- [RoboKast] Imagine a game that completely revolutionizes and defines an entire
genre that is decades old, a game that sets the standard for what first person shooters can do, a game that wins multiple awards and goes on to form what will later become one of the most popular
battle royale games ever made. Imagine "Titanfall". This game was the real deal. And while I felt like I needed to take a goddamn Adderall to not look like a loser while playing it, it was intense, groundbreaking, and most importantly fun, but this fun wouldn't last forever. In fact, this multimillion
dollar game franchise was completely obliterated
by one singular hacker. One guy who caused enough problems to kill an entire franchise. A guy who would drive
this game into the ground whether it be through hatred, spite, or just messing around. Whatever the intentions were, this hacker brought
"Titanfall" to its knees with a lot of effort and the game is no longer playable or even available to be
purchased because of it. It was a true tragedy. And while this story is
insane and super interesting, what if I told you that
there's even more to it? An angle that makes it seem
like Respawn themselves are responsible for
killing their own project? That two of the lead devs who made the original "Call of Duty" purposely destroyed their passion project to move on to bigger and better things. Things that would bring in
loot boxes, battle passes, and a constant stream of revenue. Today, we're gonna dive
into the dark secrets that would go on to
cause the tragic downfall of "Titanfall". We're gonna talk about
the story of this hacker and how he took down a franchise, how the company may just
be as much to blame, and how there's a wormhole of a story that you will find very interesting. This is the tragedy of "Titanfall". To tell the story of the tragic tale, we need to start at the very beginning. Jason West and Vince Zampella were top devs over at Infinity Ward, the company behind the
original Call of Duty, as well as the Modern Warfare series. Obviously it was a wildly
successful company, but West and Zampella
were fired by Activision, their parent company, in 2010 for insubordination. Nobody really knows
what happened for sure, but it's assumed that
Activision fired the duo to retain creative control over the Modern Warfare franchise without West and Zampella's input, which as the whole world knows was a terrible decision
that caused Infinity Ward to go from these amazing games to CoD: Ghost and Infinite Warfare. The firing was unfortunate, but these two guys were very well esteemed in the gaming industry and
they weren't gonna quit when they faced some challenges. So directly after their departure from Activision and Infinity Ward, they created their own
company called Respawn and partnered with EA as a publisher. And they decided that
they were gonna shake up the entire gaming industry with something that the world had never seen before. "Titanfall" was announced
to the public at E3 2013 and everyone was absolutely
blown away by what they saw. And let me tell you, this game was and still is one of the most badass
multiplayer games ever made. The demo reaffirmed the
hopes that everyone had when they saw the reveal. And oh my God, was "Titanfall" about to be the best first person shooter ever made. "Titanfall" would launch in March of 2014 as an Xbox One exclusive with a PC version soon to follow. As soon as the game hit the market, the reviews and awards started pouring in praising the developers
for their unique approach in an otherwise stagnant
first person shooter market. "Titanfall" had some of the
best and smoothest combat and movement ever seen
in a game like this. And the titans alone made
the game worth buying. There was no single player campaign or any fancy bells and whistles and the game delivered
on what it promised. By November of 2014, the game had seen over 7 million players and was considered to be a success, at least on the surface. You see 7 million players
sounds really good, but due to free promotions
on platforms like Origin there weren't exactly
7 million copies sold. The game struggled to retain players and also had to compete against loads of other first person shooters and extremely popular games that launched around the same time. In 2014 alone, we saw "Destiny", "GTA 5", and "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare", which obviously was a direct
competitor to "Titanfall". "Titanfall 1" was a
start to something great, but the launch time was abysmal and the game needed some more depth. Players were getting bored fairly quickly and even with the three DLC and map packs that were released in
the following months, players needed more. Thus work began on "Titanfall
2" almost immediately. After "Titanfall 2" was released in 2016, the original title fell into the abyss. The player count declined drastically due to the improvements found in 2 and the original game never
really got its chance to shine. As the second game gained popularity, there was a small group of
extremely dedicated players who continued to play the first
title on a consistent basis. Thus, these people obviously
got really good at the game and pretty much anyone who
wasn't a part of this small group would struggle due to the huge skill gap. That's how I felt when I
hopped in "Titanfall 2" for the first time. And I will say, this is a big issue with a lot of niche
older gaming communities, but it would cause many more problems than the traditional irritation that came with than in other games. A player in the PC "Titanfall"
community named Jeanue was entirely convinced that they were only losing
matches due to hackers. He didn't believe that this
skill gap was the problem and he assumed that there
were loads of other people hacking on the PC version of the game. So Jeanue decided that they
were gonna start hacking as well in order to balance the field. This situation would be the spark that ignited the destruction of the entire "Titanfall" franchise. It would also go on to create a scapegoat for the problems of the entire franchise, allowing power hungry people to try to take control of the game, but we will get to that a
bit later so stay tuned. Jeanue started out by
downloading some simple hacks like speed hacking and aim bot and the traditional
exploits that you would find on any "Modern Warfare 2"
server back in the day. This was a bit of a nuisance, but it wasn't anything
that would directly impact the remainder of "Titanfall 1" as a whole. It was annoying, but that was about it. However, this close-knit community was tired of this person
ruining their experience and since Respawn didn't
care about the game, they retaliated and
teamed up against Jeanue. They thought they were
neutralizing the target, but they were only feeding the fire. Jeanue simple speed
hacks and aim bot hacks weren't doing much anymore. It seemed like this
person wanted attention, but the remaining community
members didn't really care. It was time to do something more notable, something that would
directly impact "Titanfall 1" for the remainder of its life. It was time to ruin the game. So Jeanue did exactly that. He found a way to
reverse engineer the game and he developed something
called the atomic bomb, which abused and exploit
with "Titanfall" servers, checking player names, and allowed him to join servers with a bot that had an insanely long name. This name was long and randomized and it crashed the entire
server that he'd joined kicking everyone out and often
even crashing their games. This bot began to wreak
havoc across the remainder of the "Titanfall" PC community and people were constantly
being kicked from games due to this nuisance of a bot. But the crazy part about all of this was that the atomic bomb was something that had to be manually operated, which means that Jeanue had to manually be looking at the game to see if people were
searching for a match and then connect while people were looking to physically cause them to
disconnect from the game. This guy had to sit around, pay attention, and go through the physical effort to join when other people were trying to play. He was extremely committed to ruining this game for everyone and he was gonna do it
no matter what it took. The situation with the atomic
bomb turned into an epidemic that threatened the longevity of the game and caused the few remaining
players to look for a solution. Enter TF Remnant. Remnant was a community of people who wanted to bypass Jeanue's
hacks and enjoy the game that they had grown to
love over the years. They just wanted to play "Titanfall". So a person named red shield
rallied the troops and he found that if a lobby full of
players joined a match at the exact same time, there would be no slots for Jeanue to join and crash their game. Look at that, problem solved. They found a way to do scheduled events with their small Discord community and play without interruption from Jeanue. It was a small step towards the goal of bringing "Titanfall" back to life, then comes p0. If Jeanue was the main antagonist, p0 was the protagonist in this story. The one fighting the
battle to bring Jeanue down and to bring back
"Titanfall" to the masses. This guy was one of
the most active members in the early days of Remnant and he was extremely, technically skilled and wanted to find a
way to fix the problem once and for all. So this community organized
their events to play the game and p0 was working on a
program called Spyglass network which would fill the slots
in the servers with bots who could then be
replaced with real people when the operator of
the network allows it. So from what I understand
by reading through thousands of Discord messages from 2019 is that p0 would operate the bot, basically whitelist people, and when they were whitelisted they would take one of the bots places. This prevented Jeanue
from being able to join and crashing the lobby
that the Discord members were playing their events in. This genius bit of white
hat hacking saved the game for the 40 or so people
who still played it and were in the Remnant Fleet Discord. There was once again hope, at least until Respawn
could come up with a fix. But this fix wasn't coming. In fact, it was rumored that they only had a two man
team working on "Titanfall 1" and it appears as if
the company didn't want to allocate the resources needed to fix the security issues that caused these problems
in the first place. So the community was abandoned and they had to figure out
what to do on their own. According to very recent Discord messages between me and p0, and
the Remnant Fleet Discord, it seems like Spyglass was
only a temporary solution and when Respawn didn't take
actions to fix the problems, it eventually became irrelevant. This allowed the small remaining community to still enjoy the game without Jeanue being able to do anything about it. And for him, that was not okay. So he developed something more complex, a series of bots that would
basically fill up every slot in every open server in "Titanfall", making it to where nobody
at all could play the game. These bots were much more
complex than the atomic bomb and they basically blacklisted
everyone in the community from even getting into a
lobby in the first place. The game was 100% unplayable for 100% of the players who owned the game and Respawn did pretty
much nothing about it. In fact, throughout most of this time, the game was still for sale
on Steam for full price, with hundreds or even thousands of people buying it every year. And this went on for
almost three entire years with no solution. The game had fully died
and a singular hacker was the one responsible for killing it. But Respawn didn't care and they had a valid reason not to. "Titanfall 2" had launched in 2016 and anyone who was still interested in playing the "Titanfall" series was on that game instead. It was a newer, somewhat better game, and it was actually playable. "Titanfall 1" on the other hand, even before the hacker killed it, was already on its last leg. So why would Respawn
focus on this dying game instead of their cash cow, "Apex Legends", or their sequel of "Titanfall 2"? Just let it die out and they no longer have to worry about it and that's exactly what they did. At this point the remaining
players gave up hope and went over to "Titanfall 2" instead, but this didn't last for long either. Jeanue moved on to
bigger and better things to a community that had
people remaining to mess with. It was time for him to
ruin "Titanfall 2" as well. So he worked on what he
called the blacklist. Basically this was a way
to ban pretty much anyone and everyone from the game
entirely at Jeanue's discretion. He could add someone to
this list and from there, they would no longer be able
to connect to any lobbies and anyone who's in a lobby with them will also be kicked off. This new list was impressive, and it was set to wreak havoc across the "Titanfall 2" community. And to gain that aforementioned publicity, Jeanue started by publicly
targeting streamers. These streamers would be kicked offline while streaming the game and often met with
racist, messed up comments in their Twitch chat by
none other than Jeanue. His name spread once again like wildfire throughout the community and his notoriety increased even further. Somehow Jeanue managed to make this blacklist work on people, no matter what their name, account, IP address, location, or even what platform they were on. In simple terms, he got access to the core of the games' infrastructure and implanted himself
on it like a parasite that was bound to suck out
the life of this community. "Titanfall 2" was in Jeanue's hands and it was like this due to
the fundamentally flawed design from Respawn themselves. The same Respawn that didn't
allocate any resources to fix the issues in the first place. But with this newfound
publicity in the community regarding Jeanue targeting big streamers who were the lifeblood of "Titanfall 2", things were different now. You see there wasn't a lot of information about the previous "Titanfall
1" hacks on the internet except for within the
small remaining community. Most people didn't know and most people didn't care and Respawn wasn't getting
a whole lot of pushback. But now that these streamers
were publicly getting targeted in front of their large audiences, the word was getting out. Respawn was being mentioned a lot more and their PR team probably
started to sweat a little bit. So on May 20th, 2021, years after the problems with
the original game started and months after they began in "TF 2", they tweeted that they
were gonna be looking into a fix for it. This fix never really happened and the fate of "Titanfall 2", while not as bad as the first game, was not looking good. All of this was still just the beginning. You may be wondering, how this story could get any
more complicated than this, but you have no idea. You don't know what would happen when "Apex", the golden egg of Respawn, gets targeted on July 4th, 2021, a few months after the "Titanfall" tweet that yielded no results. "Apex Legends" servers got taken down for an extended period of time on this day with the message directing players to savetitanfall.com being
posted on the main menu screen. All players who tried to play
the game during this period were given this message and
savetitanfall.com was born. savetitanfall.com was
an informative website aimed at shining light
onto the terrible problems that had been facing the
"Titanfall" community for years, the same problems that
I've been talking about in this video. On this website was a link, a link that took you full circle to the TF Remnant Fleet Discord. The one that was created by
fans of "Titanfall 1 and 2" to help keep the games alive, The ones that serve as
the complete opposite of what Jeanue was trying to do. So people obviously assumed that the staff and the
leaders of this server like p0, the one I mentioned earlier, were directly responsible for hacking "Apex Legends" as well. And that is a fair assumption, considering that the site links back to their very own Discord server and that they were passionate about saving their favorite franchise. It makes sense and if they wanted to get
attention from Respawn, this was the way to do it. They wanted to promote their cause, bring light to the issues, and hopefully get this
multi-year battle over with, but there's actually another layer to this that makes it even more complex. After this hack happened, the problems with "Titanfall
2" received major news coverage by journalists all over the world. The hack accomplished its mission and sent a lot of people
to their Discord server, but p0 and red shield, the two main guys in
charge of this server, made sure that everyone knew
the hack wasn't their decision. They made claims about how the hacker was trying to target them and that they didn't plan this hack and didn't point it back
at savetitanfall.com in the Discord. They were adamant about this, and most people believed them. But some higher ups in the
Discord made a document that exposed everything,
made some crazy accusations, and turned the entire
situation on its head to make Remnant Fleet the bad guys. This document titled "Project RedTape", showed off dozens of Discord screenshots that ultimately claimed red shield, p0, and the rest of the admins
did in fact plan this hack to bring like to their cause and that they also pretended
to be Jeanue to kill the game and promote a project of their own, and lots of other things. This was big news in the community and it changed everything. The "Titanfall" drama had reopened and nobody knew what was
true and what wasn't. Was p0 actually Jeanue? Did he pose as a sort of Palpatine figure creating a bad guy and
fighting that same bad guy with a different persona in
order to gain power and clout or was there another layer
to this onion of a story? Directly after the
release of this document, the long standing "Titanfall" community had a major civil war with
claims being thrown around and people standing on every
side of this situation. It appeared as if the
RedTape stuff was true and nobody trusted anyone. But p0 and red shield released a counter argument of a document that straightened everything out and told the quote unquote
true story of the "Apex" hack and savetitanfall. Basically some of RedTape was
true and some of it wasn't. The people at the TF
Remnant Fleet including p0, lied about some things and definitely made some
questionable decisions, but apparently, they did not intentionally
hack "Apex" themselves to bring light to their cause. Basically they knew the
people who were hacking "Apex" and these people were in
direct contact with them. So the claims that the hackers
trying to sabotage them and make Remnant Fleet look
bad were completely false. Yes. Technically Remnant
Fleet did not plan the hacks, but they knew who did and they knew what was going on with them. So claiming that someone
was trying to sabotage them or acting ignorant was not okay. So ultimately, Jeanue,
whoever that may be, did kill "Titanfall 1 and 2". p0, whoever that may be, did everything he could
to circumvent these hacks and to get Respawn to fix the problems. "Apex" was hacked by people who p0 knew were doing it and even though he didn't stop them, he did stay silent on the situation. From the information I gathered, this does seem to be the
most feasible option. While nobody really knows if this whole thing is an
elaborate scheme or not, it is likely that Jeanue
still lives on in the shadows of the two games that he
almost single handedly killed. "Titanfall 1" was removed from the Steam stores on March 1st, 2022, after years of being up
while being unplayable. Respawn should absolutely
not have done this. And honestly, they are equally to blame for the destruction of
this game as Jeanue is. As for "Titanfall 2", the hacks eventually stopped and the game is playable again, but the player count is quite small. The damage had already been done. Now to this day, only a
select few people claim to know who Jeanue is, but I don't think there's
any way to know for sure what the true story is. Until we somehow find
out more information, you're probably gonna have to
jump to conclusions yourself based on all the information I showed you. We all know though that
"Titanfall 1 and 2" ended up being a complete tragedy. What do you think of this situation? Do you think there's more
between Jeanue and p0 that meets the eye? Is the whole thing a chapter that needs to be closed
with people moving on or is it all Respawn's fault? I wanna hear your
thoughts in the comments. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to like and subscribe and feel free to follow me on Twitter to see some pointless tweets about games and some other information
about my channel. I hope you guys enjoyed. I will see you next time and peace.
