Game Theory - Watch This Backwards To Release The Devil (Trombone Champ)

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he SOLVES the epic lore of Trombone Champ! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, Tom Robinson, and Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, and AbsolutePixel Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

And so it comes to pass. Weeks after the theorist wheel was forged, a new theory appears. A wacky theory, one that stands the fine line between camp and cringe. A theory that will rend the fabric that holds the algorithm together. So theorize that lore, brave soul, so that you may rise. Rise to become the Theory champ! Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that isn't here to cause any trouble,

and just truly be based. If you gotta giggle out of any of those puns, let me introduce you to the funniest game you will ever play, trombone champ. Everyone is talking about Sonic Frontiers and God of War Ragnarok. Everyone be sleeping on Trombone chair. Seriously, Game of the Year 2022. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect when I went into this thing. Heck, I'd never even heard of it before head editor Dan showed it to me.

But what I found was a wonderful world of music, mayhem, and of course, memes. Yo, I got a sack. In case this one passed you by, Trombone champ is, quote, the world's first trombone-based rhythm game. Basically, it's guitar hero's socially awkward cousin. You get to play a variety of music tracks from the national anthem to dubstep,

all while using your mouse to imitate the slide of a trombone. Never realized that trombone dubstep was a thing that I needed in my life, but hey, here we are. The game also has a weird obsession with hot dogs, baboons, and is filled to the brim with trombone facts. Trumpet. The towers! As you can tell, it is a lot of fun to play this game.

And obviously, it's not designed to be taken seriously. Or is it? You see, as soon as we started the game, all our expectations were thrown out the window. Strap in, friends, for the gaming event of the air. So it comes to pass. I'm sorry. One day you will stand before two baboons. No one.

What? Oh, there is lore. That's right. A simple game of playing cowboys. Copyright neutral music using the instrumental equivalent to fart sounds has decided to join the lore party. And so, from that moment on, it became my life's mission to figure out what the game described as the mysteries of the trombaverse. Yes. Oh.

Yes. Trombone champ theory. This is a win. Trombone champ theory. Is dissecting this game important? No. Will it help forward mankind in any way? Certainly not.

But am I going to take the lore of a silly trombone game way too seriously anyway? You bet your sweet sackbutt, I. That's the original name for the trombone by the way. Guess where I learned that? Trombone champ. Entertaining and educational. Sack butt. So I grinded my boning a bunch in order to figure out this game's lore. A story that's filled with toots, hot dogs, and baboons for some reason.

Hot dogs are important. I don't know how. And baboons. Because they're relevant to tromboning. I don't want to toot my own horn here. Actually, I do because, you know, that's how you win the game. But I came up with some shocking discoveries. Specifically that becoming the titular trombone champ ain't all its crumbone champ.

cracked up to be. By merely beating this game, we're actually responsible for the total destruction of music as we know it. Grab a hot dog friends. We've got ourselves a trombaverse to save. To solve the true lore of this game, we need to go back to basics and ask one very simple question. Why trombone? Why trombone, though? Sure, it's a funny instrument that makes for some chaotic, meme-worthy gameplay, but believe it or not, there's actually a deeper meaning behind it all. If you weren't like us and giggling like a bunch of band kids in the back of the orchestra, you'll know that in the opening scene, were sent on a grand quest to become the trombone champ, to rend the very fabric that binds this land.

It's essentially a holy quest. It's up to us to free the world of whatever evils before us. Believe it or not, trombones have a history with this exact thing. In the 16th century, large mixed instrumental ensembles, what we'd later call orchestras, were coming into existence. One of their main purposes was performing oratorios, basically a concert-style opera without the musical theater performances. Back then, oratorios were primarily Christian in nature,

telling stories from the Bible like the Israelites in Egypt, King Saul, or the death and resurrection of Jesus. And you want to guess what instrument was introduced as an integral part of these sacred pieces? The trombone. In fact, they were often given the solos in church music as the trombone was considered to be a symbol of God himself, or some other supernatural phenomena. So, looking at the quest that we've been put on, it only makes sense that we would be given a trombone in order to free the world. It's the instrument that was chosen to represent the voice of God. Kind of makes me feel bad about all those fart jokes from the intro. Armed with the voice of God is our instrument, we set out on our journey.

Tuting our way through songs and then clicking on everything in sight. By doing that, we come across the two baboons that I talked about earlier. Bassmaster Ben and Toot Master Tom. Not our Tom. He had a bit of trouble with his tooting. Okay, you got this. Yeah, this is got a mess ring last time. Sidebar?

Yeah, what's going on. This is not what I saw. I don't know what this is, but it is embarrassing. Maybe it's a British thing. The baboon version of Tom. seem to have a bit of amnesia, so he isn't overly helpful. But bass master Ben proceeds to lore dump all over us. He informs us about the origins of music,

the Battle of Good Against Evil, and then name drops Mozart. Oh, wait, Ina Klinea is a Mozart song. Clearly, Mozart is important to this world's lore. There's just one issue. We're never explicitly told why this classical composer of all of them is so critical to the Traumaverse. But then again, this is game theory. We exist to find out the why of it all.

You see, for a long time, trombones were just stuck in the realm of sacred music, like I mentioned before. One does not simply put the instrument of God into any old Rihanna pop song. You know? However, eventually there were two men that changed that. The first was Christov-Villebald Gluck, who put trombones into his ballets.

Might be hard to believe, but ballets back in the day were the cool hip music. That said, Gluck wasn't exactly the first. The composer most synonymous for taking the trombone out of his own sacred music and putting it directly into the orchestra of his operas was the main man himself, Mozart. He was inspired by Gluck's use of trombone and ballets,

and in turn, Gluck was inspired by Mozart's use of it in the opera orchestra. And in this one move, the floodgates open to make the trombone a mainstay in orchestras to this very day. Going from oratorios to opera was like going from off-Broadway to Broadway. The trombone was suddenly in the big leagues. It could be argued that without Mozart, there would be no trombones as we know him today. He literally gave rise to it as an instrument in classical music. Without Mozart, there is no trombone champ.

However, while Bassmaster Ben keeps Mozart's role in all of this vague, he's more than willing to spill the beans on another character, Mozart's doppelganger, an evil counterpart that leads a group known as the forces of order, ones who sought to take control of the music, splitting the harmony in two, creating order over freedom. His name is Trezum, just Mozart backwards.

Fun fact, I actually pulled his tromboner card on the first try. Oh, immortal guardian spirit, tasked with preserving the order of the base and treble clefts as a guardian spirit unable to eat hot dogs, You can be with the power of at least 10. The idea of Mozart having himself an evil twin is a strange one in the eyes of history, but if you take a look at Mozart as a composer, it starts to make a lot more sense. Mozart was obviously one of the most influential composers ever.

He literally transformed classical music. Before him, there was a focus on Gallant-style music, which returned to simplicity and wide appeal. This was a massive shift away from the complex music that came before as part of the Baroque period. What Mozart did was push music back towards a more complex structure by using chromatic harmony, which can sound very grating to your ear if it's not used correctly. Within an octave, you have 12 notes. However, most music only uses seven of them within a given key. Those are called the diatonic notes,

and they all sound nice when combined together and climbing up the musical scale. By contrast, in chromatic music, a composer throws all of that music theory out the window and uses more than just the seven diatonic notes regardless of the key. Needless to say, it can get quite chaotic. It isn't typically what you'd consider when thinking about structured music. Mozart was also famous for improvising, performing with half-finished music on the spot because he couldn't meet his deadlines. His piano concerto and D is a prime example of this, where the bass cleft has literally no music written,

but during performances, it magically has itself a bass line. Just gotta figure it out. And while Mozart was indeed a fantastic composer and pianist, not meeting deadlines, making it up on the spot, using notes that are outside the realm of the normal notes, That is the antithesis of what I'd call ordered, which is why Mozart is considered to be one of the heroes of our story here in Trombone Champ. He was all for freedom and music, making it up, breaking the rules to create new and interesting compositions in spite of the world around him.

Trezom then represents the order that Mozart fought against, the music of the day that was simple and structured, but lacked interest or complexity. This is what we're fighting for in the game, the same freedom to hit a bum note and call it a harmony. At least, uh, that's what I assume Tom was going for here. What happened? I don't know. Were you lying to be about this?

No, no, I saw it yesterday. Dude's choking on stream, man. Okay, so we want to be on the side of Mozart and defeat his evil twin, the boring counterpart Trayzom, but how then do we do that? Bassmaster Ben explains that he and Tom are protectors of one of the two major clefts in music, those little musical symbols that you find at the start of a music sheet. Tom is the keeper of the treble clef, and Ben is in charge of the bass clef. And we're told that we have to master both in order to restore the music to its former glory.

The treble clef is used when you want to play higher-pitched. voices or high-pitched instruments like the flute or the violin. The bass clef indicates the musician should be all about that bass, playing lower notes on instruments like the tuba, or obviously enough, the bass guitar. Composers need to use both the bass and the treble clef in order to create the greatest range of sound possible and therefore get more complex harmonies. You see, this is yet another reason the game's only possible with trombones. The trombone is one of the few instruments that can seamlessly transition across both the bass and treble clefts. In many ways, it unites the grand staff. Instruments like the piano, can also play on the grand staff, but the trombone is the only one that can seamlessly slide all the way from the highest treble notes to the lowest bass in a single breath rather than hitting isolated keys. True to the story of the game, the trombone is quite literally the only instrument that can restore harmony. So we do exactly that. We unlock the powers of bass and treble by playing lots of songs. We collect hot dog cards because apparently that's our power level metric in this game, and we play one final song. A dubstep version of Ina Klinea Nocht music by none other than

Mozart. that contains a musical battle in its first movement between the tonic key of G and the dominant key of D, with G ultimately winning out. And thus we defeat Trey-Zam for good, becoming the trombonious tromboner that ever did Toot. Hooray! For once, a game theory that doesn't have itself a bad ending like we were the villain the whole time. And the two clas merged into something new. Something never before seen. Hold on, wait a minute, merged? Something never before seen. I thought we were restoring music back to the way it was. And a new era. Beguings

An uncertain era. An uncertain era? It doesn't sound like we just saved the day. Have we been lied to? You bet your sackbut we have. We've been lied to every step of the way. First of all, the idea of one clef to rule them all has never been a thing in human history.

There actually used to be even more clefts than the standard two that we know now. Bass and treble clefts are formally known as F and G cleft. There's also an Elto clef that sits right there in the middle, which is called the C clef. Shout out to all my viola. out there what what? But when music was first being written down in a way that would help to show the rhythm and pitch, any note from A to G could be its own clef, meaning that there were seven clefts available for a variety of instruments. Simplifying it down to two made a whole lot of sense because it allowed for easier reading of music and simple but effective harmonies, while still cover in the ranges of most instruments and singers. But simplifying it any further? Suddenly this whole thing is useless. Most instruments only have themselves a small range, either low or high. And there aren't enough lines on a single staff to convey all the possible higher low notes available to all.

all of those instruments. Combining the clefts like we just did in Trombone Champ will lead to music that looks like this, it's hard to read on the fly. The F and G clefts also inform you of what each line represents. Combining them means that lines suddenly have themselves double meanings, leading to all sorts of chaos and confusion for musicians and composers like, which I suspect was the point all along. Listen to the ending of this game. And so the Trombone Champ forged and alliance with the baboons. We align ourselves with a bunch of apes, which is weird out of context, but becomes a whole lot more sinister once I introduce the last random character that appears in this title. You see, there's one other tromboner card that's thrown into the mix. One that seems completely random and arbitrary and just there to carry on the baboon memes.

The Babi card. It reads as follows, quote, This ancient Egyptian deification of the Hamadris Baboon, whose name translates to Bull of the Baboons or Chief of the Baboons, was a deity of the underworld and is very relevant to this trombone game. Oh, is he? Or is this just a joke? Nope, he is very relevant.

You see, Bassmaster Ben tells us that Babi was the one who created a way to control the nature of music to keep it away from the Trasoms of the world. What he doesn't tell us is that Babi, the real-world Baboon God, was known for two major things. The first was virility, because the Hamadris Baboons just had really high libidos. Thus, he was depicted with his, um, tromboner exposed, if you catch my drift. But he was also known for ferrying souls of the dead to the underworld, using his mighty trombone as the mast of the fairy, like some sort of genital pirate. You see, Babi was the firstborn son,

of Osiris, God of the dead. Thus, Babi wasn't benevolent at all. Instead, he's said to be, quote, very bloodthirsty, living on end trails, devouring the souls of the sinful. All Babi wants is destruction and chaos. Hence, why he would want to combine the clefts. He's creating chaos, confusion. Music has been around since the very dawn of man. It can help people cooperate and coordinate. It boosts your mood with oxytocin. It helps us to empathize with others and it helps bring people together. And Babi wants to tear all of that down. I mean, I've We talked this whole time about trombones being considered a sacred instrument, but think we all know how unruly the trombones section of any high school band can be. If anyone is out there to help destroy the music, they are there to provide.

As a result of our actions, society as we know it will crumble. The baboons will have won. You might be the trombone champ, but you have killed music in the process. If only, we had just stopped laughing like idiots every time they said the word tromboner. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.