Until now the interactions between Youtubers and subscribers were quite limited, but that all changes now with the first-ever large-scale youtube ARG(Alternative Reality Game) hosted by the Infamous Mat Pat. So if you’re a person who loves puzzle solving get ready to get your hands dirty.
On September 16, MatPat (Matthew Patrick) the creator of “The Game Theorist”, “The Film Theorist”, and “GT Live” uploaded a video titled “Game Theory: What is MatPat HIDING?” In this video, he explains the future plans of intuiting an ARG in order to be able to have more fun with his subscribers. For those who aren’t familiar with ARG’s, they are games that are able to be played by people in the real world by piecing together clues spread out across different places like books, websites, etc. The ARG will consist of 7 gates or in other words 7 major checkpoints. MatPat also covers in his video Theorist Points, a system that will be used to keep track of who is contributing the most to the search. The ultimate goal of the ARG is to have all the Theorists (code name for MatPat’s subscribers) work together and solve the puzzles, It’s stressed heavily that no one can solve it alone it’s a team effort.
The first major clue dropped on Septemeber 29, it was a video uploaded to the Youtube channel “tenretni olleh” or hello internet (MatPat’s signature opening phrase) spelled backward. The video titled “◉youareprepared◉” shows a different version of MatPat’s classic intro that is riddled with clues. The clues varied from morse code to background noise that when run through a spectrogram produces yet another code. At this point in time, all the clues have been found in the video, so there’s no more point in looking there.
If you’re interested in the hunt and feel like you can contribute to the cause it’s not too late to join and it won’t cost you anything, besides the Theorist can always use an extra hand. It’s easy to get started, MatPat has set up several places for Theorist to be able to post, share ideas, and even request help from their fellow theorist. Several notable places are Game Theorist Reddit page and gamedetectives.net, although the best place would probably be the Game Theorist discord page titled “Official Game Theorist”. The discord page allows Theorist to be able to communicate in real time, the discord page is also the easiest way for MatPat and his team to track your progress and give you your rightful amount of theorist point. Since the hunt has already been going on for the last few months a lot of clues have been found and solved, so the best way to be caught up to date with your fellow Theorist it to use the google doc “Master Tracker 2.0” provided and managed by the discord user Retrocraft.
Griffin Dugger-Ades a top ranking Theorist that has been with the search from the beginning said “We are very welcome of new Theorist as long as they have some sort of idea of conduct in the chats. If they type “is anything new” the classic response is too !anything-new which is a bot command that tells them to check the master log. I fell victim to it myself.”
If you’re still thinking over becoming a Theorist you may be interested to know that the first gate has been opened as of November 24. With the first gate open a leaderboard was also released. This means that there’s still plenty left to solve with 6 gates still closed, so take up the challenge and become the top Theorist. Happy hunting.