Game Theory: Don't Trust Your Friends (Roblox Rainbow Friends)

Past robotic versions of the characters, all discarded... dismantled. Old animatronic versions of blue, orange and green, all scrapped. I suspect this was because they weren't good enough for Red. They weren't realistic enough. He needed something alive...the real Rainbow FunTime Friends, which came out around 1991. Along the way, Trenton was disowned and kicked out of the company for resisting this change. Fast forward to today's

game

in 2022, where I suspect Red is now using the peepers and contaminating the local water supply with them. In the final sequence of the chapter we pass exactly that: a group of Rainbow Friend heads, which we know are living creatures, floating in a pipe explicitly labeled as a water supply.

Red is up to something...trying to turn everyone into

rainbow

friends

. His partner no longer stops him. But now that partner is back. Trenton is here and tries to sabotage his old business partner, force him to stop the crazy power trip he's been on. But that doesn't necessarily mean Trenton is such a good guy either. You see, there's one thing I can't get rid of in all of this... and that's the Easter egg that led me to believe Trenton was the villain in the first place. See, when you look through the glass of the terrarium in chapter 1, Trenton's image changes from a cool guy in a leather jacket to a man in a suit, glasses, and a top hat with a purple ribbon.

It's clear that Trenton is hiding something and is turning into an evil businessman. But who or what is he? Well, I think this conspiracy actually goes far beyond Rainbow Friends. One thing I didn't notice in the last chapter was that the computer screen showing Oswald's final login dates has a company name on it, RBM...an obvious parody of IBM Computers, right? Well, yes, but it's also much more. Two amazing theorists on our

game

theory

subreddit, FantasticFile_3903 and Rockmage_1234. Both pointed out that RBM computers actually appear in another Roblox game titled The Little Ones, produced by none other than Charcle, one of the two developers of Rainbow Friends.

In fact, a cover image for that game was updated last month. What did you upgrade to? Nothing. At least as far as I can tell, it's the same old image. I suspect it was just to draw attention to the game, especially when RBM is there on the monitors. So how does Little Ones relate to the Rainbow Friends story? It isn't, at least as far as I can tell now. It's a game where one of

your

friends

is kidnapped and you're forced to escape a warehouse populated with dozens of little mutant versions of them. The 1972 keyboard generator used in Rainbow Friends has the same keyboard layout as the ones in Little Ones, but I don't think it's too much.

I suspect that's just reusing assets. Unfortunately, the only connection between the two appears to be through this computer company RBM. But while the connections to Rainbow Friends aren't immediately obvious, there are connections to another game worth mentioning. It's Roblox's big hit, Spider. In this game, a friend is bitten by a spider and transforms into a horrible creature that tries to capture all the other friends. This game was created by the other Rainbow Friends developer, Roy Stanford. But again, the reason it's interesting is that there are images of the spider hidden within The Little Ones. There are also a number of labeled VHS tapes, one clearly marked "Spider." Why is all of that important to Rainbow Friends?

Well, for this. Spider has a pass available for purchase, a pass that increases the odds that you can become the spider in the main game. And whose face is that there, front and center on that spider step? A businessman with glasses, a top hat and a purple ribbon. It's the exact face hidden inside Trenton's portrait in Rainbow Friends. Could this all just be a series of Easter egg tie-ins from two developers referencing their previous games? Absolutely, I could. But that's already happened elsewhere in Rainbow Friends. In the lobby of Chapter 1, you can go out and around this building right here and you can see references to both the games, Little Ones and Spider.

That right there is an Easter egg. But suddenly seeing these explicit references and connections in the game itself now feels like something a bit more to me. Like maybe Trenton isn't what it seems to be. That maybe it's a spider in disguise, or some nefarious businessman running all these experimental procedures, bringing terror and dread to all these different companies. I'm not exactly sure yet. I don't really have a solid answer. The tapes and the lost ones are labeled 2019, so it is possible that the history of these three games is linked. Trenton transforms people into monsters, whether they are spiders, small mutants, or large quilted pets through spider bites, mutations, or simply contaminating the water supply.

Speaking of which, at the end of the chapter, did you notice that Trenton isn't coming with you? Despite his insistence that everyone must leave when the Rainbow Friends appear, he stays behind. His work there is not yet finished. And I don't suspect he wants us to escape. There are several exit points as he navigates the roller coaster safely, but Trenton does not tell him to get off at any of them. He explicitly tells us to stay and go through the maintenance exit. Something tells me that the elevator to the surface at the end of chapter 2 does not lead to where we expect.

We're not done yet. And in a game full of

rainbow

-colored friends, the only true friend we have... is ourselves. But hey... you don't need to be a crazy billionaire trying to turn everyone into mutant monsters to be smart with

your

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And, as always, remember, it's all just a

theory

, a game theory. Thanks for watching.