Game Theory - Duck Season's KILLER DOG... Unmasked! (Duck Season)

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Duck Season is a game that seemed pretty straightforward, but it went from zero to DARK really fast. We are left wondering so many things after completing the game. How does this dog come out of the cartridge? Why is he preying on children? And most importantly... Who is beneath the mask? Well Loyal Theorists, I think I found the answer. Join me for a creepy trip through VR land as we uncover the shocking truth of the "Duck Hunt" universe!

Luffy here, Fennifierce, pizza boy, Gasp! The Game theorists. Nugget haven't watched this in a long time. Call someone, help me! Help me! Don't turn off the video! Don't turn off... Forget to rewind! Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory, where today we will not be talking about Five Nights of Freddy's and its 80s child murdering fetish. No, sir! It's one of the last videos of the video. the year and we're gonna sit back, relax, and take a look at something completely different. Duck season, a game about children being murdered in the 80s. What is it with games these days?

Anyway, duck season is one of the best most interesting VR games of 2017, a horror game based on the popular Nintendo game duck hunt from back in the 80s. It kind of says a lot about the state of the game industry right now that one of the best VR titles of the year has us playing a modernized version of an 8-bit game from 19 Stephanie and I were lucky enough to be two of the very first people to play this game with the creator Brandon Lodge who in case you didn't know is a fellow YouTuber Not only creating the channels Node and Freddie W but also working on projects like video game high school Which makes duck season not only a cool game but one that was made by a member of our own YouTube community Makes it pretty special actually and with over seven endings tons of secrets hidden lore and the constant threat of bodily harm to those under the age of 12

It is no wonder this game grabbed up our attention for a theory. Now before I get into the meat of today's episode, a quick spoiler warning. If you have a VR headset, I highly recommend that you play this game blind before watching this video. The game itself is set in the summer of 1988 and takes place in one living room. You play as a child named David, who lives with his mother and just rented him the game duck season for a full day. The aim of the game is simple, just play duck hunt. Shoot ducks while your hunting partner dog cheers yawn. Complete eight rounds and celebrate your victory with a

Piasta! The game ends with your mom sending you to bed, giving the ominous hint of... But you know, I would have shot that annoying dog. Mayhaps, the game is trying to tell me something. So if you decide to play the game again and this time take mom's advice, shooting the dog... Ha ha! Things start to go a little bit differently. The 6 o'clock news comes on and mentions that several families have gone missing in the area.

The mystery behind the disappearance of several families in the Tri-County area continues to grow. Our mother, cat... casually mentions that a knife went missing from the kitchen. Honey, how do you think the knife? And at 7 o'clock, we get the really shocking reveal that the dog has somehow broken out of the game and is recording us from outside in the garden. And it don't get any better from there. You later find a tape next to you titled 12.

Play the video and you'll find it features the dog creeping into another child's room and abducting him. Which makes it pretty clear, 12 families have rented this game and all have gone missing, with us lined up to be victim number 13. He then proceeds to kill our mom and attack us. If you're somehow able to steady your nerves as a giant blood-soaked dog approaches you with a knife, you can blow them up using your zapper and end the horrific nightmare. Except all of this wasn't a dream. Mom? Yeah, she's still dead, leaving you to bury her in the backyard.

David almost makes a call to the police, but decides to run away instead, which seems like an odd choice at first, but then think about it. What's he gonna tell the cops? A guy in a dog costume came out of my teeth, killed my mom and attacked me, but don't worry, I was able to destroy it with my light zapper. Yeah, maybe it's best that he kept that one to himself. But all of this begs the question, Who is the dog?

At first you might think that it's just some disgruntled off-the-rails video game character, but the longer you play the game, the more clues begin to surface that there's a deeper story here. In the E3 reveal of the game that we did with Brandon on GT Live, he made a passing comment that the cartridge itself is cursed. Uh, you have a bit of a cursed cartridge? Not the game duck season, but rather this specific cartridge that David has rented out. And if we look across the game's various endings, we can start to figure out that the dog is actually trapped inside of this cartridge. During one of the game's seven endings, the nuke ending, David becomes trapped in the game.

We wander around looking for our family before we curl up into a ball and begin to cry. We see the dog slowly walking towards us before the company logo appears in front, covering up what the dog is about to do. Based on what we know about him, you think that he's about to kill you, but peek behind the logo, and you'll see that the dog is actually comforting us. He understands what it's like to be trapped in there, because this dog wasn't always in the game. In another ending, we see the dog breaking free through the television screen, trapping us inside the game for what ends up being years. The final shot of the ending is a new child playing the cartridge years later, with David, now an adult, still trapped inside. And you can 100% tell that it's years later, based on David's deeper, more adult voice.

Who are you? Horror-themed magazines sprinkled throughout the game try to hint at a demon or supernatural creature possessing the cartridge, but it appears that those are just red herrings, because we can definitively prove that the dog is a human. Not only do we catch him smoking at the beginning of every round of hunting, in the best men ending, where we call the police to warn them about the dog killer, we see him taken down after being shot. An excessive... Excessive amount of... An excessive amount of times.

Blood flies everywhere and the dog lays dead on the ground, proving that there is indeed a human inside of that dog suit. But we don't have to stop there. We can go one step further and say that this dog was someone that we knew. This dog was our father. NO! Yes! During the game, it's only ever you and your mother.

But you can see in the pictures throughout the house. that your father is in almost all of them. According to Brandon, our father is a professional baseball player in the minor leagues. He got traded to a different team and the marriage kind of fell apart. You can tell that they're either in the process of getting a divorce or already divorced based on your mother's subscription to Maligned Mom magazine and all the front page articles dedicated to your man done doing you wrong. So we have a marriage on the rocks, but what's even more important is the baseball team our dad plays for.

We see in a picture hanging near the TV that it's a baseball team whose mascot happens to be a giant dog. That's not the only way your family's connected to the game. Near the beginning of your play-through, you're greeted with a commercial where a child and mother answer the door to see the dog mascot holding the game. But that's not just random actors, that's David and his mother. Obviously the first clue is that in the commercial, there's only a boy and his mother, both with blonde hair, just like the family we're playing as. But that's far from the only clue we have. Hidden in the game is a white book titled Kid Wizard, which when thrown at certain objects, unlocks hidden effects and secrets.

By touching the book to your favorite action figure, you blow up to supersize, allowing you to explore parts of the house that you couldn't reach before. And there, in just above mom's computer is a picture of the boy and his mother from the commercial with the dog in the center. All the other pictures you find in the house are of our family, meaning it must be us. I mean, do you just have pictures of actors who appeared in a commercial hanging around your house? No, no you don't. It has to be David and his mom.

But the Kid Wizard book helps us a lot more with this mystery than just letting us see a few extra pictures. You can also throw the book at the cat clock on the wall, which starts you down the path of an entirely different meta-game. Suddenly, you're dropped into a world of clocks. Oh! Oh, damn! And are tasked with figuring out the right times for each. With that puzzle solved, the game tells you to remember the minute letters, 1, 2, 3, ABC.

It's pretty self-explanatory. You go back around the circle and translate the minute numbers 214-4-14-214-11-9-4, using the alphabet substitution to get the phrase, Bad Dad, Bad Kid, Bad Dad, huh? Bad because he's murdered 12 other families and is on his way to slaughter us? Maybe, but that would require us linking the phrase back to the dog. Luckily, we can do exactly that. If you take Kid Wizard one final time and touch it to the flashlight you get around 6 p.m. in the game,

you're taken to a tree house with a Ouija board. Ouija board. Yu-gi board. If you spell out bad dad, bad kid on the Ouija board, lightning strikes the board and you're suddenly teleported to a secret ending. But wait! In the dead ending, when we're killed by the dog, we end up as some kind of spirit looking down

on our freshly skewered body lying next to our killer. He waves goodbye as lightning flies out of the TV to zap him back into the cartridge. Lightning that looks exactly like what came out of. the Luigi board. And I think that means we found our connection as to how the father was able to get himself trapped inside the duck season cartridge. The final piece of evidence comes from a tape titled It's Me. Wait, is the dog Golden Freddy now? After getting six out of the seven endings and going back through the entire game without shooting the dog one final time, you find the tape resting on a dogbed next to your TV. Clearly with a name like It's Me, whoever's on this tape is expecting us to know who it is. If you play the tape, you see the real-life version

of the dog looking directly at you. He begins making hand gestures. At first he points towards you, then he points towards himself, then he makes it cradle with his hands. You're my baby. It's me, dad. So, there you have it. The dog is absolutely your father.

A bad dad trapped inside of a video game. Why would he then go on to kill you? Well, honestly, there's not a whole lot to explain that, but notice that he only attacks if you shoot him, if you're a bad kid. Also notice this the secret ending tells us that the cryptid has been dealt with a cryptid is basically an animal who no one can prove exists The Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot are two of the most famous cryptids in history and in the case of duck season the cryptid would be referring to the dog So by inputting the bad dad bad kid code into the weig aboard we've released the dog from his curse and achieved what is probably the happiest ending in the game

Really stops makes you think doesn't it Like, what if you were trapped in a video game? Or, I guess in my case, what if I were trapped in my own videos? But that would be stupid. Although, you know, come to think of it, I don't really have that many memories of anything outside of these videos. Even like, now that I look around, were these walls always here? Like, this... This always here?

Am I some sort of fictional character stuck inside YouTube videos? No, no, I'm not gonna happen. I have a real identity, right? I'm not actually trapped in these. Please tell me, I think something is terribly wrong. If you see this, call someone, help me. Help me, don't turn off the video, don't turn. But hey, that's just a theory.

A game theory. Thanks for watching.