Game Theory - BEWARE Crow 64 (Crow 64 ARG)

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Theorists, we all know I love a good ARG. And Crow 64? Well, I had to dive in head first. Crow 64 is the ARG of the "unfinished Nintendo 64 game" called Catastrophe Crow. In the original video, we get the history of the game as well as our first playthrough footage. From there, it spread across the internet into a building mystery waiting to be figured out. Today, I am going to try to do just that.

that we back up weekly on various outdated forms of physical media just to start a creepy pasta in 20 years. Theorists, I cannot tell you how excited I am for today's episode. Oh, man, this is a good one. This is a very good one. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the mystery of the long-lost N64 game, Catastrophe Crow. Admittedly, today's video is going to be a little less on the theory side and a little more of an invitation to join this mystery hunting community as they try to solve one of the cleverest games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. And note that today we're only really scratching the surface of a mystery that already has itself a 76-page Google Doc going over the evidence, not to mention a 26-page sub-document going

over all the evidence from just one source alone. So join me, my friends, as we start to explore the mystery of Crow 64. Now, I have to warn you that the Crow-64 mystery deals with some mature and disturbing topics, so right at the top here, theorist discretion is advised. Our internet story today begins with the criminally old. overlooked creator named Adam Butcher, who does the thing that's the instant death of any YouTube channel. He makes quality content. By that, I mean, his stuff is always very good, but it takes a long time to make, and so the algorithm is like, nope. One part game designer, one part filmmaker, each video on Adam's channel is completely different, from his story of a game that took him 13 years to make, to his most famous work, the popular internet story, where he tells the tale of a vlogging mystery hunter in his connection to a mysterious death out in the fields of the UK.

No joke, it is a 9-minute video that has better storytelling and pacing than most movies you will watch in your life. It's his latest video that I want to focus on today. A video uploaded back in October titled What Happened to Crow 64? In this video, Adam acts like your typical retro game review channel and covering a piece of lost media. Think channels like Cadicarious or gaming historian. In this case, he's stumbled across a development cartridge for the unreleased N-64 game, Catastrophe Crow. And, uh, just as a reminder here, this is just like Petscop. This undiscovered game was never really a game that was meant to exist.

It was created for the purpose of being in this creepypasta. I bring this up because it can get kind of confusing when you're talking about fake histories of fake games as though they're real. So the game was fake, it was never meant to be, it's all for this story. Well, it was a fake game, but now it's a real, totally playable game. We'll get to that. So thanks to Adam's research, we learned that Catastrophe Crow was the brainchild of the successful developer Manfred Lorenz and his company Opus Interactive. Despite looking a lot like a clone of Super Mario 64, Lorenz promised to make catastrophe crows something special,

with new features never before seen in a video game. The team promised fearless exploration and something groundbreaking called an eternal revival system. Probably just a bad translation. That's right. Something called an eternal revival system. Ah, shoot! Sorry, that's just my alarm that goes off anytime there's a story about an indie video game where people either get sucked into the game or get revived by the game. Bad light! Bad, bad light! We don't know yet that anyone's in that game. Sure, we can strongly suspect it, but we don't know!

Don't give me that look, don't give me that look, light! You know what you did. Oh, I can't be mad at you. Who's my bad light? Who is my bad light? Oh, you are! So Catrophy Crow was originally based on a drawing Lorenz's daughter made, and was based around saving your father's business from the villainous Sir Cat. Unfortunately, during development, something tragic happens that causes Manfred's home life to completely fall apart. He starts spending all his time at work and asks his developers to crew create weird unexplained assets. Then one day, Manfred disappears, alongside all the company's hardware. His boat is later found floating off the German coastline. The only thing left behind is a mysterious goodbye note written in German alongside a sequence of numbers.

And now the twist. After years of Catastrophe Crow being lost to history, Adam seems to have found himself a copy on eBay. He ends his historical retrospective with some of the public's first look at gameplay from this long-lost game. And oh man! This is where the puzzle solved. really begins. As Adam plays through Catastrophe Crow, things start off like your typical platformer. Grassy landscape, simple shapes, bright colors, but he quickly finds himself in a secret area that includes a crow typing on a computer with some weird things to say. After that, a cutscene of a house plays before the player is brought back to the first area of the game. Now, things replay, but slightly differently.

The sign on the workplace has gone out and a weird scarecrow stalks the player character from afar, only to disappear when he's approached. After failing to answer a ringing phone, Adam runs through a glitched section of the wall, behind which is this animation of a crow holding computer equipment jumping off a boat. Knowing the history of Manfred Lorenz, his disappearance, the lost boat, the stolen computer equipment, it's easy to make the connection that this is likely a recreation of what happened to Manfred himself. When the player character jumps in after the NPC, they're brought to a misty forest, where they can find an old crow crying over what appears to be a grave labeled crow, Except the headstone is actually an N64 cartridge.

The grave isn't even the creepiest part, though, as when Adam tries to leave the sight, we hear the phone ringing again before his character falls down a flight of stairs, causing all kinds of trippy imagery to appear, including a brain scan and the arrival of two skeletal figures come to take the crow away. And while I'm almost 100% sure that this is a coincidence,

I do find it interesting as I make this that the timestamp for that image just so happens to be at time equals 666, the devil. Not in MCU yet, but maybe in Catastrophe Crow? The video ends with a cutscene of an older crow walking into the bedroom of a younger crow. Before these disturbing events play out, a headless crow is kept on life support while the room fills with water until more monsters steal the crow into the blackness. To me, there's one pretty clear interpretation for all this.

Manfred's child falls down some stairs, which gives them severe brain damage. Hence, the brain scan and the headless crow in the hospital bed. Manfred receives the call about this while he's at work, Which is why the phone sound effect is so prominent throughout these scenes, but likely he doesn't answer it, which is why the phone can't be answered, or he's haunted by the memory of that phone call, which is why the phone never stops ringing. There's also probably a lot of guilt associated with the fact that he wasn't there for the kid. Hence, all of this happening while it's in an office building. As a result of the child's severe injury, he changes the game that his company was working on to include an eternal revival system

to keep his child alive in some way. Classic PetScott move, you know? The child, though, eventually dies, as evidenced by the monsters taking the hospitalized crow away, which causes Manfred to go off the deep end, literally. After realizing that he couldn't actually bring the kid back to life, he takes all of his hardware out into the middle of the ocean and jumps off a boat. Now, that alone would be a really cool way to tell this story, making a fake game to make a fake retrospective to tell a creepy and tragic tale of loss. But believe it or not, there is so much more here.

You know those iceberg meme charts that show you the depth of knowledge on any given topic, well, this one Adam video is only the tip of the iceberg. Adam was clearly working on this ARG for a long time before he launched that big video, considering that it seems like he planted five sister channels, each with one video of a random gameplay session, just to make them seem legit, followed by one or more videos of Catastrophe Crow gameplay. Each one predating Adam's original video. The only channels that are known to be canonical entries in the series are Adam Butcher, n64 long-lost lore, 90s retro gaming Fred,

N64 Excavation Man, childhood memories 64, and Ultra 64 forever. And it was here on these other channels that we started to get the necessary hints to start solving clues left behind in Adam's original video. For instance, what about that weird, coded language from the crow in the computer? Well, at the beginning of one of the sister videos, Catastrophe Crow N64 Playthrough from the N64 Long Lost lore channel, we see a fairly standard pause screen. Later that same video, though, the pause screen is scrambled.

This fairly simple substitution cipher turns out to be something the community dubbed Crow language, and it can be used to decipher many of the puzzles throughout this game. Using just the letters from this pause screen, we can decode the message from before. H is I, W is A, Q is M, that one's in, and H-E. Oh my! Maybe that Mephisto joke from earlier was a bit more on the nose than I suspected. Or else, you know, working on a video game is heck incarnate, which got to admit, that's what I've heard from many of my developer friends. So yeah, we feel you, Crow, we feel you.

And this crow language gets used a lot throughout the mystery. For instance, in the video titled Underground Level from the Childhood Memories 64 channel, we get a classic, spell something out in the ground and the letter lights up in a different color puzzle, kind of like you'd see out of Banjo Kizu Kizu Kow-Kulkevog. Except here, what you're spelling out doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Yuio Wao blizzhojo, Kuo-vlo, Kroll, Bucle. It's not German, not Swedish. It's Kro.

Using the Crow language cipher, you get the phrase, Please forgive me both of you. Oh boy, we're getting serious now. But that's not all. Listen to the clip from that gameplay segment. Every letter has an associated sound, meaning that what seemed just like one puzzle solved via Crow language is actually giving us a second alphabet that we can use,

one where sound effects can translate back into words. And that is not our only audio-based code we get. Opus Interactive, Manfred's fake game company, had one other project that they had worked on, a game titled Ocean Quest for the Super Nintendo. We learned this by pausing Adam's original video on a fake game magazine article talking about Catastrophe Crow. Here in the text we see, quote, This will be the first N64 outing from Opus Interactive,

a German developer helmed by director Manfred Lorenz, whose action-adventure Ocean Quest was a surprise late hit for the SNES. Searching for Ocean Quest on YouTube, you find one video from the Ultra 64 Forever channel of the Games End Credit Sons, It's very chill, right? Well, something that the channel Jonathan Rose Lion noticed on YouTube was that the song starts with a 26 note ascending sequence. 26 notes for 26 letters. Later in the song, you have little riffs like this. So what Jonathan did was extract those notes, match them to the tones from the beginning of the song, and translated them to the following. Thia Nils, Marta Manfred, thanks for playing. Can you see why this is such a cool puzzle and why I am saying?

so excited to be talking about this. And this gives us our key players and their names. Remember, that decoded message from earlier said, forgive me both of you. But our initial interpretation of the events of Crow 64 only had Manfred and his kid. So who else is here? Well, based on the Ocean Quest

Audio, it seems like we have our cast of characters. Manfred, our protagonist. Thea, his daughter. Nils, her brother, and Marta, his wife. This is also supported by clues elsewhere in the mystery. Thea's name also comes from a splash screen which appears for just a moment when booting up the game. The first line reads that, which of course is

Crow language that translates to my dearest Thea. And funny enough, Thea translates directly into Crow using Crow language, which is one very strong indication who this game was originally for. And we can also confirm Marta's name from that farewell letter to Marta before he disappeared off on the boat. But now we get to Theory Country, my friends, because I, and most of the community have noticed that there are four different Crow avatars appearing throughout all the gameplay videos, each representing a different member of the family. The large crow with glasses is the father Manfred. The other large crow is the mother Marta. The small crow with the primary player character is Thea, and the other smallest crow is her brother Nils. The rest of that splash screen with Thea's name, by the way, contains blank slots for secret for secret. I'm not gonna spoil how to solve every line in this video because, honestly, it's just a lot of fun to do it for yourself. Anyway, once you've figured out all the secrets, the message decodes to the following. My dearest Thea, I am sorry I could not be with you in the end. I would. was too afraid. I ran, and now I am in hell. One I made myself. I dreamed of you playing this one day, but you never will. Please forgive me, my little crow. Please forgive me both of you. Dad, this is only for your little brother now.

You'll notice that some of those letters fall on spots that are highlighted in the original splash screen. If you take all those letters from the final message, they spell out dearest Nils, the little brother. Nils, it seems, is the key. Sometimes quite literally, N64 exclamation man's video forest level includes a visionary, cipher that requires two keys to break, one alphabetic and one numeric. The code from Manfred's note, 307-813-54841, plus the name Nils repeated. Doing that, the puzzle solves for Nils, I'm alive. So is Manfred actually alive? Seems to be. Back in October, the community worked out an email address that's currently been removed from the dock with good reason. It's a real, working email address that's clearly being manned by a real person. It's not just blasting back auto responses, it is responding to what people say in real time. As the game grew more popular, more and more people started spamming the email, hoping for hints, and eventually it just stopped answering. For that reason, I'm not going to be telling you the email, but if you want to,

you can figure it out. Though I warn you, do not use it unless you think you have a solution for the next part of the puzzle that we're going to talk about, because we don't want to burn out the goodwill of whoever is on the other end of that thing. When the email was still working, it sent messages from ML, clearly Manfred Lorenz. One of the earliest responses set the community up with the puzzle that everyone is still stuck on. My dearest boy, after all these years, I have much to say. Your birthday is not too far from now. I hope we can meet the day after in the place we holiday every year. I will be there. M. There we have ourselves two clear things that we need, a birthday and a place. Since that email, a lot of people have tried to get answers from Manfred, but most have failed. The thing is, shortly after that address stopped replying, we got one of the biggest drops I have ever seen in an ARG, the source code. A Twitter account pretending to be an ex- employee of Opus Interactive dropped a huge zip file containing the entire source code of Catastrophe Crow. That's right, you can now play Catastrophe Crow the game. And not only that, you can now go behind the scenes and interact with every object and asset in unity,

which means that there is still an absolutely enormous amount of clues to dig through and solve. In all honesty, I think that this ARG is one of the best organized I've ever seen. Well, I've covered a lot of ARGs on the channel. Few come to the table with most of the solutions, already set up. Multiple channels of gameplay posted well before the main tease of the game. I really, really hope that by introducing you all to this mystery today, I've created a few more crows out there to delve into the incredible mystery that is Catastrophe Crow. Who knows? Maybe one of us theorists will finally be the one to crack the next big mystery.

All we need is a place and a birthday. Until then, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory.