DLUTI 228 - Mini ARGs: Volume 2
It's just Mike and Matt this week. We discuss a few small ARGs that peaked our interest.
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1 SPEAKER_04: Don't look under the internet.
SPEAKER_07: Holy fish paste.
SPEAKER_03: We're recording.
We are recording.
We are recording.
SPEAKER_05: We're recording.
We are recording.
SPEAKER_01: We.
You got your car in the garage so you that you don't get
hailed?
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: It's month BS for the rest of us.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not convinced you don't have just like a whole
closet of month BS t-shirts.
SPEAKER_08: You'll never know.
They're all the same quality.
SPEAKER_01: It's like Dexter's Dexter's lab when he opens his
closet and it's just lab cuts.
SPEAKER_07: Yep.
SPEAKER_01: 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: 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: Actually, I cut them right at the knee, so I could do
that.
SPEAKER_08: You could make some jorts.
SPEAKER_01: You might be onto something.
You may be on to something.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: You're not into the jean goes.
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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: There will hopefully be a new bonus by the time you
hear this.
SPEAKER_08: 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: That was gonna be my thing at the end.
You're jacking my stees, man.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Sure.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: It's one of the better concepts in a Halo game.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, aesthetic is cool, but that's really where it
ends.
SPEAKER_08: 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: That's okay.
SPEAKER_08: 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?
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll go first.
SPEAKER_01: 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: Do you have a guess of what I know what E is?
SPEAKER_01: 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: What a surprise, you might ask.
SPEAKER_08: Um was it a Half-Life 3?
SPEAKER_01: 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: 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: It was really just a build hype just to get people
talking about this thing.
SPEAKER_08: Kind of a disappointing ending if the
whole thing was just it's on PS3, yay!
SPEAKER_01: 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: They did it, man.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Oh.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
He owns a sports car racing team.
SPEAKER_02: What an interesting man.
SPEAKER_08: I would love to just sit down and be like, who are
you?
You seem like an enigma of a man.
SPEAKER_01: I think he got stupid rich and he got fuck you
money and fucked off, basically, is what happened.
SPEAKER_08: 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: He doesn't have a NASCAR team.
SPEAKER_08: Oh whatever.
SPEAKER_01: What does Gabe do?
I don't know, hangs out on his fucking yacht.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: Damn.
SPEAKER_01: 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: Hell yeah, living the dream.
SPEAKER_01: 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: Right.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: 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: 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: Nope.
SPEAKER_08: Anyway, nope.
I'll talk about mine.
Uh unless you have another one you want to do.
SPEAKER_01: I do have another one, but you go.
SPEAKER_08: 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: I'll be perfectly honest with you.
I never really found them funny.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Right.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: Now, as in like they didn't want to spoil.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: Acknowledge it as in like talk about why he left or
whatever.
SPEAKER_08: 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: So are we saying Barry's running this entire
account?
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Flow and it's all backwards.
What is flow backwards, Matt?
SPEAKER_03: ALF or Wolf.
SPEAKER_01: 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: So instead this is all just an ARG to scout car
insurance.
Anyway, it's wolf.
SPEAKER_08: You nailed it.
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Okay.
SPEAKER_08: 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: But my guess on who it is it's Ross, that son of a
bitch.
SPEAKER_08: 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: And so they're Chris.
Yeah, basically because that's exactly how he is.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Yeah, that's that's pro tip.
Don't ever let Chris know that something annoys you.
Don't ever do that.
SPEAKER_08: He'll he'll do it all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_08: 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: I think the only thing is kind of lined up
coincidentally, yeah.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Are they actually puzzles or are they just like
accidents, like happy little accidents?
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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: That's pretty fun.
SPEAKER_01: That's like I said, that's a level of fucking like
parasocial weirdness.
Touchgrass, like I said.
SPEAKER_03: Touchgrass.
SPEAKER_01: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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: Bombing the Middle East.
SPEAKER_08: 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: And also, allegedly.
SPEAKER_08: 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: 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: 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.