Put that thing back where it came from, or so help me -
*Door opening sound and intense rock music*
23 19! We have a 23 19!
*Even more intense rock music and gunshots*
Hello Internet, Welcome to Game Theory, where it's been a good long while since I've made a nice connected universe theory.
"What is this, a crossover episode?"
Yes, Mr. Peanut Butter, that's exactly what it is.
Shared universes are big business these days,
whether it's ten years of Marvel come together for Infinity War,
or Elsa sharing a universe with Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts,
everyone is competing for that coveted title of most ambitious crossover in history;
but I think we can do 'em all one better.
Last time I did one of these huge connected chain theories,
we united most major Nintendo franchises out to the real world, and then back again to God of War. We also united all of the big Ubisoft
franchises, but this time I think we can do one better by connecting one of gaming's oldest,
most popular titles to one of its newest most popular titles in a weird web that will have us spanning decades and developers to deliver
some of the most diverse cameo potential possible. All while still remaining in canon.
And that's an important one. There are no
PlayStation Royale or Smash Brothers-style crossovers here. These can't just amount to toys in a box. Most ambitious
crossover in history I hear you say? Hold my beer.
And by 'beer', I mean 'Diet Coke' (well now Diet Pepsi), because beer is gross.
Well, at least it will be the most ambitious crossover in history until Mr.
Beast does his 100
Youtuber Battle Royale he's talking about on Twitter. Sign me up for that one Sir Beast! Our journey today begins in the early
1990's, when a company named ID Software began rolling out games in a genre that would eventually be called the
first-person shooter.
And of them all, none were bigger than Doom. The timeless tale of a Space Marine
slaughtering mechanical brain spiders from H-E-double hockey sticks set the gold standard for PC games,
and in just two years was installed on over 10 million computers.
It was a game that was so influential that, before it was known as 'the FPS genre', it was known as 'the Doom Clone genre.'
And sure, later this year the Doom-iverse is gonna get even bigger with the release of Doom Eternal:
"We're not just making a Doom game anymore, we're building a Doom universe."
But the thing is, Bethesda, that universe is already more sprawling than you realize.
You see, ID had a habit of connecting their games. Since the release of Doom 2 back in 1994,
players have speculated that it's connected to one of ID's other major franchises: Wolfenstein.
"Why would they assume that," you ask? Probably because the game has secret rooms that perfectly
recreate levels from Wolfenstein 3D. Doesn't get more explicit than that one. Or does it?
*Dramatic music*
It does, actually. In Doom RPG, released for cellphones way back in 2005,
you play as BJ Blazkowicz the 3rd,
who, according to the game's ancient website that's only accessible via 'Wayback Machine',
is the protagonist of Dooms 1, 2, & 3.
The name Blazkowicz would make him the descendant of William
BJ Blazkowicz, the World War II veteran who stars as the hero of the Wolfenstein series.
Once again I say, doesn't get much more explicit than that.
And yet, once again I would still be wrong, because the
masterminds behind these games have been very eager to confirm a lot of early theories,
going on Twitter lately to not only confirm the Blazkowicz
connection, but go one step further by looping in yet another of their game series,
Commander Keen. And, don't worry if you're not super familiar with that name. Keen couldn't be any further from his Mecha-Nazi
slaughtering kin. It's a classic side-scrolling
action game about an eight-year-old boy named 'Billy Blaze' who builds himself a spaceship, dons a helmet, takes a cheesy name, goes off to
Mars and starts blasting up the place when locals take apart his ship. Confirmed by a Twitter conversation in
2018 between a fan and Doom creators John Romero and Tom Hall, the Doomguy is,
canonically, the son of Commander Keen.
End quote. So, we already have ourselves a name and a cool lineage for one of gaming's most famous unnamed protagonists.
But before we leave the ID-verse, let's just go ahead and throw Quake in there too, as Doomguy appears in Quake Champions,
specifically citing him carrying around the foot of his dead rabbit, Daisy. A rabbit we see mentioned in episode 4
and the ending of the original Doom. Doomguy is literally the O.G. John Wick, except instead of taking down
mafiosos for killing his dog, he's taking down hell beasts for killing off his rabbit. Awesome! Anyway, all of this helps confirm that Doom
2016, the new reboot of the Doom franchise,
actually stars the original Doom Guy, BJ Blazkowicz the 3rd himself. Notice how at the beginning of Doom 2016
you're in a high-tech lab, but for some reason you yourself are strapped to this random stone slab and chains, and how later in the
level you see this replication of a stone sarcophagus. It's unusual - until you read the other lore descriptions from Quake Champions.
*Low pitched voice*
That, coupled with the pet rabbit reward poster found in the game, shows that Doomguy has been kicking interdimensional butt for over three decades!
Regardless, it's not that impressive to connect Doom to itself.
What is impressive, though, is connecting Doom to our love, our life, the meme lord himself,
Shrek. We know that BJ is not only related to someone who fought in a World War, but also,
canonically, starts and ends his Doom 1 story here on Earth. And not just some future version of Earth, either. It is Earth in 2019,
this year, which is when he's sent to Mars as
punishment for assaulting his superior officer, and all that time spent here on terra firma gives him plenty of
opportunity to Kickflip McTwist in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, where he was a PC-exclusive playable character.
The Tony Hawk connection now opens up the possibility of BJ
nose-grinding against the likes of Shrek, Star Wars second-stringers of Darth Maul and Jango Fett, and even the character we all were waiting to
board with: C.O.D. Soldier. That's... that's honestly how he's known....
C.O.D. Soldier. (Call Of Duty)
Great... generic soldier for a generic franchise.
Anyway, while I would love to sit here and ponder all the ways Doomguy would be able to tear the Star Wars
bestiary limb from limb, I'm much more interested in how he could single-handedly
destroy the combatants in the world's most popular game. Forget mysterious purple cubes and illegitimate
lawsuits from old TV stars, the biggest canon threat to Fortnite Island is our green clad Space Marine. You see,
Spider-Man is an unlockable character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, and as 'Into the Spider-verse' made clear,
all Spidey's exist in one connected multiverse. And we know that Doomguy ain't afraid to charge headfirst
into an interdimensional portal. So now Doomguy can really go on a rampage. Ultimate universe Green Goblin? Meet The BFG.
Lizard? The Doom Slayer is gonna tear that arm off again my buddy. So we go from Doom to Tony Hawk to Spider Man and
then on to Thanos from 'Infinity War' who, early last year, made a detour to
Fortnite Island after collecting all his pretty little gem stones, which means that Doomguy can now take the same trip.
Forget goofy dinosaur pyjamas, all you need is green body armor. New-school meets old-school brutality.
But in all seriousness, can we actually make this happen? Can we just all tweet at Epic Games and Bethesda? It would help promote Doom
Eternal anyway, and it would be such a cool old-school style crossover.
And like I said, it is still within the canons of all of these universes. But the
possibilities opened up by Spider-Man keep going - because it also connects the universe that older viewers may be less familiar with:
the Disney 'Infinity' universe. Although it
sounds like some kind of universe caused by Infinity War, Disney Infinity is actually a series of video games based around Disney and
Marvel properties. All aimed at a younger crowd and powered by Disney's version of amiibo - or probably more accurate to say,
Skylanders, since they were the first ones that everyone else was ripping off. ( :( ) Anyway, canonically, all of the events in the Disney 'Infinity'
games are actually happening to toy versions of our heroes. *said in a deep voice* "These can't just amount to toys in a box."
Yeah, I know I said that at the beginning of the episode and you're ready to throw it back in my face in the comments, but
guess what? I also script these videos and intentionally wrote that in,
explicitly to set up this twist on my own words in this very moment. And that twist is this: the Infinity universe
canonically exists in a place called the 'Toybox'. "Welcome to the center of your experience: the 'Toybox.'
Anything's possible here with a spark of imagination." A toy-based universe where real world locations can be
replicated and where weapons of the toys
actually function in the way that they should. And what do we see in the Toy Story level in Kingdom Hearts 3?
A world named the 'Toybox', where real-world locations are replicated and where weapons actually
function the way that they should. So much so that even the toys are surprised by it.
Woody: "Say we have been taken to some kind of alternate world.
That would explain why your laser's real." It's even outright
acknowledged that, while this should be the real world,
considering that, you know, these are toys that are played with by humans. That the Toy Box in Kingdom Hearts 3 isn't the real world.
Sora: "I'm sorry." Toys: "What?"
Sora: "I wanted to get you back to the real world." Buzz: "It does seem that we're trapped here..."
Rex: "We'll never get home."
Somehow, the attacking Heartless and merging worlds of Kingdom Hearts kicked - all of the Toy Story characters over into the Disney Infinity
Toybox, explaining all the strangeness that we see throughout this entire level. And that means
nowhere in all of Kingdom Hearts is safe from Doomguy's wrath. None of your favorite Disney
universes are gonna be spared this time. Davy Jones's heart box ain't gonna be lasting too long against frag grenades and a shotgun.
Beast isn't gonna get the chance to fall in love with Belle before the last petal falls because doom guy confused him with a baron
of heck. And Cloud will have a powerful new ally in the struggle against Sephiroth, because since Kingdom Hearts is the epic
collaboration between Disney and Square Enix, this connection doesn't just open up the Disney movies, but pretty much every single
Final Fantasy game as well. Can you imagine
Kefka now visiting Fortnite Island? Or Sora, Donald, and Goofy flying their Gummi Ship to Castle
Wolfenstein to teacup-ride Mecha-Hitler to death? I can, and it is glorious.
Hehe, I'm legitimately really excited about that.
I know I over-exaggerated that for effect, but it would be the embodiment of all the stupid fun that video games have.
And the Final Fantasy connection now opens up two other huge chunks in this already
massive web. The first comes courtesy of Final Fantasy 15. Now, even though Kingdom Hearts 3 has moments that feel
very reminiscent of people and settings from FF 15, there have, to my knowledge, never been any direct physical
links between the two universes. That said, there have been plenty of crossovers with Final Fantasy X,
including the characters Tidus and Wakka. The main setting of Final Fantasy X is the
world of Spira. Now, follow me on this. Over in Final Fantasy XV, we have the city of Insomnia, the crown city, and
everywhere in that metropolis there are signs - tons and tons of signs - all making coy
references to famous enemies and characters from all the other installments. In fact, Reddit user 'scissorman' went out of his way to document as
many as he could find. But there was one set that really stood out to me: the multiple references to Spira as a real world location.
Real enough to have multiple banks and security businesses named after that. And these also appear in the Final Fantasy 15 movie Kingsglaive.
Now, I know this isn't confirmed 100%,
and I know that many Final Fantasy fans hate the idea of the worlds of these games being connected
- outside of VII and X which actually do share a canonical link - but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me that this link would exist.
And if it does - and I hope it does - it opens up the entirety of the Ubisoft Universe that I covered in a previous episode on crossovers.
Assassin's Creed Origins has a Final Fantasy XV quest complete with desert-ready chocobo.
And, as I covered in that previous video, the Assassin's Creed link then brings in Far Cry, Splinter Cell, and
Watch_Dogs, which means that hackers now could visit Kingdom Hearts's Tron world and hop inside the computers that they're hacking.
Ezio could assassin it out with Yuffie, and
Organization XIII could finally shut up about 'darkness in your heart' and instead focus on an equally useless task: helping the Templars out looking for
those damned pieces of Eden.
And if that wasn't enough crossover potential,
Final Fantasy characters have also done a fair bit of crossing over with Mario and the gang. For instance, Mario Hoops 3-on-3 and
Mario Sports Mix both feature pick-up basketball matches against Moogals and black mages like Vivi. This, in turn, brings in all the
Nintendo titles I talked about in my first ever connected universe theory from, like, 7 years ago:
Mario and Metroid, Zelda, Kirby, and Captain Rainbow, heck, even Tetris. And if we're talking Mario sports
crossovers, then you know that's gonna bring over Sonic and his whole gang from all those times Mario and Sonic
competed at the Olympics. Again, no Smash Brothers allowed here, but Mario is in so many places it hardly even matters.
And with that, we've come full circle,
crossing over not only with a massive number of games,
but crossing back over to my first ever crossover theories in the first place.
It's a crossover of crossover episodes! Which again, just goes to show the seemingly endless
limits that all these franchises can go.
Link and Samus could hop into the Battle Bus and compete in the Battle Royale,
Knuckles could knock heads with Noctis. Kirby could dine with Ratatouille.
Kamek could cast magic alongside Donald and compete for who's more annoying.
Heck, Mecha-Hitler could get repairs from Robotnik!
When you stop and think about it, it seems like the only franchise left that isn't included is, uhh,
well, FNAF. And ain't that a shame, ( aww ) 'cause I would love to see Doomguy make one final
crossover just to finally give Purple Guy what's coming to him. BUT HEY, that's just a theory.
A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching!
Make an epic crossover of your own by joining the Theorist community. Smash that subscribe button, and heck,
if you didn't see our previous two connected universe theories, left is the Ubisoft Universe and right is the OG one that started it all,
'all video game universes are connected.' Whoo boy, cringy MatPat was super cringe back then.
Ohhh, crossover of the MatPat's! The MatPat-iverse! (imagine that.)
Subtitles crossed over by: Electric Logan & gang