Alright, this page…
I wanted to create a page to talk about things I like about this series and show some little details I noticed/ not many people know.
And so I did.
I didn’t know what to call this page but that doesn’t matter anymore!
Let’s start the barrage of cool things!
First, things about the series as a whole. After that, I'll get into specific episode details and cool things.
Can we talk about how cool it is that this series has an Original Soundtrack composed by Anomidae and Pumodi, with actually great songs!
Adds so much to the immersion and series, like the song in the final demo that Portal generated in episode 4, wrong_turn.vmf! That demo was already unusual but the music during that part was phenomenal, giving off the feeling of being a song from the game, but heavily distorted and corrupted and I must applaud Anomidae for capturing this feeling so perfectly.
Some other highlights are:
umbrellas.cfg, fair_worlds.cfg, presentation.bsp and red_worlds.bsp!
All fantastic songs that fit right in with this series. I particularly like Pudomi’s compositions, as they kinda… make me feel emotional. Take the song fair_world.cfg, I can’t really describe, maybe it’s the instruments or maybe the melody, but something about it makes me emotional.
Also, it's really cool that all the song names are written like files in a folder, and fits perfectly with the series.
It’s really cool that a bunch of Source Engine tools and games are constantly used throughout the series, both by us and Anomi, to investigate and uncover the mystery of the Interloper, makes it feel so much more believable. The explanations to some of the more head-scratching things do feel like they make sense and that it could exist as well. It 's all so cool!
The fact that this is also very interconnected with the history of Source as whole also makes it very interesting to follow. Things like Valve’s original vision for the engine and even Eidamona’s previous investigation being so central and important to the series really makes it feel like this mystery existed. Even the forums when the mystery was first discovered, all this makes it feel like this world and events truly happened!
I saw a video on Anomidae’s channel called “The Parts of a Game you're Supposed to Ignore: A Lazy Animator's Guide” where he talks about using video game maps and areas out of bounds/ outside of gameplay area of these type of maps for a quick & easy way to have your animation have a scene, and we can all see that philosophy all over the Interloper series with demos! Many demos show places, areas and maps that aren’t really known/ thought much about by the player in normal gameplay.
In the topic of demos and more about them in the ARG universe. We saw hundreds of demos in this series, and there’s a few more patterns we can extract from them, aside from the whole “Types 1-6” pattern.
The demos the Interloper command seems to generate, has a bias for some games. For example, Portal games generate more type 4 demos than any other game. This is pretty cool, but there’s also two other games where this occurs: Dota 2 and Left 4 Dead games. However, these don't have a “type” classification due to being too abnormal and locked to those games specifically.
Left 4 Dead Games having the “cliffhanger” demos and Dota 2 having demos you can control the camera of… That last one reminds me a lot of Source Filmmaker actually…
Now let’s move on to an episode by episode basis, this segment will be more of a “look at this cool detail/ this might be important later on” type of thing, I won’t be going too in-depth about the things here.
(I’ll be skipping episodes if I have nothing to say about them.)
This demo:
One of the few cases of a type 2 demo moving in the direction of the map.
Also, what is the sound the umbrella man graffiti is supposed to make? When the graffiti returns, we hear the placeholder sound for missing files followed by a short game stutter, what is that sound supposed to be? The forums also say a “weird noise” plays when you walk up to it… I wonder what this audio is as well…
Eidamona can generate demos in specific maps and tells us that anyone can do this with enough patience and connecting to the IP mentioned in the previous episode, which is pretty interesting… But not too useful because the servers for FSKY are no longer up/ pretty difficult to get access to.
The crasher entity seems to have a [FSKY] playertag?
But the footage is too blurry to see… Or maybe I'm just seeing things that aren't there.
Strangely, the name doesn’t show up in the mysterious (probably the DM Editor.) program.
Couple of demos are noteworthy in this ones:
24:25 - Another case of a type 2 nocliping to the map;
42:05 - A type 3 demo that is a Source Filmmaker tutorial, I think this one is more of a reference than “lore relevant”;
1:21:32 - This demo is the strangest of the type 4 demos, because out of nowhere, the player gets noclip and slowly approaches a hole in the wall before dying.
FlashNuke, what’s up with that? It was mentioned and explored a bit in this episode, but we still don’t know the connection between it and the Interloper mystery, aside from a few surface level associations with type 1, 3 or 4 demos. Some of the examples in the video have the Source Filmmaker lighting bug too, interesting…
GMod being used to explore the endless dark void is pretty cool, it’s like a little nod to the dark room mysteries and that stuff.
The VRAD error seems to be the ghost Eidamona captured in his investigation that somehow broke free, haunting his games. What’s interesting about this is that, what Anomi experienced with the VRAD error is really similar to the hauntings. (Flying through the Source void to hunt down the player.)
The Ravencheck.exe and Skybox.exe programs are a really cool concept and genuinely smart idea.
Portal RTX seems to be moving around while all other demos are being generated, but Anomi doesn’t show/ tell what exactly it was doing in later episodes.
(Just a heads up, this part is mostly taking notes of silly demos or just weird occurrences, most of the story relevant demos people already know about!)
Some demos have missing maps, which is quite strange. What’s stranger is that certain demos seem to be repeating themselves?
Demo 44 of HL2 - The type 6 entity locks in on the umbrella man graffiti spot, likely seeing a lot of anomalous activity from there.
Demo 51 of HL2 - The CUBE.
Demo 32 of HL2 EP:2 - Marching gang.
Demo 76 of HL2 EP:2 - The type 6 entity finds a weird missing texture cube in the map… But I think this one is more of an easter egg/ leftover asset on the map itself than relevant to the plot.
Demo 47 of TF2 - The heavy donut…
Demo 52 of TF2 - The type 6 entity takes the same route as the crasher from the “Weird Crash on TF2”, how weird…
Demo 68 of TF2 - A type 1 demo on the weird and creepy map called “Cloak”.
Demo 104 of DoD - Confirms that type 6 demos can access other maps in the Source Engine, because the entity here is shown to fly through the source void for a long time, before deleting something.
The Heavy entity seems to be alive…?
(This is the exception to the comment earlier about “‘look at this cool detail/ this might be important later on’”, this one has an actual theory behind it!)
At the time of writing, this is the latest episode released and oh boy… There’s a lot to talk about.
First of all, Sky Ghost is very silly and goofy in some aspects. I find it really mischievous for her to see demos Anomi sees in secret and bring elements/ models from said demos to the projectskybox mod. Her reaction to the Umbrella man sound was also very realistic considering the freaky stuff they usually do. Actually, that sound probably set off an alarm in all the entities on that map, maybe that’s why the Heavy attacked the player… Assuming the entities Sky Ghost brought to projectskybox mod were also possessed/ anomalous models.
Now for the creepy elephant in the room, demos do have hidden data inside them!
According to Anomi’s testing, there’s hidden “Source Filmmaker”-like demos inside these demos! AND THEY ARE CREEPY AS HELL!
But this discovery poses a question, Why?
My theory is that demos generated by the interlope command are corrupted/ altered Source Filmmaker/ DM Editor/ whatever program that produces them, changes that can result in various outcomes like each type of demos we know:
Type 1 being highly corrupted data;
Type 3 & 4 being just hidden data;
Type 5 the data being the exact same as the demo, a failure to corrupt/ alter the original demo.
And using Sky Ghost and cube maps, Anomi can access this hidden data and show them to the world!
The most sketchy part of my theory is that I don’t really know how Type 2 & 6 demos fit into this. Honestly, type 1s as well, that was an educated guess based on the information we have.
And that’s everything I wanted to shine a spotlight on!
Some of the info here might be a little useless, but hey, details like these make the series a lot more fun and engaging to look through!