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Congratulations, the game is over. A winner is you. And for those of you who are confused, unaware a game begun, allow me to enlighten you. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory and welcome to my home office. Some of you may be familiar with this if you've watched any of my streams at Dapper Mr. Tom Live, by the way. But I'm sure most of you are wondering, why the heck am I here and not in my usual PNG tuber cave doing voice over in that room over there? Well, because this video is a little different. It's not a serious
video, so I didn't want to sit down on the couch. That felt wrong. It's also not a meta video on the gaming industry, so the green screen didn't really feel appropriate either. And finally, it's not a traditional theory. Instead, I wanted this video to be more of a conversation with you guys. No fancy setups, no childhood ruining theories, just you and me and the thing I wanted to talk about. Because over the last few months, we've had something going on beneath the surface of this channel. In fact, all of the fearless channels. Things were out of place or didn't feel right. Well, those weren't editing mistakes. I mean, some of them were, but not all of them. Those were purposeful
clues to something much bigger. That's right, loyal theorists. We've done it again. It's another Theorist ARG. You see, with us recently announcing the launch of the theory verse, our brand new fan society full of original shows, ad free videos, and special discounts, we wanted to do something to say thank you to all of you. Without you guys supporting us over the last 15 years, we literally couldn't have done any of this. And we are so excited to show you all the cool stuff we can make when we aren't fighting with algorithms and demonetization. But of course, because this was a big reveal, we wanted to do something a little more than just announce it. Like with Style Theory and
Matt's final episodes, we had to do it in the most theorist way possible and give you guys some really fun puzzles to solve to not only reveal the thing early, but also get an exclusive discount as another thank you for your support. The ARG is now done, and honestly, I'm really proud of the work we did for this thing. So rather than just let it be over, I wanted to make a video walking you through what we did, the pitfalls we encountered, and most of all, celebrating you guys who put in all the time to solve this thing. And who knows, maybe some of these tips and tricks will come in handy the next time an ARG shows up. So let's get into it. Because it had been a while since we' done something like this, I wanted to
make sure we eased you guys into the ARG puzzle solving side of things. Just giving you small hints that something was a foot. So between March 14th and March 17th, every theory episode that went up was hiding a code. That was Game Theory's video on Reanimal, Style Theory's video on Millennial Cringe, Film Theory's video on the back rooms teaser, and Food Theory's video on airplane food. During each of them, the screen would glitch, revealing this code. Most theorists at this point would recognize this easily as base 64, which translated to launch sequence initiated. Launch codes required. look everywhere.
Like I said, we wanted this to be an easy code to solve and just make sure you were aware that something was going on. Obviously, all the launch code stuff was thematic to the launch of the theory verse website, but with the theory verse feeling kind of spacey and the Arteimus 2 project on the horizon at the time of writing, it did kind of seem fitting to go with a spacey theme. Anyway, a week goes by and phase 2 begins. This is where I wanted to try and stretch your brains a bit, but more importantly, it was about showing you guys where you should be looking for codes going forward. We started off simple enough in the Game Theory episode, The True Identity of the Player. At the 35 second
mark, we hit a Caesar cipher in the top left corner. Again, a Game Theory classic cipher, which if you shift all the letters 11 times, gives you the phrase, "Check the description." Uh, pretty on the nose hint, but we're only in week two, so it felt appropriate. In the description, you will find two codes written in binary, and together they spell out the phrase code split for security purposes. Check the other channels. If you then waited and checked the description of both Film Theory and Food Theory's next episodes, you were trapped in the Amazing Digital Circus and McDonald's New Burger, you would find two new binary codes, each one giving you one half of the first code,
Jester and theory. This could have meant anything at this point. We say that phrase literally every episode, so it wasn't time for theorizing just yet, but we had four more codes to find. Now, you might be wondering, wait, four codes? Yeah, I realized after we started this ARG, that while I did say launch codes in the original B 64, it wasn't super clear that each week you would be solving one new code and that there were five total. So, I had to start trying to clarify things as we went into future codes. That's my bad. Turns out you can think of most things, but when you know the answers, it's quite tough to remember what the audience does and doesn't know. I have gained so much respect for ARG makers through this
process. You have no idea. Anyway, week three and in that week's film theory, The Super Mario Galaxy will kill you, we hit another Caesar cipher at 1 minute and 8 seconds, which when shifted 19 times would say code two should be more social. So, as you can see, I was trying to show, hey, code one is over. on to code two now. But on top of that, I was starting to get a little more playful with the clues. The key word I was hoping you guys would pick up on was the word social, as in social media. At the time, we only had three active social media accounts, and they were all on Instagram. Team theorist, the official GT Live, and Style Theory official. That week, each of those accounts posted a
video that was hiding a code. See if you can spot it in this one. Okay, Gatorade. I got a jingle for you. I like the Gatorade. I like the way it tastes. Did you catch it? Right in the top corner, there were five postits on the wall, each with a twodigit code, 64 65 68. Over on Team Theorist for April Fools, there was a carousel of each of the hosts taking on a different channel. And to all of you who said, "Don't let the British guy take over the food channel." I'll have you know I'm a pretty good cook. Actually, I certainly never had a primake incident, that's for sure. Regardless of the comments, the
codes were hidden within each of these images. Ash had it on their shoulder, mine was on my hand, leaves was in his glasses, and Santi was on the tree behind him because not even the code wanted to be too close to him, just like real life. But alongside that, we also had a style theory reel go up where I glitched into the video in our classic indie horror style, hiding the code in my mouth. Looking at this code, most theorists should be able to see that this is hex code, a code that translates each letter into a two-digit code of numbers and letters. For these codes, we got Darth, eerie, and incy. Rearrange the order and you get insider theory. For those of you who have seen the
trailer for Theory verse, you'll have figured out what these codes are adding up to. But at the time, it was so fun seeing people theorize about whether Insider Theory was a new channel of some kind, which would tie into the previous code and felt similar to when we teased Style theories launch a few years ago. Although, someone had a slightly different idea about what this meant. The next week's film theory about the Glendale archives hid another Caesar cipher. this time saying C3 sews discord. C3 standing for code 3, but obviously the key word here was Discord.
We recently launched our official Discord, all things theorist. And so I wanted you all to head over there and wait for a special someone to show up. That week a new channel was made for people to keep track of this very ARG. But they had an unexpected visitor, someone called operator. At first they were just reaching out to see if their connection worked. But as people started replying, they asked for help solving these codes in order to get the launch to happen. Their first request was asking you to figure out the code hidden in a text log between two employees. They were discussing a mystery project that they didn't know anything about, but that it felt important. And they
were freaking out because someone on Reddit had begun talking about it yesterday. So, that was your clue to head on over to the Game Theorist subreddit and find a post from the day before that might have the code. And wouldn't you know it, there was a new Reddit account that showed up called No Secretary. They were a member of the theorist community. But they were a little odd, shall we say? They were theorizing about what these codes might mean. They just ended up going a little off the rails, believing that we were doing some kind of insider trading to get our theories. And let me tell you right now, that is absolutely not the case. Sometimes we're just very good at our jobs. Other times, we're way too off
base to have got any kind of insider information. But anyway, have you noticed what's weird about this post? It has random letters capitalized. If you take all of those, you get the code dead wrong. Operator seemed quite impressed that you guys had found the code so quickly and you guys seem to love operator a little too much sometimes, but then they warned you that things got trickier from here. And boy, were they not wrong. You'll want to sit down for this. And if you do, I'd highly recommend you use today's sponsor, Flexispot. I spend a lot of time sitting down for this job, writing scripts, taking meetings, planning ARGs. But ever since I moved to the US, I've really struggled to find a chair that supports
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You can pump as much or as little air as you need and adjust the position to give yourself the perfect support. Plus, it all moves with you as you reposition and recline, including the 5D armrests, which means you're not constantly fiddling with controls every time you want to change position. You'll figure it out once and then you're set. Look, I've been using this chair for 2 months, and it is honestly the best chair I've ever used. It's also brand day right now, so you can get 80% off sitewide and get an extra $30 off using my code game Theory. I highly recommend you head on down to the description and click the link or scan the QR code on screen to get the biggest savings of the year.
Each of their chairs comes with a 10-year warranty. And if you decide you don't like it, they also have a 30-day risk-free return policy. There's also a bunch of other chairs available at different price points, so don't hesitate to give your back the gift it deserves. Thanks again to Flexispot for sponsoring this video. But now, let's check back in on our ARG, shall we? This is the start of phase three, and we really upped the ante here. Internally, we called week 4 audio week because it was all based around audio ciphers, starting with the Game Theory intro on our Dandy's World episode. A lot of people were excited to see this return.
I wish we could have it on more, honestly, but YouTube's algorithm just punishes us every time we use it. The one benefit here was that people watched it a lot because if you listen real close, there's a new instrument that's been added to the track. A wooden block. This wooden block is spelling out a tap code 15151412122, which translates to E D BB G. Although not quite. The second to last B is actually tapped with a higher pitch. This was a hint that it was different from the others. Rather than using the uppercase B, you use lowercase B. This was the first time we purposely seeded out a code, but didn't tell you what to do with it yet. Like I said, things were
getting a little trickier. In the next film theory about the back rooms trailer, we gave you guys another B 64 code in the description. This gave you a bit.ly link to a Morse code file. decode it and you were taken to a YouTube video starring the main man himself, Freddy Fazbear. It's a moment we've all experienced a hundred times, but never in this way. The title was glitched out, but it says count the notes. And in the description were two more B 64 codes. The first one telling you to tap to the beat GT, and the second one giving you another bit.ly link, this time to the sheet music from
Freddy's theme. I also added a third code later on as I realized I hadn't actually included the key to the sheet music, which is kind of important. But anyway, mistakes aside, this is where you have to start putting multiple clues together. Tap to the beat GT is cluing you into the wooden block tap code from the recent episode. Count the notes is literally telling you to count the notes in Freddy's theme, which is also why we provided the sheet music for more accurate reading. In this theme, there are six A's, two B flats, 10 C's, three D's, 1 E, six Fs, and five G's. Now, you might start to see why we needed that lowercase B for the tap code. It's for B flat, not two B's. And so, by taking the
tap code we gave you, E DB flat G, you get the code 11325. Now, I have to say it was quite amusing watching this throw you guys through a bit of a loop. This wasn't even the hardest puzzle in my mind. Although, I guess it didn't help that there were musical notes in the style theory. Miku episode. But regardless, after a little nudge from Operator, you did get there. However, this is not where the code ends. There's one more thing this video has to offer you. If you pull out the old school game theory method and look at the tags for the video, there's a single tag, A1 Z26. This is another cipher. It's just replacing letters of the alphabet with numbers. Obviously, there are a number of combos with five
numbers that we can do. We wanted you to work for a bit, but you guys just figured it out immediately. The combo was 11325 ammy y Amy. Later that week, we also dropped a throwback on the style theory Instagram of the intro that never was. It's a shame. It's a banger, but as you can probably hear, it's not quite right because it's a spectrogram. Chuck that into an analyzer and you'll see something. Yeah, this is where I learned about Instagram's audio compression. It made the spectrogram nearly impossible to read. And I say nearly because once again, you guys blew my expectations out of the water and figured out not only the first part of the code is 4= 11325, but also the plus the play symbol and
the S. We know that the 11325 is Amy. So combine that together with the others and you get the code for number four, Amy plays. But that's not all we left you with that week. On Reddit, no secretary was added again. Although something was wrong. Their ramblings were all glitchy, but if you translated the wingings in the middle of the message, you got a link to a piece of a QR code. Alongside that, on the food theory episode on the Oil Mafia, we put a new type of code that you may not have seen before. It's called a hex cipher. Basically, each block of six colors translates to a different letter. These letters spell out another link that you can use to gain access to a Photoshop
file, but with no instructions. There are some letters highlighted in red that spell the word Mason, and a Y gives you the Mason symbol. And if you have all those layers on, you do get a distorted Mason cipher. You just don't have the code to decipher yet. But not to worry, because now we're on to the next week, visual week. A week of visualbased code. And this one is a doozy. Or at least I thought it was going to be. Firstly, on GT's 15year anniversary video, right near the start on my office door is a code for that Photoshop file. If you only use the sections that say Mason, you end up with the phrase red herring. So yeah, that's not right. No, the key is actually in the Zed layer. It's a
file in itself. And if you open it, you get a picture of Pig Pen from the Peanut Comics. So, go back and only highlight the layers of Pig Pen. And then use the new code and you get render rift, which will come in handy because Film Theory had another link hidden in hexac. This gave you a link to a Blender file. Once again, you're met with a bunch of layers with different letters. But if you render out the ones that spell rift, you'll find only two letters. F E. Next, you got another message from our good friend operator. This time with another text log of employees freaking out about this supposed leak, though their spelling was pretty bad, and that's a clue. The missing letters actually gave
you a link to where to go next. It's this image of a blue grid with a bunch of symbols and color splotches. In order to solve the grid, you needed to take a look at the hex codes of the splotches above. The example we gave was the green splotch on top of the saddle image. with the hex code that spelled out saddle in leite speak. Although it didn't. For some reason, some of the colors shifted by a single number. So saddle became saddle. File compression strikes again, I guess. So I did have to step in and provide the original file on the discord so that you guys could actually solve it regardless. By extracting the colors, you get the phrase for access soda toffee. So you just look for the soda
and toffee on the grid and you get the code 1 F. Finally, if you were to then head over to the team theorist social pages, you would find a carousel which had some more photos of us lovely hosts. But this time, we're all green. Some of us are missing parts of us. That's because you needed to screenshot them, overlay them in something like Photoshop, and rotate them to reveal the code C0. But what are you meant to do with all of this information? Well, in the food theory white castle description, there's another base 64 code taking you to this group of colors. Now, here's the thing. I did have more clues for this puzzle, but you guys were so insane that you blew past needing those extra clues and just solved it
outright. WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to happen was if you watched the actual food theory episode, you would have seen this frame and on the corkboard was a post-it of the colors once again laid out the phrase let's party and RGB repeated seven times. Then later that week, no secretary would show up seemingly under new management, and he'd leave a classic image of FNAF past that said, "Let's party." It's a very dark image, so it's time to pull out the old FNAF theorist trick and brighten it up. And in doing so, you discover hidden in the image is Exor, a random FNAF character, but a not so random equation. You can exor hexadesimal codes together. And so by following the image, you end up with the
final phrase of launch code exclusives. But you guys just figured it out from the RGB codes and color squares alone. I have to say I'm impressed and I'm actually a little bit proud. I expected this to be way harder, hence all the extra hints. But you sure showed me, although I couldn't let you get away with it that easily. See, the code you actually got was this. Most would look at that and just assume the ending word is exclusives. But there was technically a way to give you the full answer. The second to last colors hex code was bugged. Instead of just using the raw hex code like you did with all the others, you needed to put that hex code into an ASCI translator, giving you the
letters USI, which replaces the two question marks and the first V, giving you the full answer. Yes, that was totally the plan and definitely wasn't a mistake we made because we switched what kind of code we were doing at the last minute and forgot to change that one. Regardless, you guys figured that out, too, which just goes to show how great you guys are at all of this. And I'm so grateful that you guys are part of this community. But there were still a few more clues until the whole thing was solved. That week, we also dropped a video on the team theorist Instagram teasing something very new and exciting.
Guys, I've got a surprise for you. I am on the set of and over here we have the we have got guest stars and I cannot wait for you to see it guys. It's going to be really good. Except as you can see the entire video would glitch whenever you got to the good bits. And inside those glitches was a long string of alien symbols as well as some equations to decipher it. If you decipher all the symbols into numbers and then turn them back into letters, you get the phrase, "A new world awaits," and then a bit. Link, which gives you another piece of a QR code. But with that, you had all five launch codes. You just needed to wait for the time to use them and figure out what the QR code was all about. As we entered the
final week, in Film Theory's description, we hid one last base 64 code, which led you to four files of tally marks. My old nemesis. Some of them were almost mirror images of each other. So the goal was to try and get you to stack them in a way to form the shape of a very recognizable bear for ready, which you guys did almost immediately. You even went a step further and connected the tally marks to security breach and this image of the balloons in the daycare corresponding to those tally marks. Operator did also drop this image just in case, but like I said, you guys were on it and you did exactly what I was hoping you'd do. You colored in the tally marks with the colors of the matching balloons, which
gives you this image. It's Glamrock Freddy. From here, our Reddit friend would post one final time with a massive string of codes, all with different solutions. Now, I'm not going to go through all of it because that would take forever. Plus, I want to leave some of the law and mystery up to you guys to solve. But the key point is this string of numbers and a Veneer cipher. The string of numbers is another ASCI code which translates to which bear is key. Therefore, giving you the answer to the visioner cipher. Normally, there would be 30 Freddy's to pick from. But you guys had already solved it. It was Glamrock Freddy. So, put Glamrock into the Veneer cipher. Get another piece of
the QR code. See, Scott, it's not that hard to make these make sense. And like that, we've hit the final stretch. operator chimed back into the Discord to congratulate everyone on finding all the codes and dropped a link to a Google form telling you to go there and finish what you started. You enter in each of the codes and receive the final piece of the QR code. Stitch them together, scan it, and you end up at the loading page for our new fan society theory verse. All the codes you've been gathering were the names of the five new shows that we are launching on the platform. And the first 100 people to find this page got themselves a discount off of their subscription as a thank you for participating. So, a huge
congratulations and a big shout out to those of you I saw in the Discord working tirelessly to solve this thing and putting together the whole ARG doc that I'm sure will be helpful to others, which I will link in the description. You guys rock. But above all, I really just wanted to say thank you. Whether you solve this thing in real time or you're just watching this video now and along for the ride, you guys make everything we do worth it. Whether it's putting hard work into an ARG to hype something up, or whether it's the hard work that we're putting into all of these new shows over on the Theory verse. And let me tell you, we've got a banger lineup. We've got theories that
YouTube would either bury or demonetize. We've got AMAs with the hosts, plus all the brand new shows that we've been teasing throughout this ARG thanks to the special codes. Of course, all of this stuff will be linked in the description. I cannot wait to show you it all. So, please join us and enter the theory verse with us this Saturday. And remember, friends, none of this was a theory, but thank you for watching. Anyway, I'll see you next week. World premiere on Game Theory. I've been watching and I've designed something for you. So, let's play a little
