Game Theory: I Solved The Wilbur Soot ARG... And It Only Took 3 Years!

[Music] oh an application for editor huh you can always use more help let's see what everyone else thinks [Music] oh hello head editor dan here oh finally was worried you wouldn't pick up none of the other editors seem to be around their phones right now weird anyway just got an email about someone wanting to audition got any projects i could put them on dan dan dan there can only be one [Applause] hello internet welcome to game theory where today's episode is being worked on by a brand new editor auditioning for the job hopefully he doesn't do anything creepy and start off a multi-month long erg that ultimately winds up being too obscure to be solved oh wait that's exactly what's happening right now isn't it he's inserting creepy imagery of himself over my vo isn't he darn it not again well this episode's already on a tight timeline so i guess we're gonna have to keep it in if none of this means anything to you then clearly you've never heard of the wilbur soot arg better known as the editor wilbur arg yeah when he's not trying to illegally sell potions out of a hot dog van in the dream smp wilbur soot is concocting unsolvable args steeped in literary references and complex musical codes and what do you do in your free time notice one key adjective i used here friends unsolvable this thing is filled with red herrings obtuse puzzles and clues that are so subtle that even though it started back in 2018 it has never been solved when i discovered that one of the internet's biggest gaming creators right now created an ergy i was intrigued when i found out that it hadn't been solved i was really intrigued to the point that i actually reached out to wilbur himself to check that it could actually be solved he told me that while it is technically solvable he would actively discourage me as well as anyone else from attempting to solve it he reiterated this a bunch during our call claiming that the arg was poorly constructed with puzzles that were accidentally made too hard and not hard in the good way of wow that was really challenging to figure out but rather hard and the frustrating how could i have ever known to do that sort of way and i get it as someone who's done his own energies a few times finding the right level of difficulty is really tough people take clues and directions that you could have never suspected and i gotta say it is awesome that wilbur acknowledges and admits all of his first time her fault i respect that a lot i also choose to completely ignore him sorry wilbur you're a good dude but you know that i couldn't leave this arg incomplete and i gotta say i think i solved it i think i have some solid answers to the arg's biggest lingering questions but understand how you first have to understand what exactly this thing was and what made it so hard the editor wilbur argy officially kicked off back in december of 2018 but wilbur had actually been seeding the idea of doing an arg for nearly a year before that despite having a channel of his own with over 42 000 subscribers at the time the arg wasn't actually started there instead the whole thing kicked off when another channel jack sucks at life uploaded the ominously titled i let a random guy edit this video six days ago i get this email titled new editor application important and i think well i'm not looking for a new editor nowadays jack collects youtube play buttons but back then he was predominantly a minecrafter also on that note jack i have the one version of the gold play button that you don't have as far as i know it's the only thing missing from your collection i'm just saying let's talk according to jack he was contacted by a person named wilbur looking to apply for a job as editor which immediately is weird considering jack already had an editor but things get weirder once he opens the email which begins with a giant image of wilbur and a rant against jack's current editor kai now i know what you're thinking mr massey welsh sucks at life kai has some properties that are irreplaceable right you're wrong you idiot i have all of them and better what who will be wilbur then out of nowhere claims to have invented two of the six strings found on a guitar as well as the editing tool of keyframing which means i guess i owe the dude a fortune in royalties despite all of these red flags jack decides to let wilbur go ahead and edit part of the video and things start out pretty normally at least until the middle when we switch to a video of wilbur completely taking over and introducing himself to jack's audience appearing in a decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere where no one can find you saying that there are people chasing him and that he's suffering from frostbite he begins to play a song and then there's a loud thud heard from off-screen and he runs away it is pretty much the perfect first arg video you interrupt a normal piece of content you pique their interest with a couple of mysteries leave little clues that don't make a whole lot of sense on their own and build excitement for the next video a next video that would happen a mere four days later the second video entitled i let him edit another video this is what he sent me back is pretty normal until we get to the end jack asks wilbur to play a song while he sways in the corner but all we see is wilbur sitting on a keg i haven't got a song for you thank you after that things continue on until the very end where in the top left-hand corner we're given a url to an unlisted video called our lincolnshire poacher itself a reference to a subreddit in this video we hear wilbur leave a voicemail for someone reciting the poem the raven by edgar allan poe hello your call cannot be taken at the moment so please leave your message after the tone once upon a midnight dreary while i pondered we can wear it if you go over to the subreddit you're greeted with yet another video called clues this again has wilbur leaving a voicemail and reading yet another edgar allen poe story but this time the short story the cask of amontillado listen until the very end though and you hear morse code playing it's a reversed base64 code leading to yet another youtube unlisted video entitled a ramble if you're watching this jack massey wealth sucks at life i think i'm losing my mind anyway so at the end of this one there's yet another morse code this time translating to don't let kai tell you what i did this ties in with the phrase repeated by a synthetic voice must be done reverse it and we get this i did something embarrassing i did something embarrassing now we're starting to piece together elements of a story wilbur is embarrassed about something he did something that has perhaps forced him to live on the run apparently kai also witnessed this event or else wilbur accidentally let what he did slip to kai and is now afraid of what might happen if word gets out hence him wanting kai removed from the position of editor a position where he has a voice and could likely spill the beans digging deeper though we can actually pinpoint the window of when the event happened and win wilbur's feelings towards kai shifted the first video of the arg was in december of 2018. however if you check wilbur's twitter from a few months earlier we see him tweet at kai saying quote josiah greenwich was in a rush and just kinda said hi sorry for confusing you with a follow-up tweet about how he loves kai's work a very different tone from the email that we see that starts this whole thing off in short what many people perceive as the beginning of this arg that first jack video is really a few months into the whole thing it also means that whatever this quote unquote embarrassing event was it took place between october 18th and december 16th between the tweet complimenting kai and the upload date of the video rant seen on jack's channel so certainly not the whole picture but pieces are certainly starting to fall in place the next chunk of clues actually came from discord where it seemed like wilbur was using aliases to push things forward via these presumed secret accounts we learned about a hidden cachet irl which contained a drawing of london's o2 arena and the word oxygen written beneath it there were also audio files stenographic decoders broken links like this one was really making people work but through it all you wound up with two major clues first this image which seems to be an email sent by jack to wilbur mixed in with a book title book cover l's lovely three by r fakier the second was yet another youtube video where jack syncs up and stares at a camera for about a minute or so it's pretty boring stuff but you know there has to be more to this right put the audio through a spectrogram and in the middle of the video you find some text hello can you hear me i'm trying my best to reach you but it's getting harder and harder because they're getting closer i can run and run but they're always right behind me you're trying your best and i appreciate that but sooner or later i'll have to come clean and end this thing once and for all that man jack massey sucks at life he's so kind to me and tries his best to tell me i need to know that i'll replace kai or i'll have to tell the world what i did it's just a matter of time it's emphasizing the parts of the story that we already know but not revealing anything new this becomes a trend that we'll see throughout the third video as well now when it comes to big clues at this point those actually shift over to twitter kai and wilbur seem to organize a meeting on the same day the third video goes live what exactly happens here between the two of them is unknown but afterwards kai's find a friend location was ominously located in the middle of a river just downstream of the london 02 arena suspicious we're back there kai's twitter account is also seemingly overtaken by wilbur his bio reading inventor of the ena guitar strings wilbur suit gmail.com two days later kai's twitter returns to normal tweeting what a bloody good swim that was and that the water wasn't as bad as you'd think but was bloody cold though to say the least it seems that wilbur attempted to get rid of kai by getting him to swim in the river by throwing him in the river something but kai survived also notice the detail about the water being cold a direct callback to wilbur's repeated phrase that happens throughout this entire arg is wilbur cold because he too was forced to swim the water at some point maybe the i'm so cold phrase is so important that it becomes the major theme of the next set of puzzles in the series starting at video four wilbur edited this video not much to talk about here this step actually required a good bit of brute force to solve brute force answering is when you basically just keep trying over and over again without any real hint as to the answer anyway you eventually wind up at a video of wilbur saying his classic catchphrase [Music] over and over again seriously can someone get this guy a blanket in the description of the video we're given another base64 code which translates to a backwards youtube url for another video titled you guessed it i'm cold in this video we see text saying it's not forever is it what will i do and of course i'm so cold these are all comments on the fact that in the overarching story wilbur has just gotten the editing job over kai but clearly he knew that even though he had won temporarily it wouldn't last a poem found in an imager photo around this time also backs this up i can paint with film and cut without scissors and not be hassled by the looming fate of kai ah fake ears hear only that i am permanent i am aware nay resigned to the fact that i am on but a timer i fear myself as the loss of my position may drop me drop me in the wasteful void it shall bite me like the cold and i'm so cold between the edgar allen poe references and all this fancy shakespeare talk you can tell that this one is a classy arg anyway all of this is him knowing that this isn't a permanent fix for the problems that he's caused it's merely a distraction kai will return and if jack removes wilbur from the equation then he'll be left alone in the void with nothing to distract him from what he's done so what is it what did he do and this you see is why the arg is currently unsolved no one has that core answer there are more videos after this more references to being cold more drama as wilbur loses the job back to kai and plenty more codes to solve but to me and anyone who knows this mystery the question everyone wants closure on is why why is wilbur on the run why is he so cold why does he want kai silenced what is the big secret at first i started to pick at the loose threads of clues that no one knew what to do with or at least that didn't have clear end points on the massive google doc that the fan community made there was of course the wilbur soot music video privately owned spiral galaxy which just kinda appeared at one point in the middle of the arg in this video wilbur sits on a keg in a field and plays a slightly modified cover of the song privately owned spiral galaxy notably playing the song almost entirely on the e and a strings the ones that he claims to have invented if that wasn't suspicious enough at 2 27 the video cuts away suddenly to play the lincolnshire poacher tune so clearly this video has something important to hide in the greater arg and after being involved in the petscop erg for so long one of my first instincts was synchronization remember that video i mentioned earlier the suspicious one where jack stares at a camera for a minute or two and nothing really happens well it starts with jack saying okay i'm syncing up one two three one two three seems like the perfect opportunity to sync some videos up so i tried it and wouldn't you know they sync at 2 21 and they're getting closer jack is suddenly replaced by a black and white video of wilbur staring into a bathroom mirror while digital sounds play in the background at 2 27 exactly the song gets to the same point the digital tune plays in privately owned spiral galaxy it's cool but what it was a new finding that ultimately led to nothing as far as i could tell in the r lincolnshire poacher subreddit there's a cryptic hint in the information bar do not capitalize on this poster's mistakes and in the first video of the arg wilbur claims to be suffering from frostbite and apologizes for not being good at guitar as a result my fingers are suffering from hypothermia at the moment so if i'm not very good my apologies maybe he made some mistakes in his spiral galaxy music video and those are telling me what to quote unquote not capitalize well after listening to the original version and comparing it with wilbur's version i found three different notes that just seemed out of place one at 111 one at 2 33 and one at 2 44. are these repetitive time stamps just the product of me looking too deeply into one puzzle or do they actually mean something [Music] that's not a coincidence i don't know i tried a bunch of things the lyrics the letters whatever i'd still seem to be missing a step a clue something and i could just sit here and list off more of the random rabbit holes that i looked down but the end result was always the same while i certainly had some new findings here and there none of it was earth shattering nothing was truly connecting the dots in the way that i would imagine those dots connecting wilbur was ultimately right with his phone call to me i couldn't solve it all but here's the thing just because you don't completely solve every puzzle doesn't mean that you can't win the game wilbur may have won some battles here and there but he hasn't won the war just like you can know the image hidden on a puzzle without having all the pieces i think there's enough clues on the table at this point to actually solve the main mysteries of this thing i think i know what happened at the o2 arena i think i know who the fact years are there's actually two of them we'll get to that and i think i know why everyone is so darn cold all the time so finally it's time to talk theories as you can probably imagine in absence of a definitive conclusion to the arg wilbur's communities developed some guesses to fill in the blanks of the story the first comes from the youtube channel red herring they propose that r and i fakier are actually two different personalities of wilbur and uh yeah i kind of skimmed over it but at one point in the airg a new challenger enters the fray ifakir on reddit wilbur suddenly makes a random comment on a post just saying i fakier would love this i that gear i thought it was just r you know the guy that wrote the book from earlier but we learned later from our fact year's completed book cover that r is the son of ifakir which is also an anagram for fire kai very clever anyway throughout the entirety of the arg wilbur is seen both with and without glasses sometimes even switching between wearing and not wearing them in the same video and when he switches his demeanor seems to change as well when they're on he comes across as obsessive but calmer and put together it's nice when things end with a bow on the top when they're off he becomes erratic impulsive and aggressive we love our deadlines here we love our deadlines we love them the theory goes that whatever traumatic event is at the core of this arg it may have caused wilbur to develop dissociative identity disorder more commonly known as multiple personalities this condition is commonly the result of trauma as the brain actively tries to avoid bad memories and let me just put in a disclaimer here this is a real condition that is often very negatively and poorly portrayed in media outlets usually with scary people who are serial killers being the ones that suffer from it so please do not fall victim to that stigma it is not true it is just made up and over sensationalized anyway applying this idea to wilbur's behavior throughout the series a lot of things seem to fit wilbur only ever talks about the embarrassing incident when he isn't wearing glasses same thing when he's demanding the firing of kai or celebrating getting the job as editor all no glasses during a reddit review video wilbur looks for his reading glasses and then states he's never owned reading glasses implying that this persona isn't aware of the other this is the real wilbur the one who wants to escape who wants to forget this is ifakir our fakier then is the alt personality the other persona the son or product of ifakir it's a persona that's more emotionally distant more collected honestly i think that this is right the evidence for it is too hard to deny and it explains a lot of the weird fakier stuff but clearly it's not the whole story because we still do not know what is the inciting incident well for that we need to introduce one final video one brought to light by online user christian this video on wilbur's music channel features a voicemail from a girl who asks wilbur out on a date we haven't went on a date been like forever so i just wanted to know if you would like to go to a packed burger tonight and that's it we never hear about this girl again it is a one-time random event that for followers of wilbur's work seemingly goes nowhere and it's this random phone call this out of nowhere voice message that i believe serves as both the beginning and end of the wilbur arg using both theories as a base i think i've got the complete picture this mystery girl asks wilbur to meet her at a burger place which let's assume is in greenwich near the o2 arena sometime in december remember this has to have happened before december 16th but after october due to his relationship with kai changing it also links to the poem the raven that kicked this whole thing off distinctly i remember it was upon the late december the voicemail from this girl seems to be quite awkward but to me it comes across almost as mocking she's mocking his social awkwardness it's kind of like when you're in school and the popular girl pretends to be interested in you and then it all comes out as just being a prank i have a sneaking suspicion that this might be what happened here wilbur's social awkwardness meant that he wasn't able to read the situation correctly he clearly likes the girl and so he showed up which links in our first edgar allan poe poem from the arg yula lee a poem about a lonely man finally feeling whole thanks to a woman quote i dwelt alone in a world of moan now doubt now pain come never again this then leads us to a second edgar allen poe poem annabelle lee quote again i was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea by the sea in this case the thames river and referring to both himself and a mysterious girl however when he does go she reveals that it was all a joke causing this moment to be marked in wilbur's mind as embarrassing he was humiliated and in a moment of rage pushes the girl which causes her to fall off the edge and into the cold water of the thames below wilbur panics he dives in to try and get her out but he's unable to she's not able to swim and slowly begins to drown with the last thing wilbur hearing being the words i'm so cold this explains the pictures of the o2 arena and the word oxygen written in the geocache notes she drowned in the thames near the o2 arena lacking o2 or oxygen which also fittingly ties into that annabelle lee poem again where the girl dies cold and wet quote that the wind came out of the cloud by night chilling and killing my annabel lee and so all the nighttide i lie down by the side of my darling my darling my life and my bride in her sepulcher there by the sea in her tomb by the sounding sea all of this would also explain why wilbur keeps saying i'm so cold this event has been burned into his mind those last words the embarrassing moment he himself being cold from the water a traumatic moment so strong that it causes a mental break it's also a moment that would force him into hiding explaining the knocking on his door in the first video he's running from the law or at least it feels like he's running from it he's actually running from a guilty conscience kind of like poe's telltale heart so any sort of knocking on the door can be the police or you know just a threat and so he panics and leaves every time however there is one small snag in this whole plan kai kai knows about wilbur after all we know that they met in october that year which is also probably when he met that mystery girl she does say that they haven't been on a date in forever so kai knows this girl maybe he was even in the prank that they were pulling and so he knows that she's now missing when wilbur suddenly realizes this he plots to have him removed from his point of influence as jack's editor paranoid that this information will get out when jack doesn't immediately fire kai wilbur takes it upon himself to remove him the only way he knows by throwing kai into the same part of the thames however kai is a strong swimmer wilbur knowing that he can't get rid of kai is now forced to face his actions in his last video of the arg wilbur talks about how even though the part of him that people know will be dead he'll still be here this is where i die i'll still be here this part of me dies here and the part of him that will now be dead is of course our fakier who now no longer has a place in this world as wilbur accepts what he did and so as he begins to explain the story to us our fakier disappears and to round it all up i present to you the last edgar allen poe poem lenore a poem about not mourning for the dead but instead coming to terms with death and celebrating the life that once was avant tonight my heart is light no dirge will i upraise but waft the angel on her flight with a pain of old days from grief and groan to a golden throne beside the king of heaven all of this would make sense as wilbur has come to terms not only with the death of the mystery girl but also with the death of a part of himself plus it allows us to solve the mystery about why our fat years book is called l's lovely three all three of the poems i've mentioned eula lee annabel lee and lenore are all well noted for their literary technique of emphasizing the l sound in their title three edgar allan poe poems with lovely l sounds l's lovely three all wrapped in an erg that kicked off with a heck of a lot of po references so is it the right answer i don't know wilbur wouldn't tell me because he didn't want to give me anything the wider community didn't also have which i absolutely respect but i also think deep down he knows that the best mysteries are the ones that never get solved i mean duh look at fnaf and let's face it what's more enticing than the creator himself telling you not to do something that it's just too hard to solve which you know what don't subscribe to this channel don't do it it is impossible to click that red subscribe button below this video darn it's a shame too that you can't click that subscribe button because guess what here's the thing wilbur is going to be back on this channel he is already starting to seed out the idea of doing another arg this time with more knowledge of how to craft these things for the general populace so don't be surprised if you happen to see his name pop up in the title of another video sometime in the future only this time us theorists are gonna be there watching and solving so we're not doing this three years too late and in the meantime remember it's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 4,287,934

Keywords: wilbur soot, dream smp, arg, wilbur soot arg, wilbur soot music, wilbur soot your new boyfriend, wilbur soot arg explained, wilbur soot arg reaction, wilbur soot arg solved, wilbur soot arg clips, dream smp wilbur soot, dream smp wilbur animatic, dream smp wilbur, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory dream smp, game theory wilbur soot, game theory dream, editor wilbur, editor wilbur arg, editor wilbur clips, jacksucksatlife, jacksucksatlife wilbur

Id: NtNDgOWN_2o

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CahyaAziz]

It will be in interesting if Wilbur reacted to this video on stream just like when matpat did the dsmp lore video

[u/Mcyt_Topics]

This was an amazing and crazy way of seeing the ARG

[u/0ctoGen_]

The way he said one in the “there can only be one” 💀🤚