Game Theory - The Mystery of Minecraft's Haunted Discs (Minecraft)

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he discusses the Minecraft corrupted music discs! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: BanditRants, Tyler Mascola, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Shannon (Bomboi) and Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Since the beginning, there's been... ...narrhoi... One mystery long unanswered in the world of Minecraft. One set of game design decisions so creepy, so disturbing, that they feel like they come from a completely different game. It's a riddle that one's... ...exposes more of the hidden lore that's buried deep inside this world. Today we're covering the mystery of the broken discs 11 and 13.

Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. Can you dig it? So, last Minecraft episode, we started an epic quest. Well, everyone else gets to play around with their giant meatballs and deadly skyboxes. Here we are doing the important work, solving the hidden lore that's buried inside this game. Because it is there! I started to prove that last time, and it is just waiting to be unlocked by us. Today, I want to talk about the music discs. For those of you who don't know, music discs are unique items found randomly in chests that can be played in jute boxes to, you know, liven up what's otherwise a very quiet, serene game.

No, not that. The music discs are something to really set the mood. Uh, wrong move, guys. Perfect. These discs can also be dropped by creepers when they're killed by arrows shot from either a skeleton or a stray. It's an odd spawn mechanic, but alright, we'll just go with it. Let that beat drop, creeper! Literally, creeper, let it drop. You don't even have hands!

How can you be holding this thing in the first place? Other than that, though, there's really no other way to obtain them. They can't be crafted, after all. Now, all of that isn't particularly interesting, right? But where this goes from just being another item to a full-on gaming creepy pasta is right here. Dix 11 and 13. You see, most music discs in the game have fairly innocuous names, music, like blocks, mall,

and cats. One of the first two music discs ever added into the game, but along with cat, there was one other simply titled 13. And unlike all the other ambient chill-out music, this one was, well, unsettling. Outside of it, not having a name and also being numbered after what many considered be an unlucky or evil number, so much so that airplanes and hotels don't even have 13th rows and floors. Fun fact, check it out next time you're in a hotel or an airplane. 13 also cuts off abruptly right in the middle of the track. And when it comes back, we're suddenly hit with echo-y, otherworldly noises,

leading many people to assume that this was a record left by the alien-like Enderman. But then the mystery got even deeper. When version 1.0.0 came out, 9 more music tracks were added to the game, with yet another disc going unnamed. This time, it was disc 11. And where number 13 was mildly unsettling, 11 outright screams to us that, We're not in the overworld anymore, friends. Starting right off the bat with desperate running, heavy breathing, and coughing.

And here all along I thought that Minecraft was for kids. Can you imagine finding this as a child playing this game? Putting it on the jute box, being excited to hear what you just found, and then, what? You suffer from PTSD because of what you hear. Actually, I probably don't even have to ask you to imagine this sort of thing. I'm sure many of you watching probably had that exact same experience when you were playing the game as a kid. Bring in the cuboidal nightmares. I hear no man, but that's me.

Adding to the mystery, 11 is broken, shattered to pieces. These two discs led many people to conclude one of two things. Either they were documenting someone who was attacked by Enderman, or they were of someone being chased around by Hero Brine, the ghostly glitch that many say haunted the game's code in the early days of mining and crafting. But that's largely where the discussion of these things stopped. Guesses. To my knowledge, no one has truly taken a scientific look at analyzing these two

to try and uncover the mysteries that they contain. So today I am doing exactly that. Using a combination of audio analysis, visualization tools, meta-game analysis, and just good old logic, to try and end the childhood nightmare that was these two discs. And in the process, I'm hoping that what we find continues to unravel the mysteries of the deeper lore hidden within this game's files. Now, before we get into any deep analysis of the audio itself, I want to start by actually analyzing these soundtracks. Visually. Discs 11 and 13, while they are certainly creepy sound files, they're not filled with the types of sounds that would make me immediately think to put them through a spectrogram. However, there was one finding that I wanted to put to the test for today's theory, because I was kind of skeptical about the results that they had.

A French Minecrafter named B. Sidro supposedly made a spectrogram of the sound files and said that he found both a creeper face and the numbers 12418 hidden inside. It sounded like a lot of fake news to me, and the screenshots that were circulating the internet, just felt a bit too perfect, a bit too Photoshoppy feeling for me, so I redid the whole spectrograph test using my own tools, and this is what I found. It was 100% true. This wasn't just a bunch of karma fodder, something cool that someone made up to try and get people's upvotes, the images are actually there, hidden within the sound file. But then, what does it mean? Well, interestingly enough, the numbers appear to be a secret signature inserted in there by the music's producer. Minecraft's music was produced by a

named Daniel Rosenfeld, better known online as C-418. And wouldn't you know it, but the numbers 1-2-12 and hexadecimal code or hex code translates to the letter C. Thus we have 1-2418 actually being a code for C-418 his online name. The creeper face, meanwhile, well, it's a creeper face. Maybe these tracks are less made by the Enderman and more a product of our little moss bombs. To know for sure, though, we have to keep digging. To continue being good little AV club members here, we're gonna need the A to go along with the V that we just analyzed. Hopefully giving us a clearer picture of what exactly is going on. So let's play this thing Starting where it all began disc 13. Here's a copyright neutral clip Okay, so obviously this takes place in a cave. We have sounds that are echoing Reverberating with wet dripping sounds and chimes. But we don't just have to speculate about this. What we're hearing in disc 13 are very clearly Cave Ambien sounds. The ones specifically programmed into the game to play when you're in a dark, eerie underground place. Here's a moment for from disc 13. And here's one of the matching cave ambience tracks.

But it goes even further. Nowadays in Minecraft, there are 19 different cave ambience tracks. But back when disc 13 was first introduced, guess how many there were? 13. 13 isn't just a spooky number here, it's a reference to the number of cave ambience sounds that existed in the game. But what else are we hearing here? Well, at 143, there's the faint sound of a creeper hiss,

an explosion echoing through the cave. Here's the clip, and here's that iconic sound as we usually hear it in the game. It's immediately followed by the sound of someone falling into water and then staggering out. You can almost hear their footsteps. What it seems to suggest is a caver exploring a cave, running into a creeper and then having to jump into a pool of water to avoid the ensuing explosion. He gets out slightly injured and then tries to find a place to hide. But there are two other audio clues here that are worth mentioning. The first happens at the one-minute mark. You can actually actually hear faint sounds of arrows being shot. Here's the audio,

and here's the sound effect in game. But while we hear two arrows being shot, we actually only hear one of them land in the ground. The other one remains silent, which suggests that it hit its target. Now, what mob is found in caves and also happens to fire arrows? Skeletons. Now, remember something that I mentioned before. The music discs are found either in chests

or via a very random mechanic of a skeleton stray arrow going on and killing a crue. killing a creeper. And what do we have in disc 13? In this one audio disc we have a creeper exploding and a mob firing arrows at us. The reason creepers drop music discs when hit by skeletons or stray arrows, it's a reference to disc 13. The last thing worth noting here is the cutoff that I mentioned earlier. The disc stops abruptly after the arrows fire and picks up as the creeper starts hissing. It's a cutoff that's not only unsettling, but one bad when you know it also happens at exactly one minute and 30 seconds into the track. 1-3.

Disc 13. Ha ha ha ha, yeah. And wouldn't you know it, but the creeper starts to hiss exactly 13 seconds after that cut off. Slow clap, Daniel, slow clap. You use that number 13 to its fullest here. So those are all fun little Easter eggs, but why is it cut off? What are we missing? Well for that, let's turn to disc 11, which is quite honestly a bit more straightforward.

Somebody is running on stone, uses some metallic, object that clicks, then uses a paper object based on the rustling we hear, before finally running away, first on stone, and then either on dirt or gravel. Throughout the audio though, we have a disturbing addition. Coughing and heavy breathing. Human coughing. Sounds that feel very out of place in our perfect little block world. And then it just cuts off. No words, no music, no explanation. Just cuts off at the one minute and eleven mark. Um, one minute and eleven seconds. You don't get a second slow clap. But seriously, it's no wonder these things became a creepypasta in their own right

To throw something like this into a game that has a massive audience of nine-year-olds? And suddenly this becomes a complete horror show. But okay, let's start working on identifying some of those mysterious sounds. It turns out that the easiest way to narrow down what we're actually hearing is an audio analysis. It's game analysis. We know the metallic clicking has to be flint and steel by process of elimination. Disc 11 was officially added as a music disc on July 30th, 2010. Other metallic objects were actually added later, like the compass, which was introduced later that year in September, whereas Flint and Steel has been present in the game before it even had a numbering system. The same is true for the paper object.

It can't be a map since maps didn't appear in the game until much later. April 27th, 2011, a full year after the disc was introduced, meaning that archaver would have to be using either paper or a book of some form. So he lights himself a fire and presumably starts writing on the paper or book, almost as if he's keeping a journal. And wouldn't you know it, but throughout Minecraft's extended lore, we have ourselves multiple instances of historians who document their findings in this world via journal of some sort. And more recently, in July of 2019, we got ourselves Minecraft the Lost Journals, a novel which literally has ripped torn pages from an explorer named Nicholas who finds and gets trapped in location like the Nether. Perhaps this person that we're hearing in the audio files is Nicholas. There's no really solid evidence to that, but it could very well be. Or perhaps any of the authors of any of the journals that exist in the Minecraft extended universe. We can't quite be sure who it is.

But we can be sure that these two discs connect with each other. They're telling the same story. Despite there being less reverb in disc 11, we know that it's also taking place in a cave based on the types of blocks our adventurers running on. Dungeons contain cobble and mossy cobble. Strongholds didn't exist back then, and we're not hearing ourselves any grass, only stone and dirt. Meaning that probability says it's most likely a cave. Could it be the same cave that we heard back in disk 13? Well, when you look at the events, it seems to continue the story that was set up in disc 13. Disc 11 slots in perfectly at the breakpoint that we hear in disc 13.

Our cave explorer gets attacked by arrows from a skeleton at the beginning of 13. The audio breaks, but when we pick up back in disc 11, we hear him running away, presumably escaping the arrows to a safe area where he can light a fire and record the findings in his journal. However, he's caught off guard by a creeper, a creeper that causes him to get up and run away, and as we hear back when disc 13 picks back up again, explodes, resulting in him jumping into water at the last minute to avoid the explosion. We end our little vignette here with him trying to find some place to hide and dry off. Heck, perhaps that's even why Disk, Isk 11 is shattered in the first place. It broke during the explosion with the creeper or during our cavers fall and that my fellow miners and crafters

Seems to be the story of disc 11 and 13 a story of creepers and skeletons and why music discs spawned that way a story of journalists who are lost underground in caves a story of broken records and hidden visual Easter eggs But what's most interesting of it all is that it confirms a part of my last theory the belief that there was an ancient Civilism of builders present here in these games before we arrived. People who came before us. No, these discs weren't created by Enderman, but perhaps more unsettling, they were made by men-men, humans who aren't here any longer. A race of people who tried to explore, document, and understand the mysteries of this world, but didn't survive long enough to pass their knowledge on to us. Their journals are lost, their records are broken, their structures are left empty.

Sure, Discs 11 and 13 might not be as creepy as we once believed them to be when we were younger playing this game, but they allude to something much more dire, an existential dread. This cave explorer is gone, without a trace. His people are gone, vanished into thin air, and now we're here, alone, and putting together the lost pieces of this civilization. Could the same thing that happened to them happen to us? But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.