Game Theory - I Solved The Wilbur Soot ARG... And It Only Took 3 Years!

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he attempts to SOLVE the Wilbur Soot ARG! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Zach Stewart, and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Forrest Lee, Pedro Freitas, Koen Verhagen and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (viridianrosette) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Oh, an application for editor, huh? I can always use more help. Let's see what everyone else thinks. Hello, head editor Dan here. Oh, finally. I was worried you wouldn't pick up. None of the other editors seem to be around their phones right now. Weird.

Anyway, just got an email about someone wanting to audition. Got any projects I could put them on? Dan? Dan? Dan! Dan! There can only be one. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory, where today's episode is being worked on by a brand new editor auditioning for the job.

Hopefully, it doesn't do anything creepy and start off a multi-month-long aergy that ultimately winds up being too obscure to be solved. Oh, wait, that's exactly what's happening right now, isn't it? He's inserting creepy imagery of himself over my VO, isn't he? Darn it, not again. Well, this episode's already on a tight timeline, so I guess we're going to have to keep it in. If none of this means anything to you, then clearly you've never heard of the Wilbersoot AirG, better known as the editor Wilbur ARG. Yeah, when he's not trying to illegally sell potions out of a hot dog van in the Dream SMP,

Wilbur Sood is concocting unsolvable ARGs steeped in literary references and complex musical codes. And what do you do in your free time? Notice one key adjective I used here, friends, unsolvable. This thing is filled with red herrings, obtuse puzzles, and clues that are so subtle that even though it started back in 2018, it has never been solved. When I discovered that one of the internet's biggest gaming creators right now created an AERG, I was intrigued. When I found out that it hadn't been solved, I was really intrigued.

To the point that I actually reached out to Wilbur himself to check that it could actually be solved. He told me that while it is technically solvable, he would actively discourage me as well as anyone else from attempting to solve it. He reiterated this a bunch during our call, claiming that the ARG was poorly constructed with puzzles that were accidentally made too hard. And not hard in the good way of, wow! that was really challenging to figure out, but rather hard in the frustrating, how could I have ever known to do that sort of way? And I get it. As someone who's done his own AERGs a few times,

finding the right level of difficulty is really tough. People take clues and directions that you could have never suspected. And I gotta say, it is awesome that Wilbur acknowledges and admits all of his first time are false. I respect that a lot. I also choose to completely ignore him. Sorry, Wilbur. You know that I couldn't leave this AERG incomplete, and I gotta say, I think I solved it.

I think I have some solid answers to the ARG's biggest lingering questions. But to understand how, you first have to understand what exactly this thing was and what made it so hard. The editor Wilbur ARG officially kicked off back in December of 2018, but Wilbur had actually been seeding the idea of doing an ARG for nearly a year before that. Despite having a channel of his own with over 42,000 subscribers at the time, the ARG wasn't actually started there. Instead, the whole thing kicked off when another channel, Jack Sucks at Life, uploaded the ominously titled, I Let a Random Guy Edit This Video.

Six days ago, I get this email titled, New Editor Application, Important. And I think, well, I'm not looking for a new editor. Nowadays, Jack collects YouTube play buttons, but back then he was predominantly a Minecrafter. Also, on that note, Jack, I have the one version of the gold play button that you don't have. As far as I know, it's the only thing missing from your collection. I'm just saying, let's talk. According to Jack, he was contacted by a person named Wilbur looking to apply for a job as editor, Which immediately is weird considering Jack already had an editor.

But things get weirder once he opens the email, which begins with a giant image of Wilbur and a rant against Jack's current editor, Kai. Now I know what you're thinking, Mr. Massey Welsh sucks at life. Kai has some properties that are irreplaceable, right? You're wrong. You idiot! I have all of them and better. What? Who?

Wilbur. Wilbur, then out of nowhere, claims to have invented two of the six strings found on a guitar. as well as the editing tool of key-framing, which means I guess I owe the dude a fortune in royalties. Despite all of these red flags, Jack decides to let Wilbur go ahead and edit part of the video. And things start out pretty normally, at least until the middle, when we switch to a video of Wilbur completely taking over and introducing himself to Jack's audience. Appearing in a... ...decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere, uh, when no one can find you. Saying that there are people chasing him and that he's suffering from Frostbite.

He begins to play a song, and then there's a loud thud, heard from off screen and he runs away. It is pretty much the perfect first ARG video. He interrupt a normal piece of content, you peak their interest with a couple of mysteries, leave little clues that don't make a whole lot of sense on their own, and build excitement for the next video. A next video that would happen a mere four days later.

The second video, entitled I Let Him Edit Another Video, This Is What He Sent Me Back, is pretty normal until we get to the end. Jack asks Wilbur to play a song while he sways in the corner. But all we see is Wilbur sitting on a keg. I haven't got a song for you. They said they took my guitar. Thank you. After that, things continue on until the very end,

where in the top left-hand corner, we're given a URL to an unlisted video called R. Lincolnshire Poacher, itself, a reference to a subreddit. In this video, we hear Wilbur leave a voicemail for someone, reciting the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Hello, your call cannot be taken at the moment. So please leave your message after the tone.

Once upon, I'm in Nigeria while I pondered weak and weary. If you go over to the subreddit, you're greeted with yet another video called Clues. This again has Wilbur leaving a voicemail and reading yet another Edgar Allan Poe story, but this time the short story, the cask of a Monteado. Listen until the very end though, and you hear Morse code playing. It's a reversed base 64 code leading to yet another YouTube unlisted video entitled A Rumble. If you're watching this, Jack, Massey Wells Suts at Life. I think I'm losing my mind anyway, so...

At the end of this one, there's yet another Morse code, this time translating to Don't let Kai tell you what I did. This ties in with a phrase repeated by a synthetic voice. Reverse it, and we get this. I did something embarrassing. I did something embarrassing. Now we're starting to piece together elements of a story. Wilbur is embarrassed about something he did,

something that is perhaps forced him to live on the run. Apparently, Kai also witnessed this event, or else Wilbur accidentally let what he did slip to Kai is now afraid of what might happen if word gets out. Hence him wanting Kai removed from the position of editor, a position where he has a voice and could likely spill the beans. Digging deeper though, we can actually pinpoint the window of when the event happened and when Wilbur's feelings towards Kai shifted.

The first video of the ARG was in December of 2018. However, if you check Wilbur's Twitter from a few months earlier, we see him tweet at Kai saying, quote, Just Saw Yang Greenwich was in a rush and just kind of said hi, sorry for confusing you. With a follow-up tweet about how he loved loves Kai's work, a very different tone from the email that we see that starts this whole thing off. In short, what many people perceive as the beginning of this ARG, that first Jack video, is really a few months into the whole thing.

It also means that whatever this quote-unquote embarrassing event was, it took place between October 18th and December 16th, between the tweet complimenting Kai and the upload date of the video rant seen on Jack's channel. So, certainly not the whole picture, but pieces are certainly starting to fall in place. The next chunk of clues actually came from Discord, where it seemed like, Wilbur was using aliases to push things forward. Via these presumed secret accounts, we learned about a hidden cache, IRL, which contained a drawing of London's O2 Arena and the word oxygen written beneath it. There were also audio files, stenographic decoders, broken links, like this one was really making people work. But through it all, you wound up with two major clues. First, this image, which seems to be

an email sent by Jack to Wilbur, mixed in with a book title, book cover, L's Lovely 3 by R. Fackier. The second was yet another YouTube video where Jack sinks up and stares at a camera for about a minute or so. It's pretty boring stuff, but you know there has to be more to this, right? Put the audio through a spectrogram and in the middle of the video you find some text. Hello? Can you hear me? I'm trying my best to reach you, but it's getting harder and harder because they're getting closer. I can run and run, but they're always right behind me.

You're trying your best, and I appreciate that. But sooner or later, I'll have to come clean and end this thing once and for all. That man, Jack Massey, sucks at life. He's so kind to me and tries his best to tell me, I need to know that I'll replace Kai, or I'll have to tell the world what I did. It's just a matter of time. It's emphasizing the parts of the story that we already know,

but not revealing anything new. This becomes a trend that we'll see throughout the third video as well. No, when it comes to big clues at this point, those actually shift over to Twitter. Kai and Wilbur seem to organize a meeting on the same day the third video goes live. What exactly happens here between the two of them is unknown, but afterwards, Kai's find-a-friend location was ominously located in the middle of a river, just downstream of the London O2 Arena.

Suspicious, we're back there. Kai's Twitter account is also seemingly overtaken by Wilbur, his bio-reading, inventor of the ENA guitar strings, Wilbursoot at gmail.com. Two days later, Kai's Twitter returns to normal, tweeting, what a bloody good swim that was, and that the water wasn't as bad as you'd think, but was, Bloody cold, though, to say the least. It seems that Wilbur attempted to get rid of Kai

by getting him to swim in the river, by throwing him in the river, something, but Kai survived. Also, notice the detail about the water being cold. A direct callback to Wilbur's repeated phrase that happens throughout this entire ARG, is Wilbur cold because he too was forced to swim the water at some point? Maybe. The I'm so cold phrase is so important that it becomes the major theme of the next set of puzzles in the series starting at video 4, Wilbur edited this video.

Not much to talk about here. This step actually required a good bit of brute force to solve. Brute force answering is when you basically just keep trying over and over again without any real hint as to the answer. Anyway, you eventually wind up at a video of Wilbur saying his classic catchphrase. Over and over again. Seriously, can someone get this guy a blanket? In the description of the video, we're given another base 64 code, which translates to a backwards YouTube URL for another video titled, you guessed it, I'm cold. In this video we see text saying, it's not forever, is it?

What will I do? And of course, I'm so cold. These are all comments on the fact that in the overarching story, Wilbur has just gotten the editing job over Kai. But clearly he knew that, even though he had won temporarily, it wouldn't last. A poem founded an imager photo around this time also backs this up. I can paint with film and cut without scissors and not be hassled by the looming fate of Kai. Ah, fake ears here only that I am permanent.

I'm aware, nay, resigned to the fact that I am on but a timer. I fear myself as the loss of my position may drop me. Drop me in the wasteful void. It shall bite me like the cold. And I'm so cold. Between the Edgar Allan Poe references and all this fancy Shakespeare talk, you can tell that this one is a classy ARG. Anyway, all of this is him knowing that this isn't a permanent fix for the problems that he's caused.

It's merely a distraction. Kai will return, and if Jack removes Wilbur from the equation, then he'll be left alone in the void, with nothing to distract him from what. he's done. So, what is it? What did he do? And this, you see, is why the ARG is currently unsolved. No one has that core answer. There are more videos after this, more references to being cold, more drama as Wilbur loses the job back to Kai, and plenty more codes to solve, but to me, and anyone who knows this mystery, the question everyone wants closure on is why? Why is Wilbur on the

run? Why is he so cold? Why does he want Kai silenced? What is the big secrets? At first, I started to pick at the loose threads of clues that no one knew what to do with. Or at least that didn't have clear endpoints on the massive Google Doc that the fan community made. There was, of course, the Wilbursoot music video privately owned Spiral Galaxy, which just kind of appeared at one point in the middle of the ARG. In this video, Wilbur sits on a keg in a field and plays a slightly modified cover of the song privately owned Spiral Galaxy, notably playing the song almost entirely on the E and A-strings, the ones that he claims to have invented. If that wasn't suspicious enough, at 227, the video cuts away suddenly

to play the Lincolnshire Poacher tune. So clearly this video has something important to hide in the greater ARG. And after being involved in the Petscop AERG for so long, one of my first instincts was synchronization. Remember of that video I mentioned earlier? The suspicious one where Jack stares at a camera for a minute or two and nothing really happens?

Well, it starts with Jack saying, OK, I'm syncing up. One, two, three. One, two, three. Seems like the perfect opportunity to sink some videos up. So I tried it, and wouldn't you know, they sink. At 221 and they're getting close. Jack is suddenly replaced by a black and white video of Wilbur staring into a bathroom mirror while digital sounds play in the background.

At 227 exactly, the song gets to the same point the digital tune plays in privately owned Spiral Galaxy. It's cool, but what? It was a new finding that ultimately led to nothing, as far as I could tell. In the R. Lincolnshire Poacher subreddit, there's a cryptic hint in the information bar. Do not capitalize on this poster's mistakes. And in the first video of the ARG, Wilbur claims to be suffering from frostbite and apologizes for not being good at guitar. as a result. My fingers are suffering from hypothermia at the moment, so if I'm not very good, my apologies. Maybe he made some mistakes in his spiral galaxy music video, and those are telling me what to quote unquote not capitalize.

Well, after listening to the original version and comparing it with Wilbur's version, I found three different notes that just seemed out of place. One at 111, 1 at 233, and 1 at 244. Are these repetitive timestamps just the product of me looking too deeply into one puzzle? Or do they actually mean something? I don't know. I tried a bunch of things, the lyrics, the letters, whatever. I still seemed to be missing a step, a clue, something. And I could just sit here and list off more of the random rabbit holes that I looked down, but the end result was always the same. While I certainly had some new findings here and there,

none of it was earth-shattering. Nothing was truly connecting the dots in the way that I would imagine those dots connecting. Wilbur was ultimately right with his phone call to me. I couldn't solve it all. But here's the thing. Just because you don't completely solve every puzzle doesn't mean that you can't win the game. Wilbur may have won some battles here and there,

but he hasn't won the war. Just like you can know the image hidden on a puzzle without having all the pieces, I think there's enough clues on the table at this point to actually solve the main mysteries of this thing. I think I know what happened at the O2 Arena. I think I knew who the fact years are. There's actually two of them.

We'll get to that. And I think I know why everyone is so darn cold all the time. So finally, it's time to talk theories. As you can probably imagine, in absence of a definitive conclusion to the ARG, Wilbur's communities develop some guesses to fill in the blanks of the story. The first comes from the YouTube channel Red Herring. They propose that R and I Fackier are actually two different personalities of Wilbur.

And yeah, I kind of skimmed over it, but at one point in the air g, a new challenger enters the fray, I-Fackier. On Reddit, Wilbur suddenly makes a random comment on a post just saying, I-Fack-Year would love this. I-Fack-Year, I thought it was just R. You know, the guy that wrote the book from earlier. But we learned later from R-Fack-Fackier's completed book cover that R is the son of of iFAC ear, which is also an anagram for Fire Kai. Very clever. Anyway, throughout the entirety of the ARG, Wilbur is seen both with and without glasses, sometimes even switching between wearing and not wearing them in the same video. And when he switches, his demeanor seems to change as well.

When they're on, he comes across as obsessive, but calmer and put together. It's nice when things end with a bow on the top. When they're off, he becomes erratic, impulsive, and aggressive. We love our deadlines here. We love our deadlines, we love them. The theory goes that whatever traumatic event is at the core of this ARG, it may have caused Wilbur to develop dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personalities.

This condition is commonly the result of trauma as the brain actively tries to avoid bad memories. And let me just put in a disclaimer here. This is a real condition that is often very negatively and poorly portrayed in media outlets, usually with scary people who are serial killers being the ones that suffer from it. So please do not fall victim to that stigma, it is not true, it is just made up and over-sensational Anyway, applying this idea to Wilbur's behavior throughout the series, a lot of things seem to fit. Wilbur only ever talks about the embarrassing incident when he isn't wearing glasses. Same thing when he's demanding the firing of Kai.

Or celebrating getting the job as editor. All no glasses. During a Reddit review video, Wilbur looks for his reading glasses and then states, I've never earned reading glasses. Implying that this persona isn't aware of the other. This is the real Wilbur, the one who wants to escape, who wants to forget. This is IFAC-EAR. Our FAC-Eer then is the ALT personality, the other persona, the son or product of I-FAC-Eer. It's a persona that's more emotionally distant, more collected. Honestly, I think that this is right.

The evidence for it is too hard to deny, and it explains a lot of the weird factier stuff. But clearly, it's not the whole story because we still do not know what is the inciting incident. Well, for that, we need to introduce one final video, one brought to light by online user Christian. This video on Wilbur's music channel features a voicemail from a girl who asks Wilbur out on a date. We haven't we on a date? There's like what you would like to go to a pack the burgers tonight. And that's it? We never hear about this girl again. It is a one-time random event that, for followers of Wilbur's work, seemingly goes nowhere.

And it's this random phone call, this out-of-nowhere voice message that I believe serves as both the beginning and end of the Wilbur ARG. Using both theories as a base, I think I've got the complete picture. This mystery girl asks Wilbur to meet her at a burger place, which let's assume is in Greenwich near the O2 Arena sometime in December. Remember, this has to have happened before December 16th, but after October due to his relationship with Kai changing. It also links to the poem, The Raven, that kick this whole thing off. Distinctly, I remember it was upon the bleak December. The voicemail from this girl seems to be quite awkward, but to me it comes across almost as mocking. She's mocking is social awkwardness.

It's kind of like when you're in school and the popular girl pretends to be interesting. interested in you and then it all comes out as just being a prank. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be what happened here. Wilbur's social awkwardness meant that he wasn't able to read the situation correctly. He clearly likes the girl and so he showed up, which links in our first Edgar Allan Poe poem from the ARG, Yula Lee, a poem about a lonely man finally feeling whole thanks to a woman. Quote, I dwelt alone in a world of moan, now doubt, now pain, come never again. This then leads us to a second Edgar Allan Poe poem, Annabelle Lee.

I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea. By the sea, in this case the Thames River, and referring to both himself and a mysterious girl. However, when he does go, she reveals that it was all a joke, causing this moment to be marked in Wilbur's mind as embarrassing. He was humiliated and in a moment of rage, pushes the girl, which causes her to fall off the edge and into the cold water of the Thames below.

Wilbur panics, he dives in to try and get her out, but he's unable to. She's not able to swim and slowly begins to drown with the last thing Wilbur hearing being the words, I'm so cold. This explains the pictures of the O2 arena and the word oxygen written in the geocash notes. She drowned in the Thames near the O2 arena, lacking O2 or oxygen, which also fittingly ties into that Annabelle Lee poem again, where the girl dies, cold and wet. Quote, that the wind came out of the cloud by night, chilling and killing my Annabelle Lee, and so all the night tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride

in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea. All of this would also explain why Wilbur keeps saying, I'm so cold. This event has been burned into his mind, those last words, the embarrassing moment, he himself being cold from the water. A traumatic moment so strong that it causes a mental break.

It's also a moment that would force him into hiding, explaining the knocking on his door in the first video. He's running from the law. Or at least it feels like he's running from it. He's actually running from a guilty conscience. Kind of like Poe's Tell-Tale heart. So any sort of knocking on him, the door could be the police or, you know, just a threat, and so he panics and leaves every time.

However, there is one small snag in this whole plan. Kai. Kai knows about Wilbur. After all, we know that they met in October that year, which is also probably when he met that mystery girl. She does say that they haven't been on a date in forever. So, Kai knows this girl. Maybe he was even in the prank that they were pulling.

And so he knows that she's now missing. When Wilbur suddenly realizes this, he plots to have him removed from his point of influence as Jack's editor. Paranoid that this information will get out. When Jack doesn't immediately fire Kai, Wilbur takes it upon himself to remove him the only way he knows by throwing Kai into the same part of the Thames. However, Kai is a strong swimmer.

Wilbur, knowing that he can't get rid of Kai, is now forced to face his actions. In his last video of the ARG, Wilbur talks about how, even though the part of him that people know will be dead, he'll still be here. This is where I die. I'll still be here. This part of me dies here. And the part of him that will now be dead is, of course, our factier. Who now no longer has a place in this world, as Wilbur accepts what he did.

And so as he begins to explain the story to us, our factier disappears. And to round it all up, I present to you the last Edgar Allan Poe poem, Lenore. A poem about not mourning for the dead, but instead coming to terms with death and celebrating the life that once was. Avant, tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,

but waft the angel on her flight with a pain of old days, from grief and groan to a golden throne beside the king of heaven. All of this would make sense as Wilbur is coming to terms not only with the death of the mystery girl, but also with the death of a part of himself. Plus, it allows us to solve the mystery about why R. Fakir's book is called L's Lovely 3. All three of the poems I've mentioned, Yula Lee, Annabelle Lee, and Lenore are all well-noted for their literary technique of emphasizing the L-sound in their title.

Three Edgar Allan Poe poems with lovely L sounds. L's Lovely Three, all wrapped in an energy that kicked off with a heck of a lot of Poe references. So, is it the right answer? Wilbur wouldn't tell me because he didn't want to give me anything the wider community didn't also have, which absolutely respect. But I also think deep down he knows that the best mysteries are the ones that never get solved. I mean, duh, look at Fnaf. In the meantime, remember, it's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.