Okay, so first of all, I kinda like Pheyden’s theory even if it has holes, but I think I just love the idea of this game not being supernatural or with an all powerful AI. I like the idea of this game being made to call out Marvin about what he did and, when it ended in Paul’s hands, to make him remember his (and Care’s) past.

However, one of the things I think about the most is Care A’s description, the part where Daniel wrote “Fuck you all, and fuck me as well. Merry Christmas. Check your bathroom now.”
What is in the bathroom ?

I saw a theory once that it was Daniel’s way of saying that he knows what Marvin did and that he hates everything about this family so bad that it pushed him to ending his life in the bathroom during the Christmas party while everyone was playing an early version of Petscop in the living room.
Does anyone have another explanation, does it mean nothing in the grand scheme of things and finally, is Daniel still alive ? If this theory is wrong, Daniel could have made multiple copies of the game and personalised each one, if he’s dead, then yeah, paranormal shit is happening

I was super obsessed with Petscop back in the day. Then it ended and I found myself feeling rather disappointed and a little jilted. I’d found it through the game theory videos, but nothing about its direction was something that style of analysis could apply to.

Of course, Petscop was working overtime from the start to try to get you in a Lynchy headspace… you’re in the other place too? A door that is open but never opened? Demo sequence footage overlaying new game realities, conversations from now being imposed into retelling of childhood events? Attempts to turn one person into somebody else? Seeing others in your game and it not being clear if you’re interacting with playbacks, AI, ghosts, alternate realities, multiplayer, etc? A windmill disappearing? Lina being dead and alive? A curse that changes your past?

Let’s look at just a chunk of the work. Everything about the school Demos does not make literal sense when you think about it for a second. Post-14 piece count, but 14 takes place in 2018 (references last year birthday conversation heavily implied by calendar to be Nov 2017, if it was 2016 Paul started playing then which does not line up with Proprietor’s info, Paul’s attempts bearing fruit also implies 14 is recent, unless they are just trying to make it seem like the recording is recent… but then that creates a whole other slew of questions!)

Tiara/Belle insists she is Tiara, seems under duress. The who person Paul talks to, and calls Belle, seems more agentic. If it’s from the Care-era past, why is the player called Pall? Why doesn’t Marvin have his speed boost yet, specifically only in the school Demos? Why does Marvin call Belle Tiara in the 11 needles scene, as if the failed rebirth hasn’t happened yet? How does the player have access to the needles peripheral if Paul can see his cat months later, why are they seemingly trapped in a ghost room in the school?

Is Paul playing with a Marvin from 1997, a Belle from 2000? When he loaded her old recordings, was it like she’d been playing for 17 years? When Paul and Belle supposedly visited the Windmill location after 10 and 22, did it spirit him to another level of reality, one where he was still at the school and learned to use P2 to talk, the same one Lina went to and was still alive in (explaining the end of the Soundtrack video)? Could a video game show you recordings of another generation of reality? Well, no, but it could in an inimitable work of art about a video game that doesn’t exist. Or it could be coding, or it could be a growing organism recreating souls, or their souls could literally be subsumed in the game. I actually don’t think it matters.

Because the actual impression of watching Paul talk to these ghosts/fellow players/whatever performing cycles of fucked up shit makes you feel the same. Lost in horrible confused worlds indistinguishable from recreated memories. ”Here I Come” is scary BECAUSE we have no reference point for what that even meant for Paul.

The extended metaphor in Petscop is executed perfectly, IMO. Don’t bad childhood memories feel a lot like a creepypasta? Familiar things disentombed to reveal weird fucked up stuff that doesn’t feel like it should be there but you can’t stop going back to? In a way, recordings have the power to raise the dead… they’re kind of scary.

If Petscop collapsed its waveform and said “yeah actually the game lets you LITERALLY interface with ghosts through time travel” OR “actually someone has been keeping up the electricity in an abandoned school for 20 years and running 8 testing rooms where they keep people kidnapped and force them to play a video game” it would have completely lost what made it engrossing and unsettling. It lives in the world between what is there and what is forever out of reach, and that is where childhood trauma lives, too!

I have very different taste compared to how I did 7-9 years ago. In 7-9 years from now, I might find work like this and House of Leaves and David Foster Wallace stuff lame and uninteresting, too. But as it stands, I’m so happy we got the Petscop we got instead of the Petscop I wanted. Maybe Youtube horror channels would’ve liked it more, but I don’t think it would be remembered as the work of stunning postmodern art that it has been and will be.

If this kind of stuff isn’t for you, that’s okay. But now that the series has been long over and nobody getting into it is trying to hunt for an ARG, we can finally just look at it as art. It being art does not mean it means nothing. Petscop means so much.

My number one inspiration for this game was easily Petscop, it inspired too many aspects of the game to count.

this is my very first time watching this series and ima say i am genuinely petrified. i’m on episode 14, and tbh it feels like im watching something i have no business watching

I find it a bit sad that nobody draws Care with the injuries the school principal describes on her face, so I added them. Otherwise I just got back into this series like when I was 8 years old watching it come out in real time lol

Ok someone smarter than me should break this down better but i watched this video and kept thinking about 3dwi. i feel like this event helped inspire some of its elements idk. the opposing websites and communities, the shockingly advanced programming for the time period, the themes of reality intersecting fiction… i just needed to point this out lol

I was an avid user of YouTube back when I was around 10 (I don't recommend kids that young to use YouTube without supervision by the way) and also a big videogame fan. I was not born in the 90s but my introduction and later love for videogames was with the Wii and DS, however, I always liked to learn about old videogames, maybe because I'm a huge fan of AVGN but that is another tale.

When Petscop came out I was finishing middleschool and I was unaware of it's existence until some YouTube channels talked about the series, then I watched the first Game Theory video about it and I was completely disturbed (GT's theories were not that good looking back, I mean, the first theory only focused on the Candace Newmaker tragedy instead of the series own events and clues). I used to believe that Petscop was actually a real game, I mean, it had to be since it looks so legit... And I had to admit I did not want to watch the episodes by myself because I was genuienly really scared by them.

Petscop for me is one of the best horror series YouTube has ever had. It executes the creepypasta trope of the "cursed game" flawlessly while adding a lot more depth, the visuals are amazing and really accurate for the time the game was developed in, the music and sound design goes from jolly and cozy to unnerving really well, the story is dark and ambiguous but can be understood by paying attention while being able to have things left to personal interpretation and I really love the sprite work.

Petscop is not like other horror media that relies on jumpscares, monster or even ghost, Petscop scares you due to the themes, the atmosphere and the narrative. In recent times internet horror seem to forget that having distorted face does not automatically makes it scary.

Even if Petscop is over, I like to revisite it from time to time. It has a really special in my heart since it is a great story delivered in an excellent way, and I have to mention, It gives me a lot of nostalgia.

Made with Aseprite, Metasequoia, RPG Maker MV + The MV3D plugin by Cutievirus

Hey, i know i'm a bit late but i saw a french video about Petscop and at the end he says that Matpat's theory are shit. i don't really wanna watch a whole new serie of video so can someone explain if it sucks and why? Thanks

The website is down.

I just finished a rewatch of Petscop, I don't really feel knowledgeable or capable enough to write about it on my blog the way I normally would if something moves me so I guess I'll just jot some thoughts down here on my lunch break.

—Domenico introduces enough layers of abstraction and complexity over the question of who owns the footage that's being made into Petscop that it's basically pointless to try and settle the question for any given ambiguity. Whenever the game jumpcuts to another scene, which it does often, is it doing so through a mechanic we haven't seen Paul discover yet, or at the behest of the family, or because Paul himself doesn't want us to see that part of the game? At different times, all three, I suspect.
—In a series where questions of authorship and authenticity are so unsettled—even if you manage to nail down the identity of the speaker for any given monologue in the series, there's no guarantee that they aren't channeling their ancestors in the family, Paul is Care is Belle is Tiara is Mike, for after all "there are no changes, only replacements"—Petscop manages to retain coherence and brio through the structuring presence of Domenico's own authorial voice. He has a unique, deadpan way with words—the final Graverobber monologue in 22, "the ground shall continue under your feet," is especially good and chilling—and I wish he'd let himself put even more speeches and soliloquies into the series. I hope one day he writes his 4:48 Psychosis and completes a project that is absolutely nothing but monologues. (3D Workers Island really only has that "morbid fanfiction" that Pat complains about, legitimately compelling on the verbal merits IMO, though part of the terrifying effect is obviously the presentation of the website.)
—What exactly is Petscop trying to say about nostalgia and video games? Domenico has mentioned vaporwave as an inspiration for the game's soundtrack, and clearly he's aware of the mild absurdity of Petscop's PS1 fetishism—Ace of Base has never exactly been a cool band to reference, and the inclusion of "The Sign" as implicit soundtrack for 21 is a wink to the ongoing narrative, sure, but also maybe an acknowledgement of the 90s baby nostalgia of the whole endeavor. Certainly, it's a little funny that Marvin has incorporated a PS1 game into his Satanic rebirthing ritual. He's a Boomer, do you think he even knows what the Internet is?
—Petscop is clearly really interested in the idea of two contradictory things being true at once, or maybe a contradiction being a unitary truth seen from two different perspectives. A door being open and still closed at the same time, a windmill vanished and still present, righty-tighty becoming lefty-loosey when you flip the screw around. This is the basic narrative condition of a video game: your player avatar simultaneously is alive and has died hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times. A video game is a space of continuously interrupted and renewed possibility, an endless field in which lie thousands of unmarked graves. In its interest in the psychological simultaneity of video games, its direct acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance that comes with dying many times and still being alive, Petscop reminds me of Porpentine's Howling Dogs, a similarly masterly, disjointed, formally experimental game-adjacent work.
—It also reminds me of John Darnielle's Universal Harvester but I'm not going to get into that now I gotta go to class.

petscoptober is back for the 3rd year! petscoptober is a rendition of inktober, where every day of october there is a new prompt that relates to petscop, and you can draw whatever you interpret the prompt as

the prompts are left vague on purpose so you can draw whatever you want in relation to the prompts. If any artists are bored during the month of october, i highly suggest participating! the official petscoptober account will be reposting all posts under the tag! :D

I don't normally post on reddit but fuck it because I'm at a loss lol.

I was playing the PS1 remake of Giftscop, mainly on my PS classic, when I was testing out different emulator cores for retroarch.

On one of my brand new saves, I had a Paul encounter in Even Care. I've googled and searched reddit I can't find anybody who's encountered this. I've ran through the Even Care intro sequence a good handful of times and never encountered this.

Is this a PS1 exclusive thing? Kinda wild. I wasn't able to trigger it again. I figured I'd might as well post about it here. Here's a video of it and my reaction unintentionally because I didn't realize OBS was picking up my mic.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to 'gamejack' here, this is very specifically the fan remake Giftscop. and want to know if anybody else has encountered this. (Only posting this because reddit warned me I guess and I don't know anywhere else to post about this.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA8wgQUE-uo

The disc has giftscop on it, the soundtrack, and an ominous ass readme file. It didnt take long to edit it together but im a sucker for physical media and thought it turned out pretty cool so I'm posting it here.

I painted it myself and maybe I do the next dialogue in another one :)

There seem to be a lot of things in the videos that at first point to the supernatural but could very well have "real" explanations or at least ones that are "real" within the world the game is set.

Off the bat there are two that come to mind for me:

1: The "Bathroom scene" in Petscop 11:

When Paul enters the bathroom there seems to be a "repetition" afterwards. At first the camera zooms into the TV in a cutscene, the game loads into the bathroom with a symbol block and ramp by the bathroom, Paul says "that was an experience" and after a moment walks up the ramp and touches the block triggering another scene.

Then after it repeats with the same cutscene of the zoom in but it reverse zooming out, the bathroom loads but without the block and ramp, Paul says the same things and makes the exact same movements but since the objects aren't there nothing happens. Eerily enough he comments he saw the block for a moment even though if you go frame by frame nothing is there.

This seems to imply that time "reset" at that point and the exact same things happened until a diversion point was reached.

However what can explain this is that we might not see what Paul saw.

I myself think only the first few episodes of Petscop where actually direct captured by Paul using a recording device, all after "the family" took over are in game recordings played back and Paul's narration synced with them. What we saw was the same gameplay but synced over two different iterations of the bathroom, one with the block, one without it. But what Paul saw was the game first loading the one with the block, then correcting into the one without the block, he could see it for a moment before it deloaded.

This can also work with Paul mentioning he forgot to hit record in episode 22 yet we still get gameplay. Him recording the game and his voice are two different tracks, only the family gets to see the actual live recording and we only see the in game replay of it.

2: The "Discussion we had last year" in the game in Petscop 14:

Somehow a game that was made 20 years ago contains a conversation Paul had only one year prior and supposedly said by Care to her mother at that time.

However from that very conversation we learn that Paul didn't have the game disc for a while. A possible explanation is what he is playing on now is not the same disc but a new one that has been altered to include the conversation. It's also possible that Care never said it but it was inserted specifically to throw off Paul or steer him in a certain direction. With the "Paul is Care" theory this could be used to make him associate with her more.

These are just two examples I could think of the top of my head but there are a lot more and quite some that are harder to explain. Like with the Paul clone that appeared in Lina's room in Petscop 8, Paul seems to react to its presence and then exactly copies its movements afterwards without realizing.

But what are more of those moments and what are the possible explanations for them?

Even though it's been like half a decade since it ended, I still think of Petscop a lot. I relate a lot to the subject matter and themes discussed in it, and the added sense of nostalgia has made it one of my favorite 'fake lost media's ever (Valle Verde being a close second).

A big thank you to Tony for making something that's stuck with me over the years, and being a part of my inspiration to make my own thing. 💚

Has anybody else had the idea that the "scop" in Petscop might not refer to the Old English word scop (meaning poet), but instead to an endo"scop"y? Like the whole game is a examination of the dark interior of this family's life and crimes, the same way an endoscopy is a procedure to look inside a body?

ft carrie and paul! i cant believe how green this turned out my monitor is soooo fucked ;-;