Episode 101. Lore and Mystery of Obscure and Strange Video Games
CONTACT US: Email: paranaughtica@gmail.com Twitter: @paranaughtica Facebook: The Paranaughtica PodcastContact Cricket: Website: www.theindividuale.com Twitter: @Individualethe 良い一日を祝你好आपका दिन शुभ होGood day to you. We are so happy to have you with us for this episode today!It’s ALL about the lore of certain video games, the mysteries of certain video games, and some of the weirdest shit about certain video games. If you’re a gamer, or if you enjoy conspiracies, or play solitaire any day of the week before 9:35pm but after 4:45am......or if you’re just a cool mo-fo who likes to hear about random things that a couple of random dudes talk about on a weekly basis than this show is FOR YOU! We’ve got some cool stuff to go over in regard to games.But we also have some hard-hitting news that shouldn’t be missed, and also some amazing jokes, so well-written that Samuel Clemens would shed a tear at the mere sight of the letters written.-Bill Gates Indicted in Dutch Court?-Police send SWAT and spend tax payers dollars to raid house just to murder a squirrel and a raccoon who did nothing wrong (I still have questions about the squirrel, though)-Why are all the celebrities who went to Epstein’s Pedo Island endorsing and supporting Kama-Chameleon Harris rather than Trump?-Bruce Springsteen's weird lyrics to “I’m On Fire”-Scorpions highly questionable Cover Art for “Virgin Killer”-Floods in Spain-Jill-do Biden dresses as Panda Bear despite the public's knowledge of what ‘Panda Eyes’ represents in light of Dil-Joe Bidens questionable behavior with children-JLo is scared, Cardi B fucked up, and MORE Diddy victims come forward to say that Diddy drugged and raped them when they were 13 years old-And SO MUCH MORE NEWS, it’s crazy.This is a show you shouldn’t miss. Plus, Cricket really wanted to do a show on video games and so I compiled some games to go over with him and see what knowledge he has to drop on them......and damn, he dropped some knowledge!So, welcome, and don’t forget to velcrow your boots as we dive into this.Also, don’t forget to LIKE, SHARE, AND SUBSCRIBE. And give us 5-star reviews. And help us out any other way you can. WORD OF MOUTH works wonders. Thank you to all of our hard-listening fans who keep this show going. It’s not us, it’s you. ***If you’d like to help out with a donation and you’re currently listening on Spotify, you can simply scroll down on my page and you’ll see a button to help me out with either a one-time donation or you can set up a monthly recurring donation. You can also go to the Facebook page where I have a link to Ko-Fi and Pay-Pal if you'd like to help out the show. I would greatly appreciate it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Unsurprisingly. Well yeah, it's the area of darkness.
Not really surprised by that.
Have you ever heard about the...
The Logratze Shade Library, I think is what it was called.
Super Mario Bros.
3 is a tribute to Satan.
I have not heard that rumor.
Yeah, so...
Heard the rumor of the stage play, but not that it was the devil.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
Apparently, like, because...
There are seven Koopa kids that signify the seven deadly sins and there are there's a platform you go on and you go into like you fall into a different level and like there are sixes of like six seconds to achieve great power and like I don't know man I'm just reading this thing here six is extensively used in the game it's a power meter being exactly six and I mean I've heard some crazy ones about Mario.
There's another one where Mario's communist propaganda where he pulls down a peace sign in the first game and replaces it with the communist red star.
I remember that one.
He represents the everyman.
Oh yeah, dude, for real.
The common worker.
A plumber of no renown.
I thought it was a pretty funny conspiracy.
Yeah, in the sixth level of this game, the game is centered around ice.
And he's dressed in red.
It's a frozen planet and monsters, and it's like a prison.
And it's supposedly supposed to be TARDIS, which is...
Which would make sense.
Oh, Tartarus?
I don't know.
Which would make sense, because the sixth area of, I think it was like Axed Razor 2 was also a frozen area.
Yeah, which was inhabited by the Demon of Lust, which had everyone stuck inside a dream.
Well, check this out, man.
All the stars in Super Mario Bros.
3, all the stars are pentagrams.
Huh. And the card game played at Toad Houses are actually referenced to tarot cards.
And God is watching you at all times in almost every level through the hills, clouds, and even the ocean.
And then you see the...
Eyes, in God's eyes, essentially, in World 8, which is hell.
And on the map of World 8 are skulls in the background, all arranged in a heart shape, which represents how they love hell.
That's a sweet theory.
I like that one.
It's a theory made by the Angry Video Game Nerd on YouTube.
Do that, guys.
Tribute to Satan.
Dude, that guy's got some really funny ones back in the day.
His older work was the best.
Oh, you know that guy?
Yeah, I've seen some of his older videos.
Hell yeah.
It's all the games that used to frustrate the hell out of me as a kid, so it was very cathartic watching other people rage out to them too.
I was like, see?
See? The shit was just harder.
You kids don't understand.
You have it good.
Your games beat themselves because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't worry about dying.
The game will just, like, push you through, nudge you through.
This one's crazy.
Luigi's corpse was inside or is inside the killer piano in Super Mario 64. I haven't heard that theory before.
I heard the L is real one.
Well, because Luigi's not in the game.
It's just Mario, right?
So where did he go?
Because Luigi's in every game up to that point.
See, officially they took him out because of hardware limitations at the time, because they would have involved either a split screen or a lot more polygons to display.
But the thing is, is they had this blurry texture that everybody read as either Eternal Star or L is Real 2401.
And then...
Funny enough, 24 years and one month after the game originally dropped in Japan, this hacker released a prototype build that still had a Luigi in the game.
I guess they gave him Voiceline, supposedly.
What? At the time, it was essentially just a Mario model reskinned.
Because they hadn't put too much effort into it.
But they originally intended to make it a two-player game.
Huh. Which Miyamoto confirmed.
They wanted to make it two players, but they just simply couldn't get it to display.
I just thought it was crazy that it was after 24 years and a day.
So 2401, they confirmed that L was in fact real.
Weird. Dude, that's weird.
He existed all along.
They just dummied him out of the code.
Well, actually, they wrote him out of the code, but he was in a prototype build, apparently.
So in Super Mario 64, the theory goes that inside of the fountain in the center of the castle courtyard is a gravestone for Luigi, and it supposedly reads, Luigi, L-U-G-I, rest in peace, 1983 to 1996.
Let's see.
A bunch of boos in the courtyard where you can only find the boos.
The theory takes an even darker turn by concluding that Luigi's corpse is actually inside of the giant piano.
So if Mario walks by the piano, it doesn't harm him in any way.
No other enemy is neutral towards Mario.
Secondly, the piano is invincible.
Mario is fully capable of lifting a giant fire-breathing turtle monster.
Yeah. If you can so easily toss around such a large creature, then why can't he simply destroy the piano?
Maybe he leaves it alone out of respect?
Lastly, if you look closely at the piano, it has no piano parts that are necessary to create music, but it's just enough room to hold a Luigi-sized corpse just right out of the player's line of sight.
Yeah, all it's got in it is a big old set of teeth.
Yeah. So people are saying Luigi is in his corpse.
So they wrote him out of the game and just put him in the giant piano.
And interestingly enough, that whole theory is almost like a foreshadowing for when he would actually finally get his own game, Luigi's Mansion, because I will not count Mario is Missing as his own game.
That game was too terrible to count as a game.
Which one?
Mario is Missing.
There was a Nintendo game that was made as an educational product, and it very much emphasized a lot more the educational part over the game part.
So you went around answering questions about the Sistine Chapel and stuff.
I learned that the Sistine means six.
It just reminded me of...
I don't know what game it was.
It was a stupid game like that, though.
A very educational game with Mario.
If you went in one direction, out of the bounds, you would just go forever.
There's no end.
And I was just like, there's gotta be something out here.
So I'd just go forever.
And I would never find anything.
But it was one of those educational things.
And it was really stupid, dude.
I'm not surprised.
They didn't really tend to code them very tightly.
Like, the original game, you had to, like, pull off some crazy feet to jump over the flag or use a game genie code to do it.
Like, you could potentially jump over the flag and go past, but they made it pretty darn hard.
But when you play those educational games, a lot of times they're made on a shoestring budget.
Oh, yeah.
With the playtesting mostly consisting of, does the educational material reflect accurately what you're trying to teach?
And beyond that, they're like, who cares if the game works?
Yeah, this was a really horrible game.
I don't know what it was, but it was a storyline, and you would do these little stupid missions that were all educational, and it was like the people were dressed in 18th century clothing.
It was like Renaissance.
Yeah, that's what you did, because you would go around historical areas.
And it was all these old Rome and Italy.
Yeah. So even if it's in modern times, it's going to look like old sites.
So I'll bet you you played that particular game and went out of bounds.
It must have been.
I remember getting to the end and being all excited because all you really do is jump on really slow-moving turtles.
Don't really do anything to you and get items.
And so then I got to the boss thinking, okay, now they're going to really do something.
And he just like walked at me and I jumped on his head three times.
And I'm like, man, this is really terrible.
Oh, God.
Well, do we have any crazy news?
Because I know that like, all right, dude, Bill Gates, everyone was saying he was indicted in the Netherlands by a Dutch court.
So apparently that is not true at all.
I say apparently because all of the mainstream news is saying this is debunked.
Bill Gates is not indicted.
But you'd think you could just go to the Dutch court online or whatever and see if he was actually indicted.
And there are, in fact, documents by this Dutch court saying he is indicted.
I don't know.
At some point, people got comfortable with the fact that debunked.
Pretty much just means we ran a counter-study.
Yes. Like, we debunked that.
We looked into it and decided that's not what happened.
It's debunked.
So you type that in, was Bill Gates indicted by a Dutch court, and just everything, no, fact check, debunked, false.
Was Bill Gates wanted for premeditated murder in the Philippines?
No. What?
And then I'll skip to like four pages.
Let's see.
Is Bill Gates being sued?
No. Bill Gates tries to squirm out of court case, but the Dutch aren't allowing it.
So like, there are still articles saying yes.
The news has recently been dominated by the murder of a squirrel and raccoon.
Yeah, which is bullshit.
We care about that so much.
R.I.P.
Peanut and...
What was the name of the...
I don't remember what the name of the record was.
I guess this lady...
I don't know if it was New York or Texas or whatever.
Maybe it was living in...
I think it was living in...
The guy was living in New York and the lady who called in and ratted him out was in Texas is what happened.
If I remember the story right.
That's a...
R.I.P.
Peanut. You are a victim of...
Massive and pointless anarcho-tyrannical government overreach.
It struck a chord with pretty much everyone because you just can't hate on an adorable rodent that is trained in stuff, especially when it turns out that it's all based on a false report from somebody who didn't live in the same state supposedly getting attacked or something by it.
What? I mean, it's dumb as fuck that they would spend all that money to, like, find this person, go raid his house, kill his fucking squirrel and raccoon.
But, like, you know, there are at least 300,000 missing children.
Yeah, you know, and I'm sure it was resources well spent when they dispatched the animal SWAT team for this.
By the way, they have an animal SWAT team.
That's so fucked up.
Which I'm pretty sure is for doing stuff like breaking up cartel dogfighting rings and cockfighting stuff.
They're using it to lock down and harass this dude in New York with a social media star squirrel.
That's a really crazy thing.
If there's any claims of mistreatment or that they were attacked, that squirrel's got an awful lot of recordings.
He's kind of famous, or was semi-famous, hence why everybody got so mad.
It's because, you know, the squirrels probably got more followers than half people online do.
And so, yeah, it kind of touched on a nerve.
But I think part of it, because people always ask, you know, why is there more sympathy for this than people?
It's that people have not had empathy trained out of them towards animals like they have towards people.
They haven't been trained to...
They haven't been trained to accept animals being mistreated as just being the norm and okay.
At least not over here.
There's definitely places in the world where it is the norm and very accepted, but not here.
And so, yeah, you could complain about it, but I think it more so just highlights...
Our mental training and we should turn it around back on it and look at the fact that no, we're not worried about people getting mistreated and probably should be as opposed to getting really upset because people are upset over a squirrel because it's very justifiably upset.
You also have to look at the humans involved were pretty damn mistreated too.
On top of having their pets killed, they were treated as if it was like a freaking...
No-knock raid on a drug lord's house, pretty much.
Yeah, I think it's just really ridiculous, the whole thing.
And so quite a few people said it kind of, part of the reason it struck such a chord is because it just represented just pointless overreach for the sake of justifying your existence.
Okay, so I've been looking into this and I found that indeed Bill Gates was in fact indicted.
I have the court case documents right here.
I have video recordings at the court during the hearing by Dave Riege Omrope.
It's true.
It's true.
The shit's real.
But it's been debunked so many times.
Yeah. Well, I have a whole summary of the case right here.
Well, it's like they say, you know, they had to create new words that don't actually mean lies, because otherwise they would just call it lies.
But lie is an actionable term.
If you call something a lie, you have to demonstrate it's provably false.
If you call something debunked, you can just say, well, that was our interpretation.
Yikes. So it actually serves like...
A utilitarian purpose.
It's not just simply the whole Orwellian, let's change the words around thing.
It actually serves a purpose when they do this stuff.
It keeps their butts out of the fire because misinformation, malinformation, disinformation, all defined as pretty much info we dislike to different degrees.
But none of them are actually untrue, and if it gets proven that they aren't untrue, well, we just called it those things.
We didn't say they were lies.
So debunked is yet another example.
But why would they want...
But the really crazy thing about the whole squirrel story to me was there was actually people justifying the squirrel dying and being like, nah, he should have done the paperwork.
Why? It's so dumb.
It's so stupid.
I don't even want to talk about that.
It's just pointless bootlicking.
I know, it's just pointless bootlicking.
Yeah, for real, dude.
I just don't even want to talk about it because it's such a ridiculous thing.
It's just another distraction point of other things that are important, dude, like 300,000 missing children or this election that is just out of control.
I mean, these people are coming out and saying, oh, the machines aren't working.
Oh, I put my cast, my vote in, and it...
Said I voted for the other person.
You have the actual officials of the Dominion system saying, yeah, we're having some problems.
We're going to have a nationwide issue with Dominion.
There's a bug that's going to go around.
So they're already telling us that the Dominion machines are going to be affected.
They threaten preemptive legal action against anyone doubting.
They have a lot of confidence in themselves.
But it's just a joke, man.
All of this is just a fucking joke.
Block the replies.
Well, I mean, those are the real stories.
See, that's the annoying thing is you look for it and all you see is a damn squirrel because all these stories get buried.
Yes. There's a lot of stories about people being prevented from voting and being told to come back home the next day.
And then the officials lying about it.
And you have the voting, like, authority.
Cops, whatever you want to call them, that are there to make sure there's order.
And they're kicking people out because they're wearing red.
But then people are saying, no, this happens at every election.
They have to remove people.
It's just normal procedure.
It sounds kind of ridiculous because it's like video showing them kicking out only Trump supporters.
Well, that's the trick.
You're supposed to be removed if you're wearing any kind of explicit regalia.
Red or blue shirts don't count.
But if you're wearing something with a candidate on it, you're not allowed to canvas.
At the polling site, legally.
Oh, really?
So you can't wear a MAGA hat?
MAGA, whatever MAGA?
But they have to exercise equal treatment and kick out anyone wearing anything, and that includes third parties and everything.
That's nuts.
If you're advertising any candidacy, because you're not allowed to try to manipulate someone's vote, and so wearing shirts advertising it could be...
Well, let's be honest.
If you saw a whole bunch of people there with the same shirt, you might feel...
Groupthinked into voting the same.
If your will is not very strong on what you believe, you might just think, oh, well, maybe I'll just do this because it seems to be the majority.
I certainly understand it, but the problem I see is, again, like you say, you don't see any Kamala supporters get kicked out.
And I don't think that's because nobody's wearing regalia by them.
All you gotta do is turn your shirt inside out.
It's just so weird that the only party, if you believe in the two-party system, it's just so weird that you're down here and you see these two groups, Democrats and Republicans, but it's always the Democrats who are causing violence and destruction and attacking the Republicans in any way they can.
You never see a Trump supporter doing anything to a fucking Kamala supporter.
It's just really weird.
It does happen on occasion and gets tons of publicity when it does.
It's just so uncommon that it's notable how infrequently it happens.
Was that a burp?
Yeah. Excuse you, sir.
Inadvertent. I used to like some of his songs.
Heck, I used to like a lot of the older 70s and 80s music when I was younger.
Before I got into techno music.
Have you seen the lyrics to that song, I'm On Fire?
Alright, let me read these to you.
Just tell me what you think.
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?
Did he go away and leave you all alone?
I got a bad desire.
Tell me now, baby.
Is he good to you?
And can he do to you the things that I do?
Oh, no.
I can take you higher.
Oh, oh, oh.
I'm on fire.
Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby.
Edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.
At night, I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head.
Only you can cool my desire.
And only you, dear listener, have heard this remix that I just made of I'm on Fire by Bruce Springsteen.
I made it super quick just for this little segment.
Stupid remix.
But hey, I was bored in the middle of doing this edit and I thought I would do something funny.
Some of this sounds kind of good.
The rest of it is absolutely retarded.
But there you have it.
First time listening to what's going to be on the top of the Billboard charts for probably seven years total.
Every fucking day.
No one's going to top it.
Guaranteed. Little Girl.
What do you think about those lyrics?
Well, that's a creepy double entendre.
A reference both to the obvious and...
Like, is he talking about having an implant put in his head?
I don't know what the hell that is, dude.
That six-inch hole in his skull, I'm like, that makes him a pervert.
Sometimes it's like someone took a knife and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.
Is he just like, because he wants it so hot, he wants to be with this girl so bad.
So it burns through his brain is the idea?
Yeah, I think it's just giving him such a headache.
Like a hard-on.
He's got such a hard-on.
Six-inch hard-on.
Well, that was the part that caught me.
I was like, six-inch valley?
I was like, that sounds like a medical reference to an incision size.
Yeah. Like, wait, what?
It's really that first part.
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?
Did he go away and leave you all alone?
I got a bad desire.
Well, and the fact that he makes it sound really creepy and then tries to walk it back a little bit.
Like, yeah.
Super famous song.
And he's a huge Kamala Waltz fan.
And Obama.
Loves Obama.
Well, see, the trick is all the people going for, they have to make it clear that they're all propping up the old system to try to get people to lend their energy behind the new one.
I mean, the October surprise thing that came out about Trump, I do believe, was a bunch of stuff about Epstein talking about him and such.
And so you always have to ask yourself, maybe they didn't get dirtied on one island, but at the same time, how hard would it be to compartmentalize your dirt?
I mean...
There's more than one place to get blackmail material on people.
And everyone just keeps looking towards the Epstein thing and keeps getting directed there trying to catch Trump in something.
And I just think it's all the distraction.
And that his dirt was obtained somewhere else.
And somewhere that they don't want to touch on and want to emphasize Epstein Island.
I'm going to show you something.
Because now that you pushed the squirrel out of my head, that was also in the news recently.
But all I read about from the past week is that damn squirrel.
Alright, I know.
Enough of the squirrel.
Alright, check this out.
This is...
Are you seeing this?
Yeah. So the Scorpions.
This goes with Bruce Springsteen.
So the Scorpions, the band, the album Virgin Killer, the cover art.
This has been modified.
So that's what the cover art is.
If you can tell, it's clearly a little girl.
This is the real one.
See how young she is?
She's like 11 years old.
And they have her posing like that.
Naked. I see that.
Isn't that crazy?
And I'm not showing the picture.
People can't see this.
It's all blocked out.
But this is the best one you could see.
Yeah, I gotta say, all these pictures are censored, by the way.
The ones we're looking at.
Yeah, they're all censored.
But they put this on the fucking album cover.
The Scorpions.
Virgin Killer.
This is like, I don't know, 9 or an 11 year old girl.
Somewhere in that age range.
Completely naked.
Posed in a way where her vagina is obviously showing.
Very seductive looking.
So, what the fuck is that about, bro?
Dear God.
Yeah, and that was just out there.
That was okay.
Well, you know, when you're in the club, you get away with everything.
That is true.
What other news?
Alright, there's floods in Spain.
You see these floods in Spain?
That happened last week.
When we were recording last week, these were happening.
So it's just some weird hurricane-like weather, and it just swept in there all of a sudden, and caused catastrophic flooding all over Spain.
Over 100 are dead.
Hundreds are missing.
The damage is just unimaginable.
And literally, right after the floods here, right after the hurricanes here.
I was about to say, oh gee, I wonder if the authorities will say we can't rebuild.
I'm sure.
And I'm sure some of these areas, like Valencia, Spain, some of these areas, maybe in Chiva or whatever, they probably have like lithium mines in the areas maybe.
I'm just going to throw that out there.
Oh yeah.
Something underneath them.
Something United States wants.
BlackRock wants.
Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting with John Podesta.
It's really weird to see this guy in the news now again.
Not Schwarzenegger, fuck that guy, but John Podesta.
I mean, he really seems to be like almost a manufactured celebrity.
Like the elites wanted to show off that they could elevate that guy.
Schwarzenegger? Oh no, Podesta.
To almost celebrity status without ever actually having done anything but be a sleazebag.
Such a sleazebag.
Such a sleazebag.
And I found it pretty weird that last week on Thursday when we were recording, I believe, ABC on some rally racing, some car racing program, they accidentally aired election results.
Well, you know, they just have to get you used to the idea that it's all a fraud.
I feel like at this point they're just trying to destroy any confidence in the system.
Oh, yeah.
And they roll back, said it was just a technical glitch, obviously.
That was purposely put there, you assholes.
I think it's funny, because, you know, why do you have Harris wins?
Pre-spun up, exactly.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Why is that already pre-spun up and ready to go?
They did it with Hillary Clinton.
Remember Hillary Clinton in 2016?
They already had a book ready for her, Hillary the President.
They already had all this stuff ready, thinking she was going to get in.
And they put it out there.
Pre-planned, and it fell apart.
Right. Well, was it the time cover that just said Madam President on it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what it was.
Yeah, and she had a book, too.
So, what do you think about this bullshit motherfucking Joe Biden with Jill Biden dressed as a goddamn panda bear?
I would say after the recent episode we did that that symbolism is just absolutely terrible to put out there.
Yeah, and they know.
They are fully aware of what that means.
Jill does not fucking like panda bears.
She wants to kill them all.
And so for her to dress up as one is only signifying one thing.
She's representing the love they have for...
It's disgusting.
Look at her, dude.
This is just...
The audacity to go out there and parade like this.
I don't know if you're watching it.
I am.
And it's just like, wow, dude.
I saw the...
I checked out some of the pictures of it, of the part.
Of the party and everything that she went to.
I mean, the most charitable interpretation is that you're demonstrating you have more allegiance to China than the US.
That's the most charitable interpretation you could have.
Yeah. It's still bad.
That's the best one.
If you really want to give them the benefit of the doubt, that's the one you could lean to.
And it's still awful.
Completely awful.
And then you go into the RSA shit and it just gets a million times worse.
Well, let's go through these 10 stories really quick.
Idaho Health Board becomes the first to remove COVID-19 vaccines from the clinics.
That's a win.
Brian Donald shuts down Joe Biden's attempt to backtrack on garbage remark.
Oh, that's actually an interesting story because they tried to rewrite reality and change what he said.
Oh, really?
To say that Joe Biden referred to their rhetoric as garbage instead of the supporters, but it was pretty clearly the other one.
So it's very Orwellian how it was changed.
All right, moving on.
Moving on.
A stunning analysis of voter history records by Michigan Data expert Tim Vedder reveals 279,113 casted ballots from 114,545 Michigan voters.
About. Over two times the amount of people.
How'd that happen?
You know, that's what you call nothing is too big to rake.
Interesting. All right, so Harris' campaign caught red-handed manipulating Twitter to censor criticism.
The Harris-Waltz campaign has seen great success in manipulating Reddit's algorithm, but that isn't the only social media site they're manipulating.
They're also manipulating Twitter, perhaps the most influential site for political news.
I mean, you have to ask yourself.
Why Brian Krasenstein is probably everyone's most common 4U poster.
Fucking Krasenstein.
Oh man, I forget his name.
One of the doctor guys just going hard on the Krasenstein brothers, just exposing their shit.
It's crazy.
Oh yeah.
But them and a few other major accounts pretty much dominate the rhetoric on there in the 4U section.
So yeah, there's definitely some algorithmic manipulation going on behind the scenes.
Oh yeah.
Number six, Facebook is looking to earn favors with the Biden-Harris regime when they censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.
82-page report that the Judiciary Committee is about to release.
Hmm. Shocking admission from Facebook.
Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Glegg.
Quote, obviously our calls on this could color the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than anything else.
End quote.
He's really looking to get those blue dollars, man.
Oh, yeah.
Pointing out evidence of their meddling is really devastating to their claims that they weren't meddling, though.
But didn't Mark...
So you gotta be careful.
It's so dangerous.
Didn't the old Zucky...
Their rhetoric.
Didn't old Zucky come out and say, like...
He came out and admitted it, yeah.
It wasn't Secret Service or FBI or someone pressured them.
Was it the administration themselves pressured him to censor all that shit?
Yeah. Via the FBI, I do believe.
They... They had a channel back and forth.
It came out during the Twitter files, and then he admitted it after it was pretty much already out there.
Number five, Rhino, Screw Your Freedom, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dulces Kamala.
So, yeah, all these celebrities are endorsing Kamala, and this is horrible.
And Arnold Schwarzenegger, you remember when he was like, Screw Your Freedom, everyone needs to get the shot?
Oh, yes, during the COVID.
Yes, the COVID vaccine, screw your freedom quote.
Screw your freedom.
That was good.
And then afterwards, he's like, I'm sorry.
I just had to get to the chopper.
I just say lines that are written for me.
That's all I've done.
I just say anything that's on the plumpter screen.
Yeah, he endorses Kamala.
So it goes back to the question of all these celebrities are all dirtied by the freak-offs and the Epstein Island.
So then who are they going to replace them with that has dirt in another place that we don't know about?
Because they've got to have new celebrities for people to worship because we're losing our faith in the ones that exist.
Yeah, the new faces of Hollywood, there are some photos.
And there's a bunch of fucking ball-less, sack-less, titty-implanted, bleached asshole.
Well, you know, Doug Emhoff is...
Yes. People who look at Doug Emhoff and say, that is a man's man.
That's... Yeah.
They're all a bunch of Doug Emhoffs and Tim Walters.
Dude, they are.
Those are the new faces.
Number four, CNN breaks down signs pointed that Trump is going to win.
Presidency. Number three, Congress is bracing for violence after the election.
Yeah. Seems like a given.
That's a given.
They always do it.
They board up the White House, put fences around.
Yeah, they always do it all the time.
But, I mean, obviously there will be violence.
No matter what happens, there will be violence.
That's a given.
Kind of like after a major sporting event, win or lose, they're going to burn down the town.
Exactly. I forget the two different...
Sports teams or soccer players or football players, they were banned from playing against each other because every time they played, just mass eruption and violence in people would die.
And that was like in the early 90s.
They were banned from playing together.
I remember seeing a picture back then.
It was like soccer victory.
It was like all this chaos and violence.
Soccer defeat.
All this chaos and violence.
Oh, shit.
Win or lose, we're going to burn out.
Feminist. Number two, feminist author and ex-Clinton advisor endorses Donald Trump for president.
Okay, that's great.
That's fucking awesome.
Who is that?
I don't know.
Let's see.
Feminist author.
Whenever I see feminist author.
Is it Tony Morrison?
Naomi Wolf.
Oh, okay.
Tony Morrison did already, which was the one I thought was sad because she was such an iconic writer.
And to see her kind of like
out for cheap political points in her declining years was like, bleh.
I mean, granted, I always thought it was funny because they were talking about brilliance.
And I remember her quote saying, well, or way back then, well, what if you got a burger and instead there was a lizard on it?
And I'm like...
Thinking to myself, wait, that's not an interesting conflict.
That's just bad writing.
I'm like, there needs to be a reason the lizard went there.
You're missing the whole background of, you know, like, let's just throw in this random thing for no reason.
I'm like, wait, that's what your books are written with?
That's your methodology?
Terrible writing.
So, number one.
Number one.
Mainstream media air shocking segment about turbo cancer.
Fox News 45 Baltimore brought on censor Dr. Paul Merrick to talk about it.
Quote, there seems to be an association between vaccination, particularly the boosters, and the development of turbo cancer.
Dr. Merrick.
Yeah, I mean, I covered that when I had Dr. Peter McCullough on the show a while back.
Yeah, we were talking about turbo cancers and how children, it's like a 15,000% increase in children alone.
Something's up.
What could it be?
It permeated all the way into the realm of Fox News, though, which is pretty much in normie territory there now.
I guess they're going to stop claiming that turbo cancer doesn't exist at this point because it's pointless now.
They'll try.
They'll try.
And I think the last news thing we'll touch here is just some more Diddy stuff.
We haven't talked about Diddy in a while.
So since we last talked about Diddy, I don't know, probably like two dozen other people have come forward and pressed charges against him.
So they're part of this lawsuit.
And so at this point, Diddy Witness says he saw eight celebrity sex tapes, two or three of which involved celebrity minors.
Courtney Burgess, an investigation court witness, says he was given 11 flash drives containing at least eight sex tapes involving eight celebrities.
Burgess testified before the Combs grand jury in the Southern District of New York on Thursday.
Among the eight celebrities who were Combs' victims, two to three were minors, according to Burgess.
Burgess said his former associate, Kim Porter, an ex-girlfriend of Combs, is the one who gave him the flash drives.
Jeez. And they were seriously considering granting him release when this first happened.
Like, they credibly looked into, eh, should we let him out?
Yeah. Like, God.
They were almost there.
They were almost there, and somehow they're like, nah, nah, nah, nah.
I mean, as far as we know, because we don't know.
Like, are you going to be a sacrifice?
Eh, yeah, no.
Okay, you are.
Let's put him away, I guess.
I mean, he gave a bunch of money.
Diddy did.
He gave a bunch of money to Kamala.
He helped Kamala rise the ranks.
Well, I mean, the trick is, of course, Diddy is the fall guy for whoever is actually financing all this crap because, you know, Diddy didn't build himself.
No. He's not getting all this money, just pulling it out of his butt because he prints it.
Yeah. So somebody is paying for all this and they want us to be focused on Diddy.
And that's the real question is, who's his financier and is it going to come out?
That's what I want to know.
Oh, all these people are coming forward.
It's really crazy.
And to the Simpsons, they even did a Simpsons episode and it was basically a diddy party.
They were showing a diddy party and all of the celebrities were there that are being called out in the Simpsons episode.
I mean...
Matt Groening knows about all of it.
He knows it all before it happens.
I mean, he's got to be in deep growing up in L.A. as a, you know, cartoonist.
Here's Trump saying he was Diddy's number one fan back when he was on The Apprentice, doing The Apprentice.
Yeah, well, you know, they all favored him back then.
Until they suddenly decided to boot you out the club, you're the most important person ever.
Yeah, all these people that went to Diddy parties, they're all Democrats.
All of them are on Kamala's side, and they're all wiping their accounts, social media accounts.
Oh, the Jennifer Lopez thing, dude.
Did you see that shit when she went up at that rally at Kamala?
Oh, with the...
She looks just scared.
Yeah, it looked like she had an invisible dot on her forehead.
Yep. Like, say the line.
Say it right.
And then there was the Icardi B. Oh, or her teleprompter cut off?
That was classic.
Yeah. And I had never seen her, I'd never heard her talk before.
And then when I heard that, I was like, oh my god, this voice is horrendous.
Who can listen to this and enjoy themselves?
But yeah, the teleprompter going off was super awkward.
I mean...
That's the really sad thing.
You'd think as somebody who's out there in the public eye that much, being cut off, you'd think you could throw out 45 seconds worth of dead air covering words.
Something. You could fill that gap.
You're an entertainer.
What happens if your song doesn't display?
Do you just sit there?
Well, yeah, I think in her shoes, she's not political.
These celebrities aren't political.
They're fucking celebrities.
They know acting.
That's all they know.
Well, in her case, she's a singer, a rapper.
And so to put her out there on a political stage and expect her to say something of political value without a teleprompter?
Boy. Boy.
No. Well, that's the trick.
Something fails during her concert.
You know, she's still an entertainer.
She can say something to make it up.
But something fails during a political speech.
I mean, she probably didn't write or even read the speech beforehand.
Let's be honest with ourselves.
She didn't even read it.
At a concert, people are pumped up on the energy of what's going on.
A lot of times, they're the ones that are carrying a tune as they sing along, whatever.
And the beat is always playing, right?
The beat is going.
So at a political party, at a concert, people aren't really necessarily looking at the words, looking for the words you're saying.
Some are, but they're there for the beat.
They're there for the energy.
At a political rally, the people are there to hear the words and nothing else.
So to fuck up at a political rally, you're fucking up pretty big.
Yeah, like you said, there's nothing else.
If you completely blew a song, And forgot to sing for an entire verse or something.
There's still instruments playing.
It's not just pure, awkward silence.
Yeah. So who are some of these people that are endorsing Kamala Harris?
Jussie Smollett.
Remember him?
Remember he did that fake racist, white people beat me up thing?
And he got caught for it, and it was all fake.
He set it up.
He just wants you to know he is not making this speech under duress.
So he's back in Kamala.
John Legend, along with Chrissy Teigen, that event at the White House with Obama.
Yeah, they're backing Kamala Harris, Robert De Niro, Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, and then Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lopez, Jay-Z, Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Stiller, Beyonce, Ellen DeGeneres, Taylor Swift, Martha Stewart, LeBron James, Cardi B, who were also all
at Diddy parties.
But they're all also Kamala Harris.
I mean, is this like a huge effort to dirty exclusively the Dems?
Because I can't imagine that nobody on the other side is dirty.
That does not fly for me.
If they aren't, how does things get done?
You've got to have some people that are compromising on the other side.
So then the question is, where are they compromised?
A lot of them aren't on the Epstein files, and so if they're not in the Diddy files either, but they're still going along with it.
Yeah, and what's up with those Diddy files?
Because Trump said he was going to release those Diddy files in his first presidential...
But he never did.
He supposedly claimed he wanted to drop the Epstein stuff in his first term and they wanted to try to talk him out of it and he read it and he looked it over and decided not to have them release it.
That's the story.
That's what he said on the Joe Rogan show specifically more recently.
Was that for the Epstein or was that JFK?
That was, I think, Epstein Files.
Okay, because he said he was also going to release JFK.
Or maybe it was the JFK files, but one of those two, he was going to release conspiracy files.
Maybe it was JFK.
I think it was JFK.
Okay, because yeah, he looked over one of the two and decided not to.
Yes, it's a matter of security because there are still people alive involved.
Yeah, and I can't help but think, I don't care.
Like, let it out.
Yeah. That's the whole point.
That's too bad.
Oh, no.
People that were complicit with child trafficking might get in trouble.
Boy, that really pulls at my heartstrings.
We must think of the poor molesters.
So once the last person dies that are in these lawsuits or whatever, then they'll release the files because nobody can be harmed.
And it's freaking pointless.
So that's probably what they're going to do with the Epstein.
Yeah, and it's freaking pointless at that point.
These people still being alive likely means they are still involved.
And have connections.
Let's be honest with ourselves.
The people whose names he read, he is protecting.
Don't fool yourselves.
Such a joke.
Just such a joke.
Speaking of jokes, what did the blanket say as it fell off the bed?
I don't know.
Oh, shit!
God, that's a terrible pun.
Yeah. Yeah, man.
Alright, so we should probably move on to gaming stuff.
Absolutely. Let's get to the gaming stuff.
Let's get to the gaming stuff here.
First, though, first, what kind of dogs love car racing?
Greyhounds? Lap dogs.
Alright. Let's get into this.
Because this is a video game.
We're going to be talking about conspiracies and obscure stuff in video game world.
And what else?
Well, basically all that stuff.
Lore. The fun things.
Well, yeah, some of the old urban legends of Note.
Yeah, urban legends.
There's some great stories from back in the day.
I miss old internet.
Dude, the old internet was such a blast.
So fun.
And I was thinking the other day, because when I was a kid, I'd get on Yahoo Chat, because that was the coolest thing you could do as a kid.
And MSM or AOL chat, whatever.
And you'd be chatting with people, and it'd be like ASL, age, sex, location.
And you'd be like, oh, I'm nine, I'm a male, I live in the USA.
Just imagine how many of those people on the other side of the computer were fucking peds looking for information.
Yeah, it's a...
Yeah, the early internet was very Wild West-y for that.
You watch your own ass.
Yeah, that's so funny.
Yeah, I still remember a couple of my friends going on to chat with the username of DrunkSchoolGirl and how many creepy dudes hit on us.
We were a little grossed out.
We were just trying to screw with people and then we realized, yeah, these dudes are serious.
Yeah, you realize if you put yourself in there like, oh, I'm little Susie or whatever, I'm seven years old.
Way too many people want to talk to you.
All sorts of boys your age want to talk to you.
Or it might be a little older.
Yeah, I'm nine years old.
What do you like to do?
And you're just like, alright, I'm being grounded from the internet.
Bye. Well, yeah, internet was great, man.
Especially old video games.
So in a world dominated by mainstream video games, a peculiar fascination lurks just beneath the surface of the buttons.
Join players into the realm of weird and obscure video games.
These hidden gems often overshadowed by blockbuster titles such as Big Rigs Over the Road Racing came out in 2003 and Leisure Suit Larry Box Office Buzz.
That was an awesome video game.
Homey Rollers in 2008.
Great game.
They're all steeped in bizarre lore.
Strange mechanics that defy modern convention.
I'm pretty sure the lore behind Big Rigs Over the Road Racing was that it was routinely voted the worst game ever made.
Leisure Suit Larry game was a classic, though.
I will say that.
Leisure Suit Larry, dude.
Such a good game.
Never actually played Homey Rollers.
I just remember, like, it...
Big rigs appearing a lot in the 10 worst games ever lists.
What was the, um, kick, punch, it's all in the groove?
You that onion guy?
And you do, like, karate stuff?
What game is that?
Kick, punch, it's all in the groove.
I don't remember what it was called.
What was it?
I don't remember that line.
Parappa the Rapper.
Oh, yes.
Yeah. Oh, my God.
I'm seeing this.
Holy shit, that's taking me back to memory lane.
Holy crap.
Yeah, one of the original, whatchamacallit, rhythm games.
Yeah. Yeah, you do really fun things.
They capture the imagination.
These games of players who crave experiences that push the boundaries of gushy storytelling that makes the eager players of such games mesmerically gush like Niagara Falls on a typical early Saturday morning in the glow of the distant rising sun.
Take, for instance, the enigmatic Super Mario Bros.
2, which most people don't realize is actually a reskin of a completely different video game called Doki Doki Panic!
Oh, I loved it.
Even if it wasn't a Mario game.
Although we eventually did get Super Mario Bros.
for Super Players, which was the real Mario 2. It just didn't come out until the Super Nintendo released the Lost Levels.
Yeah, she was fun.
This oddity in the Mario franchise springs from a dreamlike universe where Shy Guys and Radical Vegetables reign supreme.
The game's original Japanese version featured a more traditional platform.
But the off-Broadway American release took a sharp turn into the surreal.
Players are left pondering its whimsical aesthetic and disjointed narrative, sparking debates that contribute to its lasting legacy.
Then, there's the infamous Catastrophe Crow, a game so obscure that it has become the subject of internet lore.
Players assume the role of a crow, tasked with distressing, absurd missions like collecting falling donuts in a world of unsettling pixel art.
Many wonder how such a bizarre game found its way into the annals of gaming history, and that is only chumped peanuts compared to what else is out there, yet that's precisely what fuels our intrigue.
And lastly, there are the forgotten classics like Chex Quest, one of my personal favorites, the 1996 PC version of everyone else's favorite, Doom, with its quirky characters and Doom-like setting.
Players find themselves exploring a world that feels both familiar and wonderfully strange, filled with humor.
And unexpected moments as it caught the hearts of many young kids growing up in that era.
Oh, yeah.
The old corporate-included games concept was so wonderful.
ChexQuest, and of course, who could forget what was my favorite?
Sneak King.
What was Sneak King?
The Burger King game.
I didn't play that one.
The stealth game where you try to sneak up on people to surprise them with delicious Burger King.
Like, literally, you play the Burger King from the commercials, from all the weird ones.
Like the one where you wake up with the king and there's like those two seconds of, oh my god, was I roofied or some shit?
And then he brings you some breakfast and it's like, oh, I wasn't molested, he's just here for breakfast.
Jesus. So yeah, there was actually a game where you could do the same thing.
And it, well, got released through Burger King.
That's crazy.
The Chex Quest came in a box of Chex cereal or something.
Yeah, I think you had to send in three UPCs or something.
No, it came with a CD-ROM originally.
Yeah, it was just in there.
Dude, I was so stoked.
Chex Quest.
I mean, that was actually a pretty decent one.
It was a full-on game.
It worked.
Like, it was a lot better than most of those corporate-included games, which were usually barely playable.
The graphics were decent.
I mean, it was nice, dude.
They did good work on it.
I guess it was basically just a reskin of Doom, really, and they just coded in Chex instead of the Doom guy.
I mean, hey, it beat Mario was missing.
That's for freaking sure.
Oh, God, yeah.
So the allure of these oddities lies in their mystery, inviting every gamer to explore the unknown.
It's in these peculiar corners that we discover the heart and soul of what video gaming can actually be.
So let's start with an obscure story.
That is, the story of Polybius.
Oh, I loved this.
I love this one.
It's got all of the paranoid, like, conspiracy tags.
Mysterious men in black collecting information, kids going nuts, the game vanishing without a trace, and nobody even remembering having played it, but everybody knows, supposedly in a certain region knows someone who played it, but no one can point to anyone who has.
Yeah. It's the best urban legend ever, and is it real?
I don't freaking know, but I love it.
Yeah, and it's at the top of our list for that reason.
And it's also one of those missing video game things.
And so, what is it?
Well, of all the video game urban legends, perhaps the most compelling is the legend of a US military, or perhaps CIA, arcade cabinet known as Polybius, supposedly released in 1981.
This story has circulated online since the mid to late 90s, and curiously, at least in comparison with most rumors, this story has circulated online since the mid to late 90s, and curiously, it's pretty much...
Gone dark.
Indeed, by all accounts, only two Polybius cabinets were ever constructed and placed at arcades in various parts of Portland, Oregon.
Yep. Well, and you know, apparently in the Simpsons universe.
Which, interestingly enough, would place the Simpsons somewhere in the Oregonian region.
Yeah. Well, they're supposed to be in Springfield, Illinois, aren't they?
Well, they're in Springfield, which the reason why Matt Groening picked Springfield is because he effectively said there's Springfields all over the country, so it could be anywhere.
Hmm, okay.
Because there's Springfield, Ohio, Springfield, Illinois, Springfield, well, all over the place.
So the story goes that players would suffer headaches, they'd get nausea, they'd have nightmares.
In some retellings, this was followed by suicidal thoughts.
Black-attired agents were reportedly seen prowling Portland arcades, apparently to download the information stored on each of the cabinets, and each machine supposedly vanished months after its first being installed.
So why would that be?
What would they be trying to get?
What information would be in there?
I mean, the theory was that they were testing the kids' reflexes and overall spatial awareness.
For military purposes, for recruitment later.
That was the kind of scuttlebutt behind it.
They were pretty much looking for people to enroll in some kind of super soldier thing.
I see.
So it's kind of like the Circadia thing?
Yeah, exactly.
And kind of bolstering this is the fact that the game's kind of described as being...
A pretty standard arcade game, but in some weird way, psychologically damaging and upsetting, where playing the game would cause you to become depressed and upset, which might have been, again,
another attempt at determining who could handle psychological breakdown.
See, it kind of sounds like they'd also use it as a form of like...
It's creating social unrest in people, like putting these games out in the public that make you get violent playing them and be angry, and then you just fight people, cause unrest in the city streets.
So they put these out there, and then trouble would happen.
I think that's a possibility?
I could see that too, because you're supposed to have played this game, and then over time you lose the memory of having played it, but you just have this...
Lingering irritation almost.
MKUltra, bro.
Yeah, so not only does it program you to be more hostile, angry, upset about things, but then it tries to cover its tracks and make you forget that it existed and that that's what caused it.
If you're wondering why you can find a copy of Polybius online, that's not the real thing.
That's just a mock-up somebody did based on what people were describing from The Urchin Legend.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so while it was true that the FBI agents did make rounds of arcades in the summer of 1982, it's allegedly part of an investigation into illegal gambling proctors.
Which is legit, but this game is still out there and they took this game away after a month or two.
So what's that about?
But yeah, that's the thing.
Nobody's ever come forth to say that they've played it.
People have only ever come forth to say that they knew people who played it.
And that kind of begs the question of how do you know a guy and did those people disappear?
Yeah, what happened to them?
Who's the guy that everybody knew that never came forward?
Even though I can guarantee that they would be like a news story if it happened.
The gaming world would go nuts if somebody came out and said, I played Polybius and it drove me insane.
Right. Well, it drove all of them insane.
So yeah, they're all in insane asylums and probably in prisons and stuff.
We'll never talk to them because it drove them insane.
But the thing here is that there's a whole story, this whole thing about Polybius being real.
But we cannot verify that.
And then come along, Matt Groening comes along, and is it Groening or Groening?
Matt Groening.
Yep, he goes ahead and sticks a Polybius cabinet in Simpsons.
Yeah, so he goes ahead at whatever year this episode aired.
There's a Polybius arcade game, so that's interesting.
Nice nod to the old urban legend.
Which, like I said, it's got all the perfect stories because you can never really confirm it since nobody was willing to come out and say, I played it.
And yet you still have the nagging notion that maybe it was a thing.
And yeah, it does feel like a very MKUltra-esque mental reprogramming thing when you read people's accounts of it.
Because they talk about how it...
It uses a series of weird flashing lights and stuff along with the colors and shapes.
And it induced a state of paranoia and fear in them.
And they would vomit.
And nausea over time.
Another theory could be it was not necessarily a targeted thing, but just a means of experimenting on what various...
Essentially, you know, frequencies of display could have as an effect on a human.
Exactly. That's what I'm thinking.
That's what I'm thinking it would be.
Because there's a lot of varying.
There's a lot of variance in the descriptions of supposedly people who've played it.
Because that's a funny thing.
Nobody ever came forth, but we have all these accounts of supposedly people who've played it.
Because they all know a person.
When I come along with something like that, I'm like, I just have to call it bullshit because there isn't a single person who can be like, yeah, I touched that video game at that arcade.
I played that.
I vomited all over it.
I got kicked out of the store.
They wouldn't give me my money back.
So no one's come out and said anything like that.
So when I hear something like that, I just want to say, God, this is creepy pasta bullshit.
I don't want to fucking deal with it.
But it's interesting because it's very possible.
That this could have happened.
And the ode that Groening put into The Simpsons.
I love those connections.
Yeah, because a lot of that stuff that gets dumped in The Simpsons is subliminal.
In a way, if you look back, again, I always kind of reference what's 10,000 years in the future, what the history would be.
Stuff like that would effectively make Polybius a real thing, if you look back.
So then you'd have that part effectively canonize itself in the future as the mists of history lose all of the connecting points that confirm and unconfirm things.
The less living people alive to confirm and not confirm stuff, the more it just becomes everybody's word and every story becomes like that.
That's true.
That's true.
Hey, what do you call birds who stick together?
I should probably guess this one, but I can't.
Velcros. Nah, I wouldn't have got that.
Not a chance.
We love our Velcro around here.
We love it.
What does a house wear?
A skirt?
A dress.
Oh. Address?
Address? We're here all day.
Okay, where are we here?
Alright, so...
What I want to do, Cricket, and your listeners, is that what we're going to get into here, we're going to get into 10 of the biggest video game scandals ever to rock the gaming community.
Do we have 10?
I don't know if we have 10. I don't know if we have 10. We have a list, an indeterminate amount of numbers of the biggest...
Video game scandals ever to rock the gaming community.
A numbered list of...
A list of indeterminate numbers.
It's not definitive.
It's not definitive.
These are by far...
These are far from all of them.
There's way too many to even cover.
The ones we have here, most of them come from ArcadeSushi.com, so shout out to them.
Essentially, because I figured that, you know...
They're much more qualified in video game scandals than I am.
Because I have virtually no knowledge.
See what I did there?
Virtually? I have virtually no knowledge in video game scandals other than what I've read and researched for this show.
You know, because I used to get...
I don't know what magazine it was.
One of those gaming magazines back in the day.
I used to get it.
Let's see.
I used to get Nintendo Power.
Then there's the more general ones like Game Informer, Game Pro.
Yeah, I'm not sure what one I'd get.
It's been years since I've video-gamed.
I still got the very last episode of Game Informer somewhere around here.
They only stopped production like a year or two ago.
Actually, no, this year, I think.
It'll be their last issue.
Damn. Damn, dude.
Maybe a little bit before that, because it was about Overwatch new stuff, so yeah, it would have been relatively old.
Well, let's see what scandals we have here.
What kind of scandals are going on?
Oh, so there was a South Korean StarCraft match-fixing scandal.
Remember that?
That was big.
That was like...
Really big.
Yep. See, most people, when they think of esports, they think of the U.S. now, but back in the day, South Korea was like the police to be.
If you were a pro gamer, there was no scene in the U.S. compared to there.
Yeah. So in this, there were over 10 individuals linked to a competitive StarCraft II scene in South Korea that were apprehended for their involvement in match-fixing and illegal gambling.
As reported by various media outlets, the Korean Esports Association uncovered that at least five matches were compromised.
Among those implicated are a coach, two players, and their financial backers with the operation reportedly connected to organized crime.
Yeah, most likely.
These matches, each or which allegedly generated over $60,000 in illicit earnings, Wow.
That's pretty amazing that that happened so recently.
Shows how they got such a head start back then.
Like, if you've ever looked into what they do for the professional gaming scene over there, it's nuts.
We're talking...
It's more than a regular job.
It's like 11 hours of practice per day.
Holy shit.
We're talking soul-crushing career.
It's pretty rough.
Yeah, it was nuts reading about it.
But you become a celebrity, effectively.
You are up there with K-pop girls in terms of name recognition.
Yeah, right.
You'd be going to parties with all those K-pop girls, which would be amazing.
Oh yeah, there's definitely perks to it.
And it's not really super high paying unless you're one of the high winners.
It's kind of like the US streamer slash esports scene.
Unless you're one of the top earners, you don't make much.
You're just kind of a job.
Some of these gamers make a lot of fucking money.
The ones who do, though, they make a ton.
Let's see how much top pro gamers Make about, yeah, $1 million a year.
Oh, yeah.
The top pro gamers.
Yeah, and then you look at more of the median ones, and it's effectively about the same as writer in Hollywood kind of levels of pay.
Like, good pay, but not amazing.
But then you look at the fact that you really got to be dedicated to esports to actually even earn that level.
I am looking at this as the top 1,000 earners.
Okay. Top 1,000.
At the bottom of this 1,000 top earners of video game players, Hearthstone, he makes or she makes $313,458.26 a year, essentially.
That's at the very bottom.
Yep. You have to play a trading card game of WoW.
Oh, God!
Yeah, dude, and that's a thousand down.
How many gamers are out there?
Maybe, like...
Oh, it's gotta be a lot, dude.
Well, nowadays, it's a more prevalent form of entertainment than cinema.
I would partly ascribe that to cinema being so much worse, though.
You want how much a top gamer makes?
Who would that even be?
Would that be Ninja?
Nope. Johan Sunstein.
Sunstein from Norway.
His tag is No Tail.
I haven't heard of him.
Yeah, he has made $7,184,163.05.
I guess that makes sense.
The guy I was referring to more makes money off of subs and whatnot.
And I'm guessing $7 million, that's all winning purses right there.
$7 million in prizes.
Imagine what that dude gets in endorsements.
And product placement.
Especially playing Dodo, which is such a highly competitive game already.
You gotta be like...
You effectively become a celebrity in the scene.
This two-year-old has made $943.15.
How the fuck?
Let's see who this is.
Is that prize winnings?
There are two of them.
Attila Buxi, who's made $33.33, and then Burlodo Jewels, who's made $909.82.
How? Two years old.
How did they win?
Dude, what's going on here?
You'd think at that age you'd eat the controller.
I don't know.
It seems like, I don't know, dude.
It's interesting.
Yeah, how this is set up, it has their age, 29 years old, and there are 1,019 players who are 29 years old.
Altogether, they've made 17,182,000.
This is set up really cool.
This is a cool site.
And this is probably really boring for people to listen to.
A recent tournament, the LOL 2024 World Championship.
That tournament is $2,225,000 to whoever wins that.
I was going to say, it's getting up there with like PGA Tour levels of purses.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's crazy, dude.
Alright, where were we?
So, South Korea has been scrutinizing StarCraft and other esports for some time.
Two years ago officials likened Starcraft to gambling indicating a need for regulatory measures.
The rising popularity of esports has also caught the attention of major daily fantasy sports platforms.
Recently, DraftKings formed partnerships with several prominent esports organizations, while FanDuel made headlines by acquiring AlphaDraft, a leading fantasy esports platform.
Holy shit, if you're not a gamer,
That's a pretty massive merger.
That's huge.
So, screw that.
Anyway, Microsoft reverses its policies on the Xbox One.
What's up with this?
Oh, I love this one.
This was a great story of Icarus flying too close to the sun and getting burned.
Oh, shit.
Burned his glued wings.
Alright, what happened?
Alright, so back in the day, a certain Xbox spokesman very arrogantly declared that people would become comfortable with not owning their games.
Oh. And that they weren't going to have any disc-based and there was going to be, effectively, you were only really buying a license.
You would have to have constant internet.
They would be constantly checking to see if you purchased the games that you own, etc., etc.
You wouldn't be allowed to sell used games.
I mean, they were talking about getting rid of the disc entirely by the generation after that.
Which they will.
I mean, they keep trying to do it every gen, and people keep buying the disc drive.
We love the disk drives.
We don't want to go full digi, dude.
We don't want to go full digi.
We want at least the disk.
That's our last line of hope of a time of good times, you know?
Yes. Well, you know, the cloud can't be relied on for everything, so you really do need physical stuff.
Yeah, we want the physical copies.
You know, that bothers me about, like, Photoshop.
When you go in and buy that, it's $100 a year, the Adobe Photoshop.
So you get...
You don't even get a disc.
You just get the code.
Right. And every year, you're paying that money to use their service.
Oh yeah, it was ridiculous.
And I mean, they pretty much didn't even account for people who play only offline.
What do they do?
They just get screwed.
They have to go somewhere to confirm every so often they really bought the stuff they bought.
It was unsurprisingly...
At least back then, a very bad move.
They've tried to pull it more now, and it still isn't very popular, but back then it was really unpopular.
And a single meme picture pretty much won PlayStation the console or that generation, where somebody posted a picture of those progression trees of decision points.
Yeah. Where it's like, can you do this?
Yes. Can you do this?
No, etc.
Right. And they had Xbox and PlayStation, and the PlayStation one was just, do you have the game?
Yes. Do you own the game or have the disc?
Yes. You can play.
Like, two questions.
And then on the other side, it's like Xbox.
Do you have the game?
Yes. Do you have the disc?
Yes. Have you connected to confirm that you actually really own the game?
And then it just kept going.
There was like three or four more steps of confirmations that you had to do.
It really highlighted the absurdity of their assertion.
And yep, they're still trying to go all digital because they want to control the pipeline.
Mostly, I think, so they can turn it off.
Could be dicks.
Yes, that's what I think.
You have full control.
You have that off switch, dude.
That's what they want.
And hence why consumers keep pushing back and saying, no, we'll even pay extra for that disk drive.
Screw you guys.
Like the PlayStation 6 Pro launched native no disk drive, which is like the first one ever where they didn't have an option for a disked version.
But you could still buy a disk extension and sure enough, pretty much everybody did.
Boy, it's going to be hard to get rid of that.
See, as long as you keep something popular, as long as you keep supporting it...
They have a really hard time taking it away from you because everybody's all like, oh well they'll just corner the market.
And I'm like, no, that's what they do because they present that option.
Instead, if they try to take away that option, well that's when the competition beats them.
Which is why you always need a non-monopolistic system.
Because then, when Sony's censoring booby games, Nintendo Switch says, we'll take them.
And the circle of life continues, and Steam proceeds to pretty much not censor anything short of porn games, and keep them all honest.
Has the PlayStation tried to go full digi?
They tried to with the PlayStation 6 Pro.
There is a no-disc version that you can buy of the PlayStation 5, but there's also a disc version you can buy for another $100, which I opted for the disc version.
Because half of my PlayStation 4 games were disc-based, and they would have completely shut me out of my library.
Yeah. I didn't like that idea.
Yeah, that's bullshit.
So I bought the disc version.
So, alright, this next one, the PS3 security breach.
So, in 2011, PlayStation Network outage, often sometimes referred to as a PSN hack, was the result of an external intrusion on Sony's PlayStation Network and Curiosity services, in which personal details of approximately 77 million accounts were compromised and prevented users of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation portable consoles from accessing their service.
The attack occurred between April 17th and April 19th, 2011.
So what's that about?
So how did they do that?
Was it a jailbreak?
What was the weak point here?
I wasn't entirely certain exactly how they got in initially.
That was the part they never really publicized now that I think about it.
They just said somehow hackers broke in.
They never really presented too many details beyond just they somehow got into the PlayStation Network's internal servers and their user databases.
It says it was an initial jailbreak dongles for PS3 hardware were being created.
Yeah, they had a...
Oh, okay, so then the...
Yeah, I don't think PlayStation ever really, like, talked about it.
They didn't really want to publicize it too much.
So what, they just had these dongles that they would just jailbreak, they'd plug into the PlayStation, and it would just crack the code and get their information?
You can crack every PlayStation edition.
That's unfortunately a thing that continues to this day.
The sword always overpowers the shield.
But back then, with the way the PS3 worked, you could get a lot deeper into the guts of things, which is probably how they actually jailbroke into the actual PSN list.
Because that was the real scandal of it, was rather than just breaking into other people's PlayStations, they broke into the entire PSN network and linked everybody's account info.
The player, or the hacker, rather, who played a pivotal role in their development, the Dongles development, George Hotz, known as Geohot, found himself in the crosshairs of Sony's legal team not long after the internet activist group Anonymous launched an assault on Sony.
likely for reasons connected to Hott's situation.
Although Hott's claimed he had no part in the attack, the timing of these events felt too intertwined to be mere coincidences.
Well, it makes sense that they didn't really hear much about it.
The guy they accused claimed he didn't do it.
And they probably didn't really want too many more stories to come out about it.
Shit, at the time, May 6, 2011, Reuters began reporting the event as the biggest internet security break-in ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
Oh, yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
I remember thinking back then, like, was my stuff compromised?
I've had a PSN for a really long time.
Yeah. Right.
And they removed, Sony removed personal details of 2,500 people.
2,500 people.
Stolen. By hackers and post it on a website.
So the hackers already got it, but then Sony's like, well, let's remove it anyway.
Yeah. We won't get this one again.
Yeah. Unfortunately, the nature of the internet being forever.
All of those are permanently archived somewhere.
And repeatedly uploaded.
It's kind of like that, what was it?
The more recent security breach of social security.
They can try to delete it, but once it's out there once, it's permanently out there.
That file's going to circulate everywhere forever.
And even with high-level hardcore censorship, they'll try and push to protect us from that sort of thing.
It still gets by.
What do you call a man who can't stand?
What's that?
Neil. Damn it, I have heard that one.
Oh, man.
Oh, how does your feline shop?
Fuck Fido.
How does your feline go to the store and shop around?
By reading a catalog.
Oh! Oh!
Shit! That must have been some painful ass puns.
Oh my god.
Hey, oh shit, did you hear about the kidnapping at the school?
At A school, I should say?
They woke him up.
Yeah, it's fine.
It's fine.
Yep, they woke him up.
He's okay.
What do we got here?
This next one.
Grand Theft Auto's hot coffee scandal.
What's this about?
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had a famous hot coffee scene that allowed you to have explicit on-screen sex with a woman by participating in a rhythm minigame.
The minigame was taken out of the final product because it was deemed too risque.
So what happened here?
What'd they do?
What is this hot coffee?
Oh, it's a...
It's what you refer to as a, quote, dummied code.
Pretty routinely, programmers will do what's called dummying out things, which is just commenting out sections that they decide not to put in the game.
In this case, they dummied out this entire minigame because...
It was going to give them too high a rating.
It was going to effectively push it into the adults-only realm from above M. So they took it out of there, but because they didn't actually code it out, they just commented it out.
It's still in there.
And all you gotta do is uncomment it, and it becomes part of the code again.
Wow. So, with a little bit of modding of the code, usually through a...
Either a GameShark or if you have a PC version, online mods.
They can go ahead and slap it back in there.
And then people got super offended because there was this awful thing in this game that you could put back through this extremely convoluted process whereby you voluntarily place it back in the game and that was just the worst thing ever, which I thought was just the funniest thing.
You have to put so much effort to put it on there again.
What is this thing that people would...
Would do in this.
What is the hot coffee?
Well, originally, you would take the ladies out on a date, and afterwards, you could go back to their place for, quote, some more coffee, as Matt Groening used to say.
And, uh, well, you'd have basically a random game where you screwed up.
You know, this was long before the era where Kratos got, or like, actually no, it isn't really long before the era where Kratos got away from it, away with it, now that I think about it.
It's about the same time.
It's just, this was more explicit and on screen.
And so, people were really super offended by it, because, you know, how dare you have sexual content in a game where you pay strippers and then murder them for health.
I mean, this is pretty much the biggest moral failing of our time.
Oh, yeah.
To think that we might have sexual content in a game all about murdering cops and stealing people's cars.
Yeah, God forbid.
Yeah, and you can go on Wikipedia, just search up Hot Coffee minigame, and there's a picture, a still shot of what you can do in the game.
And the player, CJ, is doing a nurse.
I believe she's a nurse.
Doggy style.
She's on a bed.
It's pretty interesting.
So all of the copies of the game that could potentially be modded or have it hacked back in, or GameSharked back in for that matter, were all removed.
From stores, because they were upgraded to an adults only, and they had to re-release the game without the code in it at all.
Yeah. Some fans believed that the game included an Easter egg referencing Hillary Clinton's involvement in the hot coffee controversy.
Uh, so Hillary Clinton, she was all against it, like, in 2005.
Holy shit, man, she was pushing, she was a senator at the time.
She wanted new regulations on video games after this particular controversy popped up.
This hot coffee thing, the modification became available online.
She was really pissed.
She usually is about anything fun.
Oh yeah.
I mean, it was a constant target of censorship.
Games were an easy target because most people at the time didn't really play them.
So it was really simple to make stuff up.
And demonize them using descriptions involving things that none of the people had actually played themselves.
And, you know, again, it's a game where you're murdering hookers that you just paid to have sex with to get your health back.
So it was just really ridiculous in the first place.
Very ridiculous.
Which, everything she does is ridiculous.
Which is funny because the moral degradation was so great that by the time that you got to Grand Theft Auto V, you just straight up do the hookers.
Yep. In the game, though, the Statue of Happiness or a Statue of Liberty, it's a Statue of Liberty type figure, it bears a resemblance to Hillary Clinton holding a steaming cup of hot coffee in place of a torch.
And the game file for the statue is named Stat underscore Hilberti.
That's so funny.
Hilleberti. Yeah, yeah.
Hilleberti. Grand Theft Auto 4 has an obtainable in-game achievement called Warm Coffee, the criteria being to get protagonist Nico Bellic successfully invited inside a girlfriend's home for sex.
The hot coffee scandal was mentioned again upon the 2014 release of Grand Theft Auto 5, in which players could engage in sexual activity with prostitutes from a first-person perspective.
So, and it was despite all the mechanism, all that, Grand Theft Auto V received an M rating from the ESRB.
And, yeah, and that really kind of shows the disparity that Western games and Eastern games have in terms of, like, overall censorship.
Yeah. Like, way back in 2014, they had, like, full-on prostitution in a game.
And yet, at the same time, if you had an anime game, at the same time, this was the start of the whole Gamergate boob censorship push against Eastern video games, where they had to cover up all of these anime characters because,
you know, banging hookers and murdering them, that's okay, but an anime character with a swimsuit is literally the Antichrist.
And so it really shows what you were allowed to get away with as a Western dev compared to an Eastern one.
You have to really mind your P's and Q's as an Eastern developer.
At least back then.
Nowadays it's completely flipped and the Western side is all heavily censored, less on covering up people and more on just making them weird looking.
And then all the Eastern devs, They kind of gave up the censorship thing and started, you know, hey, let's make our characters look like idealized people like we used to.
As opposed to making them look like the opposite of ideal.
I'm like, these people look more heinous than real life people.
Yeah, we need to get rid of ESRB altogether.
Games are art.
Yeah, Mortal Kombat started all that.
It was the first point when people realized that you...
Could possibly depict something graphically explicit in a video game that might get somebody's mom upset about it, so we need to do something.
Yeah, dude.
So actually, you mentioned Mortal Kombat.
So let's talk about Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and the founding of the ESRB.
So there used to be a time when ESRB never existed, and games could be whatever they wanted to be.
And at this time, you know, video games are all unrated then.
And so they were just sold like toys to whoever wanted to buy them.
Some, some of the greatest games came out during these days.
Like super Mario Bros.
Three, plenty of unrated piles of crap also came out like Custer's,
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And Bubble Bath Babes.
Bubble Bath Babes.
You know, that's a good one.
Oh, yeah.
It's one of the best.
However, two games really put the fear of the video game gods into parents everywhere.
Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.
Night Trap's entire premise was vampires trying to attack a girls-only slumber party.
Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, was said to be excessively violent.
Yeah. So, I mean, you have to keep in mind that like at the same time as like Mortal Kombat, I mean, they had like all kinds of violent, like first person shoot, like the violent first person shooter genre was about to take off too with like Wolfenstein and.
Oh, yeah.
Later on, Doom.
I'm trying to remember exactly what year Wolfenstein came out.
I had the shareware version as a kid.
Yeah, let's see.
When did Wolfenstein come out?
Oh, 1981.
Yeah, so, you know, the games have depicted violence for quite some time.
Because way back then, you were shooting Nazis and blowing them up in clouds of blood.
But the trick is, what Mortal Kombat really offended people at Night Trap was now these were realistic depictions of people.
It wasn't cartoony.
It wasn't some kind of idealized version.
It actually looked like people with regular proportions and stuff.
Yeah. Alright, so check this out.
I mean, like you already said, these first-person shooter games, like very violent games, Like Wolfenstein and those that came after.
They were starting in 81, right?
Back in the day.
We had these shooting games way back in the day.
Mortal Kombat didn't come out until when?
91, 92?
Came out late enough that the Super Nintendo had a contemporary release of it.
Right. So there's a whole decade of violent, violent, violent games.
And Mortal Kombat, in comparison to those other games, are not that violent.
Or, you know, isn't that violent.
Yep. And the funny thing is, when Mortal Kombat came out on the SNES, they actually censored the blood and turned it into sweat.
So it was as heavily censored as can be.
So maybe that was also the other part of it.
On top of it being realistic characters, it was more mainstream appeal.
Because the games I'm talking about are available on PC, which...
Back then, PC gaming had a high barrier of skill to entry where you had to know a little bit about computers to actually be a PC gamer to install all that stuff and configure your soundboard and everything.
Because none of that stuff was, quote, plug-and-play back then.
You had to install drivers and God help you if you didn't have them or couldn't find them.
And so it was really hard to get Wolfenstein.
On most people's things, whereas in this case, you know, SNES, Sega Genesis had the gore version.
You just had to buy it, you know, you just buy the cartridge for a console you already own, and you put it in and you turn it on.
No installation required, no fancy sound card to install, nothing.
Like, I remember putting a sound blaster into my computer and going through a great deal of pain.
To try to get the digital effects on Wolfenstein to play and afterwards hearing him say Ock Tong and Ogg was very satisfying, I have to admit.
Instead of the old bloop and bloop from before.
The barrier of access to get at the violent video games was nowhere near as much.
But in terms of disturbing and messed up things, oh yeah, like Ragnarok back on the And so when it all came to a head,
it would be at a joint hearing before two Senate committees in 93, and good old Senator Joel Lieberman called for a bulky TV to be wheeled into the room so he could show a video to illustrate the point he was trying to make, that Mortal Kombat is just too violent.
And the scene he chose was...
A scene from Mortal Kombat where blood was splattering from Sonya's head before Kano rips out her heart.
And in a second clip, Sub-Zero finishes Raiden by ripping his head off, spine still attached.
Those are pretty cool.
Those are the only really brutal parts are like, to finish him!
You do some crazy maneuver.
Those are the only...
Only parts that are actually extreme.
The other part of it's just everybody's Rocky, the human sprinkler.
So every punch you take, you inexplicably bleed no matter where it's at.
And not all of the Fatalities were as brutal as those ones.
One of them just had you burn them into ash.
Another one just had you...
Or had you like punch their head off.
But of course they're going to pick the most visceral ones.
But that's a good example of it being more realistic violence which upset people more too.
It's not just a big blood spatter on the ground.
It's like actual organs and shit.
I'm trying to remember.
There's like one really famous dude.
What the hell was his name?
Who was on a crusade against Violet Video Games.
I don't know if he was part of this original ESRB creation, but he was pretty notorious in trying to ban all of them.
What the hell was his name?
I know who you're talking about.
I do know who you're talking about.
Jack Thompson.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
That fucking tool.
But yeah, you know, after Joe Lieberman kind of passed the torch on...
Jack Thompson became a very advocate, very big, big time.
Let's see.
He is a Christian conservative and an attorney.
And he was against sexual themes, violent themes in video games and other entertainment media.
And he actually represented the families of three of the Columbine victims, trying to get the families, helping the families sue the producers of Doom and Mortal Kombat.
Because they're trying to blame those two games on the violence.
Yep. See, Joe Lieberman kicked it off.
Jack Thompson turned it into like an industry.
The industry of offense.
In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers, is one of his many disgusting quotes.
It's like everyone played a video game, dude.
And most people play games.
I mean...
That was the silly thing, was that somehow...
Somehow, something that literally didn't even exist before the 70s was entirely responsible for the human condition.
Yeah. 100% responsible for the human condition.
It's nothing else but this.
This is the problem right here.
I'm Joe Lieberman.
This is the problem.
Yeah, and it was a great example of...
The lack of nuance in the discussion because he called them all murder simulators and I'm like, I'm pretty sure escaping a Nazi prison as a Jewish escapee is not really the same thing as going into a school and hurting people.
There's a certain degree of effed up in the head for you to even make the connection that shooting demons from hell equates to wanting to kill people.
Yeah, there's no connection.
There's a very disconnect there.
Huge disconnect.
Like, he doesn't even pick a game where he shot humans.
He picked a game where he shot demons.
Right. Demons.
Yeah. Old, you know, William William Clinton, he stated that, quote, Video games like Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, and Doom, the very game played obsessively by two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton.
"Make our children more active participants in simulated violence."
What's the funniest part is that they tried to argue that it helps them with marksmanship and stuff.
And I'm thinking to myself, it's a hitscan game where your attacks hit immediately and aren't actually based on verticality so you can shoot monsters 20 feet above you by shooting straight.
Yeah, that's a great accuracy simulator.
Hey, what do you call a fat psychic?
A large medium?
A fortune teller.
And I just went for the obvious one.
Alright, so what about this next one here?
Any number of game-related murders.
There are a plethora of game-related murders, meaning essentially any person killing another person over a video game.
Dude, it happens a lot.
Oh yeah.
A lot.
Oh, yeah.
I still remember the story of the guy who brought an actual gun to the Counter-Strike tournament, thus demonstrating there is actually something worse than that fucking Magnum.
What happened to that tournament?
Essentially, there was a Counter-Strike tournament, and one of the guys apparently brought a real weapon in and just started firing on people psychotically.
It was messed up.
Really? But it led to a lot of dark humor, like the joke I just made, which people pointed out.
It tends to happen during tragedies like this, because people are fucked up.
Yeah, I mean, there was one teen, he was found guilty of killing his parents over Halo.
They took his Halo away, and then he killed his parents.
And that would be Daniel Petrick.
In 2007, at age 16, he shot both of his parents after his father confiscated his copy of the game, Halo 3. His mother died after being shot and his father managed to recover from a critical injury.
That kid, Daniel Petrick, he is incarcerated for life with a chance for parole after a certain amount of years.
I don't know how many.
In 2013, an 8-year-old boy had shot his grandmother in the back of the head with a handgun as she watched television, bro.
The boy was allegedly playing GTA 4 just before killing her.
See, now that one, I could actually see an argument for, it blurred the, what you call it, the wall between fantasy and reality for that kid.
Although, well, that's the reason they created ratings, was to avoid this stuff in the first place.
The trouble is, they don't enforce it anyway.
So it's effectively pointless, because they just...
Yeah, well, no.
It's going to come down to the parents controlling what their children do.
Because if you have a child that's older, and they have a younger brother or younger sister or whatever, and the older child gets these violent video games that are rated whatever, mature, whatever it would be, they're going to let their younger brother or sister play the game if they want to play it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Short of the parent actually stopping them, which...
That's what should be happening.
So, yeah.
You have to actually get involved.
You can't just assume that they're absconding their responsibilities onto others.
It's a real problem, that.
You would always see the mother.
Remember those two teens who blamed Metallica?
Oh, yeah.
For their committed suicide?
And then one of them succeeded when they used a shotgun in that playground and the other took it and failed.
That should eat himself in the face and just fucked himself up.
The mothers were the ones that came out and were like, it was Kiss or Metallica.
It was Metallica.
Which I kind of think to myself, what a scathing critique of a band.
Your music is such garbage, my kids killed themselves.
Yeah, that's the real reason why.
They were like, this fucking music sucks!
Yeah. Enter Sandman.
I'll admit, dude, when I was a little kid and I was listening to Enter Sandman, I was like, whoa, that's a cool sound.
Right? But yeah, a lot of the actual problems being developed from this are just the same problems of nobody has a parent here who's stepping in and effectively either saying, no, you can't play this game,
it's not old enough for you.
Or they're not...
Establishing for the kid that there's a difference between fantasy and reality in these situations.
And yet at the same time, you never really saw this huge crusade towards things like professional wrestling quite so much.
Even though, again, to point out the Simpsons, there was an entire episode they had that was pretty much dedicated to people getting injured because little kids saw wrestling moves on TV and thought those things were real.
So I can hit someone over the back of the head with a wrench.
They'll get right back up.
So yeah, the notion of kids blending fantasy and reality is far from this new concept.
We just suddenly acted like this was a problem because people weren't making the steps to establish it in video games like they needed to.
Well, it's just low-hanging fruit.
It's very low-hanging fruit.
It's what people will go after when they have to place blame somewhere else but themselves.
So they see, you know, oh, okay, this kid killed someone.
For instance, in 2022, a 14-year-old Pakistani kid shot and killed his mother, his brother, and two sisters after becoming quote-unquote addicted to the video game called Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, which involves players parachuting onto an island and scavenging for weapons to kill others while avoiding getting killed themselves.
According to the police officers, the boy went to get a hold of his mother's pistol because he failed a mission in the game and he killed everybody.
Yeah. Which is like, you know, you take the video game out, the kid has no impulse control.
And look, dude, he shot his mom, and then shot 45-year-old Nahid Mubarak, and then he shot his sister, Monmore Fatima, 14, who came from another room after hearing the gunshot.
She's like, what was that?
Came to the room, he shot her.
Later on, he killed another sister, Janat, she's 10, and his older brother, Tamir, 22, all in their family home in the Kana area of the city.
The boy then reportedly left the house to throw the gun in a drain before returning to pretend to fall asleep.
And a maid would arrive to the home.
So, first of all, this family's rich.
Okay, they have a lot of money.
She arrives to the home to do her job, and she found the body of the mother and the sister.
And an investigation began.
Sounds like a bad kid.
Like, you know, it just feels like it's just kind of tangentially related.
Like, he was really obsessed with this, but at the same time, it sounds more along the lines of the kid just overall was not socializing with people.
Right. He sounds like a very isolated child, and he obviously had some problems in the old brain there that were never addressed.
And so, yeah, okay, he's playing a violent video game.
All right, well, he's...
I don't know.
Probably watched some violent movies.
Probably watched violent television.
Probably listened to some violent music at some point.
There's violence everywhere.
He's probably seen fights in school.
The violence is everywhere, yet it's the game.
One of the saddest things I ever heard quoted was somebody saying that the most likely place you'll encounter physical violence in your lifetime is actually during your time at school.
The worst part is that It's also the time when that physical violence will be less likely than any other point for anyone to see any accountability for it because of the difficulty in charging minors.
For real.
A lot of fights happen at school.
Yep, so a lot of them get exposed to it and they also get taught that you get away with it because you're young.
And that's the most messed up part is that it also subconsciously tells them that if they give in to their impulse controls, they won't get in nearly as much trouble as if they did the same thing as adults.
Wait and see if life gets better and maybe I'm not so unstable a few years from now and then go be a psycho.
But no, we can't wait.
We've got to do it now because I won't get in trouble as badly now as I would then.
People never really think about that part of it where it almost pushes you into making those bad decisions at the age where you're more likely to stupidly make them by that incentive system.
Exactly. Check this one out.
In 2023, 35-year-old Devin Jones shot and killed 16-year-old Tavion Swindle by shooting him in the chest with a shotgun.
The pair were playing an online video game at Tavon's mother's house.
And during the online video game, which I don't know what it was, Devin Jones, the older...
The older of the two said that Tavon was smack-talking, and so Devin got up, grabbed a shotgun, and just walked over to Tavon and shot him in the chest.
The mother would call 911.
During the gameplay, this is actually in the affidavit.
During the gameplay, words were exchanged commonly associated with smack-talking.
Associated with smack-talking.
Jones then pulled...
Jones then pulled a gun out and placed it against Tavion's chest and the firearm discharged, striking Tavion in the chest.
So he put it right against his chest.
Holy shit.
So smack-talking.
He's like, fuck you, you suck, man.
And that was all it took.
Yeah, pretty much.
Words commonly associated with smack-talking happened.
Yeah, it's like if it wasn't for the psycho-violent incident, this sounds like most gaming sessions, really.
Happens all the time.
It's not exactly...
Abnormal for you to call someone else trash during a gaming session.
They're making it out like this big abnormal thing in this article, and I'm thinking, that's most gaming sessions.
It's just most people's response isn't, I need to shoot you now for hurting my feelings.
You know what's funny?
If you put on a headset in Call of Duty or something like that, and you just listen in, there's so much trash talking.
And it's usually little kids.
Yeah, the squeaker crowd.
It's always them.
And they're just fucking talking shit to the older people.
And we're just like, just stop.
Leave us alone.
Trying to fucking play the game, dude.
Well, and they'll be saying all these messed up things that makes you realize, yeah, there's definitely no supervision going on.
Right. Like, the lack of supervision to me is more a symptom than a cause.
Because every one of these things, it's not like they were being coddled and having huge amounts of attention paid to them and getting spoiled in every other aspect of their life.
These were Lashkey kids who saw their parents twice a day, maybe, and sometimes didn't even see them in a full day.
They'd go to school, go to bed, never once see their parents come home because they'd work so much.
Alright, well let's move on to this next section here.
Some more video game myths, video game conspiracy theories, video game urban legends, and I want you to tell us your take on them.
Alright. Alright, so this one, Donkey Kong Country is anti-American propaganda, so the game may actually be about Banana Wars from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And without blabbering on about the history behind how the U.S. helped the United Fruit Company, now known as the Chiquita Brands International, to illegally overthrow local Caribbean businesses in order to corner the banana trade and make a killer profit.
Now, Donkey Kong Country actually symbolizes the Caribbean countries and all of their bananas being stolen by an invading military force.
The main enemy of the game is King K. Rool.
And the president at the time was Teddy Roosevelt.
You eventually fight King K. Rool on a pirate ship, which is odd since he's not even a pirate, but consider that the United Fruit Company and the US military like to enforce their will by using naval vessels.
You are essentially fighting Teddy Roosevelt on a naval frigate.
Not only that, but the enemies are dressed as invading force, which is how the UFC and U.S. military surely must have appeared.
Right? Am I correct here?
Yeah, there's actually a lot of connections there.
I can tell you a couple of them.
There's actually a monster in the game that has a military-style helmet on, so you can't jump on their head.
American military.
Yeah, like a green helmet that looks an awful lot like a U.S. Marine helmet.
Like the ones you'd wear in the combat.
Yeah, a lot of the villains are dressed like American military grunts.
And then, now that you think about it, like, what's his name?
Crusher. It basically looks like a U.S. wrestler.
Like, he's a big, tough guy.
Like, a macho dude.
And I would note that it's a pirate ship with a Jolly Roger on it, but the name of the actual level doesn't reference the pirate ship.
It's called the Gangplank Galleon, which is, well, galleons are military vessels.
I mean, technically, pirate ships can be galleons, but you don't generally associate the term galleon with piracy, though.
No, no.
So that's pretty interesting.
And when did that come out, Donkey Kong?
Let's see.
That came out in the SNES era during the period when games weren't quite there at breaking out into 3D.
So then they would make these 2.5D type games that had a little bit of depth to them, but weren't actually 3D.
Everything was on the front plane.
1981. July 1981.
Oh, dude.
I guess that's the original Donkey Kong.
Although Miyamoto's team was told it would be an absolute failure, Donkey Kong became Nintendo's first major international success upon its release in July 1981.
So which Donkey Kong are we talking about?
This is Donkey Kong Country.
See, the Donkey Kong from that game is actually Cranky Kong in the new game.
Donkey Kong Country.
1994. Yeah, he plays the crotchety old Kong that lectures the new Donkey Kong, who's his son.
Right. Dude, that game was fun.
But yeah, it is kind of an interesting thing, because the premise isn't rescuing somebody, it's getting back all the bananas that King K. Rool stole from you.
But yeah, if you play through a lot of the games, you start to realize that most of his troops and stuff don't actually like him.
Like, there's a reference in the second game where Clubba actually says he treats him rotten and he hopes he ruins his plans.
Ha! Got him.
Alright, you're gonna love this one, dude.
This one's right up your alley.
You ready for this?
I'll admit I've played this.
Animal Crossing?
You played this?
Yes, I've played Animal Crossing.
New Horizons, specifically.
So the one where you get your own island.
No, it's good that you play it because you can tell us firsthand experience.
So Animal Crossing is about a child abducting cult.
Is that true?
I mean, when you phrase it that way, I could see quite a few examples of why that could be true.
For starters, you can choose whether or not people come and go to the island, but you can never really leave.
You can go to another abandoned island to go explore for resources, but you can never get back to the mainland.
Weird. There's no option to go home.
You're stuck forever, permanently in debt to Tom Nook, until you pay him off, but then you just keep supporting his economy by buying more stuff from him anyways.
So this theory claims that Animal Crossing is about human trafficking, making you an indentured servant, and brainwashing you into joining a creepy cult, but you're also a child.
Yep. And it's even worse.
So first off, in the game, K.K. Slider is apparently an unabashed nudist in the game, whoever that is.
Oh, K.K. Slider is the mascot of Animal Crossing, even more so than Tom Nook.
He's the musician that plays songs in the square.
Well, look at that.
And you're a little kid.
Alright, so Gulliver, who is the apparent antagonist character of the game, is the victim of multiple murder attempts on his life.
Every free gift you get actually carries a terrible and inescapable curse along with it.
Tom Nook is a loan shark and he's coming for you throughout the game.
Shapely but irritable, Isabelle has a massive drinking problem.
The island you're on is actually a simulation from which you cannot escape no matter which, no matter how much you try, and no matter how many near-heart attacks you encounter in your escapades.
The Nook economy is built by the child labor that goes on there.
But don't give up because they need your help in there, man.
They need you to get in there and help.
So help them already and put this game behind us like Pulse Racer 2003.
Oh, God.
I mean, it really kind of makes you wonder if Tom Nook's kids are really running that company store voluntarily.
They're not, man.
Or if they're even his kids.
They're not his kids.
They're freaking orphan-trained kids.
And they were brought there.
He needed fucking free slave labor.
They just come off the boat and he's like, hmm, you're the same species.
You'll be my kids from now on.
And they're like, we're what?
And he's like, silence.
You're in debt to me now.
I will give you a house and you can pay it off forever.
I mean, that's literally what they do.
Stick you on an island, put you in debt to put you in a house, and then you work off that debt for the rest of the...
Well, the game never really ends.
You just keep going.
Once you've paid off all the potential things you could be put in debt for, well then now you just have to buy stuff from them outright.
Because there is no other economy available.
They own everything.
So yeah, I could definitely see...
Ventured servitude, working only for the company store, can never go home.
Ever. Even if you get almost killed by a bee sting reaction.
Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
Hey, how many lips does a flower have?
Two lips.
Oh, how do you find Will Smith in the snow?
I don't know this one.
Just follow the Fresh Prince.
Oh, God.
Alright, so how about the Super Mario Smash Bros.
sad backstory?
Alright, I loved this one.
Alright, so the basic backstory of Smash Bros.
is that you're effectively a bunch of figurines being collected and played with by this thing called the Master Hand.
And so essentially you're being pitted into these eternal battles by this...
Cruelty of children kind of force where it doesn't really understand that it's getting you beat the hell out of each other as it manipulates you all into fighting.
And then as you're going through the quest trying to seek out the Master Hand there's a nice Illuminati reference there in that there's actually another hand that you don't see until the very end of the game called the Crazy Hand that's also manipulating things but from behind the scenes.
So there's a deeper narrative woven into the fabric of that game.
Yeah, because when you finally get to the end, you realize, I mean, you know, most people have two hands, and all you ever hear about is the master hand, so what's the other one doing?
Hmm, the secret.
And then you get to the last boss, and you've got to fight them both.
It's interesting, because you always see, you know, always watch what the right hand is doing.
Or when they're doing something with the right hand, you always got to watch what they're doing with the left.
Because that's where the magic happens.
Yep. See, in terms of symbolism, the Master Hand, most of its moves involve it pointing straight, poking you with its palms, slapping you and stuff.
Whereas the Crazy Hand involved a lot of twists and turns and different angular motions.
So there's a real contrast and inversion between the two.
They act completely different.
And only one of them shows up in the story.
That's pretty interesting.
What about, alright, this next one.
Luigi is a chaos god and only Mario keeps him in check.
Super Paper Mario.
It's funny because I played through this whole game without ever encountering this theory, but I would love for this to be true because I think Luigi needs some proper respect.
I mean, his first game, I mean, the first game he got exclusive to was Mario is missing, for God's sake.
Yeah, so what is this?
Essentially, it's a theory that Luigi is actually the ideal What was a vessel for the Chaos Heart, which, if you've played through the game, is the artifact that Count Bleck is using to destroy realities and melt everything.
The game actually has a lot of really fascinating nods towards simulation theory and stuff.
There's a whole section.
Where you actually fail to save a world.
So you're just going through this void of emptiness where there's literally nothing, no air, no time, no anything.
Just random bits of space-time placed here and there in the background in an empty universe.
Really a fascinating concept.
It is.
And then you just, like, reincarnate somewhere?
Yeah, so essentially, well, you're kind of stuck.
It's like the end of the never-ending story.
Oh, see, that's it.
Like, there's just nothing.
Like, there's nothing there.
Like, that world was destroyed.
Crazy. And, yeah, it's a really dark as hell story for how cutesy it was.
The tragedy of Count Black and Tim Potty is actually a pretty decent narrative for a video game story and has some real depth to it.
I highly recommend that game, by the way.
Super Paper Mario had an amazing story.
But I love the thought that Luigi was actually behind the scenes all this time, being effectively suppressed by Mario as the secret chaos god, which is why he never actually goes into the game.
He was behind the scenes all along.
And was pulling the strings as...
Yeah, he's like the hidden hand.
Yeah, he serves as pretty much Count Bleck's...
Well, he's supposed to be his great-granddad, so...
Yeah, a reincarnation of Count Bleck's great-grandfather.
Yep, so Luigi would actually be the originator of the story in a way, because he would have been the one who started it all out at the beginning.
Who first started this series of events that eventually ended in Black deciding to turn all worlds into nothingness by the end of it because he was extremely upset.
Damn, so Luigi could just unleash chaos and destroy the universe if he wanted to?
Yeah, the disturbing part about this side plot is that Is that by defeating Bleck at the end of the game, you didn't really stop anything.
And now Mario is going to be wandering off into the sunset, not even realizing he needs to be paying attention anymore.
So if this is true, they might have even had it.
Or if this was actually thought to be made canon at one point, they might have even had a subtext originally planned where Luigi would be set up to be the villain of the second game.
Like if they made a sequel for it?
Yeah, they should.
They should go with that narrative.
But yeah, it's so funny because you play Paper Mario and you think, oh, it's such a cutesy little game and then it's all about emotional torment and psychosis and delusional levels of obsession about relationships that can never be.
It's really fucked up.
Oh my god.
Sounds horrible.
Alright, Pokemon Lavender Town Suicide Spike.
That one was seriously fucked up.
This is basically isolated in Japan, I'm assuming.
So when the game first dropped in Japan, it was supposedly linked to a massive spike in child suicides and illness.
Children from the ages of 7 to 12 were either falling sick or taking their own lives outright.
The most bizarre thing about the incident was that the children did not fall ill or commit suicides until they reached Lavender Town.
Many think the town's score was the cause of the ailments.
The town's specific music caused nausea and eventually suicidal tendencies in children, it is said.
The music was eventually changed before it was shown.
Oh yeah, I've listened to the original score back when I first heard this rumor.
It has kind of a weirdly hypnotic...
Yeah, so they're saying the music in it is suicidal-inducing music, just like the tones and all that, whatever.
It's supposed to do something like Polybius.
Yeah, see, this to me lent some credibility to the old Polybius stories because it demonstrated that at the very least –
They responded to this because they took it out of there.
I could see it being entirely a rumor, but they actually changed the song.
Mark of the Beast.
So way back in 1981, 19-year-old Jeff Daly died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berserk.
One year later, 18-year-old Peter Bukowski also died of a heart attack just moments after cracking the Berserk Top 10 High Score list twice in 15 minutes.
Now tell me, is that just a coincidence?
Probably, but maybe not.
That's what's fun about these.
Who can tell?
Also, from what I'm hearing, if it was the same score in both instances, more than likely that score was some kind of breakpoint in the game that's really hard to exceed.
Like, that's your maximum score, effectively.
So it is kind of creepy that they make the exact maximum score, 16,660.
Yeah. Because usually, by the time you're hitting high scores nationwide, you're generally hitting the highest score that you could potentially reach in a game.
Yeah. That's what you're going after.
But think of doing something like Dance Off, Dance Revolution.
Now, if this was Dance Revolution and everyone got the score 16,660, that would be something.
Oh, that'd be really creepy.
Because then that would mean that you set it up so that getting perfects in every note would add up to that.
It's harder to know in this, which is like an action game, so there's probably a lot more variance in the scoring.
A lot of variances.
So that's an interesting one.
Is it as interesting as the Fallout 3 predicting the future?
I would say so.
So what's that one?
I guess there was like a...
A beeping thing.
It's kind of like an in-game reference to the numbers channel.
Okay. In a way, and supposedly one of the numbers that comes out predicts the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster down to the day and hour.
Right, so it was a Morse code.
Yeah, which could be coincidental and could not because, you know, there was a lot of that random transmissions.
But at the same time, sure is convenient.
Interesting. So they Morse coded a prediction that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster would happen right down to the day and the hour.
I mean, that is pretty exact.
It's pretty crazy.
All out three.
All right.
Well, I mean, everybody wants to hear about this one.
You know what I mean?
Naked Laura Croft.
What's up with this one?
To confirm, you could never do it.
Oh, what?
Never actually happened.
What? Old urban myth that said that you could do it.
There was supposed to be a nudie code.
There was absolutely no way you could put one in because, as I recall, the first Tomb Raider was actually rated T, and there's no way they would allow a nude code in a T-rated game back then.
So it already was pretty unbelievable, but people held out hope for the longest time, and eventually the modding community answered their call.
Oh, man.
So you can get it, it's just not an official release like everyone claimed.
Yeah, I don't...
Yeah. Who made the game?
Who makes Lara Croft?
Or Tomb Raider, whichever.
Back then it would have been Ados Interactive and Crystal Dynamics.
Yeah. I mean, it's possible they would have let some code like that through.
It's possible.
But it was never found out.
I mean, the whole reason Lara Croft got the rack she did was supposedly because of a proportion error.
Where he inflated the bus size by 175%.
It was necessary.
I'm like, yeah, necessary for all the sales instead of just some.
Got to be proportionate.
It's very important.
So that brings us right into New Mexico has something buried in their sands.
What's going on there, dude?
I love this.
The rumor was, is back in the day, one of the first movie tie-in games, I think the first officially referenced one, was E.T., the Atari game.
And the rumor went that they anticipated this massive, massive sale after the movie was hit.
Such a fun game.
And so they bought a lot of copies for it, and then after it failed, they then proceeded to dump all of those copies in a landfill.
I don't know if it was actually true.
I just kind of read it in passing, but supposedly they actually found the landfill more recently?
I don't know if that's...
I could never really get confirmation because it's all through those clickbait sites that want you to click like 16 links.
I think they buried it in 1983.
About 10 million unwanted Atari game cartridges showed up at it.
Alamagordo Landfill in New Mexico.
Yep, so they really did throw it all away.
Yeah, 5 million copies of each title were returned to Atari by disgruntled fans.
And what else are you supposed to do with 10 million unwanted game cartridges?
You know?
That is such a mind-blowing level of failure when you think about the fact that the original Final Fantasy games barely cracked 5 million sales.
So it really showed how Atari was taking off when they just completely crapped the bed.
Yeah. They got way ahead of themselves.
Anything like this next one, I just adore.
So like GTA V has a connection.
There's a little connection with the Black Dahlia.
What was her name?
Her real name was...
Elizabeth Short.
Yeah. So, yeah.
GTA V has a connection to the Black Dahlia, or Elizabeth Short.
God damn it.
So, in the game, you might have stumbled across the WhokilledLenoraJohnson.com website in Grand Theft Auto V. Go check that out if you haven't.
Put that in there.
Type that in.
WhokilledLenoraJohnson.com The site is filled with fake newspaper stories and a trail of breadcrumbs.
That lead players to an in-game murder mystery.
And the murder surrounding Lenora Johnson, a fictional actress killed during the Golden Age of Vinewood Cinema, is based on the very real and very famous Black Dahlia case in the 1940s in Hollywood.
Again, Elizabeth Short.
It's a real name.
And on one page of the site, players are directed to another murder in Los Santos.
The murder of Jolene Cranley Evans is strewn with clues on where to find Evans' ghost on Mount Gordo.
At 11pm, players will find a ghost in the distance and she looks like a terrifying ghoul.
Terrifying fucking witchy ghoul, bro.
And then she just disappears.
Just after midnight.
Gone. I've seen a screen cap of somebody.
Pointing at her ghost through a sniper rifle.
And in that same game, man, do you remember?
Because there's that mission that the developers actually had to take out.
It was flying a commercial jet into a building.
Yeah, that would have been a little too on the nose.
I think they should have left it.
I mean, why the hell not?
At least made it like a secret mod mission or something.
I mean, people complained about the game dawn to dusk anyways.
Why the hell not leave it?
Yeah, exactly.
If you hide it well enough, people won't even know to get offended.
Yeah. And if they do, just ignore them.
God damn it.
God damn it.
The funniest thing, dude, Saddam Hussein and his Playstations, he was just mass-collecting Playstations.
Remember this going down?
Yeah, he supposedly was going to use them for, like, program them as military computers.
He was going to take the, because the PS2s all had 32-bit CPUs, which you can get in so many other things, but the PS2s had them, and so he just, like, got, he purchased a shit ton of PS2s just for that little 32-bit CPU.
Because it was cheaper than buying them, yeah, than actually building your own.
So, you know, if you could mod it to turn it into a computer.
He could probably get some decent computing power out of it, and he's running a dictatorship on a budget.
Well, those processors are apparently highly beneficial for military design purposes.
That's an anonymous source at the time.
Well, I mean, a major trick is they probably could be utilized for all kinds of military purposes, and I wouldn't imagine that his country had any kind of restrictions like we do about it.
You know, jailbreaking your stuff and using it to launch missiles.
Like, I'm pretty sure you...
You know, there'd be regulations stopping you from that in most, like, other countries, but not really over in Iraq.
Right. Like, I wonder what PlayStation feels about that.
Thanks for the money.
Yeah. Here's more.
Discount. So, yeah.
So, a PlayStation...
That CPU is sufficient to control a drone.
So this is in 2000.
So listen to that, man.
They were using these PlayStation 2s and drones back in 2000.
I hate this world of drones with the military, dude.
Because if that's how we're going to be fighting, that's so scary.
I mean, they pretty commonly use game controllers.
That's what I'm saying, dude.
It's going to be so scary, man.
Anybody could just fly a drone right through your window and blow your shit up.
Well, thankfully Saddam Hussein was not terribly good at anything else or we might have been in some real danger there.
I mean, we gave him really good chemical.
We gave him some of the best mustard gas.
We sure did.
And then we invaded him because we're like, he's making chemical weapons.
And that's more than we allowed him to have.
That was the funny argument.
He's producing weapons and it's like, didn't you just give him a whole bunch?
Yeah, but he's not allowed to make them.
It was such a blatant setup, dude.
You used him for as long as they could, and then they're like, oh, we don't like you anymore.
We can't use you anymore, so we're just going to have to do this and start this war and then kill you, take all your money, all your gold.
Holy fuck.
And, oh yeah, weapons of mass destruction?
Oh yeah, you never had those.
Sorry. Yeah, let's get this trial done quick.
Maybe it was because of the Madden curse.
Well, there was a lot of Madden games on PS2.
So what happened with the Madden curse?
Well, basically you'd get a boost in your career and then it would end your career.
Damn! You get a bunch of extra money from promotions and stuff and then suddenly get a game-ending injury.
Yeah, and you can't really tie it to anything nefarious.
It's just a really crappy coincidence that seems to always happen.
So soon after any of these players would appear on the cover of Madden, they would get hurt.
And their career, essentially.
Yeah, like a crazy large proportion of them ended up getting injured afterwards.
At least season-ending.
18 total, 19 total suffered severe season-ending injuries soon after their video game's release.
And I mean, if you think about it, there's been pretty much a Madden every year since Madden was first made.
So that showed us over time, people more and more would be like, I don't know if I want to necessarily be on this cover.
Maybe you can just put a football up there.
Oh man, they're like, dude, alright, I'll do it.
And then sure enough, fuck, you get hurt.
God damn it, Madden.
Maybe it was just a way of being like, okay, I'm kind of done with football.
I'll be a Madden picture.
EA Sports.
Who's behind it?
I think we have this last one, right?
Oh yes, the World of Warcraft.
This one was legit creepy.
Seems very intentional.
So there's this town called Goldshire where essentially there's nobody ever lives.
Nobody's ever there.
But for a short period, once a week, in fact, I don't even know if it says only once a day, but I thought it was actually once a week you had to come here.
And you find these six kids who would stand in this perfect six-pointed Six-pointed star-like pentagram formation.
And then they would proceed to walk all the way to Stormwind, never breaking this formation, and then just kind of desport.
And a lot of people are suspicious.
Of the fact that a bunch of unaccompanied minors show up to a house and then walk somewhere else as if compelled by some kind of enchantment where they then vanish.
Well, that's pretty fucking weird.
Why would they do that?
I mean, it could be just a single programmer just deciding, I'm going to put in this fucked up scenario.
That's what a lot of these are.
People hide these references in the games, and if they're obscure enough, they make it past playtesting.
Take them out because people get attached to them.
Have you ever heard the game Sad Satan?
Don't think I have.
It's like one of those dark web games, right?
Oh, I've heard rumors of it.
I don't think I've heard of anyone ever saying they played it, though.
Yeah, so...
Yeah, wasn't that game, like, circulated on the dark web?
Yeah, it was supposedly released from Microsoft Windows in 2015, and it's allegedly created by a dark web user operating under the pseudonym ZK.
And in the game, the player walks around in all these dimly lit corridors in first-person view while being periodically interrupted by flashes of full-screen images, just, like, weird fucked-up shit going on.
There are really no, like, missions, no goals to do, nothing...
To do.
And there are two versions of Sad Satan.
And there is some footage of this.
And the footage of the earliest version was uploaded to the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner back in 2015.
And the channel's videos of the game were picked up by a number of other people and publications, internationally even.
And later, a later version of Sad Satan, informally known as The Clone.
Owning to the substantial differences between it and the earlier version, it gained notoriety for containing extremely graphic imagery, including photographs of mutilated corpses and some child pee.
Wow. Yeah, and so what they did, like the clone version, somebody took the game and apparently recoded or added code to it to put all this extra imagery into it.
To make it more disturbing.
To make it much more disturbing.
And so the original game, it has blurred graphics from a first-person view on the EBSCUR Horror Channel video.
The player walks down this monochromatic corridor, and audio samples are being played, looped over each other, and the audio is just really weird.
And there are recorded interviews of various murderers, such as Charles Manson.
If you think he's a murderer.
Or just distorted audio.
Reversed audio.
Just unusual musical clips.
Like I Love Beijing, Tiananmen.
And just a lot of reversed music.
You just walk through hallways.
And then images flash.
And you hear these screams in the background that sound like children.
And a lot of these images have reference to child abuse.
Especially people indicted in the Operation U-Tree.
Go check that out.
Like images of Jimmy Savile and Ralph Harris surrounded by children.
All these weird images.
Jeez. Yeah, and they all revolve around crime, cannibals, necrophiles, even political figures.
So there's a message they're trying to convey.
Well, that's creepy as shit.
Yeah, it's something.
They're just putting all this really weird MKUltra-type shit in there.
It almost sounds like a psychological...
Like, breakdown device.
Yeah. It's Neo-Polybius.
Yeah. And then the sad Satan, the clone, you know, it came out and it's just insane.
It's just insane.
People were like, what the fuck is this?
I think the FBI got involved at some point.
I'm not sure.
Well, it sounded like at least some kind of fucked up game was passed around.
It's still out there.
Like, you can get it.
You can go on deep dark web.
You probably don't even have to.
That's the thing about the dark web.
we're gonna be doing an episode on the dark web and the internet like that whole thing because
The dark web's kind of bled into the regular net at this point.
At this point, it's basically the same thing.
Back in the day, it was basically almost the same thing.
Arpanet and DARpanet and all that.
The dark web, anything you want to do on the dark web, you can do on the clear net.
The internet.
Through Google search engines or DuckDuckGo or whatever you want to use.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
You don't have to go to the dark web.
It's not the scary, ooh, can't go there, because scary stuff happens there.
But I'm going to tell you, anything you want on the dark web, you can find right here on the clear net.
Unfortunately. It's one of those sad realities.
Like the fact that most recent anime games have less Rule 34 than the Catholic Church's new mascot loose.
Just one of those things that you'd rather not have learned, but now you know.
Yeah, dude.
Oh, that reminds me.
That reminds me, dude.
Alright. What do you call a fake noodle?
What was that?
An impasta.
Oh, Jesus.
Oh, my God.
What is this?
Did you hear about the guy who invented the knock-knock joke?
What about him?
He won a Nobel Prize.
Damn, those are bad.
God, who comes up with these?
These are so terrible.
What's white and can't climb trees?
Uh... Oh my god.
A refrigerator, dude.
What is this?
Alright, check this one out, dude.
You know me, dude.
I hate them.
Russian dolls.
I hate them.
Yeah, I hate Russian dolls.
They're just so...
Full of themselves.
Oh, Jesus, dude.
Yeah, and because you mentioned communism earlier, so I really wanted to make this joke.
So a communist joke isn't funny unless everyone gets it.
Everyone better get that joke.
I always like the old joke that Stalin used to make.
You know, jokes are like food.
Not everyone gets it.
Oh, man.
Alright, let's finish this out here.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.
This was an episode on video games and, you know, fun stuff like that.
Conspiracies, urban myths, legends, and lore on the whole video game world.
They're fun.
It's fun stuff.
I just like the history of everything and the weird, like, situations where, like...
Software engineers did some ARG shit that nobody would even realize was there until years later.
Like, whoa, look what I found.
Just love that shit.
Back in the day, when you could get all popular online by telling people the secret to bringing General Leo back in Final Fantasy III, even though it turned out you could only glitch him back, and there was no legit way.
So what is your favorite game, then?
What is your favorite game?
I'd say probably overall, probably either one of the Souls games.
If I go back to the original favorite that I always go back to, that'd be the old Lufia 2 on the Super Nintendo.
That's such a classic, just perfect RPG.
Not an amazing story, but just serviceable enough.
But it's just so well put together.
All the mechanics in it are so perfect.
Yeah, see, I've always been a fan of, like, free world games, like GTA.
So, I don't know, man, GTA has been my favorite, my favorite game.
Yeah, I was always a big-time JRPG nerd.
So, I know all these random games, like RoboTrack, Secret of Evermore, like all the Super Nintendo-era games.
Yeah, I need to go find some retro game system somewhere.
You get the regular Nintendo, Super Nintendo.
Games were so unbalanced and random back then.
I remember playing Robo Trek and having a boss fight because I didn't know what I was doing in terms of how to set up attacks that lasted 40 minutes.
And at no point the entire time was that I had any kind of danger of dying.
It just took that long to kill him.
It was so tedious.
And I guess as a kid, my favorite games, like as a kid, kid would have been like, you know, anything Mario, and Donkey Kong, and Zelda, obviously.
And then what was that one?
Rage. Rage came out.
Oh, Primal Rage?
Primal Rage, yeah.
That was fun for a little while.
The game where you play as the giant dinosaur gods and apes and stuff?
Yeah. You know, obviously Mortal Kombat.
I'm sure you were the same big games that everyone played back in the day.
Oh yeah, I played more Street Fighter 2 than Mortal Kombat.
Oh yeah, Street Fighter, definitely.
I was definitely more about Street Fighter.
I was about to say my mom was very anti-Mortal Kombat at the time.
Really? She fell into that whole thing?
Oh dude, I remember...
I remember as a kid learning that D&D was going to turn me to Satan, and then it turned out that it was actually popular culture as a whole that was going to try to do that.
But everybody was all worried about some obscure game, and I'm just like, I feel like this is a red herring to distract from the actual rituals that were happening back in the 80s.
For real.
Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening.
Hope it was a great one for all you nerds out there.
So contact us, email us, Paranautica at gmail.com or at Twitter, at Paranautica, Facebook, the Paranautica Podcast.
You can contact Cricket at his website, www.the-www.
Is that website still up?
Are you doing stuff on it?
I haven't updated it in a while, but, you know, it's still up.
You can visit his website at www.theindividual.com.
And you can hit him up at Twitter, at individualthe...
People, hit them up at Twitter.
At I-N-D-I-V-I-D-U-A-L-E.
The. Get them.
Hit them.
Follow them.
I did get 20 more bots.
You got 20 more bots.
That's good.
You're up to like 80 bots.
Well, I'm up to about 10 real people and 50 bots.
That's beautiful.
You're growing.
You're blossoming.
It's beautiful to see.
Nah, better than 60 bots.
It is.
It's good to see, man.
It's good to see you blossoming on Twitter.
Um, I mean, that SRA episode of Cheryl Beck, man, people are reposting that.
It's getting out of control.
It's awesome.
Good stuff.
It helps that that issue is really becoming a trend as of now, as much as they'd like it not to be.
Yeah. Well, a lot more has been coming out.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, take care of yourselves and take care of one another.
