RIP Petscop, One Of The Internet's Greatest Creepypastas

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the September 2019 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here. The article has been edited to contain up-to-date information.

It’s hard to believe that Petscop, the surreal and highly unnerving Let’s Play-creepypasta-ARG hybrid which grew a sizable and obsessive online fanbase, has finally come to an end. Or maybe it didn’t. Who can know for sure?

For those unaware, Petscop was an ongoing YouTube series that initially appeared to be a run-of-the-mill Let’s Play. In the first episode, released in March 2017, an unnamed man begins playing a janky-looking game from the Playstation 1 era named “Petscop.” He offers what one might expect from a typical Let’s Play. He interacts with what appears to be an average puzzle game in which the player frees animals from a pet store. He remarks on the banality of the puzzles and the small, brightly-colored first level of the game. However, things take a strange turn at the end of the episode, when he inputs a code that grants access to the dark, sprawling “underworld” of the game. What follows is one of the most singularly brilliant art projects of the 21st century.

Over the next two years, the Petscop series grew into a bizarre, labyrinthine mystery as the narrator, identified only as Paul, explored the esoteric underworld of the game, wandering around mostly empty space, discovering opaque texts and encountering a handful of highly memorable and disturbing characters. Each episode only seemed to introduce more mysteries, such as the time Paul discovered a mysterious “tool” that only answered highly-specific questions. In a different installment, Paul expresses shock at discovering an item hidden behind a censorship bar. At a certain point, Paul begins addressing an unknown off-camera presence, which gives the whole series the air of a found-footage horror film. Soon after, Paul stopped narrating episodes altogether. The video descriptions changed to reflect the voice of another unidentified group that appeared to have struck a deal with Paul to control and post the recordings.

As one might imagine, the series attracted a large community of hyper-attentive fans, who compulsively dissected every detail to figure out what the heck was actually going on in Petscop. Fans theorized the game was inspired by the Candace Newmaker incident, a true story in which a ten-year-old girl was killed during a 70-minute “rebirthing” session, a controversial practice where a person is brought to the brink of death in order to return as a “new person.” While the series did feature several words and scenes that seemed to reference the tragedy, later episodes shifted away from the incident.

On Reddit and Discord, sleuths eagerly exchanged ideas about how the various stray threads in the series connected. Fans compiled a 38,000 word Google Doc with relevant clues and mysteries. Some YouTube videos dissecting Petscop became more popular than the series itself. The Game Theorists YouTube channel posted videos that gained four times as many views as the original Petscop episode. A video by YouTuber Pyrocynical contains an hour and twenty-minute breakdown of the first several episodes and became so beloved that clamoring for Petscop 2 became a meme among his fans.

When looking at the bevy of affective alternate reality games that have grown popular in the past decade, each has utilized a familiar social media trope and twisted it to tell an unnerving mystery. For example, The Sun Vanished used Twitter to bring live updates from an apocalypse happening somewhere in America, Pronunciation Book’s 77 Days began sprinkling long and disturbing messages into its daily stream of goofy “how-to-pronounce-X” videos and Tumblr’s Hey Peebrain – You Teleport? used the site’s notorious population of porn bots to lead users down a rabbit hole involving a guardian angel and a sick little girl. Petscop, however, struck gold by twisting the world of “Let’s Play” videos. This genre had already become an established mainstream force as people like PewDiePie, Markiplier, and the Game Grumps became well-known names to anyone with an internet connection. Every Let’s Play follows a basic outline: a gamer will play a video game while offering commentary and jokes over the action. Let’s Play streamers update regularly and usually act as over-the-top as possible to keep fans’ highly-sought-after attention.

Petscop follows none of these rules. Paul has a dry, nasally voice, never jokes and leaves lots of dead air in his videos. The channel would go months without updating, then suddenly release several episodes all at once. Each installment felt like the release of a network television show episode, with the community gathering around the proverbial water cooler to discuss what they think happened. It was like a Gen Z Twin Peaks.

On September 2nd, Petscop released its 24th episode, which was simply a credits sequence for the game itself. This led some to believe the series had come to an end, while others were understandably unconvinced, given the series’ erratic upload schedule and the myriad questions that remain unanswered. A little over two months later, however, the creator appeared to step forward and announce that the series was in fact over. The man, known as Tony, showed some concept art for the series and made an edit to the channel's description to prove his credentials. He thanked the fans of the series for making it as special as it was. He also promised one more thing, so take talk of Petscop being over with a grain of salt.

If Petscop is truly over, it concluded as one of the most effective horror stories told in the 21st century. The effort poured into creating the fake, gloomy atmosphere of the game and its deep and detailed lore constitutes an achievement the likes of which we’re likely to never see imitated. Maybe we’ll never know the full story behind Paul, the Tool, the Newmaker theory, or any of the other bizarre breadcrumbs Petscop left behind. But sometimes it’s better not to know. That's what makes it fun.