Game Theory - The Bob Mod SOLVED! (Friday Night Funkin)

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he solves Friday Night Funkin's most in-depth mod, with a HIDDEN ARG! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Zach Stewart, and Tom Robinson Editors: Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Jerika (NekoOnigiri), Tyler Mascola, Pedro Freitas, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (viridianrosette) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Wow, that escalated quickly. Internet, welcome to Game Theory, the show that's here to spit rhymes and solve mysteries, and we're all out of rhymes. Today we're looking at a massive AERG mystery that came out of the Friday Night Funkin' mod community. Case you're not familiar, a game mod is anytime someone's been able to manipulate the game's code to change how it behaves and looks, sometimes even creating entirely new stories and gameplay modes.

And to be honest, some of the world's biggest games actually started off as mods. The incredibly difficult Kyzo Mario series, mods of Super Mario World. Both League of Legends and Dota have their origins in a mod for Blizzard's Game Warcraft 3. Even PubG and Daisy started their lives as mods of the ARMA series. Loyal theorists, it's time we talk about literally every FNiff Mod ever versus Bob Week. Uh, yes, that is the actual full title of this thing. Earlier this year, the mod was everywhere. I think part of the reason it gained so much attention is because it's actually designed as a parody of other Friday Night Funkin Mods. Crudely drawn characters, clunky,

crass dialogue. Oh, and memes. All the memes. There's a fart sound effect button because it's so lull random. We go up against the little man whose bonus song is nearly eight minutes straight of breaking glass. Bras, a dancing. Ayo, there's pizza here, meme, and Spotify ads. Want to break from the ads? If you tap now, you'll receive 30 minutes of ad-free music. There's even a character named Ron who is literally a dancing meme folder. His song when cranked up to 1.75 speed, by the way, is my favorite to come out of anything Friday Night Funk and Not gonna lie, the thing is a Bob. This is a certain of my game for...

But the real star of this two-part mod is Bob, a basic black and white animated character who boyfriend compares to dream. And I gotta admit, it's not entirely wrong. I could definitely see the family resemblance. Anyway, the mod uses the same basic progression that you'd expect from a Friday night Funkin' Mod. Boyfriend is introduced to a new challenger. Each song becomes slightly harder, tap arrows to win. Except, Bob is a little bit different. Sure, after you beat him the first time, he becomes a little mad bro, but if you beat him again,

Things go insane. Bob becomes consumed by his anger and transforms into a black blob with photorealistic eyes, teleporting himself, boyfriend, a girlfriend to what can only be assumed as some sort of hellscape. Or at least, that's what we assume. The devs apparently couldn't afford to pay for the cutscene that shows us that part. At this point, there's a huge spike in difficulty as the game just becomes one big creepy pasta. Bob's eyes flash across the screen, you struggle through and if you manage to make it to the end of the song, it just kind of ends. Fortunately for us, though, there's a part two. Few months after part one's release, the Bob mod got itself a sequel titled Bob's Onslaught,

where Bob shows us that he suddenly has control over the game. He makes parts of the UI disappear, elements spin around, he moves the game window, ads open up blocking the player's view, and through it all, the notes come at an inhuman rate. This thing is crazy, and if you somehow manage to beat this insanely difficult challenge, the screen goes black. Bob claims that he has no more tricks for you here. But then things glitch and reveal a Google Drive link.

And this friends is where it gets real weird. Now, this part of the game seems to have been mainly overlooked on YouTube in favor of the fast and nearly impossible gameplay, but you know me, who am I to ignore some random link given to me by a stranger? I followed the link, and boy, oh boy, things go way, way deeper than you first thought. So what's really going on with the Bob mod? Let's find out. When we jump into the drive, we find a slew of documents, images, and sound files for us to investigate. The drive appears to be owned by someone called Lennon Noah,

And by searching through the files, we start to get a sense of who this guy really is. Looking at the file of NOAA family expenses, we learned that this is a family of three. Father Lennon, wife Jess, daughter Jane. Another file, titled Dear Lennon, starts to reveal to us that the family is in trouble. Jess has fears that her husband is starting to grow distant from the family. We learn from another file, Lennon's writings, that the day after the letter was written, Jess and Lennon are on the rocks. She doesn't believe him about something, but what?

Well, by jumping back and forth between all the different files, we can actually assemble a time timeline of events. A few days after Jess and Lenin's fight, we see that Lenin has been blocked from spending family finances after buying a book called How to Clean Carpets, which was prompted from a, quote, liquid accident at work. The next day, he's fired from his job, as evidenced by the pink slip that's found in the folder. And it's here where we just start to get an idea of what Lenin's been up to. Quote, look, man, I don't know what this weird goop in your office is, but you can't do this on company grounds. You barely do work, and you're always too busy with your AI side projects to do any work. Lenin also mentions a lot of these same things in his writings on the same day.

Quote again, these experiments have to work. I've done so much with this goo, it has to work. This AI I've created, I love him so much, he is so smart, I have to bring him to our realm. He will be beautiful. Hmm, an AI, mysterious goo, coming to our realm? Ladies and gentlemen, we've got ourselves in Afton. Afton Alert, After the Weird. Loyal theorists, we've done this dance enough times to know that this is not gonna end well. Lenin is clearly trying to bring his AI Bob to life using some sort of organic goo.

The picture labeled unknown, inside the file, practically confirms this for us. As we see in the black goo, the letters B-O-B. So, is that it? All done, case closed friends? Oh no. This is just the beginning. There's still four files left,

a sound file called Plant, a picture file and document called Jane's drawing and Jane, and finally a picture called Didi-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- You get the point. And it's here that things start to change from a little story Easter egg to one of the most creative, fully-blown ARGs that I've covered on the channel. Let's start with the audiophile plants. And if you have headphones, you might want to turn the volume down very briefly.

I just want to give you a taste of what this thing sounds like, because it's pretty unusual, but also a bit sharp in piercing. Sounds like it could be Morse code, right? Or maybe plugging it into a spectrogram will give us an image. We've done both of those. methods solving mysteries in the past, but nope, not this time, neither of those will actually result in anything. This is actually something that's a little bit more complicated. The giveaway of what this is are those high-pitched beepings that happen at a regular occurrence. They're indicative

of something called a slow-scan television signal, basically a way to send and receive pictures via radio waves. If you see a spectrogram that looks a little something like this, with a header that sounds different, that's used to calibrate the signal, and then a repeated series of pulses that are used to synchronize the signal, you know that you're likely dealing with an SSTV feed. So let's just listen to the audio file briefly one last time so you can hear that header and also identify those synchronizing pulses. Pretty cool, right? Okay, we're now officially done with obnoxious audio files so you can set your headphones back to normal. Now, in the early days of space exploration, SSTV was actually used to transmit images of the far side of the moon. Nowadays, it's not really used that much since, you know, you can just send an email attachment.

And I gotta say honestly, in all my lore hunting and ARG solving, it's the first time that I've ever really encountered this method of clue solving. So, really awesome job there, developers. A plus for creativity, just really stellar. How do you solve this sort of thing? Luckily, there are online converters. Converting it, we get the following picture. Next up is the DDD file, which is much simpler. It's just a squashed image of a URL that's missing a few letters. Which leads to a website that seems like it's all about the memes,

but actually contains another piece of information. Using the classic technique of up in the contrast levels, we find that down in the bottom right, it says just noaspage.card.co. Which contains a link to an audio file called Dispense. This one isn't ear splitting like plant was, so here's a clip that you can listen to. You can hear a robotic voice reading out a long string of unrelated words. This is actually a code written in what's called the NATO alphabet, A, Alpha B, Bravo, C, Charlie, etc.

It's a type of spelling alphabet, basically as a way to spell something over audio-only signals without the letters getting confused with each other, since, you know, a lot of them sound alike. The result gives you this absolutely glorious phrase, Edmuchshieh. You know what? I'm just gonna. to put it up here on the screen because it's a bunch of gobbly gook. Clearly there is more here that needs to be solved. So what? Is it base 64? Is it a substitution cipher? Maybe a visionary cipher for feeling spicy? Nope. Again, none of the usual suspects work. I told you, this was a really

creative, really wild mystery. I was stumped until I looked at the other clues that were left in the folder. One of the last things that we haven't talked about is the file jane. And honestly, there's a reason why it's just the daughter's homework assignment. And let's just say it's not going to get a grade worthy of hanging up on the refrigerator. Throughout the page we see Jane making a bunch of misspellings, saying that she's learning the alphabet, notably leaving off the last letter of her practice alphabets, the Z on the first, and the A on the second. Something tells me that teacher is going to have to break out the red pen when grading this one, but teacher Matt Pat's here and ready to give her an A plus, because all of those missing letters and misspellings are a whole lot

of ARG red flags. The only question is what do they mean? Well, Jane says that her favorite game is four square with a hyphen, and that is our biggest clue of all. You see, there's a type of puzzle called a four square cipher that involves four squares of letters, ideally arranged in a grid of five by five. The eagle-eyed among you may have already worked out that a five-by-five grid works out to 25 letters, but there are 26 letters in the alphabet. And this is when you realize that's why jane's alphabet leaves a letter out of each one, which means it's time to make the squares. The forward alphabet will go in the upper right-hand corner, and the backwards cipher will actually go. into the bottom left. In the other two blocks we'll use a standard alphabet with I and J combined, which is a traditional way to solve these sorts of puzzles. And yeah, we have ourselves a giant grid of letters. Now what? Well, now it's time for that handy

phrase from earlier, where we're gonna use it like coordinate points, taking each two letters section to find points in our new grid. As an example, we start with the letters E and D. To decode this, we actually need to find the E in our first cipher text box in the top right and D in our second cipher text box in the bottom left. Now we see where those two overlap in our plain alphabets to get the letter C. We do this again in the lower alphabet block to get the letter Z. This makes the first part of the deciphered text to be CZ. MU becomes LH, CX becomes C C C, and so on and so on and so on until we end we end up with something that barely looks better than what we started with. Notice the repeated word capital and the equals at the end? Well, if we take the capitals and turn the letter after it into a capital letter and the equals at the end into an equal sign, we get something that looks closer to this. Now it is for. finally in base 64, which means there's one last step to decoding it. But you also have to lose that X at the end because it was just a placeholder to make sure that the text worked out properly.

Anyway, blah blah blah, there's a lot of smaller details here. Long story short, you eventually wind up with a paste bin link that leads you to another Google Drive. This one is ominously titled Case File. And it finally gives us the information we needed to have a complete picture of everything that happened. From reading the files, we learned that the black goo wasn't enough to bring Bob back to life. He needed a host. So Lenin pulled a Norman Osborne and tested it on himself. When that wasn't enough, he took his wife and child,

with the sole purpose of sacrificing them to Bob, as confirmed by the character profile file. However, that document also reveals something else. A few days later, his daughter Jane was found covered in black goo, heavily disfigured and in a coma, but still alive. Apparently, she wasn't fit to be the host for Bob and she escaped, but Jess and Lennon remain missing. And that's where the story ends.

There's still some clues that don't have places like the SSTV signal image doesn't really connect to anything and a symbols image that appears in the folder entitled evidence, but weirdly, this does seem to be the end of the story. And then, of course, as I was writing the script, something new was added to the mystery. The developers asked for it to stop. Now, clearly visible in the original Google Drive folder is a subfolder labeled ARG spoilers. The developers go over all the story details and then clearly state, Lenin has nothing to do with the Canon of Bob Mod or FNiff. Sorry for the weird ARG. See, according to the developers, the ARG started as something small, just some inside jokes in the source code of the game that led them to think that they could make a full ARG.

Soon, they'd accomplished exactly what they wanted, but in their words, quote, it eventually started to grow in popularity and started taking a toll onto ARG dev's mental state. I just wanted to get this thing to a close so I can put my mind at ease. As someone who's worked on multiple ARGs in the past, I can totally understand this. Things very easily get out of hand very quickly. But I still want to do this episode to bring this whole thing to light because this was, without exaggeration, one of the most clever ARG experiences I've yet seen online. It also answered a lot of questions regarding the sinister nature of the Bob mod,

which I thought was really cool, even if it doesn't wind up being official canon. And lastly, this note made me think, maybe things aren't quite done with Bob. You see, they say that the ARG has nothing to do with Bob's in-game lore, but there is still one thing I haven't covered. If you beat the first Bob mod on Hard Mode, you're given a web address. Bob is mad. This page gives you some clues to find a second website,

and then another, and another, and another. You end up at a site where it tells you that Bob is happy you get here. Seems sweet, but a problem occurs if you keep digging. There's a hexadecimal code at the bottom of the page, and decoding it leads you to yet another web page where Bob states, What, how you hear, I am angry. If you keep going by solving binary, Morse, and base 64 codes, Bob gets madder and matter until he gets covered in goo and disappears.

Leaving the message, you do realize what you've done. The devs learned that Bob doesn't like people looking into his origins, and when they do, he disappears to claim that person, as his next victim. So in some weird way the ARG being called over may actually just be another part of the ARG. I don't really think it is, but from a story perspective, there's truly no way to canonically end this ARG without it feeling like an actual legit part of the lore. Because the ARG and finding out about Bob's past is just part of that process. Kind of like a weird catch-22 scenario. Anyway, Bob clearly likes attention. He wants people to play with him, but he doesn't want those people to look into his backstory. And when they do, he hops over to his new host. And so now, Here we are talking about him. Is that a good thing? Are we making him happy or by talking about his past are we making him mad? Anyway the whole thing's over now and it wasn't canon anyway so it really shouldn't matter