Petscop - Nitro Rad

I drove read Holly's vessel in this day and age there are so many different mediums of storytelling whether you write a book create an animation or make a film there's so many different ways you can tell somebody a story in recent years videogames have floated to the top as one of the best mediums to do this with when something's interactive you can involve your audience in a much deeper and personal way make them feel like they're part of the story filling the shoes of the main character or perhaps you'll uncover it in a more unconventional way piecing together the bigger picture as you explore and digest the world around you but what if what if you could tell a story through a game that did not exist a story that may or may not be about the person playing what if you could combine these mediums the medium of video games with the medium of filmmaking a webseries under the guise of a video game let's play when in actuality the game is fabricated the player is fabricated that the story it tells feels very real the game in question is called pet's comp it's a fictional ps1 game that was made up for a web series of the same name it launched just last year in March of 2017 and it's still ongoing updating every two to four months the premise is nothing new somebody finds an old game they loved as a kid and they play it again only to find unsettling things within it one of the most popular examples of a web series like this was Ben drowned which was achieved by using emulator codes to create strange effects and scenarios but despite treading familiar territory there's a lot that makes pets copy unique the first and most obvious thing is that pets cop is not a real game this game you watch him play was something built from the ground up just for this series I had a friend show me the series about a month ago and I got so sucked into it that I ended up watching a whole thing in one sitting and then I watched it all again and then I watched it all again so since it's the Halloween season I thought it would be maybe kind of cool to talk about it a little bit not just about the theories like all the other channels seem to do I also want to dive more so into the production of it as well there's already a lot of videos about the series up on YouTube and from what I've heard a lot of them just retread familiar territory so to try and avoid that I'm not gonna be talking about the most well discussed and popular theories and tidbits like the like the whole thing with Candace new maker just not even gonna bother with that because I feel like anyone who cares about the series probably already knows about the stuff like that that and to assure that my theories are entirely my own original theories that have not been influenced by other videos I actually have not watched a single video about pets cup I've only watched the series and that's it so with that said why don't we get started alright so this is just to prove to you I'm not lying about this day on March 12th of 2017 a user simply named pets cop uploaded a video simply titled pets cob the description saying nothing more than a game I found it follows a guy named Paul who claims to have rediscovered an unreleased ps1 game he'd somehow had when he was a child the game is apparently unfinished because there's nothing over here the video is recorded as a casual walkthrough with commentary as if intended for a handful of Paul's close friends it's uploaded to YouTube simply so we can show it to them and it all looks legit from the splash screen of the company name to the title screen to the gameplay to the menus the sound effects even the loading screens all the way down to the quality of the footage looking like he was actually recorded off of an actual ps1 even the character you play as it all reminds me of those cute little oddball Japanese games you'd see between the late 90s and the mid-2000s games like shoe lifts or Katamari this looks like it could have been a real game that actually got released around this time at its core pets cop is a game that has you looking for different pets at a care center called even care solving puzzles in order to collect them even care is in the gift plane this cutesy little white area with a bunch of presents everywhere and these are real puzzles he's actually solving to get these pets one involves opening and closing a gate one has you using this treadmill to create clones of yourself and this one has you using a bucket to catch the rain from a cloud I was floored by how real this game looks there's plenty of examples of genuinely good game design here to take this pink block for example it obscures the collectables down the way so the player will walk to the right before seeing them but all being somebody already familiar with the game walks down and grabs them before the screen Scrolls this is something that's here to make the game both convincing in its design but also to make it convincing to the viewer that this is something that Paul has simply played before and this room the cloud is at the dead center of the screen and the amount of time it takes for your character to walk to it is exactly the same amount of time it takes for the cloud to move as if the game is meticulously designed to give the player all of the visual information they need to understand the puzzle by the time they get to it whoever made this clearly has some sort of background in game design whether they studied it in school or they simply have experience making games before or they've I don't know watched a lot of behind the scenes or something whatever it was this guy knew exactly what he was doing and not only is just the game convincing as something that could have been real but Paul's reaction to it is as well there's a petty can't even figure out how to get and his reaction to that just seems really genuine over here I can't catch this one I've tried this is always what happens so I don't know what's up with that one Palvin reads a note that he claims came with a game it describes a strange cryptic scenario walking down stairs and becoming a shadow man also attached is a button combination that must be used in a certain room to unlock the rest of the game demo so like anybody else would Paul walks into the corresponding room and enters the button combination and then this is where things start to get strange down right okay all right leaving even care now brings Paul to a dark and desolate field of grass polar opposite to what we've previously seen in every possible way Green being the opposite color to pink the graphics being detailed and realistic instead of flat shaded in cartoony and of course most obviously the game being dark and spooky instead of bright and cheery after walking around aimlessly for what Paul claims to be is more than an hour he discovers a wooden hatch with no idea how to open it or what to do next Paul asks the audience to leave their ideas in the comment section and then he ends the video over the next year the video would receive over 1 million views and would kickstart one of the most fascinating rabbit holes the internet has ever seen between then and now pet Scott would upload 14 additional episodes as of this video there's 15 in total each one following Paul as he gets further and further into the game having him solve cryptic puzzles bear witness to things both strange and unsettling and have the game act as if it's trying to communicate with him sometimes through text that appears to be aimed at somebody this part of the game was made for somebody to see or this statue that you can ask questions after what appears to be some sort of texture glitch that turns it pink it stops giving Paul the programmed answers and starts to speak as if it has a mind of its own so that's not that's not what it said before when I put in that question but perhaps the most direct way it's communicated was through the other players the most frequently recurring one being a green character named Marvin well at least that's what we believe his name is based on the information the game has given us we only ever see dialogue from Marvin in the game's demo you know like when you leave a game running at the title screen and eventually it plays a demonstration some recordings up on the channel or of the games demo instead of Paul playing it himself and here's where things start to get interesting it seems as if Paul's button and puts in the main game affect that of the demo this is acknowledged and shown in detail for the first time when Paul tries to get the demo version of himself into a room that's only open in the demo so he can grab an item he overlays the footage to show him in real time in him in the demo at least I think that's what's going on he describes it as pretending like he's pretending the door is actually open and he goes in despite what's being shown on screen I'm not really entirely sure honestly there's so much to digest here it'd be impossible to cover at all but I'm not here to tell you the whole story just my own two cents but firstly I'd kind of like to take a look at the production of the game like how did he make this and why does it look so convincing from emulating the limitations of the hardware all the way down to the analog look of the video quality having the game actually run an official hardware though seems a little far-fetched to me especially if we're assuming that he's constantly making changes at the game as he makes more episode so here's my theory as to how he achieved this composite look I would assume that the game was made for PC and then he records it simply in a window on his desktop and makes sure it has that proper low resolution to best emulate that Jacqui ps1 look the recording would be then put on a USB stick and then played off of something like a ps3 or xbox 360 something that can play back footage but is also natively compatible with composite video he would then rerecord the footage in its composite quality back into a game capture device like an elgato or something I decided to try this out myself with some ape escape footage that I recorded through my HD upscaler it looks real clean sharp edges and everything almost like it's being emulated I put the footage on a USB stick played it back through a ps3 via composite video into an elgato and voila it looks just like it was recorded off a ps1 jittery colors and everything this seemed to me like the most likely way he did it well at least it did until I played the pet Scott fan recreation seconds into booting this thing up I noticed that they had this composite filter over the gameplay in real time replicating a look of the videos without the need for real composite video I figured if there's anybody who could tell me how this guy probably made this game it'd be the guys behind this fan remakes so I hit them up at this cord and they were nice enough to help me out the guy in charge the project is a user called bubble derp who shared with me game assets a brief rundown on how his version was built and some estimates on how pet Scott was made bubble derp told me that he thinks it's likely that pet Scott was made in some sort of game engine but it's possible was programmed from scratch as well now the composite shader was programmed by a user called red he explained to me that he achieved the effect by breaking it down into five components horizontal blur color blur fringing scan lines and edges he was nice enough to send me an old build of a pets cop remake running in unity here he can turn the shaders off letting you see what the game would look like with clean edges but he tells me he doesn't believe the composite effects in pets cop are real once they've taken a thorough look at them and they believed that they were synthesized either via programming like they did for the fan remake or by using some sort of filter applied through a program like After Effects or a media front-end like retro arc which allows you to play anything through it with any of several built-in filters applied over it for comparison's sake have compiled four different versions of the filter here's the original pet cop footage from the webseries here's the filter on the fan-made remake in game maker here's the closest filter I could find in retro arc and here's a version I created myself by recording the build with no filters and then running it through real composite video whichever method was most likely used well I'll leave that up to you guys there's no way to know for sure so all we can do is speculate but composite filter aside is most likely the game was made in some sort of publicly accessible engine when I asked what his build was made in bubble derp told me I've been using game maker studio 1.4 but it's possible it could have been made in unity or Godot honestly though any engine that can emulate the ps1 is a possible candidate regardless of what kind of modern programming pets cop was made and the creator seems to have a thorough understanding of what is and isn't doable on the PlayStation one when I asked about staying true to the hardware I was told there doesn't seem to be any R and G anywhere and they haven't used more than one light source at all times purely to comply with the Playstations capabilities aside from emulating just the ps1 look there also doesn't seem to be a single thing in pets cough that could go beyond what the ps1 would actually be capable of whoever made this they certainly understood the hardware man seeing how much work went into this game really makes me hope that we'll see an official playable build of it someday but an equal amount of work has also gone into the cryptic story this series has to tell every line of dialogue every reaction to the game that Paul delivers that's a dead kid every single last thing about Peskov seems deliberate in one way or another the science boasts didn't even care for example even before the game gets creepy they allude to the game's theme of adoption and rebirthing when you're choosing a pet find somebody that you like you don't have to love them right away interpret pets as adoptive parents and you've suddenly got a complex allegory deep rooted in real-world events this line would be meaningless to most but to those familiar with the story of candace new maker it's probably pretty chilling link that with how you capture that first pet you trick it into a false sense of safety by manipulating the gates it's home that's pretty dark how this all links to the bigger picture though well I'm not gonna get too specific like I've said I'm not here to simply re explain the entire story I feel like that kind of ruins the fun like I feel like the point of a web series like this is to watch it all on your own and then think of theories with your friends and talk to others and figure things out I feel like having a whole youtube video just telling you how it goes kind of ruins all the fun but with that said I still have a couple of theories that I'd like to dish out myself so the rest of the video is probably not gonna mean a whole lot to people who haven't watched the whole series and its entirety yet yeah this is just gonna be rapid-fire nonsense this is probably gonna be very incoherent but I'm gonna try my best so from my understanding this is tiara and this is Marvin there's a lot of little clues that hint at what applies to who and who's speaking when certain text appears the game has several ways of communicating sometimes through in-game dialogue that seems to be aimed at a specific real-world individual sometimes by character dialogue and sometimes by bizarre messages almost as if it's from a ghost in the machine what Paul says right here is very interesting this game is trying very hard to make it seem like like there's an entity in it like a ghost I find this line interesting because because that's just what every other creepypasta game thing does there's a ghost in the game it's just so freakin easy and everybody does it and and I'd like to give this series way more credit than that the production value the way everything connects so well everything in this series feels like I've said before deliberate so I feel as if this line too is deliberate there has to be a reason why he said that and that's why I think this line is a red herring I mean why would he acknowledge that if that was the big thing we were trying to figure out a ghost in the game really he didn't put all this work into the series just so there could be a ghost in the game just like every other frickin creepypasta out there not a chance there is not a ghost in the game but the game definitely knows things one way or another it has characters that speak act a certain way and these characters again feel like they represent real world people so here's my theory I think these people in the game are people that have played the game before since the game records your actions and plays them in the demo well what if those other characters recorded the actions of others who played this game like the game key logged every button push as they played and created a character based on them somehow this would explain why Marvin only speaks during the demo because it's using inputs that somebody put into this game at some point in time I think the game was originally intended for Marvin in Pets cop 3 Paul says the note in the bedroom is intended for somebody certain characters have certain text colors associated with them and in later episodes you'll see that Marvin's text color is green this note has words spoken by the person it's written to in green so when it says you said that's a puzzle the you in this case must be Marvin in Pets cop 9 the note in the bedroom describes a scenario that happened in 1977 I believe this note is also addressed to Marvin Marvin his best friend and her sister all visited a windmill her sister then took a photograph and afterwards Marvin's friend in the windmill both vanished it then says that Marvin married his friend's sister and they had a child who is Marvin's missing friend but reborn now anybody familiar with pets cop Theory's probably knows about the recurring theme of being reborn I'm not gonna get super far into that but essentially what I think is that Marvin's friend disappeared at that windmill and he believes that the child he had with his missing friend's sister is in some way or another his missing friend there's a scene in pet cop 11 where Marvin breaks in and kidnaps care pets cop 9 explains that Kerr escaped the school's basement in pets cop 2 exploring the basement you can find a note that says care has left the room which is identical to the text that occurs when Marvin kidnaps care when looking at the calendar Paul notices that the green area might represent wind care was missing so I think this line of text marks the disappearance and the reappearance of care I mean it makes sense she disappeared when Marvin kidnapped her and she reappeared when she escaped the basement my guess is that Marvin kidnapped care and brought her to the school's basement this is why she went missing and then she was found after escaping that basement I think Marvin was trying to rebirth care back into his missing friend this is assuming that Kara's Marvin's daughter the green objects paired with the yellow and blue objects in this house that Kerr lives in that makes me think that three people live here care the yellow Marvin the green and Jill the blue was Marvin's wife which we find out from a conversation in pet Scot 14 now pets cop 5 has the pink text asking you to turn the playstation off after Paul asks who tiara is the pink text then claims that Marvin uses the tool to hurt her during the demo sequence of pets cop 11 the character aimlessly walks around until the green tulle floats around the screen and then the character will walk in that direction I believe this is Marvin using the tool to show the player where to go in pets cop 15 which is the last thing that was uploaded to the channel by the time I put this video out Marvin introduces the player to tiara well Marvin claims it's Belle but she seems to think she's tiara I believe that Marvin was trying to rebirth Belle in to tiara as practice before doing the same to care but that didn't work out it would also explain the whole thing with the instrument you know if she played it right she would have become tiara but she didn't yeah now tiara or Bell or whatever you want to call her she gives the player access to the game's tile sheet where you can then draw on it with a pink marker and that'll show up on the textures in game I think this confirms that all of the pink text has been tiara writing stuff on the textures to communicate to the player she colored the red tulle pink and replaced the texture of dialogue that normally shows up in the game with what she wanted to say instead which is also why that text takes longer to appear than normal because she has to take the time to write it all in in pet Scout 14 we have this unsettling conversation between yellow text and blue text the yellow text is care and I believe the blue text is cares mother Marvin's wife this conversation seems to be happening after care returns home after going missing though in the conversation care doesn't seem to recognize the blue text as her mother calling her Jill instead of mom as if care was rebirthed back into Marvin's friend who obviously would recognize Jill as her sister instead of her mother which is why she's calling her Jill and not mom now the way Paul talks about this character in the game that goes missing he says his birthday is the exact same and that he doesn't remember somebody going missing I think care is supposed to represent Paul somehow as if Paul was the one who went missing I mean what if he doesn't remember somebody going missing because he's the one who went missing knowing any point I'm thinking there's some sort of parallel world here like the demo was one world in the main game is another maybe two different moments in time or something like that there's even a direct instance where you see Paul getting a glimpse of that world in pesco 11 he enters the bathroom and after triggering the Christmas cutscene he then walks into this white cube which triggers demo footage after the demo we then cut back to Paul playing who again enters the bathroom and once again triggers the Christmas cutscene except this time it's being played backwards and then we hear him say he swore he just saw a white cube what if despite the recording this is what Paul actually saw hell that was an experience huh hey I could have sworn I just saw above the bathtub those white blocks with the symbols on them the inputs and these two scenes are identical but one ends and one continues as if for a brief moment he was twice at once and then one ended what if he somehow switched between two different versions of the game perhaps two different moments in time in the game this could possibly explain why he's unknowingly playing during the demo screen in pets cop 13 you know I probably have to do a good thing I'm sure a lot of people have noticed this in that episode of pets cop he's playing during the demo and he's still narrating and he doesn't acknowledge it as if he doesn't even realize where he got to now what does this all mean oh I'm a Spartan at the figure I just know so much stuff that seems connected I don't know what it means looking at me for all of the answers don't freaking know dude with the series still ongoing it's impossible to come to any real conclusions there's a million different ways to look at this and it seems no matter how much I piece together I always end up hitting a wall some way or another every time I think I'm another step closer I still feel miles away whichever way you look at it there's a lot to digest here and we won't have all the pieces to the puzzle until the series is finally finished and there's no telling how many more episodes have yet to come out but whether you're watching it for the ambitious story or assembly as an interesting experiment having somebody play a creepy ps1 game they made it's an extremely entertaining series whether you're this guy or you're this guy it's still a good watch it's genuinely creepy even on its own there's no jump scares or loud noises just strange thing that don't utter a word it's a very quiet game filled with droning ambience fun fact some of that ambience is room tone of a busy crowd slowed down a bunch so there's a good way to get some ambience if you ever need some pets cop is a brilliant webseries every last detail feels entirely deliberate looking back on stuff like Ben drowned it just feels like the creative process behind that was like oh would it be scary if this happened wouldn't it be cool if we did this almost as if he just kind of made it up as he went along but pet Scot feels so much more delicately constructed as if he knew the full story from day one and then carefully sprinkled the clues across the entire series as he made it pet's cop is an incredibly ambitious project and it certainly has taken its time it's not a series that uploads very often but with each and every episode comes a dump truck load of new info to work with it's a really exciting series to get into and the fan discussion it spawned is just awesome before we end the video I'd really like to give a huge shout out to bubble derp and everybody else involved in the pets cough fan made a remake links to that project and the people behind it are all down below in the description there's even a playable build if you want to check that out it's been really awesome talking with these guys and seeing how passionate this community is about this thing I tell you man I just really love seeing people getting together and interacting because of something like this like it's been a while since I've seen something with such a ridiculously passionate fan community and I mean like it's one thing when something great gets fans together and talking to each other but when there's a mystery to solve there's so much to talk about [Music] you

Channel: Nitro Rad

Views: 481,714

Rating: 4.9507565 out of 5

Keywords: nitro rad, review, petscop, theories, production, how was petscop made, ps1, horror, web series, haunted game, there's no ghost in petscop, keylogging, demo, marvin, newmaker, tiara, rebirthing, even care, petscop fan remake, petscop fan recreation, production value, composite video, composite shader, composite filter, how to

Id: 5CM4EDrrgEs

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/b-damandude]

woah this is the crossover I didn’t know I needed in my life

[u/[deleted]]

This one's really good, I find Nitro Rad can be a bit hit-or-miss but he clearly respects Petscop and the effort that's gone into making it.

[u/annekii]

Saw it on my feed and it was a good watch. Was fun not seeing the same carbon copied stuff we always see, he had his own theories and even majorly focused on the game design and stuff.

[u/[deleted]]

oh hey

[u/vampirecatprince]

I personally like some of his theories, esp the pink tool being Tiara/Belle.

[u/LizardOrgMember5]

I didn't expect him to make a video about Petscop.