Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that isn't here to cause any treble and
just wants you to toot that subscribe button. It truly be based. If you got a giggle out of
any of those puns, let me introduce you to the funniest game you will ever play: Trombone Champ.
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.
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 the trombone dubstep was
the 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”.
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!?
See, as soon as we started the game, all our expectations were thrown out the window.
That's right. A simple game of playing copyright neutral music using the instrumental equivalent
of 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 Trombiverse.
Is dissecting this game important? No. Will it help forward mankind in any way? Certainly
not. What am I going to take the lore of a silly trombone game way too seriously
anyway? You bet your sweet sackut I am. That's the original name for the trombone,
by the way. Guess where I learned that? Trombone Champ! Entertaining and educational.
*snickers* Sackbut. 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.
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 it's 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 hotdog friends, We've got ourselves a Trombiverse 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? Why trombone, though?
Sure. It's a funny instrument that makes for some chaotic, meme worthy game play,
but believe it or not, there's actually a deeper meaning behind it all.
If you weren't like us giggling like a bunch of band kids in the back of the orchestra,
you'll know that in the opening scene we’re 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. And 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 as our instrument, we set out on
our journey, tooting 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 Tootmaster Tom.
not our Tom, he had a bit of trouble with his tooting.
Maybe it's a British thing. The baboon version of Tom seemed to have a bit of amnesia,
so he isn't overly helpful. But Bassmaster Ben proceeds to Lore dump all over us. He informs
us about the origins of music, the battle of good against evil, and then namedrops Mozart.
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 Trombiverse. 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,
y’know. However, eventually there were two men that changed that. The first was
Christoph Willibald 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 in 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 Trazom, just Mozart backwards.
Fun fact. I actually pulled his Tromboner card on the first try.
But while it was certainly awesome to pull such an important card on my first try, it didn't feel
the same as the excitement that you get from pulling a great card from a physical booster
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now we should probably go back to looking at the weird evil twin Mozart card and Trombone Champ.
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 galant 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, the 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 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 in D is a prime example of this, where the bass clef 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 order, which is why Mozart is considered to be one of
the heroes of our story here in trombone champ. He was all for freedom in music,
making it up, breaking the rules to create new and interesting compositions in spite of the
world around him. Trazom 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 that's what I assumed Tom was going for here.
Okay, so we want to be on the side of Mozart and defeat his evil twin,
the boring counterpart. Trazom. But how then, do we do that? Bassmaster Ben explains that he
and Tom are protectors of one of the two major clefs 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.
And you see, this is yet another reason the game is only possible with trombones. The
trombone is one of the few instruments that can seamlessly transition across both the bass and
treble clefs. 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 Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by none other than Mozart,
a song 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 Trazom for good.
Becoming the tromboniest tromboner that ever did toot. Hurray! for once a Game
Theory that doesn't have itself a bad ending like “we were the villain the whole time.”
Hold on. Wait a minute. Merged? Something never before seen?
I thought we were restoring music back to the way it was.
An uncertain era? It doesn't sound like we just saved the day.
H-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 clefs than the standard two that we know now. Bass and
treble clefs are formerly known as F and G Clefs. There's also an alto clef that sits right there in
the middle, which is called the C clef. Shout out to all my violists 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 clefs 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 covering
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 high or low notes
available to all of those instruments. Combining the clefs like we just did in Trombone Champ will
lead to music that looks like this, which is hard to read on the fly. The F and G clefs 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 alike,
which I suspect was the point all along. Listen to the ending of this game.
We align ourselves with a bunch of apes. Which is weird out of context, that 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 hamadryas 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? No, 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 Trazoms 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 hamadryas
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 is the master of the fairy, like some sort of genital pirates.
You see, Babi was the firstborn son of Osiris, God of the dead. Thus, Babi wasn't benevolent
at all. Instead, he is said to be, quote, very bloodthirsty, living on entrails, devouring the
souls of the sinful. All Babi wants is destruction and chaos. Hence why he would want to combine the
clefs. 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 talked this whole time about trombones being considered a sacred instrument,
but I think we all know how unruly the trombone 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.
And hey, if you don't want to get
off the meme train just yet, you go watch our video proving that Red is actually sus
in Amogus. That video is over on your left. But if you're like me and you just want to
get after more Looooooore, you can always watch our video on the right where I break
down the creepy hidden secrets of Roblox' Doors. There's a new update out there,
so maybe we were proved right.To find out you're going to have to watch that
one. As always, my friends, don't forget to subscribe. And I'll see you all next week.