MatPat’s Alternate Reality Game ‘The Theorist Gateway’ Has Amassed 400,000 Unique Players

Matthew Patrick, the YouTube vet who chats about mysteries and puzzles across the internet, film, and video games on two channels — The Game Theorists (12 million subscribers) and The Film Theorists (7.8 million) — is seeing massive numbers with The Theorist Gateway, his 10-month-old alternate reality game (ARG) that he created as a thank you to fans.

The free, globally-available ARG (an ARG is a puzzle that spans the reaches of the internet, and also extends into the real world) has amassed 400,000 unique players since its inception in Nov. 2018. In The Theorist Gateway, players can find clues in secret YouTube videos, audio spectrograms (visual representations of sound), 3D holograms, and the source code of cryptic websites. Players receive points for completing objectives within time thresholds. Rankings are tracked on a leaderboard and prizes — such as merch — are awarded at undisclosed intervals.

“With a community of over 20 million Theorists, I wanted to thank them with something completely unique,” Patrick said in a statement. “We’ve been solving internet mysteries for the last eight years — why not create our own? Something to challenge and encourage them to come together as a community to solve.”

Patrick teamed with influencer merch firm Creator Ink (which also works with YouTube news host Philip DeFranco, and animator SomethingElseYT) on the game. While free to play, Patrick says that the game has taken 1,500 hours to develop and has cost the team $70,000 to make. He says that fans can show their support, however, by purchasing The Game Theorists merch.

While the game has been available for months, Patrick formally announced it in a YouTube video last week (below), where he also teased that the seventh and final level (or Gate 7, in the game’s parlance) will launch on Aug. 31 at 12:57 p.m. PST — which is 777 minutes after midnight, a wink to the No. ‘7’. While no additional levels will be released after that, the game will continue to be available for free.

In the 25-minute video, Patrick provides a walkthrough of some of the levels as well as some tips for those who haven’t started yet, or for those who are stuck on a challenge. Each of the game’s seven gates has a different theme — with Gate 1 being retro Nintendo games, for instance, or scary indie games for Gate 2. Each gate consists of at least three puzzles or tasks — such as code-breaking and audio-visual manipulation — which earn users keys once solved.

You can check out Patrick’s (spoiler-ridden) walkthrough below: