Game Theory - Is This Game Hiding A Cult? (Kanye Quest 3030)

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the sinister underbelly of the Kanye West fangame, Kanye Quest 3030! Credits: Writer: Matthew Patrick and Ryan Sheehan Editors: Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

internet welcome to game theory where today i got the airplane passes the aviator glasses and the kanea quotes are going to be flying out to the masses as you know we've been covering a lot of argy's recently but all of them pale in comparison to how scary and bizarre today's topic is i'm talking about kanya quest 30 30 one of the internet's most frustrating unsolved mysteries on the surface this game is everything that meme culture loves in the game you play play as Kanye West, who, while taken out his trash one morning, falls into a wormhole and is transported to the year 30-30, where the United States is ruled by a clone of the rapper Lil B, who's declared himself a god. So Kanye puts together a party of other rappers to defeat Lil B and save America.

The game plays a lot like Pokemon, including random encounters where clones of Jay-Z, Nikki Minaj, Snoop Dog, and others will attack using the power of smooth flows and spicy disses. It's creative, it's funny, it's full of jokes about 2013 hip-hop culture, And it's also hiding a secret gameplay mode designed as a cult recruitment tool. Yep, a mode that stayed hidden to the public for nearly two years. And that, my theorist, is what we start exploring today. Is Kanye West's unofficial meme game actually a secret weapon created by a cult looking to indoctrinate new members?

Now, I ain't saying he a cult leader, but he'd be acting like a mad preacher. Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Kanye Quest 3030 is a 2013 game published by a mysterious person only going by the name Phoenix. Developed an RPG maker and only available through Tumblr, this thing made moderate levels of news across the blogosphere, but was relatively unknown over here on YouTube. Dunkie was one of the only people to really do a dedicated video on it. Kanye Quest 3030 is the 3,000th and 30 installment of the popular Kanye Quest RPG series. And that was it. Laugh of the jokes, struggle through the janky balancing like so many other RPG maker projects before and after it and then move on. You know, it was fun for like a week.

Or so people thought. Roughly two years after the game's release, it was discovered that by talking to an anonymous NPC in the game, you could unlock a completely hidden and much more sinister game mode. Early in the game, talking to this NPC prompts them to ask, what do you want to do? Pretty innocuous, right? You'd probably fill in the answer with something dumb like poop,

and nothing really happens from there. But if you respond with the word ascend, things take a very unexpected turn. You're transformed into a butterfly and teleported to a hidden level, filled with haunting music. There you receive the following secret message. Congratulations. You have proven yourself to be an open-minded and curious thinker. We must apologize for deceiving you, but we can reveal that the game you were playing until this point was a front constructed to protect what you are currently accessing.

We must ask that you do not reveal this area to the public. Oops, my bad. By selecting the yes option, you agree to participate and not reveal information. Okay, theorists, I'm gonna hit yes to this invitation, but we're all going to have to collectively agree here to keep this to ourselves. Got it? Hitting yes continues the message. The following is a thought exercise designed to help teach you something beneficial. By undertaking this exercise, you will hopefully be affected in a positive way. Due to the nature of the exercise, this something cannot be revealed immediately. This exercise may or may not be restricted to this software. It is important to remember that the purpose of this exercise is to benefit you. You will not be timed. We cannot provide any more

information except that we wish you good luck. You may begin now. Welcome to your ascension. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not in Kansas anymore. When exploring this hidden pyramid-shaped level, you find that it contains multiple computers asking for eight character inputs. To the south of the pyramid is a room made of four squares that, when stitched together, reveal a QR code. Unfortunately, even back in 2015, the QR code link was dead. I checked the Wayback Machine and other internet archives, but sadly it seems whatever was on this site in 2013 may have been the lost, or is at least beyond my means to recover it. Believe me, we've tried, others have tried.

If this information is out there and you know how to find it, post it in the comments, but most likely it was the start of an ARG puzzle sequence that would lead to passwords for each of the computers around the room. So how then do we unlock the secrets of this room if the website's dead? And why would anyone assume that this is all associated with some sort of cult behavior? Well, it all goes back to the person who discovered this area of the game in the first place. Back in January of 2015, an anonymous user on the website Pacebin posted that they had found this hidden level while data mining the game's

source code, and that the whole thing was connected to a cult known as ascensionism. They included tons of information, including the cult's website, blog posts, and a link to the official record label of ascensionism on Bancamp, all using the logo of an eye with a pyramid at the center. And while the cult connection might seem random at first, it quickly becomes apparent that this thing was waiting in plain sight since the very beginning. Going back to the original Kanye Quest 3030 trailer from July 20th, 2013, we see a flash of the eye at the very end.

You see it? Right there. It's the flash. And wait, did you hear the code? Let me play it again. It's Morse code. Morse code that translates to the word ascend. Heck, the Morse code for Ascend is also in the description of the Kanye Quest 3030 YouTube page. It's like, come on, internet. Why did this take people 500 plus days to crack? Anyway, don't click on any of those links now. they'll lead to a less savory places. Anyway, via the data mine, this anonymous user was able to find the computer codes for the room, all of which were random words like Sembridge, Bolivia, Ogden, Snowless, Capskin. In total, there were 33 codes that needed to be found. And once input into the game, the player would get a new animation and the alert J-F-ZZ-J-N-MS emerges, along with one final terminal that greets you saying, congratulations you have ascended, thank you for playing,

while prompting for one final password. J-F-Z-Z-J-N-M-S. Come on, that's got to be some kind of code, right? It's not a rot, it's not a playfair or a Caesar using ascend as a cipher. I played around with it for a while, and it actually appears to be a visionary cipher using the keyword XXXIV, yes. 34 in Roman numerals, corresponding to this being the 34th password, and the word yes. You're saying yes to the final step of the puzzle.

Decrypting the text gives you a final passcode, micropia, and once entered, things get real serious. You have proven your worth once again, you have ascended. However further ascension is always possible. If you do not wish to ascend further, your journey ends here. So please close this program by pressing Alt F4 or selecting the No option above. By selecting the Yes option, you agree to participate further, and you grant us permission to interact with your possessions. Would you like to participate?

Over the following two-week time period, we will interact with you and your possessions in several ways. Keep an eye out, as some of these ways may be subtle. Others may not be. We may attempt to contact you directly. If we do this, we will attempt to notify you of our presence using a keyword. If you still consent to participation, please select the yes option above. Do you wish to participate? After selecting yes, you're prompted to give your name, country, city, street name, house number, and zip code. Once you've submitted this information, the game thanks you by name, and we're told to enjoy the next two weeks and await instruction.

A brave member of our team actually did this. Others online have done it as well. To this day, no one has reported anything happening to them. So, what the heck? Oh yeah, it's all a fun ARG game until they start asking you for personal information and threatening to mess with your stuff. Which leads to the question, what is this thing? Just a very, very elaborate prank, an actual recruiting tool a laus a case. 3301 which presented puzzles to the public in the hopes of finding top codebreakers or some obscure cult recruitment tool like many think would a cult actually use an indie video game with hidden elements to recruit a new generation of members does ascensionism as this pseudo religion even exist well let's start with the last one since that one seems to be the easiest to tackle if the cult didn't exist prior to the game case closed right well Google searching for ascensionism now returns many links directly related to Kanye Quest 3030

However, first mention of the cult comes from a draft wiki page submitted in 2006 by a user named Kevin Friels, a full seven years before the release of Kanye Quest. It claims that, quote, Ascensionism is a religious movement stating that human beings can transcend their current limitations, and that doing so is a sacred right and duty of a human being. The website, ascensionism.com is blank today, but according to Whois records, it was active five years before the Kanye Quest 30-30 game was released. We can even find a capture of it from 2011 with the Wayback Machine,

where it described its beliefs as, quote, a state of existence. It's the space between reality and fantasy. The only place that allows all the things that the mind can create to completely coexist with all that reality has to offer, and all that it withholds. It all amounts to nonsense, right? But it's also the sort of nonsense that you could see a cult or pseudo-religious group trying to preach to followers.

Our anonymous Pacebin user also points to a blog that describes ascensionism. And while the article itself isn't dated, using the Wayback Machine, we can see that the main blog has posts about Ascensionism up as early as January 14th, 2011. The blog post our anonymous user linked to shows up in the Wayback Machine on July 24th, 2012. Again, before the release of Kanye Quest. So, using these three different sources, we can definitively conclude that ascensionism as a religious concept certainly predated Kanye Quest and is unlikely to be a creation of the game itself. But could a game like this actually be used as a recruitment tool? Seems odd, right? Really arbitrary. But not only could it be, it's actually fairly common practice for these groups.

The cult Unicult was famous for directing its users to an Etsy shop, where they had to buy applications, which, according to Vice, asked new followers to answer pages of personal questions. Heaven's Gate, a cult that believed its followers could transform and ascend to Heaven, used ideas and phrases from popular science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clark in their recruitment videos, Which again, isn't unlike using a popular musician to get attention and make your cult seem cool. Even the Japanese death cult, Om Shinrikio, produced its own anime to recruit its followers. In short, it isn't a stretch to think that a cult could use video games or pop culture to find new members.

And once you get into the secrets of Kanye Quest 3030, you quickly see that it follows the key tactics cults actually do use to recruit new members. According to New Yorkcult.com, there are eight steps that cults use to indoctrinate new members, with the first four focused on recruitment. So let's go back and take a look at the end of Kanye Quest 3030 with those four steps in mind. Number one, invitation to a non-threatening event. Absolutely applies to Kanye Quest here. This whole side quest starts with the player having to play a silly video game.

And from there, they give us the message by selecting the yes option you agree to participate in an exercise design to help teach you something beneficial. Nothing scarier threatening there, just more of the game to play. Step two, love bombing, where the recruit is showered in praise. And again, this is a solid yes. At each step in the ARG process, the game celebrates your victories and tells you how smart you are. Congratulations. You have proven yourself to be an open-minded and curious thinker.

You have proven your worth once again. You have ascended. Step number three, dangling the prize. In this case, the game is continually teasing that further ascension is always possible. There are higher and higher levels for us to achieve. More and more knowledge of this mystery for us to attain. Absolutely yes here too. And finally, step four, extracting an agreement from you that you want the prize.

Again, Colts work by turning on the boiling water, so to speak, slowly cranking up the heat, asking you to say small, easy, yes as early, so you go deeper and deeper down the well and say yes to bigger and scarier things down the line. And this is what Kanye Quest does too. It starts with the yes to not share information about this room. It then evolves into a yes as we answer bit by bit

all the secret mysteries hidden across the computer rooms and passwords. And then finally, the biggest yes of all. By selecting the yes option here, you agree to participate further, and you grant us permission to interact with your possessions. Would you like to participate? That is a huge request. But at this point, you've already said yes to the game no less than four times. What's one more yes really going to hurt?

Kanye Quest 3030s Hidden Level is certainly unsettling, but it doesn't move into terrifying territory until the game starts asking you for personal information. That, to me, is the part where my blood really starts to. run cold and things get real serious. But what if I told you that RPG maker doesn't have a built-in online component? Yes, the game pauses after you enter your information, but that pause is scripted. You can even see it in the game's code, creating the illusion that it sent your information off to someone. With the copy of the game we were able to get, we tested it to see if it tried to connect to the

internet with network monitoring software, and sure enough, nothing happened. It isn't outside the realm of possibility that someone could have built an online component into RPG maker, but my copy copy of the game, which is meant to be a direct replica of the original, doesn't have that in there. And while sure, the QR code that you scan at the beginning of the ARG sequence could have loaded malicious software onto the computer, why ask for all that information again later? Without the original file or website, it's impossible to say for certain, but something didn't seem to add up here. What makes things even more suspicious, though, is the connections this has to another ARG running at roughly the same time as Kanye Quest. The Pastebin, Anonymous poster who originally hacked into the game and discovered all this ascension stuff,

provided a link to a now-defunct forum called Unfiction. Unfiction was a bulletin board where people would get together to discuss ARG happenings at the time, sort of like what we see today with Discord groups and Reddit pages. And we see that on September 30th, 2013, two months after the release of Kanye Quest, one of the forum members received a mysterious YouTube link to a video all about ascensionism. A video that, unfortunately, is no longer available today. But reading through these old posts and seeing some of the embedded images, we can piece together the tone and feel of how this ARG went.

Scary news stories with hidden binary codes, base 64 decrypting, adjusting the brightness levels of stock images, more QR codes, or your standard fair for this sort of ARG quest. Oddly enough, though, this separate ARG seemed to share strange similarities to Kanye Quest, specifically with keywords like Ogden, Jagtai, Iron, Idol, Pitunz, and more. Words that were random enough that it rules out simple coincidence. It's also worth noting that the ARG link was sent,

to the unfiction user in September of 2013, two months after the release of Kanye Quest. It suggests to me that not only are the two AERGs connected, but that the creator was disappointed people weren't finding the trailhead hidden within Kanye Quest itself, and so instead tried to get more players to the AERG half of the game via more explicit means by dropping it on an AERG specific forum. Something that, I suspect, they try one final time in 2015 via that anonymous pastebin post, that finally got a critical mass of people talking about this thing. Our biggest clue that suggests that anonymous Pacebin user is also our game's creator is timing.

You see, the anonymous poster links to a video showing what happens when you type Ascend at the right moment of the game. The link is to a video on the YouTube channel, Ben 9. But here's the thing. The Ben 9 channel only has that one video. He's never posted anything before or since. And we've seen this sort of thing before with fake YouTube channels created specially for ARGs, specifically with Catastrophe Crow. They tend to have one, maybe two videos on there, and then the ARG related one.

This channel, Ben 9, fits the mold perfectly. What's even stranger, though, is that the YouTube channel posted the video January 29th, 2015. The anonymous Pacebin post about Kanye Quest went up January 28th, 2015, a day before the YouTube link would have even been available. In other words, with all the evidence that we have, I think we can confidently say that Kanye Quest 3030 and the unfiction YouTube ARG had one person in common. Kanye Quest's creator, Phoenix. But who is Phoenix? Are they actually a member of a cult trying to do some recruiting? Are they just an indie game dev making something that's very

convincing and very creepy? So this now becomes the tale of three posts. The original game posted by its creator Phoenix, the YouTube video ARG posted on unfiction, and the 2015 pastebin post, all connected and all likely made by the same person. Three mysteries, three potential ways to find the next clue. And that next clue would be, PayPal. On the unfiction thread, one of the forum members Cheza decided to send one cent to a donation link that they found via the YouTube ARG, knowing that when you donate to PayPal, you get a receipt that's required to have a name on it. And the name Cheza got back was Nicholas Lyons. Nick Lyons, Fee, Nix. Could it be? Ladies and gentlemen, could this be the person who began at all? Who would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for that meddling, fair credit reporting act of 1970?

Now, searching around for active accounts with the name Nick Lyons from 2015 brings you to a profile on bandcamp, featuring links to social media pages for ascensionism records, and sporting the ascensionist imagery of, you guessed it, an eye with a triangle in it. That same site today still sports the eye with a triangle, but now hosts music by someone else named Valerie. And this was a lead that I hadn't seen anyone else run down in any other coverage of Kanye Quest. So a member of our team contacted Valerie, and to our surprise, they responded. and not just responded, but openly admitted to being the creator of Ascensionism.

Suddenly, we started to get all the answers that we'd been looking for. What we're about to read to you are excerpts of our full conversation with them. To protect their anonymity, Valerie didn't actually record these lines. This is just a dramatic reenactment. And what you're hearing underneath and throughout are selections from the Ascensionism Bandcamp page. It would be helpful if you could introduce yourself. I have an idea of who you are in your relation to Nick Lyons, but I want to give you the opportunity to tell people in your own words,

so I can represent you the way you wish to be. Hey, I'm Valerie Shepner Harris. Yuc Lyons is an alias I used in the past for a couple of projects. It's not actually my name and it never was. Originally, that was all it was, an alias. Of all of my work, I never expected that to be the thing that blows up. Tell me all about ascensionism and ascensionism records. What was the inspiration when the project started?

Who worked on it? What were the goals when it started? I have this sort of obsession. I like to have a lot of band camp URLs handy. Part of the reason is I like the idea. of having this sort of disjointed presence, this fragmented maze of random remnants of information and art scattered across many different places, and then not actually telling anyone about them. As for ascensionism specifically, I started projects with a very loose and tangible goal in mind.

My brain was just like religion, cult, ARG, and then I get this urge to make something to relate to that concept and how it feels in my head. Then, when I actually finished the audio, I ended up having to spend weeks thinking of a name, cover, how it should be presented, etc. It doesn't come naturally to me, not like the music itself does. In terms of the actual reception the concept project has gotten, I have the David Lynch approach, honestly. Every interpretation is correct, as long as there is no true interpretation that can be communicated properly through the language. The music currently up on your band camp is very interesting. The change in feelings is striking.

To me, it feels like it's an emotional journey, but what's your intention with the album? Those albums, that was the closest I managed to get to the main driving force behind ascensionism. That being like the idea of being adopted into a cult's religion, putting your life into it, your money, being promised that because you're doing this, everything will be okay, your future will be saved. But then one arbitrary mistake, one thing that goes against the will of some specific circle of people that make the rules, having it taken away from you without question, one of the biggest in particular, Scientology.

The more and more I learn about Scientology, the more it makes my heart ache for the people whose lives have been reduced to nothing because of it. When did you personally become aware of the Kanye Quest 3030 pastebin post that claimed to link your Ascensionism Bandcamp page, an ARG unfiction thread, a cult, and the game together? Have you read the post? Do you have any thoughts on it? Yeah, so Kanye Quest, it's not actually related to me. For a long time, I wanted to make music for games. Because of this, I spent hours and hours finding and talking to folks in random game developer

group chats on Skype, Discord, TeamSpeak, etc. I would say sometimes, hey, feel free to use my work or even just my ideas and your stuff for free. Just make sure you credit me. And with Kanye Quest, it's, I don't really know. I don't know who developed it. I don't know why. I guess they just liked my work and wanted to incorporate it somehow while challenging themselves to implement some weird mechanics into their game. Honestly, I've never played the game.

It wasn't made by a cult. Ascensionism isn't a cult. Maybe someday I can try starting a cult, but that day has not come yet. How did the attention that came from the theories on YouTube affect you? What effects, if any, did they have in the direction of your own art? It meant a lot to see that my work meant so much to so many people, and I often wanted to say something, but I was worried it would just seem like a baseless claim,

especially since during that period of my life, I'd never saved project files, and I deleted stuff constantly. So I worried I wouldn't have any evidence to back anything up. Since then, I've started focusing more on the music under my actual name over aliases. The more I figure myself out as an artist, the more comfortable I am releasing my work without hiding behind a separate page. Obviously, there's merit to anonymity, but you can't have that anonymity and then still get upset when the ignorance that anonymity relies on bite you in the air. You mentioned you have a new project on the way?

For people who have truly enjoyed the projects that you've worked on, is there a way that they can follow you or keep an eye out for the next things that you're working on? The wax divulgents. Most of the details behind it are secret currently. If you like my work, you can follow me at Winter Couplet and anyone is free to reach out at any time. And that, my theorists, puts an end to the story of Kanye Quest. In the end, it wasn't a recruitment tool. It all began with one musician inspired by the human tragedy of cults. Sharing that work in online game forums resulted in a budding game designer named Phoenix to create an ARG,

adopting ascensionist ideas to help make it extra creepy. They packaged it all up into the meme game Kanye Quest 3030, but after two months, got tired of waiting for people to get started, seating the ARG portion out to the unfiction forums. Two years later, they would do the same thing again. They jumped onto YouTube, recorded a video showing how to access the ending, and hammered out a 2,500 word hint to the ARG community to get them started. The post blew up and the ARRG finally achieved the critical mass

that it had been looking for the entire time. Except no one ever really figured it all out. There seemed to never really be an end game to this thing. Just a mysterious work of art that was seated out into the world to keep people guessing. In the end, this was never the story of a cult, but rather the story of two brilliant artists inspired by cults, who created one of the most fascinating, interconnected ARGs ever to be fulfilled. found online. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.