I think i may have figured out the ARG

[FireBasedAnomoly]

Okay, so, as the title states, I think I may have determined the plot and potential conclusion to the ARG storyline around UFO 50. Probably stop reading if you don't want spoilers on what the community has found thus far, but if you're ready, then strap in because this is going to be a wild ride.

Before I get to the main part of the theory, I feel it's important to establish my theory on what EXACTLY happened to missing employee Bola. I would probably use her first name if I could but I'm terrible at remembering names and it's not the priority. My basic concept is that she confronted the manager about the poor conditions and increasing cult-y-ness of the workplace in the parking garage, but it spiralled into a major argument, and the manager ended up running her into a wall with his car. This explains the decimated state of the bike, the stain on the wall, and, most importantly, the grasshopper statue falling. The manager rushed to cover up the evidence in the fastest way he could, hence the poor job he did, and rushed to fix the statue. This explains pretty much all of the evidence fairly succinctly, although I won't deny that his car would realistically be damaged by such a method of murder.

But this isn't the main topic, it's really just a secondary musing to what I actually am claiming to have figured out: the end goal of the company, and more specifically, Mr. Nemuru. There are four major themes which UFOsoft is notably fixated on, those being eggs, bugs, space, and play. Even as early as the collection's second game, all four of these converge in Bug Hunter. What exactly do each of these mean? Well, there's plenty of parallels to one of Aesop's fables in the metanarrative, wherein an ant and a grasshopper need to prepare for winter, but while the ant makes sure to work and do all the preparations needed, the grasshopper spends all their time dancing and singing and playing. Nemuru's philosophy seems to be an exact inversion of this concept; he believes that work is fleeting and pointless in the end, and the only way to survive the metaphorical winter is through play. As the bootup screen says, the thing to do is to Play Forever. That explains the bugs and the play, but what about space and eggs? We'll get back to that.

First, we must discuss a supplemental part of the ARG, located in Mini & Max. Here, there's a secret easter egg wherein you can take a red army ant, feed them to one of the blob enemies, and when it spits the ant out, it will have turned into one of the ants from Combatants. Two notable things about Combatants: It was the next game released after Mini & Max, and it was apparently the vision of Mr. Nemuru. Yet more interesting is that you can take the ant to an obscurely-hidden Mol Dok (remember those guys, they're a surprise tool that will hurt us later), who will instruct you to go to the room where the entire Miasma Tower ARG started. There, we find a grasshopper, the bug associated with Nemuru, and it tells us of a 'higher intelligence' that will be arriving soon. And in the context of Mini & Max, only one figure fits the role of 'higher intelligence'. After you return the Mol Doks' great stone book that teaches them how to do things, an ominous voice instructs you to go to the alarm clock. Shrink down there, and you find a ruined equivalent of the stone book's pedestal. And waiting there is The Great One, who is, as they state, the hyperintelligent singularity that all Mol Doks one day will fuse to become. Singularity. Space. Eggs. Space goes on forever, like Nemuru believes play will. Eggs are shown to represent rebirth. And the Mol Doks look very similar to some other designs in the collection, in particular the protagonist of Onion Delivery.

The protagonist of Onion Delivery is an alien.
Mol Doks are made to look like aliens.
MOL DOKS REPRESENT ALIENS.

The Great One says that one day they will overtake the entire house. Nemuru, alongside a preservation company, is creating an archive of games from a handful of studios, and sealing them in capsules. Capsules notably also feature heavily in Warptank, a game taking place on a space station. These capsules are labelled 2039, seemingly when they're set to be opened. Miasma Tower is set approximately during the creation of UFO 50, which means it happens in 1989. 1989. 2039. Those are fifty years apart. Fifty. FIFTY. UFO FIFTY. A GAME FOR EACH OF THE YEARS BEFORE THE 'WINTER'. And hold on a second. UFO 50. 50 years. UFO, 50 years. We have reached my thesis and ending, the goal of the company. In 2039, a UFO will arrive on earth, and it will seal humanity in eggs before rebirthing them into a vegetative singularity with singular focus on entertainment, and we will be like bugs before them.

Eggs. Bugs. Space. Play. Singularity.

And if I may go one step further, I believe from one of the Mooncat endings that the only hope for humanity, the only person who can truly prepare us for the winter, will be someone represented by a preying mantis. And if I may go one step even further than that, into the realm of maybe unrealistic time frames? At some point in the near-ish future, the same team behind this game will release some kind of game centered on a preying mantis. And, yet further beyond that, the threads will converge with a final game in this world released in 2039, in which the aliens will arrive, and only the mantis will be able to save us.

But hey, that's just a theory. A STEAM DISCUSSION BOARD THEORY! If you think you have any better ideas for part of this then do tell, but besides maybe the end bit about the IRL UFO 50 team waiting until 2039 to release the conclusion, I genuinely believe that I've figured it out.

[FLGibsonIII]

I do think serious consideration needs to be given to the idea that Nemeru is not some Saturday Cartoon Villain. The themes involving preservation are too prevalent for him to be written off entirely. Numerology is a bit dangerous, especially for theories, but I almost want to believe 2039 means something. Do any games take place in that year?

it is clear that Thorson Petter has prophetic dreams, and his games should be read as prophecies. You may be onto something with Mooncat and Warp Tank. It does seems kinda easy to read Nemeru as the Corruption in Warp Tank though. Waldorf's Journey is very much a game about Petter trying to figure out his dreams, although it is made by Smolski. Waldorf may be that Smolski's interpretation of Petter's dream is that Nemeru is a corrupting/invading force (Nemeru represents the humans trying to take the teeth of the Walruses which represent the studio). Smolski is known to hate Nemeru from the beginning, so it is possible that this is intended as a short sighted misinterpretation of the situation.

[FireBasedAnomoly]

Originally posted by FLGibsonIII:

I do think serious consideration needs to be given to the idea that Nemeru is not some Saturday Cartoon Villain. The themes involving preservation are too prevalent for him to be written off entirely. Numerology is a bit dangerous, especially for theories, but I almost want to believe 2039 means something. Do any games take place in that year?

it is clear that Thorson Petter has prophetic dreams, and his games should be read as prophecies. You may be onto something with Mooncat and Warp Tank. It does seems kinda easy to read Nemeru as the Corruption in Warp Tank though. Waldorf's Journey is very much a game about Petter trying to figure out his dreams, although it is made by Smolski. Waldorf may be that Smolski's interpretation of Petter's dream is that Nemeru is a corrupting/invading force (Nemeru represents the humans trying to take the teeth of the Walruses which represent the studio). Smolski is known to hate Nemeru from the beginning, so it is possible that this is intended as a short sighted misinterpretation of the situation.

I am admittedly disappointed that Nemeru didn't factor into my theory more, although i feed like 'written off' is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. A more human element centred around preservation and legacies would be great, but there does seem to be too much stuff relating him to some sort of supernatural stuff for it to be nothing at all. In particular, the grasshopper in Mini & Max feels conclusive in implying some kind of supernatural end goal. I would like to say that I don't fully think that Nemeru is EVIL, rather, he comes off to me as misguided and also just generally strange.

I do think that there's probably something in the idea of prophetic dreams, although I don't know what. I don't really remember who directed which games off the top of my head with the exception of a couple particularly notable ones like Greg Milk making Night Manor, and of course Thorson starting the production of games at the company with Barbuta. I'd imagine that poking around and seeing who made which games could probably reveal more evidence.

For the 2039 year, though, I can't really see that meaning anything more than aligning with the number games in the collection. I feel like if any games took place in that year people would've noticed by now. I easily could be wrong on that though, as I'm not in the 0.1% of players who have cherried every game.

One possibility that comes to mind as I'm writing this is that Nemeru is, alternatively, trying to make a collection that will SURVIVE an alien invasion (or some other danger that the term 'higher intelligence' could apply to; my secondary idea is 'AI uprising'), thus passing on these games to future civilisations.

There's probably also more to the manager, though who knows what.

[oddzef]

you sorta lost me when you couldn't even remember the character's name...how can you expect to remember details about the plot if you can't remember a name lmao

I think the guy talking about Derek Yu being however many different people had a more coherent point than this Pepe Silvia lookin' rambling

[Triplefox]

The Aesop parable is a direct inspiration for Bernard Suits' work of philosophy, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, which is featured in the text of UFO50's metanarrative. Tao Nemuru's ideas are drawn from the actual book: the grasshopper of the book makes a lengthy argument for why it is so important to value play even when it means starving. Nemuru's motive can be explained from the philosophy alone: if play is important over all else, then he cannot properly value "the work that generates play", which is the thing that UFOSoft is doing. Instead he presumes that play is some kind of zero-sum object that must be collected and hoarded. In this respect Nemuru could be called a representative of "the gamers" - pure consumers who never contribute back. The aliens do not have to be the primary invention here, they are a pragmatic way to support the belief in play.

One of the things OP has overlooked as a major theme is apocalypse: something like half or more of the games involve a cataclysm of some kind. This recurring backstory transforms the meaning of "play", because it presents the work of surviving in that scenario as the gameplay. As a text, UFO50 is deeply engaged with and often critical of the claims of The Grasshopper by folding back work and play onto each other like a Möebius strip, making the utopia in Suits' book unachievable.

Chiffon Bola's narrative acts to characterize the apocalypse of UFOSoft itself brought about by Nemuru - instead of work or play, there's simply nothing left.

However.

It's also the case that the gamer grasshopper, by hoarding "eggs", turns into the games preservationist, and therefore is a champion for the next generation. There's a cyclical element in this text - it's not meant to have clean answers saying that someone here is right, because the early UFOSoft is also characterized as an unsustainable venture driven to work through speculative visions, making it doomed in the same way as the grasshopper.

Or in other words, UFO50 is a meme about Gamergate(a mated worker ant that can reproduce sexually).

[FireBasedAnomoly]

Originally posted by Triplefox:

The Aesop parable is a direct inspiration for Bernard Suits' work of philosophy, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, which is featured in the text of UFO50's metanarrative. Tao Nemuru's ideas are drawn from the actual book: the grasshopper of the book makes a lengthy argument for why it is so important to value play even when it means starving. Nemuru's motive can be explained from the philosophy alone: if play is important over all else, then he cannot properly value "the work that generates play", which is the thing that UFOSoft is doing. Instead he presumes that play is some kind of zero-sum object that must be collected and hoarded. In this respect Nemuru could be called a representative of "the gamers" - pure consumers who never contribute back. The aliens do not have to be the primary invention here, they are a pragmatic way to support the belief in play.

One of the things OP has overlooked as a major theme is apocalypse: something like half or more of the games involve a cataclysm of some kind. This recurring backstory transforms the meaning of "play", because it presents the work of surviving in that scenario as the gameplay. As a text, UFO50 is deeply engaged with and often critical of the claims of The Grasshopper by folding back work and play onto each other like a Möebius strip, making the utopia in Suits' book unachievable.

Chiffon Bola's narrative acts to characterize the apocalypse of UFOSoft itself brought about by Nemuru - instead of work or play, there's simply nothing left.

However.

It's also the case that the gamer grasshopper, by hoarding "eggs", turns into the games preservationist, and therefore is a champion for the next generation. There's a cyclical element in this text - it's not meant to have clean answers saying that someone here is right, because the early UFOSoft is also characterized as an unsustainable venture driven to work through speculative visions, making it doomed in the same way as the grasshopper.

Or in other words, UFO50 is a meme about Gamergate(a mated worker ant that can reproduce sexually).

That's actually a REALLY interesting way of looking at it! I still feel like the evidence is strong for some kind of weird alien stuff, but from this perspective it feels very possible that the 'alien singularity' could perhaps be a bit more metaphorical than my initial theory suggested (though i still firmly believe that it exists in SOME way). I kinda wish I had more to say on this, but it covers a lot of ground.

I will note that, as I clarified in another reply, I didn't intend to make Nemeru or Nemuru or however it's spelled out to be 'evil', though I did probably give that vibe. At worst I believe he's misguided and possibly somewhat delusional. The only character that comes across as traditionally villainous is the manager, between his cruel and frenzied nature and also plausibly car-based murder.

[Hesti]

Interesting, I don't have much to say about it. I finished Miasma Tower and didn't notice anything about a murder coverup.

[Mister Salami]

SO DARK THE CON OF MAN