Game Theory: Petscop - The Music and The Madman

A riddle: There are two pictures of a door. In the first picture, the door is closed. In the second picture taken later, The door is open. Nobody opened the door, the door didn't open itself, the door in fact, did not open at all. So what happened? Pause the video and debate it in the comments. Because the solution to that riddle is what today's episode, and the entire Petscop mystery is all about. *intro* Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory; where it's been a long time since we've talked abo

ut some dead children Which let's face. It is the lifeblood of this channel. So let's fix that, shall we? Today work hopping back into the ongoing investigation of Petscop; history's least played horror game. Now if you haven't watched any of the channels Previous videos on the topic or you've just forgotten during the last eight months since we covered this issue I'm gonna give you a brief recap on what you need to know to understand today's episode at its core Petscop is a twisted tale of abus

e and probably murder a fictional Let's play that houses a larger mystery all unfolding here on YouTube via a series of currently 16 videos we have most of our Information through Paul the person we most often watch playing the game after finding the game in his house all began recording himself Experimenting with it and in 2017 began uploading the videos onto what he calls the family youtube channel early in his gameplay He inputs a code that unlocks a darker twisted lair hiding in the bowels o

f this otherwise generic PlayStation era game Paul almost immediately finds a gravestone for a dead child, Michael Hammond It becomes apparent that something or someone is trying to communicate with it as I went over in my previous theories I believe that that person is the game's creator Raynor who originally made the game as a means of accusing someone named Marvin of horrific crimes against children potentially even trapping him in the game mix in a bunch of censored imagery, talk of rebirthi

ng, and the games sparse atmosphere, and you have yourself a masterpiece of slow burns psychological horror. Nope, Petscop is an enormous puzzle with layers upon layers Of mystery telling a much more complex narrative than pretty much anything that this channel has ever covered save for like Dark Souls This is far far more complex storytelling than F.N.A.F as such it would take a massive Theory to do everything in the series justice. There are just too many unanswered questions that need to be s

olved and I'll be honest I don't have all those answers at least not yet However, I do feel like I have some answers some really important answers to some of the biggest questions in the game So today I'm gonna attempt to answer two major pieces of the puzzle Which together will outline the very essence of how I think this universe is operating and lead us to potentially the biggest Reveals yet first what is the purpose of Stravinsky's septet and second what happened to the windmill? Which is pe

rhaps the single biggest question that's been looming over the series since the second upload First the piano pits cup is a game. That gives us nothing actually Let me rephrase that it gives us a lot but rarely is any of it explicitly told to us instead It's all hidden under allusions to eyebrows and windmills and rebirthing want to know who's related to Check the eyebrows want to know what year were in check the calendars want to know who's playing the game at any given time great o do I becaus

e it is harder to figure out than you would think but one piece of information it does Explicitly give us is the name Stravinsky's septet a real piece of music from a real composer out here in the real world It's first mentioned by name during petscop 12 quote. I'm calling you Bell because that's who you are You might be confused as to what happened. I was over eager before and started calling you tiara prematurely I created a space in the menu for you still unused now Then I put you inside the

Machine and played the second movement of Stravinsky septet on the needles I played it wrong, but that would have been okay, if you hadn't given up halfway you would be tiara This is not what happened. Now I'm gone there it is mentioned Explicitly by name which means that there's got to be something unique about this Particular piece of music that the creator of pet shop really wants us to know about that's not at all Sure, Stravinsky septet is first mentioned in Petscop 12 But listen closely Th

roughout the series and you'll see that the notes of the septet have actually been a recurring musical motif throughout the entirety of the series a sped-up version first made its debut during episode 7 as the unusual noises that play in the quitters room *Stravinsky septet* And again in pets cap 11 during this incredibly prolonged music lesson So what's so special about this particular piece of music, I mean in all the world of classical music This is a really obscure piece for the creators of

pets cap to choose for their story and then do not just call out Stravinsky septet but specifically the second movement of it. There's got to be something to this thing. So I started researching first It's important to note that Stravinsky septet is divided into three separate Movements this to me is an important detail since the pets cap story is divided into three very distinct time periods 1977 where it all begins When Marvin causes his friend who have guests in the past is named tiara to dis

appear along with the windmill it was a busy year for the guy second is the guy Mid-90s when the actual game of petscop is created by Rayner and given to Marvin and when kids like Michael and care start disappearing and reappearing and lastly 2017 when our protagonist Paul finds petscop starts recording his let's play in the haunted behavior happening inside the game and then begins Uploading those videos onto YouTube. It's a story told in three major acts just like the three movements of the se

ptet We're also expressly told that the main house we visit Reiner's house is frozen captured and three different points in time three movements yet again now consider the fact that it's a septet by its name a Musical piece for seven people to play and what do we have in petscop? but seven named characters Marvin the murderer Rainer his accuser tiara Belle and Michael his Possible victims care his daughter and Paul our protagonist seven key players in our story a septet But then why the second m

ovement in particular and what's all this about playing it badly and not becoming tiara? Well, there's actually a lot here It seems like playing the septet is directly tied to what petscop refers to as the rebirthing process We're through playing the song Belle would have been reborn as tiara what exactly I think that might mean I'll get to in a minute but for now just consider it a transition an evolution from one form to another and this is reflected in the choice of the second movement accord

ing to Erwin Stein's analysis of the Stravinsky septet the three movements were representative of Stravinsky's rebirthing as a musician The first movement is closely tied with his early compositional style and movement three reflects his later more modern style with the second movement serving as the Transition between the two it's the means by which Stravinsky Transforms himself as an artist in much of the same way characters and petscop are playing the song to rebirth into some other form it's

also worth noting that the second movement is what's known as a passacaglia a slow instrumental piece consisting of variations on a theme played over a repeated base part repeated variations just like the story of petscop where time and actions overlap and sync up with each other where history is Constantly repeating itself just with slight Variations every time care being a repeated version of the windmill girl paul being a repeat of care I do agree There's a resemblance Very strong resemblanc

e between us the game being passed from Rainer to Marvin to Paul even care The game's overworld being repeated in some twisted version of what fans of the game call odd care. It's all cyclical it's all the same theme repeating with slight variations every time but lastly but most importantly wonder why this Sounds so random and gross and not like something someone would actually want to compose. Well, that's because it's a variant of what's known as twelve-tone serialism Where to put it simply a

ll the notes are treated equally as such the music never feels like it truly Lands in any one solid key signature like 99% of the songs that you listen to it Instead gives it the sound of a bunch of random notes instead of you know An actual song that people would want to listen to here's why this is so important according to experts on the let's talk music subreddit when discussing 12 tune compositions the twelve-tone technique is controversial and is criticized as being robotic or reducing mus

ic to algorithms becoming the equivalent of Soulless noise and here is where we unwrap the true meaning of rebirthing I've mentioned in a previous theory how it feels like Marvin is trapped in the game it's something that Paul senses as he plays this game is trying very hard to make it seem like like there's an Entity in it like a ghost or an AI trying to communicate with me But it's the choice of the septet that confirms that this is actually what's happening And that playing the song is the me

thod by which it happens. I mean think about it We have seen hidden images in the game that show real-world pianos with controllers attached to them in petscop 16 we see the floor layout of a room where the piano itself is being kept a room that feels an awful lot like a prison or Scientific testing room in the way that it's being monitored and we're being reborn by playing a song that we just learned outright serves as a bridge between art and Algorithms the rebirthing process then seems to be

entering the petscop game by playing the song converting a real person into a computer program Trapping them there until eventually they're able to be spat back out perhaps by playing the song again as someone or some thing new Now let's talk about the second big mystery of the game the windmill planar poses this question To Marvin in Petscop 9 he must have guessed but I was looking through your things. I found that picture of you from 1977 standing in front of an old windmill with your friend y

ou went there and it was a bad idea Your friend and the windmill both disappeared into thin air. Her sister was holding the camera She took another picture minutes later. Just you no Windmill and no friend your friend never returned with you and the windmill was gone. I went to see it myself Where is it? What did you do? The windmill is one of the key icons from this series appearing and disappearing Seemingly at random Showing up in photographs letters most recently making yet another crucial a

ppearance as a miniature at the start of petscop 14 it Appears to be the location of Marvin's first crime the place where his friend was lost forever Clearly pet escapes creator intends for us to figure out the mystery of the vanishing windmill and up until this point. It has remained completely Unsolved but I think with release of episodes 14 and 15 We may finally have enough information to put the pieces together We're first introduced to the windmill in Episode 2, but it's in Petscop 4 for wh

en the windmill actually disappears However, even though it's no longer there something still exists in its place and if started like a placeholder for it Of course We know from petscop 9 that the missing windmill texture isn't missing at all Way back in pets cap 1 Paul reads us a note I walked downstairs and when I got to the bottom instead of proceeding, I turned to the right and became a shadow monster, man it's not until petscop knowing that Paul discovers what exactly that means and what it

means is pretty literal you go downstairs you take A right you become a shadow once he becomes the shadow monster man Hall heads to the windmill where low and behold the Placeholder has now been replaced with the fully fledged windmill object So why would becoming a shadow monster suddenly changed the way the rest of the world appears to us the answer to that question? I believe is gonna help us explain a ton of the weirdness throughout the series I believe that by becoming the shadow Paul has

changed what dimension he's seeing in the game halls avatar has basically been Rotated along an axis that we can't see so that his shadow replaces his avatar And now in the process he's able to see things in a different dimension that persists it just persists and a different rotation That's usually invisible to us when we're playing the main game Now this idea of dimensional rotation may seem like it's coming out of nowhere But let's take a minute to look at episode 14 it starts with the riddle

I asked you at the beginning of this episode a door that simultaneously open and closed the episode then spends the rest of its runtime focused on the way things are rotated midway through there's an extended sequence where Paul plays around with a series of CDs and picture frames all rotated at slightly different angles around a vertical access the kind of thing that the player normally can't do in petscop later in the Same episode when we see the game reload the game makers logo gara Lena now

ends up at a radically different Angle than it did in the beginning of pets cop 1 the differently rotated logo reveals to Paul a game with totally different Save files the last we saw of this screen was in petscop 10 Paul's files were named Paul, test and backup strange Situation is an entirely new save file based on this hypothesis. The original files part gone and the game didn't delete anything It was an issue of Paul booting up the game unintentionally in a different state at a different ro

tation and finally If all of this wasn't enough at the end of the episode Paul gains access to the houses Mysterious garage a dorm that was once closed and now for some unexplained reason Open how the door open it's the answer to the riddle two dimensions at two different rotations pictures taken at different angles inside the garage We find a computer the computer rainer presumably used to program the game pets cop on his computers tower Is this strange symbol? Is it a company logo? Hidden glyp

h or symbol no It's a three dimensional axis X Y Z which means that once Paul masters the ability to rotate all the Secrets the game suddenly become unlocked all paths save files hidden Locations like the windmill past time periods all trapped in different orientations of the same game So do these revelations solve the mystery of the game? No not by a longshot I'm not pretending that they do but I do feel like we are Significantly closer now with two key questions that are much closer to being s

olved the true nature of the rebirthing process and the lost location of the windmill pets cop16 Currently seems like it may be the final installment. It certainly has an air of finality to it But at this point only time will tell but hey It's worth remembering as we close out this episode. That petscop is a real game The people behind the series are literally making a video game just so they can film a fictional Let's play of it to tell their bizarre Creepypasta, it's actually one of the reason

s I love the pets cop series so much it is perhaps one of the most modern examples of storytelling out there Guess what? If you two have a story that you want to tell you can do it too with the help of our sponsor for today's episode Skillshare, you've heard us mention Skillshare before they've been a fantastic partner to all US theorists. It's an online learning community specifically oriented for creators with more than 25,000 classes available taught by experts in their respective fields. For

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