Game Theory - Don't Trust Your Friends (Roblox Rainbow Friends)

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he talks about Rainbow Friends Chapter 2 and all the new LORE this new update brings! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, and Tom Robinson Editors: Dom Sealion, Warak, Tyler Mascola, and Dan "Cybert" Seibert Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Internet, welcome to game theory, the show that builds its theories one roboleck at a time. In case you missed our last theory on Rainbow Friends, let me catch you up. A school bus heading to an amusement park called Odd World gets sent down the wrong path, causing the bus to crash and everyone inside to wind up inside a mysterious facility. Seems to be the remains of an old TV show museum and play park dedicated to the Rainbow Fun Time Friends, a cast of characters from an old animated TV show. Thanks to some plaques and pictures scattered throughout the building, we discovered that the friends were created by a man called Oswald D. Davis and his partner Trenton,

with this facility specifically designed to bring the Rainbow Friends to life. Because this is an indie horror game, though, you can probably guess how well that went. In 1991, shortly after having their first guest, the facility was shut down, as evidenced by long-forgotten computer login screens sprinkled throughout the game map, leading us to the events of Chapter 1, where we're trapped for five days by someone who appears to be the Red Rainbow Friend, Though official merch only lists him as just the scientist. If we managed to survive for the five days,

we're chased through the vents and eventually escape from the facility. Chapter 2 then picks up immediately after that, leading you to a fenced off area and an old man trying to break in. Probably should be using some wire snips instead of scissors to cut through that fence, but hey, what do I know? Anyway, we eventually make our way into Odd World, the amusement park that we were headed to at the start of Chapter 1. And clearly, Odd World is also dedicated to the Rainbow Fun Time Friends,

with different parts of the park branded around each of the different characters, Green's Drop Ride, Purple's Maze Layer, Blues Castle, and Orange's Cavern Coaster. Speaking of Orange, he's not here until the finale of the chapter. Oh, he's adorable! He's my favorite. And while my bestest boy may indeed be missing, Red seems to have brought with him some new additions to the crew, specifically Yellow and Sion, to hunt us down in any and all ways they can. Wah!

Just like in Chapter 1, we're tasked with running around collecting items required for our escape. Only this time, instead of being trapped here for days, we're only having to survive for a couple of hours. A few gas canisters and one giant cake later, we escaped the facility on the park's roller coaster. But of course, the end never truly means the end. The chapter closes with the promise of more ahead. Now obviously, while the game has us busy looking around for bags of sugar and light bulbs, my eyes were peeled for the real important thing to collect, the lore. Is there lore? Looking for lore. Looking for love and looking for lore. But this time, it's not there. Or at least, it's not all there. You see, the lore of rainbow, After Chapter 2 is so much more than just this one game and its small handful of primary colored characters.

To solve this one, we're gonna have to span a literal empire of popular Roblox games connected by a shadowy organization and overseen by a mysterious businessman out for blood. And that my friends is our journey for today. But first we gotta answer the question that everyone has when they first boot up chapter 2. Who the heck's the old guy? Even me during my playthrough. I just couldn't shake the fact that something was off about this guy. Let's hope this works! I'm not gonna skip this. I'm not gonna vote to skip.

Poke. Poke. What the? Oh, no. Oh, no, old man! Oh, that was a severe head trauma right there. Oh, he's definitely got a concussion. Whoa, how'd I get up here?

Who even are you? Do I care about you? No. And let's be honest with ourselves, this guy is suss. We start the game off and we find him breaking into a facility. And then we go, yeah, that seems like a totally trustworthy thing to do. From there, we just blindly do everything he has. asks, not a great plan. But what's even more suspicious about this guy is that he

simultaneously knows more about Oddworld and less about it than he lets on. On one hand, he's trying to break in, which shows that he's trying to do something here. Maybe sabotage red guy or spy on the experiments that are going on. It's unclear. Our old man also seems very familiar with the fact that the Rainbow Friends are now bloodthirsty monsters, considering when he sees Blue running around, he knows that it's suddenly a sign of danger. Is that blue? Davouti-Dabudai? Oh no. Coming here was a He also knows about the looky that's blocking our path and how it can be lured away with cake, or how you can escape from being caught by yellow.

All of that is some pretty insider knowledge. He's not just familiar with these creatures, he's experienced with their inner workings and mechanics. On the other hand, though, as soon as he senses danger, he immediately regrets his decision to break in. Oh no. Coming here was a mistake. We need to find the way out of here and fast! Literally the way we came. You were literally sniffing things into the fence.

We could probably get out of there. So he wanted to do something in the park and knows. that the creatures are dangerous, but wasn't aware that they're currently active. Additionally, he repeatedly lies to us, as evidenced by him tasking us to find light bulbs to call for help, only to then be surprised that we were able to find an SOS light hidden inside. Wait, there was actually an SOS light. I mean, wow, you guys must be good at finding things. So, who is the old man? Well, let's take a look at his design. A leather jacket, thick rimmed glasses, and a smirk.

Which makes him the perfect match for one of the two characters that we learned about in chapter one, Trenton, co-founder of the Rainbow Friends. It seems like a pretty open-and-shut case. Everything about these two guys match. Except, long-time theorists will realize that there's a slight hole with my plan. In my previous theory, I said that Oswald turned Trenton into Red.

But in this game, we see both characters existing simultaneously. So what's the deal with that? I was wrong. It's easy as that. Red isn't Trenton. See, I can't admit when I'm wrong. It would seem that Trenton's back in the Rainbow Friends family for... Something. But what? Well, we can actually get hints to that from the first two chapters.

First things first, obviously Trenton is much older now than he is in the picture from chapter 1. And that's because the portrait is from when the company first started. 1972. You see, before entering Oddworld at the start of the chapter, we can actually go off to the side of the fence in the lobby area and activate a generator here. The code for the generator is 1-972. All it does is activate this little conveyor belt with a cinder block on it, but that right there is telling us that the date matters. I would guess that it's likely acting as the start to the Rainbow Fun Time Friends franchise. Why would I say that? Well, as we've seen with other indie horror franchises,

the 70s tends to be a good starting date for failed kids franchises. And they're not just making up these dates out of thin air either. The 70s were a huge time for the types of kids programming that Rainbow Fun Time Friends was probably like. This was the era of Mr. Rogers, the Electric Company, the new zoo review. Sure, they weren't animated, but you had these big casts of characters with life-sized puppets and designs that really didn't mesh together all that well. Random animals and monsters and dinosaurs all mixed together. It was the early days for this sort of programming and so whatever popped into your head was kind of what worked, just like the assemblage of characters that we get with rainbow friends.

Yellow Dino, green monster, blue person, orange gator and purple arm thingy. This timeline also roughly coincides with a similar sort of kids show at the time, a British program by the name Rainbow, which also was popular all throughout the 70s. Go and look in the kitchen and hurry up, I'm starving. Zippy, you always want people. to do things for you. I'm going to zip you up. There's even an episode of Rainbow named Friends. That said, this is more of an interesting coincidence than anything. After watching a few episodes of the show, there doesn't seem to be

all that much connecting the two. I just thought it was worth calling out. So if Trenton and Oswald started the series in 1972, what happened? Well, throughout the chapter, there are hints to a rivalry between the two of these characters. In a control room near Orange's roller coaster, we can see a whiteboard with various messages smudged out, including Call Animal control and change garage code. Now the animal control line is likely a reference to the moment that the character has escaped. Throughout chapter one, we saw that the rainbow friends were, at least for a period of time, forced to live in stables under the facility, even having to be chained up in order to be showered. They were treated like animals, so calling animal control the day they escape and happen to be hungry seems to make a lot of sense. But what I'm more interested in is the blue text that says change garage code. You'll notice that right next to it is a blue stick figure wearing a crown. An obvious reference to the character. a blue, right? Well, also notice that there's a red stick figure next to it that's been erased. It seems like someone, speaking in blue, is looking to take over, take the crown for themselves, and quite literally erase red from existence.

This power struggle between the two is also reflected in the calendar that you can find in the same room. Like all the other calendars you find throughout the map, this one has July 1st marked out for a field trip, a reference to our school bus first arriving at the facility. Based on the fact that July 1st on this calendar falls on a Friday, you can actually pinpoint a few potential options for what year the game is meant to be taken place. 1994, 2005, 2011, 2016, and 2022. My money is on that 2022 mark. June 30th, 2022 is when Rainbow Friends Chapter 1 first released.

And with the next day, July 1st, being circled followed by the words field trip, feels like a reference that's both meta and canon. Anyway, that tells us that it's been over 30 years since the initial facility shut down in 1991. But this calendar actually gives us a lot more information. Notice that there are a couple more dates highlighted. July 4th for fireworks, which, yeah, that tracks. And July 6th for a light show. These highlighted dates, I believe, not only confirm that this calendar is up to date, but also gives us an idea of what Red is aiming for.

Remember, the first chapter took place over the course of five nights. That means that our escape happens the evening of July 5th. That's why there are leftover fireworks for Red to use to scare the old man during Chapter 2's third challenge. However, clearly there is someone else here who's trying to foil Red's plan, because each date is scratched off using blue, including the light show that's happening on the 6th, a date that has not happened yet. Technically, that's supposed to be happening tomorrow. And underneath those dates is a note saying move to August for investigation. Whoever's writing these messages in blue is trying to stop or slow down Red's plan.

The power struggle was also being referenced in Chapter 1 with this random line on a wall written in Red. You only slowed me down. Since we only have ourselves two named characters in this game, our list of suspects is fairly limited, especially with Trenton, obviously being the old man. Unless they're introducing a new character in the next chapter, process of elimination kind of dictates that Oswald the founder must be read. The park is named after him, he's the one in control, he's also the one who has the proper garage code as we see from the opening cutscene.

It's also clear that Red and Trenton have themselves a backstory, considering Red has the chance to kill off Trenton in Challenge 3, but chooses not to, instead just using the fireworks to scare him. That then means that Trenton, our old man. man must be the one in blue, breaking into the facility, trying to strike back, and ultimately reclaim the crown for himself, erasing red from the picture for being too ambitious, for pushing too far. Here's what I think happened. The two started the show together, helping it to grow in its early days, but then something started to change. Red, Oswald, wanted to keep growing,

make more characters, make them more realistic, and Blue, Trenton disagreed. In Chapter 2's final chase sequence, we run past robotic versions of the characters all discarded, dismantled, old animatronic versions of blue, orange, green, all thrown away. I suspect that this was because they weren't good enough for Red. They weren't realistic enough. He needed something living. The actual Rainbow Fun Time Friends, which came out around 1991. Along the way, Trenton was disowned, ousted from the company for being resistant to this change. Fast forward to the game today in 2022, where I suspect that Red is now using the lookies and tainting the local water supply with them. In the chapter's final sequence, we run past exactly that. A bunch of Rainbow Friend heads,

which we know our living creatures, floating past in a pipe explicitly labeled water supply. Red is up to something, trying to make everyone into a rainbow friend, no longer slowed down by his partner. But now, that partner is back. Trenton is here in trying to sabotage his old business partner, make him stop the mad power trip that he's been on. But that also doesn't necessarily mean that Trenton's that good of a guy. You see, there's one thing that I can't quite shake in all this.

And that's the Easter egg that led me to believe that Trenton was the villain in the first place. See, when you look through the glass of the terrarium in chapter 1, Trenton's picture changes from a cool guy in a leather jacket to a man in a suit with glasses on a top hat with a purple ribbon. Clearly Trenton is hiding something, transforming into a villainous business guy. But who, or what, is he? Well, I think this conspiracy actually goes much further than just Rainbow Friends. One thing that I didn't notice last chapter was that the computer screen shown Oswald's final login dates have a company name on them. RBM, an obvious parody of IBM computers, right? Well yeah, but it's also so much more.

Two awesome theorists on our Game Theory subreddit, Fantastic File 3903, and Rock Mage 1234, both pointed out that RBM computers actually appear in another Roblox game entitled The Little Ones, produced by none other than Charcoal, one of the two devs for Rainbow Friends. In fact, the cover image for that game was just updated last month.

What was it updated to? Nothing. At least as far as I can tell, it's the same picture that it's always been. I suspect that it was just to draw attention back to the game, Especially when RBM is right there on the monitors. So, how is little ones connected to the lore of Rainbow Friends? It's not. At least, as far as I can tell right now.

It's a game where one of your friends is kidnapped and you're forced to escape a warehouse populated with dozens of little, small, mutant versions of them. The 1972 generator keypad that was used in Rainbow Friends has the same keypad layout as those in Little Ones, but I don't think that's too much to go off of. I suspect that that's just reusing assets. Unfortunately, the only connection between the two seems to be

through this RBM computer company. But while connections to Rainbow Friends aren't immediately obvious, there are connections to another game that's worth calling out. The massive Roblox hit, Spider. In this game, one friend is bit by a spider and transforms into a horrific creature, trying to capture all the other friends. This game was made by Rainbow Friends' other dev, Roy Stanford. But again, the reason it's interesting is that there are pictures of the spider hidden inside the little ones.

There's also a series of labeled VHS tapes, one clearly marked as Spider. Why does all that matter for Rainbow Friends? Well, because of this. Spider has one pass available for purchase, a pass that increases the odds that you can become the Spider in the main gameplay. And whose face is that there? Front and center on that Spider Pass? A businessman with glasses, a top hat, and a purple ribbon.

It is the exact face that's hiding inside a Trenton's portrait in Rainbow Friends. Could this all just be a series of Easter-Egg connections from two devs referencing their past games? Absolutely it could. But those have already happened in other places from Rainbow Friends. In Chapter 1's lobby, you can actually go out and around this building right here, and you can see references to both of these games, Little Ones and Spider. That right there, that is an Easter egg. But to suddenly see these explicit references and connections in the gameplay itself, that now feels to me like something a little bit more. Like maybe Trenton

isn't all he appears to be, that maybe he is a spider in disguise, or some nefarious businessman running all of these experimental procedures, bringing terror and dread to all these different companies. Not exactly sure yet. Don't really have a solid answer. The tapes and lost ones are labeled as 2019, so it's possible that the lore of these three games are linked together. Trenton transforming people into monsters, be they spiders, tiny mutants, or large pillowy mascots. Through spider bites, mutation are just tainting the water supply. Speaking of, at the end of the chapter, did you notice that Trenton doesn't come with you? Despite his insistence that you all have to leave when the rainbow friends appear, he stays behind. His work there isn't done yet, and I don't suspect that he wants us to escape. There are

multiple exit points as you safely go around the roller coaster. But Trenton doesn't tell you to get off at any of those. He explicitly tells us to stay on and go through the maintenance exit. Something tells me that the elevator to the surface at the end of chapter two isn't leading to where we expect. We're not done yet. And in a game full of rainbow-colored friends, the only true friend that we have is ourself. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.