Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that builds its theories one ro-block at a time.
Man, this summer really is the season of indie horror sequels. Security Breach is getting DLC,
Project Playtime just got a big new update, and I'm pretty sure Garten of Banban 4 and 5 and 6
will probably drop any day now. Add in the demo for the cooking companion spin-off, and honestly,
we've got ourselves an Infinity Gauntlet of indie horror. I guess you could call it the identity
gauntlet. I honestly feel like I need to release an entire apology video for that one joke. But
speaking of multi-colored gemstones there is one other brightly colored sequel that just dropped:
Rainbow Friends, Chapter 2. In case you missed our last year and rainbow friends let, me catch
you up. A school bus heading to an amusement park called Oddworld gets sent down the wrong path,
causing the bus to crash and everyone inside to wind up inside a mysterious facility. It seems to
be the remains of an old TV show Museum and play Park dedicated to the Rainbow Fun Time Friends,
the cast of characters from an old animated TV show. Thanks to some plaques and pictures
scattered throughout the building, we discovered that the friends were created by a man called
Oswald D Davis and his partner Trenton, with this facility specifically designed to bring
the Rainbow Friends to life. Because this is an indie horror game though,
you can probably guess how well that went. In 1991, shortly after having their first guest,
the facility was shut down as evidenced by long forgotten computer login screen sprinkled
throughout the game map. Leading us to the events of Chapter 1, where we're trapped for five days
by someone who appears to be the Red Rainbow Friend... though official merch only lists him
as just "The Scientist." If we managed to survive for the five days, we're chased through the vents
and eventually escape from the facility. Chapter 2 then picks up immediately after that, leading
you to a fenced-off area and an old man trying to break in. Probably should be using some wire snips
instead of scissors to cut through that fence, but hey what do I know? Anyway, we eventually make our
way into Oddworld, the amusement park that we were headed to at the start of chapter 1. And clearly,
Oddworld is also dedicated to the Rainbow Fun Time Friends, with different parts of the park branded
around each of the different characters: Green's Drop Ride, Purple's Maze Lair, Blue's Castle,
and Orange's Cavern Coaster. Thinking of Orange... he's not here until the finale of the
chapter. 'Oh, he's adorable. He's my favorite.' And while my bestest boy may indeed be missing,
Red seems to have brought with him some new additions to the crew specifically Yellow and
Cyan to hunt us down in any and all ways they can. Just like in chapter 1, we're tasked with running
around collecting items required for our escape, only this time instead of being trapped here for
days, we're only having to survive for a couple of hours. A few gas canisters and one giant cake
later, we escape the facility on the Park's roller coaster. But, of course the end never truly means
the end, and the chapter closes with the promise of more ahead. Now obviously, while the game has
us busy looking around for bags of sugar and light bulbs, my eyes were peeled for the real important
thing to collect: the lore. Is there lore? Looking for lore. Looking for love and looking for lore.
But this time it's not there. Or, at least it's not all there. You see, the lore of Rainbow
Friends after chapter 2, is so much more than just this one game and its small handful of primary
colored characters. To solve this one, we're gonna have to span a literal Empire of popular
Roblox games connected by a shadowy organization and overseen by a mysterious businessman Out For
Blood. And that my friends, is our journey for today. But first we gotta answer the question
that everyone has when they first boot up chapter 2. Who the heck's the old guy. Even me during my
playthrough. I just couldn't shake the fact that something was off about this guy. Let's hope this
works. I'm not gonna skip this. I'm not gonna vote for skip. Poke. What the. Oh no. Oh no,
oh man. Oh, that was a severe head trauma right there. Oh, he's definitely got a concussion.
Whoa, how did I get up here? Who even are you? Do I care about you? No. Let's be honest with
ourselves, this guy is sus. We start the game off and we find him breaking into a facility,
and then we go yeah that seems like a totally trustworthy thing to do. From there we just
blindly do everything he asks. Not a great plan. But what's even more suspicious about this guy is
that he simultaneously knows more about Oddworld and less about it than he lets on. On one hand
he's trying to break in, which shows that he's trying to do something here. Maybe sabotage Red
Guy. Or spy on the experiments that are going on. It's unclear. Our old man also seems very familiar
with the fact that the Rainbow Friends are now bloodthirsty monsters considering when he sees
Blue running around, he knows that it's suddenly a sign of danger. Is that blue wdw die? Oh no,
coming here was a mistake. He also knows about the lookie that's blocking our path and how it can be
lured away with cake. Or how you can escape from being caught by yellow. All of that is some pretty
Insider knowledge. He's not just familiar with these creatures, he's experienced with their inner
workings and mechanics. On the other hand though, as soon as he senses danger he immediately regrets
his decision to break in. Oh no, coming here was a mistake. We need to find a way out of here,
and fast. Literally the way we came. You were literally snipping things into the fence. We
could probably get out of there. So he wanted to do something in the park and knows that the
creatures are dangerous but wasn't aware that they're currently active. Additionally, he
repeatedly lies to us as evidenced by him tasking us to find light bulbs to call for help, only to
then be surprised that we were able to find an SOS light hidden inside. Wait there was actually
an SOS light? I mean wow, you guys must be good at finding things. So who is the old man? Well,
let's take a look at his design. A leather jacket. Thick rimmed glasses. And a smirk. Which makes him
the perfect match for one of the two characters that we learned about in chapter 1, Trenton,
co-founder of the Rainbow Friends. It seems like a pretty open and shut case. Everything about these
two guys match. Except long time theorists will realize that there's a slight hole with my plan.
In my previous Theory I said that Oswald turned Trenton into Red, but in this game we see both
characters existing simultaneously. So what's the deal with that? I was wrong. It's as easy
as that. Red isn't Trenton. See I can admit when I'm wrong. It would seem that Trenton's back in
the Rainbow Friends Family for something, but what? Well, we can actually get hints to that
from the first two chapters. First things first, obviously Trenton is much older now than he is in
the picture from chapter 1. And that's because the portrait is from when the company first started,
1972. You see before entering Oddworld at the start of the chapter, you can actually go off
to the side of the fence in the lobby area and activate a generator, here. The code for the
generator is one nine seven two. All it does is activate this little conveyor belt with a cinder
block on it, but that right there is telling us that the date matters. I would guess that it's
likely acting as the start to the Rainbow Funtime Friends franchise. Why would I say that? Well as
we've seen with other indie horror franchises, the 70s tends to be a good starting date for failed
kid's franchises. And, they're not just making up these dates out of thin air either. The 70s were a
huge time for the types of kids programming that Rainbow Funtime Friends was probably like. This
was the era of Mr Rogers, The Electric Company, The New Zoo Review. Sure they weren't animated,
but you had these big casts of characters with life-sized puppets and designs that really didn't
mesh together all that well. Random animals and monsters and dinosaurs all mixed together. It
was the early days for this sort of programming and so whatever popped into your head was kind
of what worked, just like the assemblage of characters that we get with Rainbow Friends:
yellow dino, green monster, blue person, orange gator, and purple arm thingy. This timeline also
roughly coincides with a similar sort of kid's show at the time, a British program by the name
Rainbow. Which also was popular all throughout the 70s. ...look in the kitchen and hurry up,
I'm starving. Zippy, you always want people to do things for you. I'm gonna zip you up.
There's even an episode of Rainbow named Friends. That said, this is more of an interesting
coincidence than anything. After watching a few episodes of the show there doesn't seem to be all
that much connecting the two. I just thought it was worth calling out. So if Trenton and
Oswald started the series in 1972, what happened? Well throughout the chapter, there are hints to a
rivalry between the two of these characters. In a control room near Orange's roller coaster, we can
see a white board with various messages smudged out including: call animal control and change
garage code. Now the Animal Control line is likely a reference to the moment that the characters
escaped. Throughout chapter 1 we saw that the Rainbow Friends were, at least for a period
of time, forced to live in stables under the facility, even having to be chained up in order
to be showered. They were treated like animals, so calling Animal Control the day they escape and
happen to be hungry seems to make a lot of sense. But what I'm more interested in is the blue text
that says change garage code. You'll notice that right next to it is a blue stick figure wearing
a crown, an obvious reference to the character of Blue, right? Well also notice there's a red stick
figure next to it that's been erased. It seems like someone speaking in blue is looking to take
over. Take the crown for themselves, and quite literally erase Red from existence. This power
struggle between the two is also reflected in the calendar that you can find in the same room. Like
all the other calendars you find throughout the map, this one has July 1st marked out for a field
trip, a reference to our school bus first arriving at the facility. Based on the fact that July
1st on this calendar falls on a Friday, you can actually pinpoint a few potential options for what
year the game is meant to be taken place: 1994, 2005, 2011, 2016, and 2022. My money is on that
2022 mark. June 30th 2022 is when Rainbow Friends Chapter 1 first released, and with the next day.
July 1st, being circled followed by the words field trip feels like a reference that's both meta
and canon. Anyway, that tells us that it's been over 30 years since the initial facility shut down
in 1991. But this calendar actually gives us a lot more information. Notice that there are a couple
more dates highlighted: July 4th for fireworks, which yeah that tracks, and July 6th for a light
show. These highlighted dates, I believe not only confirmed that this calendar is up to date,
but also gives us an idea of what Red is aiming for. Remember the first chapter took place over
the course of five nights. That means that our escape happens the evening of July 5th. That's
why there are leftover fireworks for Red to use to scare the old man during chapter 2's third
challenge. However clearly there is someone else here who's trying to foil Red's plan because each
date is scratched off using blue, including the light show that's happening on the 6th, a
date that has not happened yet. Technically that's supposed to be happening tomorrow. And underneath
those dates is a note saying move to August for investigation. Whoever's writing these messages
in blue is trying to stop or slow down Red's plan. The power struggle was also being referenced in
Chapter 1 with this random line on a wall written in red, "you only slowed me down." Since we only
have ourselves two named characters in this game our list of suspects is fairly limited,
especially with Trenton obviously being the old man. Unless they're introducing a new character
during the next chapter, process of elimination kinda dictates that Oswald, the founder,
must be Red. The park is named after him. He's the one in control. He's also the one who has
the proper garage code as we see from the opening cutscene. It's also clear that Red and Trenton
have themselves a backstory considering Red has the chance to kill off Trenton in Challenge 3 but
chooses not to, instead just using the fireworks to scare him. That then means that Trenton,
our old man, must be the one in blue breaking into the facility trying to strike back and ultimately
reclaim the crown for himself, erasing Red from the picture for being too ambitious for pushing
too far. Here's what I think happened, the two started the show together helping it to grow
in its early days, but then something started to change. Red, Oswald, wanted to keep growing. Make
more characters. Make them more realistic. And Blue, Trenton, disagreed. In Chapter 2's final
chase sequence, we run past robotic versions of the characters all discarded... dismantled.
Old animatronic versions of Blue, Orange, Green all thrown away. I suspect that this was because
they weren't good enough for Red. They weren't realistic enough. He needed something living...
the actual Rainbow FunTime Friends which came out around 1991. Along the way Trenton was disowned,
ousted from the company for being resistant to this change. Fast forward to the game today in
2022 where I suspect that Red is now using the lookies and tainting the local water supply with
them. The chapter's final sequence we run past exactly that, a bunch of Rainbow Friend heads,
which we know are living creatures, floating past in a pipe explicitly labeled water supply. Red is
up to something... trying to make everyone into a Rainbow Friend. No longer slowed down by his
partner. But now that partner is back. Trenton is here and trying to sabotage his old business
partner, make him stop the mad power trip that he's been on. But it also doesn't necessarily
mean that Trenton's that good of a guy. You see there's one thing that I can't quite shake in all
this... and that's the Easter egg that led me to believe that Trenton was the villain in the
first place. See when you look through the glass of the terrarium in chapter 1, Trenton's picture
changes from a cool guy in a leather jacket to a man in a suit with glasses and a top hat
with a purple ribbon. Clearly Trenton is hiding something, transforming into a villainous business
guy. But who, or what, is he? Well, I think this conspiracy actually goes much further than just
Rainbow Friends. One thing that I didn't notice last chapter was that the computer screen showing
Oswald's final login dates have a company name on them, RBM... an obvious parody of IBM Computers,
right? Well yeah, but it's also so much more. Two awesome Theorists on our Game Theory subreddit,
FantasticFile_3903 and Rockmage_1234. both pointed out that RBM computers actually appear in another
Roblox game entitled, The Little Ones, produced by none other than Charcle, one of the two devs
for Rainbow Friends. In fact, a cover image for that game was just updated last month. What was
it updated to? Nothing. At least as far as I can tell, it's the same picture that it's always been.
I suspect that it was just to draw attention back to the game, especially when RBM is right there on
the monitors. So how is Little Ones connected to the lore of Rainbow Friends? It's not, at least as
far as I can tell right now. It's a game where one of your friends is kidnapped and you're forced to
escape a warehouse populated with dozens of little small mutant versions of them. The 1972 generator
keypad that was used in Rainbow Friends has the same keypad layout as those in Little Ones,
but I don't think that's too much to go off of. I suspect that that's just reusing assets.
Unfortunately, the only connection between the two seems to be through this RBM computer company. But
while connections to Rainbow Friends aren't immediately obvious, there are connections to
another game that's worth calling out. It's the massive Roblox hit, Spider. In this game, one
friend is bit by a spider and transforms into a horrific creature trying to capture all the other
friends. This game was made by Rainbow Friends's other Dev, Roy Stanford. But again, the reason
it's interesting is that there are pictures of the spider hidden inside The Little Ones. There's also
a series of labeled VHS tapes, one clearly marked as "Spider." Why does all that matter for Rainbow
Friends? Well because of this. Spider has one pass available for purchase, a pass that increases the
odds that you can become the spider in the main gameplay. And whose face is that there, front and
center on that spider pass? A businessman with glasses, a top hat, and a purple ribbon. It is
the exact face that's hiding inside of Trenton's portrait in Rainbow Friends. Could this all just
be a series of Easter egg connections from two devs referencing their past games? Absolutely,
it could. But those have already happened in other places from Rainbow Friends. In chapter 1's lobby,
you can actually go out and around this building right here, and you can see references to both of
these games, Little Ones and Spider. That right there, that is an Easter egg. But to suddenly
see these explicit references and connections in the gameplay itself, that now feels to me like
something a little bit more. Like maybe Trenton isn't all he appears to be. That maybe he is a
spider in disguise, or some nefarious businessman running all of these experimental procedures,
bringing terror and dread to all these different companies. Not exactly sure yet. Don't really
have a solid answer. The tapes and lost ones are labeled as 2019, so it's possible that the lore
of these three games are linked together. Trenton transforming people into monsters be they spiders,
tiny mutants, or large pillowy mascots through spider bites, mutation, or just tainting the
water supply. Speaking of, at the end of the chapter, did you notice that Trenton doesn't
come with you? Despite his insistence that you all have to leave when the Rainbow Friends appear,
he stays behind. His work there isn't done yet. And I don't suspect that he wants us to escape.
There are multiple exit points as you safely go around the roller coaster, but Trenton doesn't
tell you to get off at any of those. He explicitly tells us to stay on and go through the maintenance
exit. Something tells me that the elevator to the surface at the end of chapter 2 isn't leading to
where we expect. We're not done yet. And in a game full of rainbow colored friends, the
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today's episode. And as always, remember, it's all just a theory, a Game Theory. Thanks for watching.