Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

• Universal
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters
• Characters As Device
• Dialogue
• Motifs
• Narrative Devices
• Paratext
• Plots
• Settings
• Spectacle

Genre

• Action Adventure
• Comedy
• Commercials
• Crime And Punishment
• Drama
• Horror
• Love
• News
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• War

Media

• Animation (Western)
• Anime
• Comic Book
• Fan Fics
• Film
• Game
• Literature
• Music And Sound Effects
• New Media
• Print Media
• Radio
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Television
• Theater
• Videogame
• Webcomics

Topical Tropes

• Betrayal
• Censorship
• Combat
• Death
• Family
• Fate And Prophecy
• Food
• Holiday
• Memory
• Money
• Morality
• Politics
• Religion
• School

Other Categories

• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Creators
• Derivative Works
• Did Not Do The Research
• Language
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Stock Room
• Trope
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Weirdness Isolation

I Wanna Be The Guy

This theory came up on the game's official forum, but the thread has been at least temporarily lost.

The idea is that the events of IWBTG take place entirely inside The Kid's imagination. In reality, he lives with his highly abusive father and copes with the pain by playing classic Nintendo games. Thus, these games form the backdrop of his imagined adventure in which he, equipped only with his very small gun (because he's just a kid and Freud Was Right), seeks to defeat his father and upgrade to a much larger gun, thus becoming The Guy (that is, a man) and leaving his tragic childhood behind.

Full theory here

Upon defeating his "father", The Guy warped space and time to protect himself from anyone who might challenge his position. This also brought his past self into the battle; who made the same assumption that this was his father, and that his father killed "his" father. The Kid kills The Guy, who then becomes the Guy and is killed in retaliation by the Kid.

• Alternatively, Grandfather The Guy killed The Guy's grandfather, and The Guy set about on his original quest to avenge his grandfather. Likewise, The Kid, after becoming The Guy, will see his kid try to kill him to become The Guy. In other words, it's an endless loop spread through countless generations of revenge and becoming The Guy.
  • Every time the game is played represents one such generation. The Guy even mentions he has more than one child. Everytime you die, that was a child who didn't make it. This family has a lot of kids.
    • This seems to be partially confirmed by the sequel "I Wanna Save The Kids", which is I Wanna Be The Guy plus Lemmings.
    • ...Now I really want to be The Guy. Think about it.

Those who complete it will be drafted into the greatest army assembled to fight all sorts of Cosmic Horror.

• On impossible. That explains the tropers who've beat it not being abducted yet.
• Anyone who can beat "I wanna be the guy" with sanity intact isn't gonna be phased by something as simple as Cthulu, after all.
  • Didn't some dude in the IWTBG forums said he beat it on impossible? What happened with him?
  • Or, it's all "Ender's Game" style, and every mistake we make, someone actually dies.
    • Hopefully the enemy. Because if our side was dumb enough to have troops die whenever someone loses IWBTG...
    • What bothers me is the idea that I've been fighting a war all this time...and I don't even know who either side is.
• My...my God. That's just similar enough to the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Child Under the Mountain" (in which a video game is actually the government's missile launch system) to be plausible...

Practically all of the Let's Players who tried to play this game either gave up partway through or stopped being a part of the Let's Play community shortly after completion. Obviously, there's something in the game's coding that saps away at the initiative and motivation of whoever plays it.

• They're called giant cherries.
  • No, they're called Delicious Fruit.
• Hey, who said you could post a plausible theory?
  • OBJECTION! There's at least one guy who LPed this game and made it through. It's not that hard to find on Youtube.
    • What he's specifically talking about are well-known LPers who, after completing the game, basically quit being well-known LPers. Two examples I can think of are Cloud8745 and UltraJMan, both of whom are on YouTube. Cloud8745 closed his YouTube account entirely, and UltraJMan, though still active on YouTube, lost a lot of his LPer clout. Long story short, both of them quit being classy not too long after playing this game.
    • UltraJMan also became very embittered with the LP community as a whole, essentially becoming a bane to both the You Tube and Something Awful LP communities. So, clearly, the game was created with a curse preventing anyone from trying to speedrun and/or LP it, lest their will be broken and they either vanish from the face of the internet or fall into Small Name Big Ego madness.

I just needed to do a Rage Against The Heavens plot. Also, TARDIS.

The first person to beat it on impossible, on their first try...

Self-explainatory

• If that was the case, I'd have been arrested for wiping out the entire population of South America.
  • Dear God! It's the video game equivalent of a Death Note!
    • It'd only be worse if every time we lost, an entire universe got destroyed a la Bokurano.
    • How do we know that DOESN'T happen?
• Guys, Quick! Stop playing!

Where else could such stupid stuff happen but in the Homestar Runner univirse? Anyway, The Kid remains as "The Guy" untill sometime around the year 20X6, when Stinkoman beats him and becomes the new "The Guy". Three reasons for this theory:

• 1-Up says Stinkoman is "The Guy"
• The town in the opening video looks suspiciously like a suburban version of "The Field"
• Apparently names with "The" in them, (like The Guy, or The Cheat) are acceptable in this world

Oh, and The Kid beat The Guy at most, 8 years ago, since the game takes place in "200X".

• It's 20X6. It doesn't mean 2016 specifically. it could be 2026 (18 years) or all the way up to 2096 (88 years).

• Don't forget that Stinkoman calls 1-Up "just a kid". Hmm... 1-Up? The next The Guy? Hmmmm...

The game will be a parody of all the stereotypical girl-centered games made in gaming's history. And the ending will reveal that the "girl" in the title is actually The Kid from IWBTG as a crossdresser Depraved Bisexual.

• Or one of the kids from the implied sequel I Wanna Save The Kids, the Escort Mission from hell (even more so than most escort missions).
• Or it turns out you've been playing on Medium all this time.
• The problem with that theory is that one can count all the girl-centered games on one hand.
  • Don't even joke about that.

There's no way this cannot be possible.

• Damn you!

Self Explanatory.

Works partway with "the game is cursed" above. When people have been angered and enraged to the point of tears, they eventually stop feeling angry and enter a state of Zen, wherein they start doing very well.

How else do you explain the explosions of gore?

Every time you die, he's actually just written your name in the Death Note. This explains how fruit can kill you: It's all just one big coincidence! The reason you explode upon death is because The Guy went for a more extreme heart attack.

Look at how many times you die in this game. What does EFG do? Fail at things horribly, and occasionally harm himself. The position of Epic Fail Guy should need someone who can't take five steps without exploding, but also someone with rapid healing abilities.

Yes, the same game This Troper just caused you to lose.

And The Kid is Aggrajag.

---