Game Theory ARG

Game Theory ARG
Active since 2018-08-10
It's just an ARG. A Game Theory ARG!
Type	Official
Creator	Game Theory (Matthew Patrick, Stephanie Patrick)
Discovered	2018-08-10

Main Page > List of Investigations > Game Theory ARG

The Game Theory Merch Mystery and an unnamed arg commencing on 29/8/2018 are ARGs created by the Game Theory Team: Matthew Patrick and Stephanie Patrick. The Merch Mystery was created to promote new Game Theory merchandise, so it may be possible that the next ARG is created to promote more products by Game Theory.

The Merch Mystery

On 10/08/2018, MatPat announced on his twitter account that New Merch had been released, and that a puzzle involving the merch was also created. Although the clues necessary to complete the puzzle were hidden in merch, no purchase of said merch was necessary to complete the puzzle.

Some people who purchased the merchandise noticed 1 of 6 spelling errors on their carrier bag that the item was stored in. The 6 spelling errors were all in place of the letter "o" in the word "theory".

What a weird way to spell theory.

The 6 spelling errors could then be rearranged to spell "t#30r%". This would be used later on in the ARG.

The next clue would be hidden in the Game Theory Journal. All of the eyes of the characters in the notebook had letters located within them. When spelled sequentially, they would spell a website name: hasmatpatgonemad.com

This website showed a [A 1:00 minute video] of MatPat's face with big eyes surrounded by a weird background a rays coming from his head.

Keen eyed investigators saw that Matpat's blinking was actually Morse code.

The full sequence spelt out:

- ... . / - .... . --- .-. .. ... - / --. .- -. .-- .- -.-- / -.. --- - / -.-. --- --

This translates to THE THEORIST GATEWAY DOT COM.

Finally, Investigators were greeted with one final 6 character password to put in. Using "t#30r%" from the merch bags earlier was the correct solution and completed the puzzle. The first 100 to solve also received a prize for finishing so quickly (still not released as of 18/09/18).

This concludes the first ARG created by the Game Theory team.

Unnamed 2nd Game Theory ARG

What is MatPat Hiding?

On 16/09/18, The Game Theorists Youtube channel released a video titled What is MatPat HIDING?. In it, MatPat did a post-mortem on the Merch Mystery and what his plans for the future are. He also hid 3 clues within the video. 2 were red herrings and 1 was real.

At 0:08 an encrypted message was shown:

Uifsf bsf op Fbtufs Fhht jo ifsf. Hp bxbz.

When decrypted using a ROT25 cipher, the following text was shown:

There are no Easter Eggs in here. Go away.

At 12:38 a string of numbers with dashes is shown:

23 5 - 23 15 21 12 4 - 14 15 20 - 13 1 11 5 - 9 20 - 20 8 1 20 - 5 1 19 25

When using Letter Numbers, the message decodes to:

we would not make it that easy

Finally, a suspicious looking tag may appear within the video description, titled #UCVNTZJXAuvE3C7SfOsPNgEA. This is a youtube channel id, and when used takes you to a suspicious looking youtube channel, titled tenretni olleh.

The background contains a black picture with a pattern of the words "patience is the key".

The red ring of ARG.

The channel icon contains an upside down red version of The Game Theorists logo, with the text "pow zNb Xdd MnH" instead of "yroeht emag". This may be interpreted at face value, or can be turned upside down to give "HuW ppX qNz mob".

Some Investigators also tried going on thetheoristgateway.com again after discovering these clues, and were greeted with this message: Concatenating the numbers gives "524742323534". This can be converted from hex into text, giving the following result:

RGB254

This hints at altering the image so that each of the rgb values of colour are changed to 254, 1 less than 255. This is also hinted at in the filename, ff is 255 in hex, therefore fe is 254 in hex.

When the image is altered in this way, the secret timestamp is discovered:

Timestamp shown through brightness and contrast changes.

The timestamp is dated 29/9/2018 at 00:00:01 PST (08:00:01 UTC).