is a metal band that I guess you can call them metal still. They started as like a death chord band, now they're more of like an alt alt metal band, but anyway, um they're pretty big, pretty big in the alternative music scene, and they released a new album, I think last year, uh called Next Gen. Well, the entire theme of this album is like it's kind of like early 2000s and nostalgia, so there's like a lot of references to like video games, like old video games and stuff like that, and like the entire aesthetic is very like early internet video game coded. But when the album dropped, somebody discovered that one of the songs, I'm not actually sure exactly how this was stumbled upon. I tried to look into that and wasn't really getting anywhere. I'm sure somebody knows, but apparently, if you take the end of one of the songs on the album and run it through a spectrogram, there's a QR code in it. And this QR code links to a website called www.multidimensional navigator8.help. And you have to type, at least I did, have to type the www because if you don't, it doesn't work. But if you type in www.multidimensional navigator 8.com uh or no dot helps hold on, I've got my computer locked, slash index dash desktop, you are greeted with a login to a fake computer system. Um and hold on, let me change the screen here. And what you'll see is like a login prompt, and then this little Android thing that's hovering around, and it asks you for a serial number to log in with. And the serial number is actually printed on the side of the head of the Android that appears on the cover of the album. And that serial number is 939-34521. So if you log into this computer system, you will be greeted with a computer desktop background. Now, there's a bunch of fucking shit that you can do in this computer desktop background. There's an emulator that'll let you play games. There's a journal, which is apparently is a journal that was left by the character that's on the front of the album, and there's a whole bunch of fucking lore. And apparently, if you go digging into this shit, what you're gonna find out is that the next gen is actually the name of a like evil scientist corporation that is running experiments on people, and the character from the uh the cover of the album is actually the daughter of somebody who gave birth to this thing, this like robot thing inside of one of the facilities for the scientist organization and shit. There's a whole lot to it, and like I said, I'm gonna level with y'all. Once I figured out how much was involved here, I didn't go that much further. But it looks like this is really cool, and it's still being updated. So, because my my initial thought, because I just kind of knew of this in passing, was that this was something that had been released that was like a promotional thing for the album, and like the the result of it was just that hey, the album's coming out right exactly. That's what I thought was going on, but no, apparently this is something that came about as a result of the release of the album and is being updated. And I don't know if there's like an end game here, but there's a whole community that's like digging up more shit on this. Well, shit, and that's pretty rad. That's kind of neat. So, yeah. I mean, we're like basically at the episode runtime anyway, so I'm not gonna spend a whole lot more time on this. But this is uh just fucking check it out.

SPEAKER_08 49:17

Hell yeah, brother. Uh yeah, that that's kind of how I felt. I wanted to touch uh also on the uh the Cloverfield ARG because I was like, oh I I I don't think I'll ever have the opportunity to do this one, and I really want to do it. I was like, maybe I can maybe I can fast track it in our mini one. Uh no, there's not really a good way to fast track that. There's so much info in the Cloverfield ARG. Um, it's very fun, and there's there's a lot of stuff that does add a bunch of lore, but also contradicts itself. So it's like I that could be like a two-parter in its own, and I just don't think there's any possible way to TLDR it.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

If this ever goes anywhere, maybe we could do an episode on this because, like I said, there's a lot going on here. Um, I don't know if it's worth doing an episode on because it's really yeah, I don't I don't know that there's really anything that this leads to. There's like every time they release something new, something gets added here that is related to it. So like they came out with a lo-fi remix album that was like a bunch of their popular songs redone in like that lo-fi hip-hop style, and they had a bunch of art that looked like the lo-fi hip-hop girl from the YouTube stream, and oh yeah, and they added that to the desktop whenever that happened. Um, they recently came out with uh or maybe it's not actually out yet, but uh a live concert that looks kind of sick, and they added that to the desktop. And yeah.

SPEAKER_08 50:48

Pretty neat. Does sound fun, yeah. I'd be interested in covering it. Yeah, when it comes to covering ARGs, I feel like if we're gonna cover them, they have to have some form of an end game, no matter what it is. Yeah, even if it's dumb. Because like at some point, if if it there's no payoff, then it's us just being like and then they found this code, right? And then they found this code, and then they found this code, and that's it. Yeah, it's like okay, where does it go to? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 51:16

I think the only payoff here really is that you learn that there's lore behind the album, which maybe that's a payoff for some people.

Plugs Then A Political Detour

SPEAKER_08 51:22

Yeah, that's cool. I like that idea. Either way, we made it to a full episode. I I knew Dead Grums would carry it. Why didn't you go, Dead Grooms? Um thank you for joining us on this mini one. Um uh thanks for uh hanging out with Matt and myself on this uh weird uh pseudo diluty slash unplanned potency uh episode. But hey, here we are. Um if you want to see more stuff, you can, like I said in the beginning, go to our Patreon or our website, diluty.com or patreon.com slash dilutipod. You can also send us an email at delutypod at gmail.com. Uh and you can say, hey, there you go. Uh if you're out and about and you see a string of numbers in a weird sequence and you want to decipher them, odds are it'll mention something about hugging and or kissing a father figure in your life, and you should just go do that. And that's my that's that's my recommendation to you all. Um Matt, what do you got to say to people?

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Bombing the Middle East.

SPEAKER_08 52:25

Yeah, that's doing great. That's that's doing real really cool how we kill a guy and then his son takes over. And we're just like, here's many meetings. This this went according to plan. Yeah, I have to. Not to get too political. My my favorite thing about what happened is uh Trump was like, yeah, we killed that guy, and we got I got three ideal candidates take over for him. I got options A, B, and C. And then a day later, one of Trump's uh uh uh like security guys, I forget who was exactly, but one of his foreign uh foreign intelligence guys was just like, Yeah, the bombing was a success. Uh, we killed options A, B, and C as well. I'm just like, I wouldn't have used the word success in there. Like, so we have no plan anymore.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

And also, allegedly.

SPEAKER_08 53:17

Also a middle school, yep, which he said wasn't us, but explain the tomahawk. Anyway, this isn't don't get political under the internet. This that's all I got.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

I have three vehicles. One is a truck that is 20 years old that gets 17 miles to the gallon, and the other two take premium, so I'm having a good time right now.

SPEAKER_08 53:38

Yeah, diesel people. I I I bet you're crying, and I'm sorry. Anyway, uh goodbye, everybody. Have a wonderful time, and we'll see you next week.