(upbeat music) - Last week, when I uploaded my video documenting my discovery
of Pappy Van Poodle, I expected that a couple
of things would happen. I knew that the Google
results would probably change, going from zero to at least one result. What I could never have predicted was the explosive reaction to that video, the countless pieces of fan art, a change.org petition to get
Pappy into Smash Brothers. There are parody videos.
(man screaming) There's a whole Discord server. There's a subreddit. There's some pornography. Really, everything that
you could ever think of to make about Pappy Van
Poodle is now being made, which is mind-blowing to
watch happen in real time. ♪ Pappy Van Poodle ♪ ♪ You were forgotten by the world ♪ (man speaking French) And, while obviously it's
funny to see this character kind of raised up as this important figure in gaming history, it's also
been just straight up touching to see the internet rally
in support of this guy. This guy, Pappy Van Poodle,
who really did spend years and years and years wallowing
in almost complete obscurity. One of my favorite things that's
happened over the past week is it was pointed out to me that if you go into the 3DS eShop right now and look at their bestsellers list, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball was crept back into the top few listings,
which is crazy to me. It's a game from 2015. Like, that should not be happening. And, just to remind you where we started, this is a game whose community
initially was so small that I think I consumed
virtually every, single piece of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball content that existed on the internet
up until a week ago. And there was surprisingly little of it. On YouTube, you could see
a small handful of reviews here and there. One of which was by a much
younger-looking version of me. There was a Let's Play some
guy did with no commentary and then, you'd occasionally
see these very charming uploads from passionate, die-hard
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball super fans, including this
video from 2015 of some kid, going by the name, Mustachioed Bear, explaining his theory of why
Rusty was definitely gonna be in the next Smash Brothers game. - Well, look at that right there. It's Rusty. Rusty is the face of Free
to Start games, look at him. Free to Start, it shows Rusty. It doesn't show Pokemon, doesn't
show that dumb badge thing, doesn't show Pokemon Picross. It shows Rusty slug. And, that's why he has the biggest chance of being in Smash Brothers. Everyone's laughing at me right now. Tomorrow, we're gonna
find out who's the one that's gonna be laughing. - He made a videos about
that, if I'm not mistaken. It's be genuinely beautiful
to watch this saga unfold, but one of the side effects
of the outpouring of support for Pappy online has been that, when I go back and watch my original video with about a week and half between me and that upload,
I can't help but feel like a major piece of the story is now missing. Everything that happened
afterwards is such a big part to me of the Pappy Van Poodle story. It's a much a part of it as
my initial discovery was, so it feels like some of this stuff should be documented in some way. So, that's part of the
purpose of this video. Starting the day I uploaded that video, there was this immediate groundswell, and it wasn't just a
groundswell of fan creations, it was a groundswell of all the other Rusty's Real Deal Baseball
fans on the internet coming together in one place. And, together with the
help of many of those fans, we were able to dive way
deeper into the history of this underdog character
and also uncover even more Pappy lore than I ever
thought humanly possible. So, the last time we spoke,
I claimed that my video was, as far as I could tell, the
very first time Pappy Van Poodle had ever been documented on the internet. And, that was true, at least
as far as the English-speaking surface level internet was concerned. But, there is a part of this story that I fully missed the first time. See, after publishing my initial video, all these other Rusty fans began
pouring out of the woodwork and one of them was a Twitter
user who went by the name MB. And, MB came to me saying that years ago, he swore that he saw
an instance of somebody revealing Pappy's existence to the world on Nintendo's Miiverse service. If you don't know what
Miiverse is, it was essentially a sort of closed internet
that you could access through the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U. And, this seemed pretty plausible
to me because Miiverse had what must have been the highest density of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball fans ever gathered in one place until now. And, it also had this
built in feature on the 3DS that allowed you to upload screenshots of whatever you were playing. So, to me Miiverse seemed like
exactly the place where Pappy would've initially been documented, but as I'm sure as many of you know, the tragic part of this is that Nintendo decided to shut
down Miiverse back in 2017 and in so doing, they took thousands and
thousands of posts with them. But I really felt like we needed
to answer this possibility. I wanted proof. Like somebody sort of half-remembering, seeing something on Miiverse
wasn't enough for me. I wanted concrete, definitive evidence that somebody somewhere
tried to tell the world about Pappy years before I did. And, that was when I remembered
some very incredible people running a service called
Archiverse went out of their way to archive Miiverse in the weeks before Nintendo shut it down. And, while I don't know how
thorough their archiving was or how far back it went, or what percentage of
content they'd backed up, I figured it was worth
a shot to look there. So, that's exactly what I did. I found the Rusty's Real Deal
Baseball Miiverse community in their archives and preceded
to scroll through literally hundreds of posts from the
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball Miiverse and I found nothing. Frustrated, I replied to MB saying hey there's this thing called Archiverse. I looked through it, and tried to find this post
you were talking about, but maybe I missed something. But, you should feel free
to take a look for yourself and a little while later, he got back to me with some bad news. He told me that, like me, he had searched through the Miiverse, but hadn't been able to find anything. He also had a theory
which was on Miiverse, see, there was this function that let you mark posts as spoilers. And, it appeared that
Archiverse hadn't archived any of the posts with spoiler tags. This was a bummer obviously 'cause I wanted that conclusive evidence, but at that point, I felt we'd done all the
digging that could be done and I would just have
to take MB on his word that he'd seen Pappy once before in the ancient ruins of the bizarre Nintendo micro internet
that had been reduced to ash by Nintendo in 2017. But, a few hours later, after
I had completely given up all hope on this whole Miiverse angle, another tweet from MB rolled in. Quote, I found it! Attached to that tweet was
that image and there it was. February 2017, just nine months before Nintendo shuttered Miiverse, there was a post from a user named David AKA charizard300, and it
laid out in perfect deal how exactly to awaken Pappy. He even included a screenshot of Pappy in this Miiverse post. This was straight up, irrefutable
evidence that somebody was trying to get the word out about Pappy years before I did. While my video might've popularized Pappy and gotten him his first Google results, charizard300's post
absolutely deserves credit for being the first one
to bring Pappy to light, even if it was just within this sort of walled garden of Miiverse. Except, what if he didn't? I mean, realistically February
2017 feels awfully late for Pappy to have first been captured. I mean remember, by that time,
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball had already been out for over three years in some territories. Surely, there was some
evidence that somebody had encountered Pappy
earlier than this, right? For awhile, I thought this was it. And, right when I had started to accept that this Miiverse post three years after the game came out was the first instance of Pappy, I saw a comment on my video
that changed everything. A user going by the name Ricardo Webb left the following comment. Quote, I remember when
CWCs Nintendo purchases got discovered, and it turns out they paid the full amount for each minigame. People laughed at the fact
that Chris didn't seem to get the haggling aspect, but
perhaps Chris was just a fan of the unsung hero, Pappy? This comment stopped me dead in my tracks. For those of you who don't know, CWC is an acronym for
Christine Weston Chandler, often referred to colloquially as Chris Chan on the internet. You might know her from
her creation Sonichu or from her very vocal
protest when Sega changed Sonic the Hedgehogs arm
colors from tan to blue when they released Sonic Boom. Christine is a truly legendary
figure on the internet and has been for over a
decade now, so the possibility that she discovered Pappy before I did completely shook me to my core. And, after reading this comment I immediately began looking
into this possibility, which led me to a list of eShop purchases that Christine had made,
allegedly leaked back in 2015 by a Nintendo employee. And, after scrolling for
a while, there it was, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball presented with the additional information
that Christine had quote, bought every single minigame. I gulped. It was beginning to seem possible. If Chris Chan had purchased
every minigame at full price, as this comment suggested,
that would mean that she had definitely encountered
Pappy not just once, but six separate times. And, knowing that this
must have happened in 2015, at the latest, that would mean that CWC was the first individual on record to ever encounter Pappy Van Poodle. (upbeat music) Frantically, I kept
looking for information, but it soon became clear
that I had hit a dead end. I searched everywhere I
could online, but this list and the caveat that she had
purchased every minigame, was just straight-up all
the information that existed about Chris Chan's relationship to Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. So, very quickly I realized
that there was one way I was going to be able
to clear this mystery up and that was to reach out to Christine and simply ask her directly. And, with the help of a YouTuber
friend of mine named Copitz who lives in Christine's general area, I was able to set up a meeting and he went to Christine's house, put her on FaceTime with me,
and I asked her point-blank. - [Christine] ** Ow, ow, ow. - [Copitz] Uh-oh, **. - [Nick] Hello. - [Christine] Hello.
- [Copitz] Hi. - Hey, Nice to meet you. I'm Nick. - Hi Nick. - [Nick] So, I'm making a
video about a 3DS game called Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. - Yeah, the Real Deal. - [Nick] Are you familiar with that? - Yeah, I've played it. - [Nick] Oh, awesome. - It was Free To Play, but
you had to pay to play also. - [Nick] Yeah. - I remember playing the
bunch of minigames within it and making a deal with Rusty! - [Nick] So, there was a... I made a YouTube video recently
about this hidden character in the game. - Hmm. - [Nick] It turns out that, you remember like there was a haggling thing where you could
negotiate with Rusty? - Oh, yeah. - [Nick] Did you ... (laughing) - You're gonna make me lose
my whole profit margins. You make me go below even breaking even. - [Nick] So, somebody told me
that you had played the game and that when you had
negotiated with Rusty did you haggle with him? You haggled the money down? - Yeah, way down. - [Nick] Oh, got it. I'm trying to track down who originally discovered this character
for the first time, and somebody in a
YouTube comment said that you had encountered this character, or that you did negotiate. But, I guess that's not true. - Yeah, not quite, sorry. - [Nick] It's okay. What are your main memories
of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball? - The back and forth
between me and the wabbit. 'Cause Rusty was a wabbit. - [Nick] Right.
- I just like saying that. (laughing)
- [Nick] Wabbit. - Oh my gosh, I wove the wabbit**. - [Nick] Actually, you
know, you might be thinking of Nintendo Badge Arcade
'cause that was a rabbit. I think Rusty was actually a dog. - Oh, okay well, my mistake. - [Nick] It's okay, but just to be clear, you did haggle with Rusty and you did negotiate with
him to get those prices down? - Oh, yes, yes, yes. - [Nick] Got it. Thank you so much, Christine. It's a pleasure to meet you. - Yeah, nice talkin' with you, Nick. (upbeat music) - [Nick] Now, after I
spoke with Christine, she even went onto
Twitter to further confirm this information. So, that settled it. The comment that either
misremembered or were mistaken, it was mis-info, and CWC had never before met Pappy Van Poodle. Which meant that the mystery was unsolved and I had to continue on my search to find who first discovered Pappy. It was around that time
that it dawned on me that maybe I was too
focused on American fans of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. I mean, the game came
out in only two regions, North America and Japan,
but Japan actually had an eight month head
start to play this game before America did. And so, it would stand to reason
that in that window of time somebody somewhere had encountered Pappy and maybe even documented it. And, that actually brings me to one of the most common questions
you guys had about Pappy, and it's a really good one. What about in the Japanese
version of the game? And, it was something
that I too had wondered when working on the original video, but I had just simply lacked
the resources to answer it. Did Pappy even exist at all
in the Japanese version, and if so, what did they call him? And, even more crucially,
what did he look like? And, if that last question seems weird, there's a reason I'm asking it. Here's why it's worth asking. It turns out, in Japan,
there were a lot of things that were very different about
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. For one, the name of the game. Over there it was not
called Rusty's anything, it was called Darumeshi Sports Shop, with Darumeshi being the
Japanese name for Rusty. And, while changing a characters
name during localization is extremely common, what's not as common is completely redesigning the
entire physical appearance of your protagonist, and
that's exactly what they did. See, Rusty has a totally
different character design in Japan, and one of the only pieces of physical Rusty's
merch that seems to exist is in this sticker book that I bought. I was in a Japanese bookstore
and bought a sticker book based on Nintendo Badge Arcade, one of my other 3DS favorites,
and in that sticker book I discovered the Japanese design of Rusty. And, yeah, just completely
and utterly different. And, while Nintendo has
never outright stated why they completely
redesigned this character the general consensus online seems to be that Darumeshi's original
appearance could be misinterpreted as a little bit insensitive in the West. And, that begged the question to be, what about Pappy's face? Like, his name is almost
certainly different in the Japanese version, but
what about his appearance? Now, miraculously, not long
after publishing my video I heard from a game hacker
and translator by the name of Samuel Messner who reached
out to me over Twitter to let me know that after
watching my video he had elected to hunt down and dig
through a Japanese ROM for Rusty's Real Deal
Baseball, and had found the exact information I was looking for. (dramatic music) It turns out that, yes, Pappy
Van Poodle has a separate name in Japan, and that name is Inuzo Toipu. Which, according to Samuel, is
a multilayered Japanese pun. Inuzo is a classically old man
sounding name, says Samuel, but it starts crucially with inu which is the Japanese word for
dog, and then his last name, Toipu, is actually a shortened version of the toy poodle breed which
is what is Pappy Van Poodle is and is an even more
delightful pun than the first. Interestingly, while
Pappy's face is the same in the Japanese version of the game as it is in the American
version, his outfit is completely different
and there's actually a narrative reason for that. See, it turns out that Pappy's
relationship with Rusty in the Japanese game
is completely different than that relationship
in the American release. Now, as you know, in the
North American version of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball,
Pappy is characterized as sort of a neighbor-slash-businessman-slash-mentor to Rusty. But, according to Samuel, the
Japanese version describes him as the boss of a nearby
shotengai, which is a sort of Japanese shopping street. And in the Japanese version
of the game, upon first being introduced to Pappy - or,
I guess I should say, Inuzo - the game describes him
as: "Inuzo Toipu, head of the local shopping street and purveyor of gardening supplies." As if that wasn't enough,
Samuel actually helped me get my hands on the Japanese version of Rusty's Real Deal
Baseball, which was a delight because there were so many more changes than I ever could have imagined. For one, while Rusty eats
donuts, his Japanese counterpart Darumeshi eats hard-boiled eggs. He even has a custom
egg un-peeling animation that is totally exclusive
to the Japanese game. There is no way to see this animation in the American version. So, if you're dying to
see a cartoon dog un-peel a hard-boiled egg, Americans
are just out of luck, unless you watch this video, I guess. And, the more I played
of the Japanese version, the more changes I noticed. For instance, I noticed
that Darumeshi's kids are drastically more
snot-nosed that Rusty's are. I noticed that this lucky
cat on Rusty's back shelf was swapped out by Nintendo
of America with this shockingly-detailed bat and
baseball... I guess, statue..? - that if you zoom in - you'd never know that it's on a 400 pixel
by 240 pixel 3DS screen - but if you zoom in on it, it is drastically higher-resolution than anything else in Rusty's shop, which cracked me up. And, here's where I stop and
tell you that I have a lot of obscure facts to share
about both the Japanese and American versions of
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. But, with the interest in
getting on with the point of this video, I'll spare you
all that and just tell you that I've set up a
dedicated Twitter account called Rusty's Real Deal Baste. Think of it as like Supper Mario Broth, but instead of being about Mario, it is exclusively about the 3DS shop game, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball,
and I have loaded this account with all sorts of obscure
trivia and other findings that I've uncovered from one
of my favorite 3DS games ever. No pressure, but it's there
if you want to follow it. There's a link in the description. Anyways, back to Japan. We now have in our
possession the Japanese name for Pappy Van Poodle - as a reminder, Inuzo Toipu - Which means that now we're
able to Google "Inuzo Toipu" in quotation marks to
see if that exact phrase was ever mentioned online
in Japan or anywhere. And, amazingly, while the English
name "Pappy" was mentioned zero times on the entire
public-facing internet, there actually were a
small handful of mentions of the Japanese Pappy out there. Now, the oldest mention
surfaced by Google came from a blogger by the name
of Chiko who had written a small guide in the
Japanese website, Wazap! Or Wuz-zap. W'zap. ...and, in this post which is
dated February 6th, 2014, reminder, that is well ahead
of any other Pappy discovery we found to date, Chiko mentioned Pappy. Chiko mentioned Inuzo Toipu. And, if that wasn't
enough, Chiko even included a blurry cellphone photograph
of Inuzo Toipu in action. After seeing this page, I was
pretty much ready right there to award Chiko the crown
for the first person to truly document some
version of Pappy Van Poodle. I mean, I'd seen everything on Google. I had seen everything on American Google, on Japanese Google - this had to be it. And, 2014 is, again, drastically earlier than any of our other
prior discoveries, right? So, Chiko was the winner. But, just when it seemed
like the story was over that's when we discovered Pozukago. (electronic music) Pozukago is the alias
of a Japanese blogger who's been running his own
sort of small, personal gaming blog since 2013 with a
large focus on Pokemon. And, that name he goes by, Pozukago, is actually a portmanteau
of the word Pokemon and the Japanese word for waste basket. Essentially, in my interpretation,
he's calling himself "Pokemon trash" which
immediately endeared me to him. Now you might be wondering,
how did we find this blog if it didn't show up on Google? Well, it turns out that
Samuel, the same guy who hooked us up with the Japanese version and all that other stuff, he
found this entry by simply Googling Pappy Van Poodle's Japanese name without quotation marks. And, when you do that,
when you Google Inuzo Toipu without quotation marks, a post emerges. This post is called "Regarding
Darumeshi's Sport Shop" and in this post, Pozukago tells a story. He describes how after finishing
Darumeshi's Sports Shop, he decided he wanted to
delete the game from his 3DS to free up space, but he
wanted to manually extract his high scores from his save data and back them up on his computer. However, when he did that, tragedy struck. Pozukago's entire save game disappeared, requiring him to replay
the game in its entirety. Does this sound familiar yet? Now, from there, the rest of the post has a section called "What I learned," where Pozukago describes
everything that happened differently on his second play through of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball,
including the fact that, quote, if you don't haggle,
the story changes a little bit. One of the bullets on this
bullet list says that you can progress without using
story items and then, in a subsection of the bullet list, he mentions this: there's
a character called Inuzo Toipu who appears. Or, as you and I know
him, Pappy Van Poodle. And, the best part of this revelation is the fact that this post
is from August 14th, 2013. 2013. August 14th 2013 is just six days after Darumeshi Sports Shop came out in Japan. This post is from six days after Rusty's Real Deal Baseball
was ever seen on earth. Not even a full week! Six days! This was it, this was
the first ever documented occurrence of Pappy Van
Poodle on the internet. And to me there is just
the beautiful, delicious poetry to this ending. I love the idea that in
2013 a Japanese gamer happened to lose his
Rusty's Real Deal Baseball save through some tragic
accidental circumstances and that six years later
the exact same thing would happen to me with
my apartment burning down. If Pozukago hadn't accidentally deleted his save file, he never would have been the first person to mention
Inuzo Toipu on the internet. And if my apartment had never burned down, I never would have been
able to make the video that you guys watched. So there just, I don't
know, there's a lovely symmetry to that. But really, at the end of the day, I think the thing that I'm gonna treasure the most about this experience is the connections I've made
with other old-school Rusty's Real Deal Baseball super fans who were languishing in obscurity with me back when nobody knew what this game was. People like solitonmedic who was the guy who ripped the Rusty's Real Deal Baseball soundtrack to YouTube where it got, like, 30 plays, 10 of which were me. People like Samuel Messner who uncovered Pappy's Japanese name, helped me find examples of it on the internet and who helped me just a ton with the video you're watching right now including translating a
lot of the Japanese text. And then, people like
MB, the guy who I told you about at the start of the story who first remembered
seeing a post on Miiverse which kicked this entire journey off. And there's one final
cherry on top of all this. When I reached out to MB who's, again, the guy who told me about the Miiverse post he remembered seeing - which is what kicked this entire video off !- I asked him how I should
refer to him for this video. And he told me that his YouTube name was Mustachioed Bear, that MB was
short for Mustachioed Bear. And if that name sounds familiar... "Look at this. Do you think
they would put in there if they completely forgot about him? He's the face of Free To Play games. If we want a Free-To-Play representative in Smash Bros, 100%
it's gonna be Rusty. So, Rusty is gonna be in Smash, thank you all for watching, goodbye." And with that I am done Pappy-posting for the foreseeable future. That is the last piece of Pappy Van Poodle related content you
will see on this channel for the foreseeable future. I can't imagine I would
ever have to make another Pappy video after that encyclopedia I just dropped on you. Three things to say
real quick before we go. Thing number one: I
have teamed up with one of my favorite artists Halefall to make a Pappy-inspired shirt. It's the first piece of merch I've ever put out on this channel. It's called Pappy
Accident, which I think is a good name. And it's sort of a poodle head floating in the ambient void of space. This whole Pappy thing
just seemed like the right sort of, one-off event
to do a limited time piece of merch around if that makes sense? So it's a limited thing. There should be a link
underneath this video or in the upper-right corner
of this video eventually but right now, for
complicated YouTube reasons, it is processing, it
takes a couple days to get it in there. So this all came together at the 11th hour but it exists and it's
real and you can buy it right now - and, as a
reward for sitting through this goliath video, I set up a coupon code to give you 300 cents off of it, called CHARIZARD. It's kind of a reference to charizard300 I was thinking..? I don't
know if that plays. But don't tell anyone else about it, it's only for people who
watched this entire video. Cause I don't know how
many of you there are but you deserve some sort of reward. Thing number two, if you did sit through both of my Pappy videos, that means you watched,
Jesus, I don't know, 45 minutes of Pappy content probably? That's ridiculous. If you did all that and
haven't subscribed yet, 'what's wrong with you.' Please subscribe to this channel. I'm nearing a important landmark... [LOUD VEHICLE RUMBLING SOUND] Are you joking? I'm actually mad. At the time of this
recording, I'm pretty close, like, within arms reach of hitting 300,000 subscribers which would
be a really big deal for me personally, so please subscribe to this channel if you haven't. There's a link right here. And thing number three: thank you, thank you, thank you for watching these stupid Pappy videos. They've been a lot of fun to make. Have a good weekend, I stayed up all night editing this so I'm gonna go sleep. Have a good one. God I'm tired.
MB on Twitter actually being Mustacioed Bear is such an amazing plot twist