Game Theory - The Secret Lore of Friday Night Funkin'...

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the ~groovy~ lore of Friday Night Funkin'! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Forrest Lee, Tyler Mascola, Koen Verhagen, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Alright, we're here looking at the lore. I want you to show me if you know the score. Tell me what you know. Tell me what you know. I'm getting PEO'd with that B Bipi Bough. Your words are homogenous. They're all completely meaningless. I'm getting serious.

You're making me delirious. Forget you, boyfriend. I'm doing it myself. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The only show that takes pride and shoving the word homogeneous into their rap lyrics. Friday Night Funkin is as indie of an indie game as you can get. It was originally made as a prototype for a 48-hour game jam,

but despite those humble beginnings, it's a game that now needs no introduction based on how popular it's become over the last few months. In case you're out of the loop, here's the quick rundown. In Friday Night Funkin, you play as Boyfriend, whose one and only mission is to hook up with Girlfriend. And yes, their names are confirmed to canonically be Boyfriend and Girlfriend. Anything else is just for the lulls. Along the way, your quest for attaining love will be challenged by Girlfriend's Dad, Daddy Dearest,

canonical, along with her mom, mommy Mearest. Yes, that too is confirmed. Along with all sorts of other rivals and antagonists. You win them over via your sick flow in a DDR-style rhythm game. Best them all, and you're on your way to Friday Night Funkin, which is indeed a euphemism for exactly what it sounds like. The game over

fatality screen shows boyfriends succumbing to a case of his family jewels turning blue. But there's a lot more here than just trying to woo the girl. Friday Night Funkin is a love letter to a bygone should I say bygone era of the internet? Yeah, I guess so. History lesson here people before there was YouTube there was Newgrounds and with it the first home to some of the internet's biggest creators before there was Aaron Hanson game grump there was Aaron Hansen ego raptor

no one told me there were bombs there hey snake there are bombs there before there was video game donkey there was meatwad sprite who's your dentist quiet oh my dentist quintus and Newgrounds was the place to find them newgrounds creator and CEO Tom Fultz created the site back in the 90s when he was still a teenager first starting on as a digital version of a magazine he created when he was 13. Since the beginning, Newgrounds has, for better or worse, been the result of what you get when you take a bunch of bored teenagers with nothing but free time and an internet connection and give them total creative freedom. It was, and still is, in a lot of ways, the place you turn to to see games that were too raw, too random and too violent for the mainstream, parody videos of your favorite characters doing

questionable things, and where you adjusted your age settings late. into the night to see what was behind those big red A rated videos. Remember, this was back in the 90s and early 2000s when most of us had never even heard of concepts like brand safety. And there was no worry of getting demonetized because, well, none of it was monetized in the first place. We were just making stuff to make stuff. Friday Night Funkin is packed to the gills with Newground's history and references. And if we tried to unpack all of it, we'd be here for literal hours. And it'd be a different sort of channel.

No, what I'm here to do is to dig into the lore of this game. Because yes, there is lore beyond just blue-haired guy wants to get the girl. We know via AMAs on Reddit with the game's creators that there's an overarching story here, and that with regards to that, each week has a reason for existing, even the ones that don't have dialogue yet. So that's our quest today. Piece together the existing lore, try to fill the holes in the plot that we do have, and then predict where things are headed next for the final release of the game.

And I think I'm on to some big reveals. Like, haven't you wondered why mommy and daddy are attacking a mall Santa in week five? Or what the origin of the Lemon Demon Demon is? Well, I think I'm on track to getting this whole thing figured out. Will it be speculative? Absolutely. Is it more hypothesis than actual theory? You betcha!

Am I aware that the game devs have gone online to talk about some of this stuff in a way that directly contradicts some of what we're talking about today? Yes, and I don't care, because I think they're keeping secrets for the final game. Does it give me a chance to spend a week listening to this music on loop while I research the script? Undoubtedly! And that, my friends, is why we're here. So let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat. The way the weeks are presented in game is misleading.

Sure, they're numbered 1 to 7, but from a lore perspective, this isn't an accurate timeline of events. Phantom Arcade, the game's story lead slash animator slash character creator, confirm this during a live stream. Week 2 is supposed to come after the mom. Meaning that the events of week 2 actually come after the events of week 4. In other words, we've got some untangling to do. Luckily, our story doesn't start too confusing. The first week, week 1, is indeed the first week chronologically. Boyfriend battles Daddy Dearest, who apparently doesn't take too kindly to the idea of his daughter getting funky on a Friday night.

After he loses, Daddy Dearest is humiliated. And so he hires a mercenary to kill off boyfriend, because why not? Enter Pico, the main antagonist of Week 3. He's a Merck who is hired by the dad to go f*** with the boyfriend after the boyfriend humiliated the dad by beating him in the first stage. Pico doesn't quite know who he's being sent to kill until he gets there, and then he finds out that it's somebody he used to know. Someone he used to know, huh? Who could that be? Pico is an old Newgrounds mainstay with his own series of games including Pico's school, Pico's Sim Date,

and Pico's Infantry Covert Operatives Game, to name a few. But in one of those games, Pico's School Love Conquers All, released last month for April Fool's, we get hints that Pico and boyfriend might have actually had themselves an intimate backstory. This is my boyfriend. Everyone at school is totally cool with it. I'm not saying everything is perfect, but our planet is coming around. Now, obviously, this was an April Fool's project, and most likely set in an alternate universe. So can we really believe that boyfriend and Friday Night Funkin might have a romantic backstory with Pico? Yeah, actually, 100% yes. Look no further than the developer posts on Reddit and Twitch streams.

Pico and BF are canonically X's. That is real. That's not mean. So if you played the level and assumed that Pico was a jealous X, you were absolutely right. But maybe not in the way that you first expected. The next antagonist in the timeline is Mommy Murest, duking it out on the roof of a limo speeding down the highway with an army of backup dancer henchmen. And if the limo didn't tip you off, girlfriend's family is loaded. We see it briefly in one of the earliest trailers for the game, but Daddy Dearest is a former rock star. And according to details shared on the game's Kickstarter,

Mommy Mearest is a pop star in her own right. Hence the limo and all the dancers. It's also worth noting that those demonic backup dancers are apparently grown in bottles, a detail that's going to become very important later on as we talk about the lore. The fact that they could be regrown, though, is good considering in the final game. They'll likely die during one of the song, In a now deleted tweet, Phantom Arcade hinted at this surprise death, and looking at unused sprites hidden in the game

We see them ripped to pieces with the first in the sequence showing them clearly getting hit in the gut by something That something is likely a low-hanging light hole another unused sprite found in the game's files Now this is where we're really gonna start filling in lore holes with puzzle pieces Sourced from various developer comments after his battle with mom Boyfriend's musical ability seemingly manages to gain him acceptance from the family We know this based on a bit of lore that Dev Phantom Arcade dropped during a live stream. The boyfriend gets accepted by the family, because week two is supposed to come after the mom. And yeah, well, dad and mom might no longer consider boyfriend a target for murder,

they're still willing to mess with him, which leads us to Halloween. When the boyfriend's accepted by the family, they sort of invite him over and, like, play cruel tricks on it. So they make him come over to their, like, spooky Transylvania House and pass out like candy with the girlfriend on Halloween. And the spooky kids stop by. Those spooky kids, by the way, are Skid and Pump. Characters from the Spooky Month video series and originators of the Spooky Dance. However, not everything is as it seems. Turns out they were kind of being tricked by someone not so nice.

Someone not so nice is the monster with a lemon-shaped head. And yes, it's merely lemon-shaped and not actually a lemon, according to the devs and yet another deleted tweet. Regardless of what his head really is, though, he makes no secret of the fact that he intends to eat girlfriend. Yeah, man, I've got to eat your girlfriend. Pretty explicit stuff there, but why? Just because he's a monster or is something more going on here?

And this is where we get back into heavy theory territory. Remember when I said that mommy murists' backup dancers are born out of a bottle? That's why them getting murdered by a telephone pole, hereditary style, didn't matter a whole lot, because they could just be regrown. It could tie in with something in the Lemon Demon's lyrics. While the appearance with Skid and Pump had to be pieced together by the fan community using unused assets, Lemon Demon officially makes an appearance in week five at Christmas in the level with Mall Santa. Just out of nowhere randomly appears.

It is a weird transition. It's kind of the only one like it in the game thus far. But in his song Winter Horrorland, we get this lyric. Fallen Angels, aka Demons, created with your meat. It's another reference to things being grown or born unnaturally. Could this monster be related to the backup dancers in some way? Maybe a mistake created by Mommy Mearest and Daddy Dearest during their hench? testing because remember the monster's goal here is to kill and eat girlfriend. I wouldn't be surprised if his only beef against a boyfriend is just that he got in the way. Now that connection between the monster and the family might seem like it's a stretch, but consider this. Another unused asset from the game has the monster literally growing out of a pumpkin. Notice the misplaced eyes in the jaw. He's like goo. He's able to transform grow out of things. Again, just like a henchman that would be grown out of a bottle. He also canonically has the demonic ability to

to alter someone's perception, which is their explanation for why the background in week five is able to change between songs 2 and 3. Again, this was in a deleted tweet, which tells me that it's something that they might be trying to save for the final game. But just think about that for a second. He's able to transform himself and reality. Guess what? He's Santa. Yeah, isn't it a little weird that Daddy Dearest and Mommy Mearest are holding a mall Santa hostage in week five? Super random, right? Well, I'm gonna predict that it's because Santa is really the monster. in disguise, or because we see a silhouette in the background of them all, maybe one of the monster's warriors,

transformed, hiding, waiting to get his revenge. And yeah, like I said before, I know that the devs have gone online to say that Santa's dead, and that Santa is just Santa, but neither of those statements actually contradict anything about this theory. Another monster could very well be hiding inside that normal Santa, using his body as a sort of disguise. Because as we're about to see in week six, body swaps happen in this universe and are 100% canon. And this prediction ties in with the following. week as well. See, in a seemingly random twist, Week 6 switches gears entirely and puts you into a PS1-style video game. The title of the week, hating simulator, an obvious play on dating simulator,

features a battle against a handsome man named Senpai, who, after you defeat him twice, turns into a horrific floating spirit head. It's another one of those weird transitions. So what is going on here? Well, it was confirmed via live stream that Senpai is a character from a video game that girlfriend plays, and that the spirit is trapped inside of that video game character. But Senpai is still himself. Sempai is just a video game character that's inside the game she plays. There's a human soul that was like trapped inside that character. So first and foremost, why are we suddenly in a video game? Well, the common belief online is that Daddy Dearest has the ability to trap human souls inside of video games, which would

coincide with all the soul experiments that we've been talking about with both the henchmen and the Lemon Monster. This would also coincide with what the spirit says during the cutscene where he breaks free. Quote, direct contact with real humans after being trapped in here for so long and her of all people. I'll make her father pay for what he's done to me and all the others. I'll beat you and make you take my place. You don't mind your bodies being borrowed, right? Wow, that is a lot to unpack there. So first, let's talk about that last line. You don't mind your bodies being borrowed. This is now confirmed to be a world where soul swaps can happen

and where people can walk around inside the bodies of others. This gives us more evidence to support my hypothesis that Santa is actually a monster in disguise. Which is why mommy and daddy are attacking him in the mall that could also explain why daddy would then put us inside this video game. Isn't it weird that daddy would put boyfriend in here after he had already canonically won the family over in the previous weeks? Well, it could very possibly be because we doubted him. Seeing Daddy and Mommy holding Santa at gunpoint, boyfriend tries to stop it only to give the monster a chance to transform. And because the monster escapes or whatever, Daddy punishes us by putting us inside the video game. But there's one thing that goes unexplained with this interpretation. Why is girlfriend here? It seems to be a

Seems odd that Daddy would punish his daughter as well by sending her into the game. And maybe the Daddy sends them both into a game thing has been confirmed via a tweet or something, but I haven't been able to find an original source to back it up. Which got me to ask, what if none of this is Daddy's doing? Remember, the Lemon Monster can alter perception and reality. Maybe he's the one who's actually doing this. Oh, sure, the line, I'll make her father pay for what he's done to me and all the others, implies that Daddy is the one who put everyone in the game,

but there's another way to read that line. It could just be referencing all the souls that that Daddy's been experimenting on, which led to the creation of the Lemon Monster in the first place and resulted in spirit getting trapped here. Because again, consider this. In his lines, the spirit calls out direct contact with real humans, implying there's some difference between you being in the game, real humans able to retain your own bodies, and him being in the video game, a spirit who possesses a character. It also implies that he's the only one in here with no other real humans around, which kind of debunks the idea that Daddy is sending the souls of failed boyfriends into the video game as punishment, which is a theory that we've seen around on the internet, but just doesn't line up with what we're seeing in the game. Anyway, whether it was Lemon Demon or Daddy, you are trapped in a video game and only one thing can save you,

the power of sick beats. So, there you have it, friends. A lot more seems to be brewing under the surface between shape-shifting monsters, soul experiments, and lots of people wanting revenge for the secret experiments that Daddy and Mommy have been doing. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!