- [Narrator] So, today
I've got a story for you, and I think it's a pretty interesting one. Today, I am gonna be telling you the story of the most obscure Nintendo
character of all time. A character so unknown, so obscure, that searching this character's
name on Google, to this day, I expect it to change after this video, but as of today, Googling
this character results in literally zero results. Today, I'm gonna tell
you everything I know about this character, including
the extremely specific set of circumstances that
led me to discover them. So, once upon a time, way back in 2014, that's five years ago now, Nintendo unleashed a game onto the world called, "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball". And this game, which was
I thought really fun, arcadey collection of
baseball-themed mini-games, was notable for one major reason. It was Nintendo's first-ever attempt at a free-to-play title. This was before Animal
Crossing: Pocket Camp, before Fire Emblem Heroes, before any of that stuff existed. This was a 3DS game that
was Nintendo's first-ever dipping of their toes into
the free-to-play genre. And, of course, being Nintendo, they did not just release a normal, typical free-to-play game, they made something very weird. They made something that I think is one of the most interesting and charming 3DS titles of all time, and it's something that
no one else on Earth could've ever made. And while most free-to-play games are full of the typical
crappy in-game ads, or lives-based systems,
and multiple currencies, and cooldown timers you
have to wait through, "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" kinda threw all those tropes out the window, and did something totally different. So, in the place all the
typical free-to-play crap, they have this entirely original mechanic. It's something I've never seen before, or really since. The way it worked was in
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball", there's an in-game shop
and an in-game shopkeeper named, Rusty, and you're actually able to haggle with this in-game shopkeeper to reduce the real-world monetary price of the mini-games he has for sale. Now, initially, each of those
mini-games that he sells are four bucks each, but through a combination of negotiation, and bribing him with donuts
and other various items, you can get each game's price down to drastically less than
what he's initially asking. Now, I actually like the mini-games in "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" a lot. They're solid, highly
polished, arcadey games with lots of separate challenges and just phenomenal sound design, and just a ton of Nintendo charm. They kind of evoke Wii
Sports for me in a way. If you enjoy that type of
arcadey semi-sports stuff, I would really recommend
you check this out if you're a 3DS owner, but the haggling aspect of
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" is clearly where the heart
and soul of this game lies. Rusty, the titular Rusty Slugger whose name is in the title, is a hilariously tragic character. He's a broken man with a failing business, a collapsing marriage,
and 10 kids to feed. All things that Rusty will never hesitate to remind you of during
your negotiations with him. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the main weapon
Rusty wields against you when you're negotiating on
price with him is guilt. It's something to behold,
and it's actually something I discussed in greater depth
when I first covered this game five years ago on Rev3Games. But there's one aspect to this game that I've never really
seen anyone discuss before. In all the glowing press coverage of this game's unique monetization method, no one ever really talked
about one aspect of it. I'll explain what I mean. A while back, my apartment suffered a serious fire and I lost
all of my game consoles and all of my handhelds in the process. I've got a whole video touring that burnt out space over here. And, over time, I've gradually
rebuilt my collection of hardware with one of
my last purchases being a Nintendo 2DS XL, but I
didn't actually get around to re-downloading my game library until around last month sometime. And when looking through
all the different games and going through that, honestly, very fun present-unwrapping process that Nintendo has you do
when installing a 3DS title, I stumbled onto "Rusty's
Real Deal Baseball" which was a game I had some
really fond memories of. And it got me wondering, how will the re-download process work for these unconventionally
purchased mini-games? I mean, in theory, it's a free game with DLC that you've purchased, but I honestly have no idea how Nintendo structured
the back end of it, where each of the different
possible game prices, separate eShop items,
would I have to negotiate the exact same way to re-download? I had no idea how it was gonna work, but I was fascinated
by seeing how Nintendo solved this very weird
problem they had created. So I re-downloaded and re-installed "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball", got through the negotiation process, just kinda hammered through
it as quickly as possible, and discovered this. Basically, when you re-install the game, because there's no cloud saves on 3DS, you are starting from
a brand new save file, which means that all of the tutorial stuff all of the negotiation stuff
that you do with Rusty, all that is still there and you still have to go through it, however, the end result
is basically the same. Every time you get to
the end of a negotiation, no matter what price
you've negotiated him on, you go to the eShop where, instead of charging you real money, the game just lets you download that mini-game again for free. Now, this put me in an
interesting position because now I knew that
no matter what I said or did in the negotiation, I could just re-download
the game for free. So, it put me in this unique position to investigate something I'd always kind of wondered in the back of my mind. I'd always wondered, what happends if you don't negotiate with Rusty? What if you just pay for
the games out of pocket his exact asking price, full
price, four bucks a pop? No talking him down. I was curious, was there
any unique dialogue acknowledging that you did that? And I was suddenly in
the position to find out. So, that's exactly what I did. (upbeat arcade music) And what I discovered was this: it turns out "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" does not actually want
you to pay full price for any of these mini-games. It actually takes great pains to avoid letting you pay full price. And I'll illustrate what I
mean with a few examples. See, maybe you've heard of this phenomenon called, "dark patterns",
which is basically this method by which nefarious
user interface designers go out of their way to try to drive you towards a specific option, usually a pricier option with the intent to separate from more of your money. A really good example
that I found in-person was last year, I went to a Dave & Buster's to play Dance Dance Revolution and I wanted to put 20 bucks
on my Dave & Buster's card. And so I went up to one of the machines and every step of the
way was page after page after page of these distracting pop-ups encouraging me to add quote "more value" by paying an extra five bucks, supercharge my purchase
for three extra bucks. I still don't know what
that means, by the way. I still don't know what
supercharging my purchase is. But it was just this exhausting, kind of, frankly, evil aspect
of modern interface design. The cool thing, and the
interesting thing about "Rusty's Real Deal
Baseball" that I noticed on this play-through, is that it exhibits what might be the world's first example of what I'm choosing to
call "light patters". Basically, a user interface design that begs you to spend
less money at every turn. It's essentially just the
opposite of a dark pattern. And that's the term
that I'm coming up with to describe it. Every single time you enter
a negotiation with Rusty, one of his kids will pop up and remind you every time that you can
haggle his price down. As a matter of fact, if you
attempt to purchase a mini-game at any price that is even slightly higher than
the predetermined one, one of Rusty's kids will chime in and tell you that you
could get a lower price. And, interestingly, even the
progression of the story, and there is, by the way,
a story in this game, the progression of it is
inexorably tied to you haggling successfully with Rusty. So, as you negotiate with
Rusty, he'll casually reference problems in his life
that he needs help solving. For example, his severe
nose hair length issues, or his inability to cook a
decent meal for his kids. And by playing the mini-games themselves, you actually unlock items that will help him with these problems, like a pair of nose hair trimmers, or coupons for a remedial cooking class, which then you can offer to Rusty to help solve his real-life problems in exchange for him giving you a major discount on the game. And because those are tied to the story, the game really encourages you to hand those items over to Rusty, and, for that reason, it's
actually extremely challenging to buy Rusty's games at their full price. Paying full price for one of Rusty's games is something you legitimately have to go way out of your way to do. I came to realize on this play-through that the whole experience of
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" is not meant to have you
haggle with Rusty, really. It's meant to give you the feeling of having haggled for something. Giving you that feeling of
success and accomplishment of having negotiated with this dog and having, kind of,
pulled one over on him, while minimizing the actual real-world financial consequences to the
player as much as possible. Going through this process one more time made me realize that, in all likelihood, the percentage of "Rusty's
Real Deal Baseball" players who actually paid the full
four dollars for each mini-game was likely a very low
percentage of players, which made me even more eager
to find out what happens when you do pay full price. Now here's what I discovered. If you do, God forbid, attempt to pay the full four bucks a mini-game, "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" will throw up countless warnings and interruptions, and will even repeatedly place your cursor on the options to try to force you to back down and renegotiate. Rusty's kids pop up, telling
you to hang on a second. And if you ignore all
that, if you hit continue, and you hit the buy button again, Rusty will ask you once last
time if you're okay with it. If you move down and hit "Buy for $4.00", the final prompt to buy
the game at full price, Rusty basically loses his mind that he's actually selling
a game for full price, and there's a fun little reaction from him where he just can't believe
that you're doing this. From there, the confetti pops off and Rusty guides you to the eShop to purchase the game as normal, but it's what happens after that that's the interesting part to me. Now remember, for every story beat in "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball", there's an unlockable story item that you're supposed to hand to Rusty to improve his life and
progress the plot forward. But by paying full price for these games, that means you have never given Rusty the items you need to progress the story, so they're all just sitting
on the bottom touchscreen in you inventory unused, and
Rusty never receives them since you never bribed Rusty
with them in the first place. So that raises the question, how is the story still going
to be able to progress? (soft piano music) The answer to that question is a name, it is a three-word name
that, as best I can tell, has not ever been typed
anywhere on the internet, has not been spoken into a
microphone for a YouTube video. That name is Pappy Van Poodle. God, it feels good to say that out loud. I don't think anyone outside
of Nintendo headquarters has ever said the name,
Pappy Van Poodle, out loud. So, normally, after you
buy a mini-game from Rusty, you get this little cut scene showing how your gift improved his life. So, with the nose clippers, you see him trim his nose and he can
breathe freely again, and whatever, his life's better, right? But since, in this play-through, you never gave him the gift, Nintendo's solution was
actually to introduce an entire character to fill that role. That character is Pappy Van Poodle who's an old, overweight dog with a cane who Nintendo describes as a quote "neighbor, businessman and mentor to Rusty "for nearly 20 human years." It turns out there are actually six entirely separate cut
scenes featuring Pappy. All of them completely exclusive to the microscopic percentage of players who never negotiated with Rusty and just ponied up full
price for his games. And while they're brief,
these little moments provide a surprising amount of backstory for Pappy and Rusty's relationship. In one of the cut scenes, Pappy describes how he was cooking boiled
parsnips for his daughter, which she hated so much, she gave him a coupon for a remedial cooking class, but he's too proud to use that coupon, so he gives it to Rusty. In another, he tells Rusty
that he's been quote, "like a son a to him over the years" and then hands him a bouquet of flowers as a symbol of their friendship, which Rusty promptly re-gifts to his wife. In a third, Pappy finds
one of Rusty's children asleep in an alley, and
gives him back to Rusty, which is an event that,
as best I can tell, has no parallel in the
normal version of the story. But the craziest part
of this to me is that no one else on Earth seems to know that Pappy Van Poodle exists. There was not a shred of evidence for this character's
existence anywhere online. A Google search, like
I said, zero results. He's never mentioned on
Twitter a single time. There's no trace of him on
any of the Nintendo wikis. It's like a creepy pasta almost. It's like this character only exists in my mind or something, and I can't... If I didn't have the proof
right in front of me, I would not believe he existed. It's hard to overstate how rare it is to find a first-party Nintendo game, especially modern
first-party Nintendo game that was released in
North America and Japan, that has a hidden character that no one has ever seen before, that no one's ever documented, at least. And in a game with only
three distinct characters, unless you count Rusty's 10
kids as different characters, which you shouldn't, they
all have the same dialogue, discovering the presence of a secret and, hitherto, undocumented
fourth character feels like a very special
and kind of insane moment, and one that I think is
worth putting in video form just so there's some evidence of Pappy Van Poodle on
the internet finally. Now, this point in the process, I realized I would not
be doing my due diligence if I didn't uncover every single piece of Pappy Van Poodle lore before sitting down to make this video. But, with literally no info about him anywhere on the internet, I kinda had to turn to
some pretty weird places. So in a moment of just
complete, unhinged obsession, I actually took the 3DS ROM file for "Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" and used some software called, "Kuriimu," to search through the game's files for every single mention
of Pappy Van Poodle. And what I found was
actually pretty interesting. See, it turns out, beyond
those alternate version story cut scenes where Pappy gives Rusty gifts in your stead, there are actually three
additional mentions of Pappy Van Poodle in
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball". All of them contained in the
optional epilogue content, which means that even smaller percentage of players saw this stuff. See, after you've beaten
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball", which is to say, after you've gone through all of the key story events and obtained all of the games
that are tied to those events, visiting Rusty will actually result in this sort of new post-game dialogue mostly consisting of him updating you on his life and his new career as a team manager for
his kids' baseball team, the Rusty Sluggers. Now, I could just scroll through all the relevant Pappy dialogue in the
software I used to dig it up, but that felt a little
anticlimactic to me, so I continued to play through
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" and was able to encounter
these bonus lines of dialogue organically on my 3DS. And mostly this dialogue
serves to re-enforce the friendship that we've
already learned about between Rusty and Pappy, especially Pappy's unconditional support of Rusty and his kids. In one moment, Rusty tells
us how Pappy has basically taken up the mantle as the unofficial team mascot for the Sluggers. He even tells us about an instance where Pappy cheers for the Sluggers so hard that he throws out his back and
injures himself by cheering, which I think is adorable. Now, these post-game
conversations with Rusty serve as a nice end cap
to this weird little game, but they also kinda got me thinking about how weird this dialogue must seem to players who have never
encountered Pappy Van Poodle, which is, again, almost all of them. Think about how this
endgame dialogue would look to players who didn't see any of the cut
scenes I showed you before. To players who negotiated with Rusty, which I'll remind you
is almost all of them, seeing the name Pappy Van Poodle pop up must seem like a total non sequitur. I mean, it's a reference
to character that, if you'll forgive the baseball metaphor, comes totally out of left field. Remember, most players of
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball" have no background on Pappy and Rusty's mentor/mentee relationship. Hell, they've never
even seen Pappy's face. The only way you ever see Pappy's face is by holding back on those negotiations, not giving Rusty the
obvious key item he needs, and then paying for the
game the old-fashioned way. At the end of this experience, I just kind of walked away wondering why exactly this character exists. I wonder, was Pappy Van
Poodle created simply as a convenient story contrivance to help progress the plot for players who just failed to use the story items, or was this obscure bonus
character added to the game as sort of a small reward
for those players who put a little extra money in
and pony up that extra cash. I don't think we'll ever
know the answer for sure. Nintendo is a complete brick wall when it comes to this stuff, but, either way, it seemed important to me to take this opportunity to talk about Pappy Van Poodle, get him his first-ever
Google search results, and just document him for the world. 'Cause I don't wanna live in a world where a modern first-party Nintendo game, especially one as good as
"Rusty's Real Deal Baseball", goes imperfectly documented. That is not the internet I signed up for. That is not the YouTube I wanna live on. So, thank you for indulging me
in this very, very deep dive into this character that
no one has ever heard of. Please spread the word
about Pappy Van Poodle. Tell all your friends
about Pappy Van Poodle. I don't wanna live in a world where Pappy Van Poodle is lost to history. I refuse to accept it. I think we have an opportunity to make a huge difference here, preserve Pappy Van Poodle's
legacy for future generations. It's up to us. Hop on those Nintendo wikis. If there's not an article
about Pappy Van Poodle on the Nintendo wiki by
the end of this week, I will have considered this
whole project a failure. So, yeah. Pappy Van Poodle, baby. (laughs)
Weird video.
Here's a TLDW
In 2015 Nintendo released a free-to-play game for the 3DS called Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. It's a collection of baseball themed minigames, and you can purchase these games from the titular Rusty. Each game costs $4.00 in real world money, but there's an option to haggle the price down by bribing Rusty with items you gained by playing. In fact, Nintendo actively discourages players at every turn from paying the full price. Haggling with Rusty also advances the story, showing short cutscenes after each purchase.
The creator of this video decided to play this game again from the start, and since he had already purchased all the minigames previously, the game still offered all the same haggling and unlocking progression, but didn't actually charge him anything. He decided to see what would happen if he continuously insisted on paying full price.
The items you give Rusty while haggling normally advance the story by showing how these items affect Rusty's life, but since he wasn't giving him these items, another character shows up to give Rusty those items in your stead. This is Pappy Van Poodle, the character that has heretofore been entirely absent from internet documentation.
Nintendo made a game where you can haggle down the prices of microtransactions? That actually nuts.
Edit: Okay, this video is actually fascinating. I have no interest in playing Rusty's Real Deal Baseball but learning about this bizarre-as-hell game was freaking great.
The idea of "Light/Dark Patterns" honestly fascinates me. I definitely know the feeling of recharging a Dave & Buster's card too.
It's kind of surprising that Pappy has never been recognized in any way. Rusty appeared in Super Smash Bros (the Wii U and 3DS versions, at least) as an unlockable trophy, considering Pappy's role in this game, you'd think they'd have given him a trophy or even a mention in Rusty's trophy description. Arguably, he's more important than Rusty's kids, even if he isn't as visible.
The title really doesnt give this video justice, I never heard of that game before but this entire situation is honestly amazing
In Japan Rusty's design is different to better fit the character archetype over there. I wonder if Pappy's design is different as well?
[removed]
Kyle Bosman did a great segment on this game back when it came out. Link
Had no idea about this game, some interesting stuff in this video. Both the character and the system the game used to make players feel like they are getting some kind of deal to drive more sales.