Game Theory - The Kindergarten Family Secret (Kindergarten 2)

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he solves the biggest mystery in Kindergarten 2! *Credits:* Writers: Stephanie Patrick Editors: Tyler Mascola, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Sharpen up your pencils without breaking the tip off in the machine, because today's school is back in session. We're talking kindergarten, and the question on everyone's mind, what is the deal with Nuggett? What are you doing here? Nugget thought he took care of all the people at the end of his last game. Nugget does not want another Nugget series. Nugget has some delicious golden rounds in the microwave right now. Cannot be bothered with your Paltry series. But Nugget, what's just a good? Else would we talk about? It's Kindergarten. This is practically your game.

There's not like there's a whole lot of story here to work with. No story? No story! No story! Oh, my little dumb-dum! Of course there's lore here. There's a story at work in my game that you lose your little pebble brain. This theory goes deeper than the Nugget cave and gets darker than the inside of Agnes' dumpster. Yes, Nugget has quite the theory for you today. Internet? Welcome to Game Theory, where today we're revisiting one of my favorite games of the year, Kindergarten. Now, I don't know about you, but to me, Kindergarten was that special time in life where things were just a little bit simpler.

When the edgiest life got was a pair of safety scissors and the coolest kids were the ones walking around with clear gel glue in their art box. But if video games are to be believed, this formative year of education has certainly got a bit more cutthroat since I was last in school. Apparently, it's now a world where the adults are all out to get ya. And the other kids are hiding weaponized lasers just waiting for their chance to assert the playground dominance. I guess we've really adopted the mantra of survival of the fittest in our school systems. Anyway, if you're not familiar with kindergarten or its sequel, first off, just go play the games. Catch up. They're short, they're cheap, and they absolutely deserve to be played through to completion. And heck, in most of the endings, lots of children wind up on the wrong end of the janitor's mop, so to speak.

Which, you know, it's kind of the tent. programming for this channel, meaning that you're probably gonna enjoy your gameplay experience. The premises of both kindergarten and kindergarten 2 are to basically survive the day while helping your fellow classmates and teachers with totally brand safe plots that they all have in place, which include finding more mystery pills, growing their black market empire, or brutally finishing off their twin brother in a bid to claim sole ownership over their dad's billion dollar corporation. You know, typical activities for a normal five-year-old. Kindergarten 2 features the familiar faces who managed to survive the first game. Bugs the bully, Jerome the ex-principle's son, mean girl Cindy.

The best one, Nugget. Sure, smart salesman Monty, plot device Lily. Ooh, Nugget likes the pretty Lily. If you say so, since I'm not in an age bracket, judge the looks of preschoolers, as well as adults like the drug addled Miss Applegate, murder-prone janitor. But the sequel also introduces some new faces into the mix, like the principal who experiments on kids, her daughter bot, Professor Giant Forehead, and Bob, a, well, just a really nice janitor.

Yeah, he's just really sweet, so you know he's not gonna last too long in this world. As the game unfolds, we piece together information that helps to build backstories for many of the characters that are a lot deeper than you'd expect for an 8-bit game that only takes a few hours to play. For instance, we know that Cindy's background is littered with domestic issues, drinking, divorce. We know that Miss Applegate has a long-standing struggle with substance abuse and that Penny underwent some horrific physical trauma that made her into the Android that she is today. But of all the characters, no one's backstory is more intriguing, and that Penny underwent some horrific, that she is more intrigued. and more heavily guarded than the janitors. I mean, even though we end up fighting giant sci-fi monsters in the cave under the school building by the end of the game, the janitor really is the game's main antagonist, as he ruthlessly mows down students and faculty alike, even taken out his fellow janitor Bob. It is the janitor's code after all. Told you Bob wasn't long for this world. In kindergarten one, we quickly established that the janitor regularly bumps off children for little to no cause. Everything from talking to him too much to correcting his grammar. He stayed at several times that he's not even supposed to be in mop length of children. As we help him to forge his trail of destruction, small bits and pieces of his backstory get leaked out.

But it's nothing all that meaningful, at least until one random line in kindergarten too. Reminds me of my son, dirty, ugly, and I gave him away. Excuse me, what? The murderous janitor has himself a secret son? I don't know what's the biggest revelation here. That he has a kid, that he didn't kill the kid, or that he found himself a lady friend who was willing to meet him in the room closet in the first place. You know what I mean. Regardless, this is a huge reveal for a character that's largely remained shrouded in old, cranky, murdery mystery. Now, it could just be a cool Eastering. A throwaway line mixed in for the lulls and to lightly flesh out this mysterious character.

But in these games, the details that you learn about each character tend to factor into the gameplay in one way or another. For instance, you learn that Nuggett has a behavioral disorder that he's being medicated for. But he doesn't take his pills. That information pays off because it again explains why he always has pills ready to give to Miss Applegate. Jerome is an egomaniac in the first game. But again, this pays off when the player can use that hubris to get access to his dad the principal. Likewise in the second game, we learned that Penny was in a tragic accident as a baby, which plays directly into her existence as a robot during the course of that game.

These details don't tend to be random. They're built in so we can either use them as logical clues for gameplay, or at the very least paint a clearer picture of the kindergarten universe. Sure, the characters in these games may be relatively thin, but the details that we learn about them certainly aren't arbitrary. So with that in mind, it seems fair to ask, is there a connection between the janitor's backstory and what we see happening in the game? In other words, we know that the janitor has himself a secret son that he gave up at an early age out there somewhere.

Could that son be one of the kids that we see in either of these two kindergarten games? To find out, I scoured every storyline and every dialogue tree across both, these games to see if any other characters dropped hints about their backgrounds. Details that would potentially imply that they were abandoned by an evil, hateful rage-fueled member of the custodial staff. And shockingly, I think I found it. I think we have ourselves not just a viable candidate, but a probable one. Kindergarten's most closely held secret is that the janitor has a son, a son that attends the very school he's working at.

He doesn't even realize it. And that, my friends, is what we're exposing today. Like an episode of Maury, we're opening up that Manila envelope to tell the janitor that yes, He IS THE Father to one of the kids that you see up on stage right now. But which one? Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Given the janitor's age, Monty notes in kindergarten 1 that he's an octogenarian which puts him in his 80s, almost no one is off limits, but the janitor does specifically say that he abandoned a son. So that immediately eliminates all the female characters across both games.

We won't include the hall monitors as an option here because we never really learn all that much about them, other than one like smoking, cats, and smoky cats. Same goes for all the generic kids that are being used in experiments underneath the school. They're just not important enough for us to care. So stay in your test tubes like good little kids. So with that, our list of potential secret sons looks like this. Billy, Bugs, the twins, Felix and Ted, Jerome, Bonte, and Ozzie. Equipped with our father and a list of potential sons, it's time to play reverse Mama Mia and match the kid to the parent. Now, we can take some of these out of contention pretty quickly. Billy is known to be a twin with his sister Lily,

and the janitor never mentions also abandoning a girl, so we're gonna take him on the list. Same goes with Felix and Ted. The janitor says he abandoned a son and not sons. We also know that Jerome's father was the principal from kindergarten 1, so that knocks him out of contention, and already we're down to half of our original list of contestants on who's your daddy! Monty, Ozzie, and Bugs. The new guy in this trio is Ozzie, who we meet for the first time,

in kindergarten 2, which also happens to be the game where we first learn about the janitor's secret son. Coincidence? I think so. Ozzie's whole MO is that he doesn't trust the new kids, which, to be honest, is probably a good decision, considering that they help forward plots that get him bumped off in multiple different play-throughs. The only other things that we learn about Ozzie is that he's got himself some OCD, a bad case asthma, and that his mom runs a successful company. The janitor never mentions anything about any of these things. In fact, the two characters never interact at all, which would make it a pretty difficult theory to float. Not even I can stretch that far this time. Moving on to Monty. We actually have ourselves the complete opposite story. Whereas Ozzie and the janitor have no connection whatsoever, Monty and the janitor are constantly at odds with each other. We know in the first game that the janitor sells Monty the school supplies, so they're briefly in business together.

But when Monty corrects the janitor's spelling, all alliances are thrown out the window. In kindergarten two, Monty gets himself some revenge by blasting the janitor out of existence with a laser. So, unlike Ozzy, there's at least some history here to go off of, but let's be honest, the two share absolutely no traits whatsoever. Monty's a smart, savvy, extremely literate five-year-old who's more interested in becoming a killer businessman than becoming a killer killer. So it doesn't make much sense that he'd be related to our old buddy the janitor who is violent and street smart, yes, but is definitely not book smart. Monty solves problems with his mind. The janitor solves problems with his In fact, in Kindergarde 1, Monty's mission is the only non-violent mission in the game, so I think that takes him pretty squarely out of contention.

Leaving us with only one real contender left, Bugs. And as a viewer of the show, you've probably come to expect that I've saved the best for last, and you'd absolutely be right. At a superficial level, it's interesting to note that Bugs and the Janitor are the only two male characters across both games with gray hair. Sure, that could be because the janitors in his 80s, But for bugs, a five-year-old kindergartner, it's an odd detail. Especially given that none of the other kids have any sort of gray hair.

Nugget, by the way, is canonically a blonde. Just in case you were wondering. My locks are indeed golden and luxurious. On top of that, from going through all the dialogue in both games, the only characters in the game who are considered ugly enough to make comment on it are, you guessed it, the janitor and bugs. First, in kindergarten one, the janitor mentions that, you don't want to wake up in 20 years and look.

look like me, do ya. He also specifically mentions that his baby was ugly. Then again in kindergarten 1 we have Monty telling the player that I wouldn't want to look like bugs either. But obviously all of this is superficial and tenuous, right? Two ugly characters with gray hair big wolf. No amount of mild insults is gonna make bugs the janitor's son so we need to look a little bit deeper for something that's really gonna stick. Luckily for us, and tragically for bugs, we learn very quickly in the first game that bugs comes from a broken home. It's very clear clearly established that Bugs was abandoned by his dad at an early age, saying, quote,

My dad will come back. He just went to the store to get some cigarettes, is all. Abandoned, just like the janitor abandoned his young son. And don't you dare suggest that his deadbeat dad was anything but a stand-up guy, because if you do, Bugs is gonna beat the snot out of you, leading to his second connection with both dear old dad and also the janitor, solving problems with violence. Bugs is the school bully largely because of his disappearing dad. He says repeatedly throughout the first game that he resorts to violence purely because it's going to make his dad proud. My dad will come back. Get out of here, I'll beat you so hard, I'll make him proud.

And again, in a different section of the game... What do you want? Come to make more jokes about my dad before I beat you to death? He'll be so proud of me. Unlike Monti and Ozzie, Bugs just seems to have an inbuilt violence streak, just like our favorite member of the school custodial staff, who's spends all day threatening to pound, punch, or stab kids to get what he wants. Interestingly enough, research in the real world from places like the University of Washington have shown that kids that are exposed to violence or come from homes with domestic issues

are statistically more likely to engage in violence with their peers in the real world. In other words, kids who get bullied at home are more likely to be the bully at school. Now, I'm certainly not implying that all kids who witness violence go on to become bullies in the real world, but for our purposes, bugs as the classroom bully is statistically more likely to have had a violent parent. A parent who solves problems just like our good buddy the janitor over here. But not only as bugs violent, he also has a long-standing history of covering his tracks in much the same way that the janitor hides his crimes. In both kindergarten 1 and 2, we see the

janitor burying bodies himself or we help aid and abet him in doing so. And once you know it, in kindergarten 1 we do the same thing with bugs, where we're enlisted to try and convince Nugget to hide a bloody knife for us on Bugs' behalf in the Nugget cave. While the players talking to Bugs about the cover-up, he says, You want this thing hidden where no one will ever find it? Trust me, I know from experience. Confirming that this isn't Bugs' first time at the murder weapon hide-in rodeo, and it's a line that could have just as easily come out of the janitor's mouth. But if good looks and Sharon a love for committing murderous violence and subsequently covering it off

isn't enough to prove that these two are cut from the same branch of the family tree, Sunny and Pop here also share a few other specific habits that clinch their relationship. In Kindergarten 1, the player needs to trade with the janitor for a powerful laser gun. And depending on your inventory, you can actually offer a few different things in this trade. The first one is pills, but the janitor isn't interested in those. They're also not particularly relevant to us since Bugs never mentions a propensity for pills. The next option is cigarettes, which the janitor says that he'll take in a pinch, but adds, some siggies, ha, haven't had one of these since I was your age.

In the moment, it seems like kind of a ridiculous thing to say, until you realize that this habit apparently runs in the family. At another point in the game, you have an opportunity to foist over the same cigarettes to Bugs in the schoolyard, to which he responds, I've been robbing kids so I could buy these from Monty. Meaning that Bugs is actually smoking at his age, just like his dear old dad did. He's the only character who smokes other than the much older Hall Monitor, so it's an unusual detail to include here.

But the janitor's preferences in this trade-off actually give us our biggest smoking gun for this theory. In that same laser trade-off moment, the last thing that you can offer the janitor is a flask Which he readily accepts saying that Cindy's got the best stuff. Okay, give me the flask and you've got yourself a deal. It's the only thing that he actually wants Which doesn't necessarily seem out of character, but takes on a whole different light when you consider what Bugs misses most about his dad. At recess, Bugs tells the player, I miss everything about him. Even the way he used to drink excesses He goes on to tell the player how he cherishes the memory of his mom forcing his dad to use a breathalyzer as well as the flask that his dad used to use to get drunk Wait a minute a flask you say a flask? Oh, it's just like the one my dad used to get completely hammered from Thanks buddy when you offer to give bugs the flask

He's so grateful to have this connection with his dad that he gives you a monster Monk card I'm telling you if the bugs janitor connection wasn't intentionally put into this game in the first place well There's enough evidence here to at least make a theory about it and definitely include it in Kindergarten 3 Anyway, you slice it in all of these cases Bugs and the janitor are the only two characters to share these sorts of preferences Really there's some of the only characters to share any sort of preferences in this game at all and from their looks the psychology of a scarred childhood the fact that Bugs was abandoned by his father figure at an early age the smoking as well as the true smoking gun the flask all the Evidence points to Bugs being the janitor's long-lost or rather long-abandoned son.

The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. And if Bugs somehow manages to survive an entire year of kindergarten, well, we can probably expect him to follow in his father's bloody footprints. Now my only regret is that I couldn't also tie Agnes the dumpster hag in as Bugs' mother. But, you know, there just wasn't enough evidence. That's okay, Deary! Wait for the third game! Something tells me I'll be back.

And that's no theory! No, it's not. but this is a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.