- I bet you didn't know
that every Nintendo game
exists in the same universe.
(cheery 8-bit music)
When it comes to video games,
some people become totally obsessed,
delving into the philosophy, the history,
and the hidden meanings behind
the games that they play.
- [Matt Patrick] Hello,
Matthew Santoro fans.
Welcome to Game Theories.
- No, no.
No, no, Matt Pat, this is my video.
I'm gonna take this one.
- [Matt Patrick] Oh, okay, sorry.
Please continue.
- Anyway, some of these game theories
might sound crazy at first,
but when we actually dive into them,
they might just flip
everything you thought you knew
about your favorite games upside down.
These are 10 mind-blowing
video game theories, part two.
Number one is Kirby 64's
post-nuclear war Earth.
Aw, cute little Kirby.
Who wouldn't love a little
pink marshmallow friend
who could swallow anyone
that they want whole?
And maybe you could have one,
if you could survive a
nuclear war, of course.
The Kirby games were designed
to be joyous and fun,
but that doesn't mean that
it doesn't tell a dark story.
In Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards,
you get to control the little hungry blob
as he moves along a level
called The Shiver Star,
which looks exactly like Earth,
only completely covered in ice
and full of automated robots
that the now dead human race
left to run the factories.
Thus, the theory is,
after a massive world war
in which humans fought the machines,
a nuclear winter blanketed the planet
and killed everyone.
But many animals survived and
evolved from the radiation
into Kirby's enemies.
In fact, at one point in a level,
animals suspended in
preservation tubes can be see,
showing that humans had
intended to use their DNA
to save species from being wiped out.
Unfortunately, Kirby has
entered the equation,
and it tends to hop around and consume
whatever's left behind.
He's literally eating our legacy.
Number two is every legend of Zelda game
is one story being retold.
Have you ever played a game of telephone?
You know, where you whisper
a message to someone,
and then they whisper it to someone,
and on, and on until
eventually you hear it back
and it's something completely different?
Well, one theory suggests
that's basically how
the Legend of Zelda games work.
The theory says that every game
from the original Legend of Zelda
to Breath of the Wild is all one story
being told to different
generations in different cultures.
Every one of them revolves around
a young sword and shield
toting boy in green
venturing far and wide in
a quest to defeat the evil
that plagues the land.
Though many of the stories
are obviously told with more detail,
the main points remain constant enough
that, told in their simplicity,
each story sounds very familiar.
And, there's an evolved
version of this theory
that says that Super Mario Bros
is actually the same story,
only with brothers fighting the monsters
instead of a single boy.
Zelda and Mario Bros are the same people?
What's happening?
Number three is Donkey Kong Country
is anti-American propaganda.
This theory suggests
that Donkey Kong Country
is chalked-full of
anti-American disinformation
created by designers upset with America
over the Banana Wars, which
took place in the early 1900s.
Controversially, during that time,
the US military helped
the United Fruit Company
to absorb and overthrow rival companies
in the Caribbean and Central America.
Basically, the theory suggests that
Donkey Kong's Country is
actually a Caribbean state,
like Nicaragua or Honduras,
who are being invaded for their bananas.
Crocodiles, the main enemies in the game,
don't eat bananas, so
they must be stealing them
for another purpose,
such as gaining a monopoly.
Many of them are found to be wearing
old American military uniforms,
and near the end of the game,
you battle King K Rule, the
leader of the crocodiles,
who resembles Teddy Roosevelt,
who was President during the Banana Wars.
Okay, speaking of bananas,
this whole thing is bananas.
I'm losing it already.
Number four is there's
a body in your trunk
in Silent Hill 2.
In Silent Hill 2, you play as James
as he deals with the horrible creatures
roaming around a dark town.
Now, spoiler alert, what
you come to realize is that
our hero pretty much deserves
what's happening to him,
based on the fact that
he murdered his wife.
More specifically, he
murdered his sick, dying wife
because she was kind of
a burden on his life.
Out of the game's six possible endings,
the one that is considered
to be the official ending
is called In the Water.
In this ending, James commits suicide
by driving his car into a lake,
after witnessing an illusion
of his wife dying in her sickbed.
However, many fans of
the game have theorized
that James's wife's corpse
was actually in the trunk of the car,
and when he says out loud,
"Now we can be together,"
he means it literally.
After the scene where
his wife passes away,
he gently picks her up and
carries her out of the room
before things fade to black,
hinting that her next destination
may be in the car with James.
The whole idea is that he's
been repressing what he did,
and the ghosts make him aware of it,
along with where his wife
is now, in the trunk.
Number five is the Madden Curse.
This theory leaves the
video game world a bit
and incorporates digital characters,
as well as their ill-fated
real world counterparts.
The Madden Curse is a legend
within both the gaming
and football loving communities.
Basically, any NFL player
who's featured on the cover
of that year's Madden NFL video game
is cursed to suffer an injury.
It started with San
Francisco 49's running back,
Garrison Hearst, who graced the cover
of Madden NFL 99.
Shortly afterwards, Hearst
broke his ankle during a game.
But that's not all.
Since then, of the 18 players
featured on the cover,
16 have had their seasons
abruptly cut short
due to an injury.
Many of these injuries
caused players serious issues
and negatively impacted their performance
for the rest of their careers.
And some of these injuries occurred
merely days after the
game became available.
The only players seemingly
unaffected by the curse
were Calvin Johnson on Madden NFL 13
and Odell Beckham Jr. on Madden NFL 16.
Good luck to them both.
Number six is you play
as the villain in Limbo.
Released by the
independent studio Playdead
on July 21st, 2010,
Limbo seems like something
out of a child's nightmare.
You play as a nameless
boy looking for his sister
as he moves along a terrifying
black and white landscape
while monstrous enemies and deadly traps
try to stop him.
While the most popular theory
suggests that the boy is
literally in Purgatory, or Limbo,
another theory adds to this idea,
as many believe that the
boy is actually the villain,
and suggests that he
actually murdered his sister,
and that's why his Purgatory is so scary.
To prove it, every other child
that you run into in the game
runs upon sight of you.
Some of them even throw spears
to defend against your push
into the fortress grounds.
Other areas see you kill monsters
in unexpectedly gruesome ways,
like tearing off limbs one at a time.
Some people believe that this is the boy
lashing out after what he did
to cause his own sister's,
and maybe even his own, death.
Number seven is Saddam
Hussein bought all the PS2s.
Okay, this one might sound
crazy, but follow me.
In December of 2000, millions of people
were trying to get their hands
on the PlayStation 2 console,
and most of them were out of luck.
This theory claims that that bad luck
is actually due to the
now-deceased Iraqi dictator,
Saddam Hussein, who attempted
to buy as many as possible,
so that he could, get
this, take over the world.
When the United Nations placed sanctions
on any computer technology
being sent to Iraq,
they forgot to include
Sony's PlayStation 2
on the banned list.
It was suggested that, through the use
of thousands of PS2s, Saddam was going to
create a superweapon
that could control vehicles
and operate weapons
with systems that could only
run on superior technology
to what they already had.
The theory also suggests
that the processing power
of 12 to 15 networked PlayStations
may actually be enough to handle powering
an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.
As if that wasn't enough,
another use of a
supercomputer made from PS2s
would be to handle distance calculations
for long-ranged nuclear missiles.
Of course, as his regime fell,
no PlayStation military supercomputer
was there to defend him,
yet the rumors still live on.
Number eight is Aerith
wasn't supposed to die
in Final Fantasy VII.
In Final Fantasy VII,
one of the most famous
and absorbing video games of our time,
you encounter a character named Aerith,
who sadly dies during the game.
A popular theory states that
she was never supposed to be killed,
and her death was a last-minute
add-on by designers.
Part of the evidence sits in
the instruction booklet itself,
with images of Aerith in a scene
that never made it to the actual game.
Additionally, her absence
is pretty noticeable
all over the game itself,
with one character mentioning
that she would come back,
and an empty section where
she would've been standing
during the game's finale.
As the main character, Cloud,
a large section of the game
is devoted to making a choice
between showing affection
towards either Aerith
or his childhood friend, Tifa.
Once Aerith dies, the
implications of these choices
are never shown, and the
whole matter is dropped
pretty fast by the characters.
No matter what decisions
that the player makes,
she inevitably dies at the
hands of the villain, Sephiroth.
Number nine is Max Payne sees ghosts.
In the game Max Payne, you control
the title protagonist, Max,
an ex-NYPD officer who
is constantly tormented
by the memory of his murdered
wife and baby daughter.
In Max Payne 3, Max essentially becomes
a drug-addicted vigilante
on a killing spree in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
During the campaign, however,
he encounters Anders Detling,
another ex-cop, multiple times.
Detling gives him clues about his mission,
but one theory says that this cop
isn't real at all,
but is a hallucination that Max is having,
due to his dependence on
alcohol and painkillers.
The idea becomes even more believable
when you factor in that Anders
has the life that Max could've had,
having settled down with a family,
not fighting to survive.
Anders also mentions having a daughter
that would've been the
same age as Max's daughter,
had his not been murdered years ago.
In addition, Anders also
seems pretty out of place
in some of the game's
locations that he's in,
and it seems especially surprising
that each time, it's
during a major game event.
Also, at one point during a shootout,
Anders hides in a toilet stall,
only to vanish into thin air
when Max opens the stall door.
And number 10 is the Nintendo Universe.
Okay, this one's the motherload.
There is a world-changing,
mind-bending theory that claims
that the entire Nintendo
library of original games
is all in one universe.
Okay, follow me on this one.
It says that Hylia, the
goddess from the Zelda games,
along with Farore, Din, and Nayru,
created the universe,
complete with Pokemon,
who would evolve into the creatures
in the Animal Crossing series,
Earthbound, and Fossil Fighters,
just to name a few.
Eventually, the creatures moved to space
and we get titles such
as Star Fox and Metroid.
And eventually, this all
ultimately leads to Earth's demise
in an apocalyptic war
involving aliens and demons,
such as in the Kid Icarus games.
During the fallout,
brothers Mario and Luigi
fall down a pipe from our
world and end up in the sewers
from the original Mario Bros game,
with mutated animals
coming out of the pipes.
A nuclear winter then
takes over the planet,
and that's where we get the Kirby series,
as we originally discussed
in number one on this list.
What?
Damn, Nintendo, that's one crazy plot.
Just, childhood ruined, I can't.
So those were 10 mind-blowing
video game theories, part two.
- [Matt Patrick] Question of the day is,
do you know any other video game theories
that deserve to be on this list?
If so, leave your response below,
and I'll be reading through 'em,
and I'll pin the best one to the top.
- You just had to get
one more line in there
just once more, didn't you, Matt Pat?
- [Matt Patrick] Uh, yeah.
The whole theory thing,
it's kinda what I do.
- But thank you guys so
much for coming by today,
and a special thanks to Matt Pat
for helping me out in this episode.
Remember to come back here
tomorrow and every weekday
at 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time,
because I'll have a
brand new video for you.
I will see you then.
