Honestly, I don't even know where to start. On the surface you’ve got this perfectly normal
family. Young girl, grandmother. You know, apple pie America kind of stuff. But I knew
better. I'd seen this kind of innocence too many times. So I did what I do best,
I dug deeper. But apparently in the process, I struck a nerve. Because
that's when this showed up on my doorstep. And that was the moment when everything changed.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory and the first ever four way Theorist crossover
weekend. I've been looking forward to this day ever since we launched Style Theory. Now we've
done this kind of thing before. KFC Week, Pokemon Week and our most infamous cross channel event:
Cannibalism Week. A theme so nice we actually decided to do it twice. But today,
ladies and gentlemen, we're doing you one better. Welcome, my friends, to Mystery Meat Weekend. Yep,
it sounds gross. And believe me, kinda is. Over on Film Theory we're dissecting the living meat
monsters of Vita Carnis. Food Theory is carving into some meatballs made out of cloned mammoth
meat, and Style Theory is being the most sensible of the bunch by looking into how many people you
can feed using a dress made of pure beef. So go get yourself a heaping helping of
protein by checking those out after you've finished over here. It is a weekend full of
content that would make the Liver King proud. Not that that's anything I am actively striving for.
How then are we celebrating Mystery Meat Weekend here on Game Theory? Well,
what I've got cooking for you is fresh, juicy and hot out of the oven.
We're heading back to the world of Merge Mansion to take another look at the mysterious pies cooked
by the one and only Grandma Ursula. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, let me catch
you up. Over a year ago, we started looking into the mystery of Merge Mansion, an item matching
mobile game that caught everyone's attention with their series of bizarrely dramatic ads.
Houses set on fire, hidden basements full of money, sheds full of knives.
And of course, your sweet loving grandma arrested with one of three
mysterious quotes written on her hand as she's driven away by the
paddy wagon. Some of these things even got freaking Kathy Bates to star as Grandma.
Grandma! When you get an Oscar
winning actress to start giving titty twisters to statues in order to hawk your mobile game,
you know you've got cash to spare. Anyway, using those ads, I was able to
put together a timeline of events and answer the question that smeared across all of them. What
is Grandma hiding? The answer, if you've been watching this channel long enough, was obvious:
Murder! I suspected that Grandma Ursula was involved in an elaborate murder plot,
killing people off and then hiding the dead bodies in her famous pies, Sweeney Todd style.
She was then training up her granddaughter Maddie, to take over the family business and her iconic
secret recipe. Hence why we're here today for Mystery Meat Weekend. And that's honestly where
I left my investigation. Merge Mansion went back to releasing their normal CG ads, which didn't
really add anything to the lore. And I went back to doing what I do best, failing to solve FNAF.
But little did I suspect what the developers of this game had cooking.
A challenge; an invite to the mansion to get hands on and search for clues to
put the Grandma Ursula mystery to rest. But before I entered the garden gates,
they also sent through plenty of pre reading materials.
And there, buried in all that paperwork was where I'd find the most shocking reveal to date.
That's right. Grandma was a unit!
Osteoporosis aint got nothing on those bones.
But apparently I wasn't the only detective headed there that afternoon. Pedro Pascal,
fresh off the heels of the last of us, would also be there at the mansion as
part of this mystery event. In fact, he had just been tapped to play the
detective solving the mystery of Grandma Ursula in a brand new series of ads that
they had released literally the same day. And so, as you'd expect, the Internet was
going nuts. Danny Gonzalez literally dropped everything to make a reaction video to this.
But to me, those ads just seemed to once again confirm everything
that I talked about in my past theories.
Like Pedro, my guy, just look over here. I got two videos with all the
evidence that you need. I literally did your job for you a year ago.
Unless, of course, there's something else going on here. Looking through Pedro's trailers. There was
something new that I noticed. Someone who kept getting an unusual amount of screen time. This
guy. They show wedding photos, family portraits and other characters talk about a missing body.
This was clearly the mystery that the guys at Merge Mansion wanted me to solve. Who is this
man? What happened to him? And how did it all relate to my visit to the mansion? We were about
to find out. After arriving at the mansion, one thing became crystal clear. Lore was everywhere:
Conspiracy boards, props, pictures and postcards. They went hard on this
thing. And through it all, only one thing kept running through my mind.
Yes, yes, it was. We were told that we'd be entering the mansion
in small groups and that Pedro would be doing the whole thing solo later that day. And with that,
my dreams of recreating my Grogu fan fiction with him were canceled… Temporarily. Anyway,
it was time to finally enter the house. The event was probably best described as an escape room the
size of a mansion, all set in the Hollywood Hills. It took us from the library to a hidden kitchen in
the basement, even up to a secret security office hidden through the fireplace.
Before eventually coming full circle back to the main floor and grandma's dining hall,
where she set up a little bait and switch for us. Distracting us with
a mannequin while she slipped out the back. So even though
Grandma Ursula ultimately eluded our grasp, the whole thing wasn't a bust.
First, the box that was sent to me at the beginning of the event confirmed that of
the three hand messages that we saw in those Merge Mansion ads, one of them was Canonical.
“He is alive”. So who then is “he”? Well, all along the path, throughout the mansion
there was one name that kept coming up over and over again: Grandpa Charlie.
In both the Pedro Pascal ads and the live action event, Grandpa Charlie appears to be the lynchpin,
the secret, unspoken character that has Easter eggs about him littered everywhere. Now,
I initially wrote him off in our earlier theories just because he seemed like nothing more than
a passing mention. And whenever anyone did bring him up, it seemed to be implying that he was dead.
Little did I realize, though, that that's kind of the point. They want you to think that he's
dead. He's the only character that would make sense in this family photo from the new ads.
I don’t know what you're complaining about here Pedro, this detective work is easy. But okay,
we have our victim, now we need to figure out what happened.
As I said, initially I dismissed Charlie because he seemed to be dead in the game's dialog,
so checking back in on the game felt like a good place to start. And let me just say this
is not the same game that I researched a year ago. The game itself is still the same. You're
still merging items together to form new ones, and you're still trying to fix up the mansion grounds.
But the story and character dialog has received a massive update. Old scenes are no longer there
and new ones have been put in their places, ones that focus very specifically on the
mystery of what happened to Grandpa Charlie. From the get go, Maddie is trying to figure
out what happened to her parents, but also Grandpa Charlie. Eventually we learn that
Charlie never set foot in the mansion. He was from a poor family, he was not
interested in wealth and he was loved by many. All of which are fine little details but they're
not really helping us get to the bottom of the mystery. The closest thing we get to that is a
gold watch that Maddie finds that once belonged to Grandpa Charlie, given to him by Grandma Ursula.
Ursula wants that thing thrown out, but Maddie keeps it and starts asking around town to see if
anyone has any other information. This, though, is what leads the police to use it as evidence
to arrest Ursula, leading to the iconic ad of Ursula in the back of the cop car. And that
right there, that's when it hit me. The recent CG videos that have been
put onto the Merge Mansion YouTube channel originally felt like a lot of nothing burgers,
or nothing pies I suppose. They were just Grandma Ursula being shady, but not that
I'm-actually-a-murderer kind of way. I didn't really know what to make of them. But thinking
about this now with the new understanding that her husband, Grandpa Charlie, is alive,
I think I've got an idea of what's going on. What if the reason Ursula's being shady is
because she knows where Grandpa Charlie is? In the video Left or Right?, we see Maddie
follow Ursula into a snow storm. But when she catches up, Ursula's footprints go one way and
the sledge of supplies that she was dragging go the opposite way, thereby implying that
someone else grabbed them and took them away. Charlie, it was all to see, and also help
Charlie. But why? Why would she want to keep him a secret? Sadly, this is where the trail
ran cold. I dug through so much in-game dialog, went frame by frame for every video ever released,
I even spent an unsettling amount of time doing the unthinkable and *gasp* playing the game to
see if there were any secrets in the item merging sections, but I ultimately came up empty handed.
Much like Daddy Pascal… I mean Detective Pascal, I couldn't figure it out. Or at
least I couldn't until I reexamined all those papers that they sent to me in their challenge.
In the middle of all those files, blueprints, and newspaper clippings, there was one series
of documents that literally blew the case wide open, a series of journal entries.
That right there? That isn't just chicken scratch. That is the diary of Grandpa Charlie himself.
This is him marrying Ursula, again highlighting their lack of finances with a small and simple
ceremony and money would actually become a running theme throughout all of the entries.
They also get a whole lot harder to read, gotta be honest, I wasn't able to fully decipher them all,
but I think I have enough understanding as to what's going on. So here's my rough translation.
This. This right here is the smoking gun loyal theorist. This tells us everything we need to
know. Not only was Charlie a poor man before he got married to Ursula, he continued to be a
poor man afterwards, they were struggling to make mortgage payments and any money that he did make,
he was thrown away on drinking and gambling, tale as old as time. What's interesting, though,
is we're also introduced to a character that we've never heard of before: Leonard Boulton,
Ursula's brother. And while we don't learn a whole lot about him, the main takeaway is that this guy
is wrapped up in some unsavory businesses. He's the kind of brother in law that always
has a get rich quick scheme going on. And sadly, the situation Charlie finds himself in means that
he has to go along with it. Unfortunately, it seems like the last scheme that these two pull
is ultimately their downfall. When I was looking at the Detective Cork Board from the live event
I noticed one very odd detail. There was a piece of paper pinned that was from an
official government document. More specifically, references to the foreign agricultural trade of
the United States. Weird, right? Something about it just felt out of place here. So
I spent my day doing the most fun thing on the planet, deciphering government financial
documents. Yeah, I definitely know how to party. I won't bore you with all the details here,
but basically these documents track the U.S’s import and export of agricultural foods,
things like wheat, rice, vegetables, fruit, cotton, sugar, coffee. It keeps track of the
rise and fall of what other countries are buying and selling to us and whether the
market is good or bad. It's important data. But looking at the files from the dates on
the corkboard revealed something that started to explain Charlie's predicament. Generally,
agricultural prices continued to go down for that period, which if these two men were invested
in those trades, would have left them with less profits. And when you owe people money,
that's not going to be great. But there was one market in particular
that was most affected throughout those dates. Slowly but surely, throughout the 1980s, the
U.S. stopped sending freights full of agricultural stock to Russia. The Cold War was at its height,
and so the U.S. stopped selling and more importantly, buying from Russia. However, during
the seventies and eighties, the U.S. did increase the rates of immigration into the country,
specifically from Russia, which led to the rise of the Russian mafia in the U.S., a mafia that
would do what it could to smuggle goods to and from their homeland, which sounds like a pretty
good match for these unsavory characters that Charlie and Leonard find themselves indebted to.
If they weren't making much from their usual agricultural sales or worse, weren't able to
keep up with their end of the debts by smuggling high value items in and out of the country,
then that would lead to a very bad ending for both of them. Which leads me to my conclusion
on all of this. Where's Grandpa Charlie now? Simple. He's on the run. He's in hiding. He
wasn't able to pay back the loan sharks, and so they came after him and he did the only thing
that he could. He ran. Leaving his wife and child behind in order to protect them. That's why we
see Ursula stealing and destroying evidence, she's trying to hide any sign of where Charlie might be.
It's also why Ursula is willing to go to prison for him. She doesn't want anyone finding him
and killing him. So is Grandma Ursula a murderer? Doesn't really look like it. She's just a lady who
loves some bloody pie and has a passion for knife collection. Perhaps the true mystery meat in the
pies was that there was no meat all along. But hey, that's just a theory.
A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching. And hey, if you wanted to cypher more random
lore about meat based products, click the video that you see on screen right now to see if you
can eat a dress made of meat. How many calories is that and how is it possible that it's still
in a museum to this very day? I don't know. Maybe they turned it to Jerky or something?
We're going to find out. As always, my friends, thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.