Game Theory: Beware Crow 64 c̸̛̊rO̵̼̮͐̄́̀͘W̴̘̪͈̆ 6̵̓͛͒4̴̈͗̃̋ c̶̾́́̀̑Ȑ̸̲̪̅͘O̶w̵̄̀̆̅̕͝ 6̴̞̓̒̈́̇4̶̩̘͗͌̉

[Music] hello internet welcome to game theory the show that we back up weekly on various outdated forms of physical media just to start a creepypasta in 20 years theorists i cannot tell you how excited i am for today's episode oh man this is a good one this is a very good one this is ben drowned but in real life it's accounting plus if accounting plus actually had a solution it's petscop but it's playable and it has a narrative that actually makes sense and best of all best of all it is still ongoing this is a mystery that you can play right after watching this video and help solve it is so cool it is so well put together can you tell that i'm excited about this one because oh man am i excited about this one ladies and gentlemen let me introduce you to the mystery of the long-lost n64 game catastrophe crow youtube's latest creepypasta arg sensation all right sensation might be too strong of a word youtube's latest criminally underrated masterpiece that i hope today we can help make a sensation because let me tell you it deserves it admittedly today's video is going to be a little less on the theory side and a little more of an invitation to join this mystery hunting community as they try to solve one of the cleverest games i have ever had the pleasure of playing and note that today we're only really scratching the surface of a mystery that already has itself a 76-page google doc going over the evidence not to mention a 26-page sub-document going over all the evidence from just one source alone so join me my friends as we start to explore the mystery of crow 64. but before i move into the episode proper i have to remind you that our new theory ware is only available for one more week right below this video that includes brand new items that we've never offered before like our game theory watch i don't know about you but totally reminds me of ben 10 the theory boy vegan leather card holder which holds everything that you need while keeping your pockets nice and thin our signature slip-on shoe eat your heart out vans the long-awaited pikachu plush will be the perfect addition to your family and our premium tech hoodie complete with double lining thumb holes and dipped drawstrings in fact of all the items in this merch launch the three pack of theory notebooks would probably be perfect for keeping notes and solving mysteries like crow 64 on your own this theory is brilliant this doesn't make any sense assuming of course you know which ends up links for all of those are right down below this video get them before they go the way of an internet mystery and disappear forever or at least for the next 20 years now i have to warn you that the crow 64 mystery deals with some mature and disturbing topics so right at the top here theorist discretion is advised our internet story today begins with the criminally overlooked creator named adam butcher who does the thing that's the instant death of any youtube channel he makes quality content by that i mean his stuff is always very good but it takes a long time to make and so the algorithm is like nope one part game designer one part filmmaker each video on adam's channel is completely different from his story of a game that took him 13 years to make to his most famous work the popular internet story where he tells the tale of a vlogging mystery hunter and his connection to a mysterious death out in the fields of the uk no joke it is a 9 minute video that has better storytelling and pacing than most movies you will watch in your life link is down below in the description along with a lot of other links because there's a lot that you're going to want to follow after this one my friends anyway it's his latest video that i want to focus on today a video uploaded back in october titled what happened to crow 64. in this video adam acts like your typical retro game review channel and covering a piece of lost media think channels like kadiris or gaming historian in this case he's stumbled across a development cartridge for the unreleased n64 game catastrophe crow and uh just as a reminder here this is just like petscop this undiscovered game was never really a game that was meant to exist it was created for the purpose of being in this creepypasta i bring this up because it can get kind of confusing when you're talking about fake histories of fake games as though they're real so the game was fake it was never meant to be it's all for this story well it's it was a fake game but now it's a real totally playable game we'll get to that so thanks to adam's research we learned that catastrophe crow was the brainchild of the successful developer manfred lorenz and his company opus interactive despite looking a lot like a clone of super mario 64 lorenz promised to make catastrophe crows something special with new features never before seen in a video game the team promised fearless exploration and something groundbreaking called an eternal revival system probably just a bad translation that's right something called an eternal revival system sorry that's just my alarm that goes off anytime there's a story about an indie video game where people either get sucked into the game or get revived by the game bad light bad bad light we don't know yet that anyone's in that game sure we can strongly suspect it but we don't know don't give me that look don't give me that look light you know what you did oh i can't be mad at you who's my bad life who's my bad like oh you are so catastrophe crow was originally based on a drawing lorenz's daughter made and was based around saving your father's business from the villainous sir cat unfortunately during development something tragic happens that causes manfred's home life to completely fall apart he starts spending all his time at work and asks his developers to create weird unexplained assets then one day manfred disappears alongside all the company's hardware his boat is later found floating off the german coastline the only thing left behind is a mysterious goodbye note written in german alongside a sequence of numbers and now the twist after years of catastrophe crow being lost to history adam seems to have found himself a copy on ebay he ends his historical retrospective with some of the public's first look at gameplay from this long lost game and oh man this is where the puzzle solving really begins as adam plays through catastrophe crow things start off like your typical platformer grassy landscape simple shapes bright colors but he quickly finds himself in a secret area that includes a crow typing on a computer with some weird things to say after that a cut scene of a house plays before the player is brought back to the first area of the game now things replay but slightly differently the sign on the workplace has gone out and a weird scarecrow stalks the player character from afar only to disappear when he's approached after failing to answer a ringing phone adam runs through a glitched section of the wall behind which is this animation of a crow holding computer equipment jumping off a boat knowing the history of manfred lorenz his disappearance the lost boat the stolen computer equipment it's easy to make the connection that this is likely a recreation of what happened to manfred himself when the player character jumps in after the npc they're brought to a misty forest where they can find an old crow crying over what appears to be a grave labeled crow except the headstone is actually an n64 cartridge the grave isn't even the creepiest part though as when adam tries to leave the site we hear the phone ringing again before his character falls down a flight of stairs causing all kinds of trippy imagery to appear including a brain scan and the arrival of two skeletal figures come to take the crow away and while i'm almost 100 sure that this is a coincidence i do find it interesting as i make this that the timestamp for that image just so happens to be at time equals 666 the devil not an mcu yet but maybe in catastrophe crow the video ends with a cut scene of an older crow walking into the bedroom of a younger crow before these disturbing events play out a headless crow is kept on life support while the room fills with water until more monsters steal the crow into the blackness to me there's one pretty clear interpretation for all this manfred's child falls down some stairs which gives them severe brain damage hence the brain scan and the headless crow in the hospital bed manfred receives the call about this while he's at work which is why the phone sound effect is so prominent throughout these scenes but likely he doesn't answer it which is why the phone can't be answered or he's haunted by the memory of that phone call which is why the phone never stops ringing there's also probably a lot of guilt associated with the fact that he wasn't there for the kid hence all of this happening while it's in an office building as a result of the child's severe injury he changes the game that his company was working on to include an eternal revival system to keep his child alive in some way classic petscop move you know the child though eventually dies as evidenced by the monsters taking the hospitalized crow away which causes manfred to go off the deep end literally after realizing that he couldn't actually bring the kid back to life he takes all of his hardware out into the middle of the ocean and jumps off a boat now that alone would be a really cool way to tell the story making a fake game to make a fake retrospective to tell a creepy and tragic tale of loss but believe it or not there is so much more here you know those iceberg meme charts that show you the depth of knowledge on any given topic well this one atom video is only the tip of the iceberg adam was clearly working on this arg for a long time before he launched that big video considering that it seems like he planted five sister channels each with one video of a random gameplay session just to make them seem legit followed by one or more videos of catastrophe crow gameplay each one predating adam's original video the only channels that are known to be canonical entries in the series are adam butcher n64 long lost lore 90s retro gaming fred n64 excavation man childhood memories 64 and ultra 64 forever and it was here on these other channels that we started to get the necessary hints to start solving clues left behind in adam's original video for instance what about that weird coded language from the crow in the computer well at the beginning of one of the sister videos catastrophe crow n64 playthrough from the n64 long lost lore channel we see a fairly standard pause screen later that same video though the pause screen is scrambled this fairly simple substitution cipher turns out to be something the community dubbed crow language and it can be used to decipher many of the puzzles throughout this game using just the letters from this pause screen we can decode the message from before h is i w is a q is m that one's in and h e oh my maybe that mephisto joke from earlier was a bit more on the nose than i suspected or else you know working on a video game is heck incarnate which gotta admit that's what i've heard from many of my developer friends so yeah we feel ya crow we feel ya and this crow language gets used a lot throughout the mystery for instance in the video titled underground level from the childhood memories 64 channel we get a classic spell something out on the ground and the letter lights up in a different color puzzle kind of like you'd see out of banjo-kazooie back in the day except here what you're spelling out doesn't make a whole lot of sense wow blizz hojo quovlo it's not german not swedish it's crow using the crow language cipher you get the phrase please forgive me both of you oh boy we're getting serious now but that's not all listen to the clip from that gameplay segment every letter has an associated sound meaning that what seemed just like one puzzle solved via crow language is actually giving us a second alphabet that we can use one where sound effects can translate back into words and that is not our only audio based code we get opus interactive manfred's fake game company had one other project that they had worked on a game titled ocean quest for the super nintendo we learned this by pausing adam's original video on a fake game magazine article talking about catastrophe crow here in the text we see quote this will be the first n64 outing from opus interactive a german developer helmed by director manfred lorenz whose action-adventure ocean quest was a surprise late hit for the snes searching for ocean quest on youtube you find one video from the ultra64 forever channel of the game's end credits song it's very chill right well something that the channel jonathan rose lyon noticed on youtube was that the song starts with a 26 note ascending sequence 26 notes for 26 letters later in the song you have little riffs like this [Music] so what jonathan did was extract those notes match them to the tones from the beginning of the song and translated them to the following thea nils marta manfred thanks for playing can you see why this is such a cool puzzle and why i am so excited to be talking about this and this gives us our key players and their names remember that decoded message from earlier said forgive me both of you but our initial interpretation of the events of crow 64 only had manfred and his kid so who else is here well based on the ocean quest audio it seems like we have our cast of characters manfred our protagonist thea his daughter nils her brother and marta his wife this is also supported by clues elsewhere in the mystery thea's name also comes from a splash screen which appears for just a moment when booting up the game the first line reads that which of course is crow language that translates to my dearest thea and funny enough thea translates directly into crow using crow language which is one very strong indication who this game was originally for and we can also confirm marta's name from that farewell letter to marta before he disappeared off on the boat but now we get to theory country my friends because i and most of the community have noticed that there are four different crow avatars appearing throughout all the gameplay videos each representing a different member of the family the large crow with glasses is the father manfred the other large crow is the mother marta the small crow with a bandage who serves as the primary player character is thia and the other smallest crow is her brother nils the rest of that splash screen with thea's name by the way contains blank slots for secret messages scattered throughout the game i'm not gonna spoil how to solve every line in this video because honestly it's just a lot of fun to do it for yourself and there is a whole community document outlining all of it so if you are interested and want the answers you can look for it over there and by the way a huge thank you to the document editors lucasim a buggy replay mozark paradox factor bmb and bird for keeping track of all of this plus everyone else who contributed to this big mystery so far anyway once you've figured out all the secrets the message decodes to the following my dearest thea i am sorry i could not be with you in the end i was too afraid i ran and now i am in hell one i made myself i dreamed of you playing this one day but you never will please forgive me my little crow please forgive me both of you dad this is only for your little brother now you'll notice that some of those letters fall on spots that are highlighted in the original splash screen if you take all those letters from the final message they spell out dearest nils the little brother nils it seems is the key sometimes quite literally n64 exclamation man's video forest level includes a vigenere cipher that requires two keys to break one alphabetic and one numeric the code from manfred's note 307-813-54841 plus the name nils repeated doing that the puzzle solves for nils i'm alive so is manfred actually alive seems to be back in october the community worked out an email address that's currently been removed from the dock with good reason it's a real working email address that's clearly being manned by a real person it's not just blasting back auto responses it is responding to what people say in real time as the game grew more popular more and more people started spamming the email hoping for hints and eventually it just stopped answering for that reason i'm not going to be telling you the email but if you want to you can figure it out though i warn you do not use it unless you think you have a solution for the next part of the puzzle that we're gonna talk about because we don't wanna burn out the goodwill of whoever is on the other end of that thing when the email was still working it sent messages from ml clearly manfred lorenz one of the earliest responses set the community up with the puzzle that everyone is still stuck on my dearest boy after all these years i have much to say your birthday is not too far from now i hope we can meet the day after in the place we holidate every year i will be there em there we have ourselves two clear things that we need a birthday and a place since that email a lot of people have tried to get answers from manfred but most have failed the thing is shortly after that address stopped replying we got one of the biggest drops i have ever seen in an airg the source code a twitter account pretending to be an ex-employee of opus interactive dropped a huge zip file containing the entire source code of catastrophe crow that's right you can now play catastrophe crow the game and not only that you can now go behind the scenes and interact with every object and asset in unity which means that there is still an absolutely enormous amount of clues to dig through and solve in all honesty i think that this arg is one of the best organized i've ever seen well i've covered a lot of args on the channel few come to the table with most of the solutions already set up multiple channels of gameplay posted well before the main tease of the game i really really hope that by introducing you all to this mystery today i've created a few more crows out there to delve into the incredible mystery that is catastrophe crow who knows maybe one of us theorists will finally be the one to crack the next big mystery all we need is a place and a birthday until then remember it's all just a theory a game theory anyway if you like that video which you clearly did since you made it to the end make sure you subscribe to this channel because we will definitely be revisiting this game when there are more developments to talk about speaking of cryptic creepypasta style games you heard me mention it a couple times throughout this video check out our series on petscop another one that's criminally underappreciated and that i should probably finish talking about at a certain point also one final reminder that theoryware is directly below this video and available only for a limited time including some items that we've been trying to get made for over three years specifically that pikachu plush so grab it before it too becomes a long lost internet mystery i'll see you in the next one guys

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 4,999,275

Rating: 4.9533105 out of 5

Keywords: crow64, crow 64, catastrophe crow, what happened to crow 64, crow 64 arg, arg, catastrophe crow 64 arg, crow 64 gameplay, adam butcher, crow 64 adam butcher, petscop, the next petscop, nintendo, nintendo 64, the game that doesn't exist, crow 64 explained, the lost nintendo game, creepypasta, scary, scary game, creepy, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory petscop, n64

Id: wvZtYgIIe2E

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DangerMacaroni]

YES MY FAVORITE ARG HWKFORNGK

[u/IronManTransformLego]

I just realized this, the crow could mean Thea on the grave because of crow language

[u/Cooltubehd]

Finally! I had a feeling he was going to do a vid on this for a good few months now

[u/Heavy-Membership-772]

Hold on when was the email sent cause we can back track by the dates and confirm the age and dates.

[u/itayfeder]

I remember watching Inside a mind cover it, nice to see matpat does too

[u/AGoodThief]

And what's a group of crows called? A murder.

[u/thebuzzbom]

how do you type in that glitchy text?

[u/Ne_Celinaa]

YES FINALLY

[u/yeetboi121]

I wonder what the note sequence at the end translates to, 16:54