EarthBound Hidden Mysteries - Theo?
A lot of you know that there are several, ah, so-called "unused" sprites in EarthBound. To name a few, there's King climbing, Ness's mom sitting, and countless other little one like a heart or a happy face. But what happens to the unused sprites that the people never put in the ROM? What about prototype Ness and the controversial "radical" Malcolm X. Agerate that was taken out early in the game's development? Gone forever. However, there are still some traces left of what could have couldn't have been. Shadows of a development team that was drinking way too many martinis and playing mini-golf. I have just made a ground-breaking discovery that shakes the foundations of "unused sprites" as we know them. I call this earth rending shockmentuary... Theo.
As an EarthBound hacker, I'm constantly opening EarthBound with many different programs. These are not the kind of programs you get at a play or you exercise to. We've created these specialized executable data files from the ground up for the sole purpose of hacking things. A good example of one of these hacking programs would be a firewall. Firewalls hack into people's computers and create a gigantic wall of heat that burns any data trying to enter the computer from the "memory hole", which is where the computer gets all of its memories. One day, I was using a specific hacking tool, called "Tile Layer Pro", just poking around in the ROM, looking for a cure for cancer, etc. Tile Layer Pro allows you to go into a game and mess around with the graphics in SNES format, which is like BMP format except with less PNGS and HATs and a bunch of other three letter words you can see all over the bathroom walls in school. Provided it's next to a computer class, of course.
The point of all this is, Tile Layer Pro is a majestic beast-god among hackers in the way that it can possibly find hidden secrets no one knew were previously there in the ROM... provided you know how. I, being in the know, took it upon myself to find something completely face exploding that no one else had ever found. I knew exactly what to do.
First of all, I fired up Tile Layer Pro and poked around my legitimately acquired EarthBound cartridge (I was hacking from my SNES) for some interesting stuff. Of course, the EarthBound ROM is full of interesting stuff: pentagrams, satanic drawings, strange codes, notes from Da Vinci, a picture of Itoi... it's all there, if you look hard enough. That stuff was paltry to me, though. I was looking for the big one. The one that every hacker of every videogame in existence spends at least five minutes looking for before giving up and buying a soda. And not just any soda. A refreshing, cool, 7-Up. The best hackers wouldn't have it any other way.
broken images
Near the beginning of my search, I found nothing interesting. I knew this, of course, I'm a professional at this sort of thing. However, I feel the need to point all of this out to lesser man, or at least Particle Man. Triangle Man is totally in the know. Anyway, this is all barfy crap, found near the beginning of the ROM. You might think you see something familiar here and there, but it's actually all corrupted data and raw programming. There was absolutely nothing in this space for me, and nothing for anyone else unless they want to draw EarthBound a new central processing unit. (Final Fantasy's looks like a cat)
Scrolling, scrolling. I endlessly scroll down the near-infinite horizon of the pixely, wavey sea of internal graphics, far away from the beach of reason and central processing units that look like cats. What kind of knowledge cake would I find here? All I knew is that I didn't have any 7-up in the house, so giving up wasn't an option. I could have given Ness a hat, or made timed hits (they're already programmed in, it's just that everything they do is invisible so you have to draw them), but thousands of other hackers had already done this, so it would have been a waste of my time. Onward!
Lightning struck the water, awash with electric foam and excitement. Was this what I had come so far to find? What was this little area? It doesn't look like anything now, at least to amateurs like you, but I assure you, this is everything and more. Flames leaped from the internal clock as I realized my computer was on fire. Then I realized it was actually my hair. The 7-up that my dad had just brought in taunted me from across the room, waving its curves and pretending that it would put the fire out. But I was no stranger to the wily evil of 7-up and its comical effect on fire and cats. I had a job to do, and I was almost finished, so there was no way I was drinking something like that. Suddenly! I saw it. Deep in the jungle of blue dots that I screwed the palettes of, I found it. It, or him.
Look very, very closely at what I've found, this godlike tablet of expression locked within everyone's cartridge unbeknownst to even the guru of the game. Can you see it? You have to. So well defined, the glasses, the hair, the mustache... several blocks are missing, but your eye should fill that in for you. I had found it.
After a lot of poking around and changing the palette and a little bit of image manipulation, I made an image suitable for even the most hilariously stupid of fools to tell what this is. I'd found what I like to call Lucy. Actually, I'll call it Theo, because several unknown things seem to point toward him being named such. Or if not such, they call him Theo. Such is only used maybe twice.
Now you're scared, right? I know I am. I'm scared right out of my pants. Actually, wait, I wasn't wearing those at all to begin with. So I guess I was scared out of my, ah, imaginary pants. Anyhow, Theo is one of the greatest discoveries to ever be made in the EarthBound ROM, and I found him on a bored (and yet intense) Saturday afternoon. Surely a new record for someone finding him. The last record was, what? Oh, yeah. Never. Anyhow, what could he be? What's his significance? Gentlemen, I present to you several theories:
Theo is a test - They were testing a system for "faceplates" or maybe for a lengthy into segment where Theo is the main character, but ran out of time or gave up early and made no further progress. His vapid, somewhat nonchalant disembodied head seems to suggest that he was to be used in a calm moment, although his head could easily be superimposed on a moving body. Perhaps he was supposed to be Giygas's first form? His cold, dark heart and uncaring soul might suggest that he's the final boss and he's going to use the main character's powers against him.
Theo was a special move - If you change the compression system of the game, you can trigger several messages that read as PK Theo. What's this mean? What was it supposed to do? Theo's face probably wove about the enemy and exploded and was probably used by Jeff as an item or as a special "Summon" move that may have been dummied out of the game. If you heavily change the compression system of the game, there's a message that says "PK THEO SUMMON CAT", which is a really weird thing to say. Maybe he was an item that summoned a "CAT", or, its more common counterpart, the "Slaveheimer Railgun of Death Mach III".
Theo was Dr. Andonuts - Several things seem to point toward this. First of all, Theo is a creepy glasses-man that wears a mustache, and so is Dr. Andonuts. Second, it's possible to give Jeff PP, meaning that PK Theo could have been a move that replaced "Spy", but this idea was probably abandoned for being too odd, even for EarthBound. Theo's odd hair could have been a throwback to Loid's dad. Secondly, Dr. Andonut's first name is completely unknown, so it's not a stretch to say it's Theo.
The only theory I can come up with that has enough evidence to support is is the fact that Theo is something from early on in development that was left over. He isn't even drawn in the same style as anything else in the game, except for the satanic backwards poems. And that's really interesting. What did Itoi want with the Prince of Darkness? Answer: He had no idea what kind of sick things his development team was turning out. Tune in next week for more Theo. actually no
A lot of you know that there are several, ah, so-called "unused" sprites in EarthBound. To name a few, there's King climbing, Ness's mom sitting, and countless other little one like a heart or a happy face. But what happens to the unused sprites that the people never put in the ROM? What about prototype Ness and the controversial "radical" Malcolm X. Agerate that was taken out early in the game's development? Gone forever. However, there are still some traces left of what could have couldn't have been. Shadows of a development team that was drinking way too many martinis and playing mini-golf. I have just made a ground-breaking discovery that shakes the foundations of "unused sprites" as we know them. I call this earth rending shockmentuary... Theo.
As an EarthBound hacker, I'm constantly opening EarthBound with many different programs. These are not the kind of programs you get at a play or you exercise to. We've created these specialized executable data files from the ground up for the sole purpose of hacking things. A good example of one of these hacking programs would be a firewall. Firewalls hack into people's computers and create a gigantic wall of heat that burns any data trying to enter the computer from the "memory hole", which is where the computer gets all of its memories. One day, I was using a specific hacking tool, called "Tile Layer Pro", just poking around in the ROM, looking for a cure for cancer, etc. Tile Layer Pro allows you to go into a game and mess around with the graphics in SNES format, which is like BMP format except with less PNGS and HATs and a bunch of other three letter words you can see all over the bathroom walls in school. Provided it's next to a computer class, of course.
The point of all this is, Tile Layer Pro is a majestic beast-god among hackers in the way that it can possibly find hidden secrets no one knew were previously there in the ROM... provided you know how. I, being in the know, took it upon myself to find something completely face exploding that no one else had ever found. I knew exactly what to do.
First of all, I fired up Tile Layer Pro and poked around my legitimately acquired EarthBound cartridge (I was hacking from my SNES) for some interesting stuff. Of course, the EarthBound ROM is full of interesting stuff: pentagrams, satanic drawings, strange codes, notes from Da Vinci, a picture of Itoi... it's all there, if you look hard enough. That stuff was paltry to me, though. I was looking for the big one. The one that every hacker of every videogame in existence spends at least five minutes looking for before giving up and buying a soda. And not just any soda. A refreshing, cool, 7-Up. The best hackers wouldn't have it any other way.
Near the beginning of my search, I found nothing interesting. I knew this, of course, I'm a professional at this sort of thing. However, I feel the need to point all of this out to lesser man, or at least Particle Man. Triangle Man is totally in the know. Anyway, this is all barfy crap, found near the beginning of the ROM. You might think you see something familiar here and there, but it's actually all corrupted data and raw programming. There was absolutely nothing in this space for me, and nothing for anyone else unless they want to draw EarthBound a new central processing unit. (Final Fantasy's looks like a cat)
Scrolling, scrolling. I endlessly scroll down the near-infinite horizon of the pixely, wavey sea of internal graphics, far away from the beach of reason and central processing units that look like cats. What kind of knowledge cake would I find here? All I knew is that I didn't have any 7-up in the house, so giving up wasn't an option. I could have given Ness a hat, or made timed hits (they're already programmed in, it's just that everything they do is invisible so you have to draw them), but thousands of other hackers had already done this, so it would have been a waste of my time. Onward!
Lightning struck the water, awash with electric foam and excitement. Was this what I had come so far to find? What was this little area? It doesn't look like anything now, at least to amateurs like you, but I assure you, this is everything and more. Flames leaped from the internal clock as I realized my computer was on fire. Then I realized it was actually my hair. The 7-up that my dad had just brought in taunted me from across the room, waving its curves and pretending that it would put the fire out. But I was no stranger to the wily evil of 7-up and its comical effect on fire and cats. I had a job to do, and I was almost finished, so there was no way I was drinking something like that. Suddenly! I saw it. Deep in the jungle of blue dots that I screwed the palettes of, I found it. It, or him.
Look very, very closely at what I've found, this godlike tablet of expression locked within everyone's cartridge unbeknownst to even the guru of the game. Can you see it? You have to. So well defined, the glasses, the hair, the mustache... several blocks are missing, but your eye should fill that in for you. I had found it.
After a lot of poking around and changing the palette and a little bit of image manipulation, I made an image suitable for even the most hilariously stupid of fools to tell what this is. I'd found what I like to call Lucy. Actually, I'll call it Theo, because several unknown things seem to point toward him being named such. Or if not such, they call him Theo. Such is only used maybe twice.
Now you're scared, right? I know I am. I'm scared right out of my pants. Actually, wait, I wasn't wearing those at all to begin with. So I guess I was scared out of my, ah, imaginary pants. Anyhow, Theo is one of the greatest discoveries to ever be made in the EarthBound ROM, and I found him on a bored (and yet intense) Saturday afternoon. Surely a new record for someone finding him. The last record was, what? Oh, yeah. Never. Anyhow, what could he be? What's his significance? Gentlemen, I present to you several theories:
Theo is a test - They were testing a system for "faceplates" or maybe for a lengthy into segment where Theo is the main character, but ran out of time or gave up early and made no further progress. His vapid, somewhat nonchalant disembodied head seems to suggest that he was to be used in a calm moment, although his head could easily be superimposed on a moving body. Perhaps he was supposed to be Giygas's first form? His cold, dark heart and uncaring soul might suggest that he's the final boss and he's going to use the main character's powers against him.
Theo was a special move - If you change the compression system of the game, you can trigger several messages that read as PK Theo. What's this mean? What was it supposed to do? Theo's face probably wove about the enemy and exploded and was probably used by Jeff as an item or as a special "Summon" move that may have been dummied out of the game. If you heavily change the compression system of the game, there's a message that says "PK THEO SUMMON CAT", which is a really weird thing to say. Maybe he was an item that summoned a "CAT", or, its more common counterpart, the "Slaveheimer Railgun of Death Mach III".
Theo was Dr. Andonuts - Several things seem to point toward this. First of all, Theo is a creepy glasses-man that wears a mustache, and so is Dr. Andonuts. Second, it's possible to give Jeff PP, meaning that PK Theo could have been a move that replaced "Spy", but this idea was probably abandoned for being too odd, even for EarthBound. Theo's odd hair could have been a throwback to Loid's dad. Secondly, Dr. Andonut's first name is completely unknown, so it's not a stretch to say it's Theo.
The only theory I can come up with that has enough evidence to support is is the fact that Theo is something from early on in development that was left over. He isn't even drawn in the same style as anything else in the game, except for the satanic backwards poems. And that's really interesting. What did Itoi want with the Prince of Darkness? Answer: He had no idea what kind of sick things his development team was turning out. Tune in next week for more Theo. actually no
