YouTube group and game developers Game Grumps may well be teasing their next project after Dream Daddy using a very odd ARG. If the fine folks at Reddit are interpreting this correctly, their next game may very well be titled Soviet Jump Game.
To understand this whole situation, we have to go back a few weeks to the start of a three-part series of videos where Game Grumps’ co-founder Arin Hanson explores bootleg Russian video games. The first two videos generally do what you’d expect: a YouTuber explores various video games that treat copyrights and trademarks as more of a loose suggestion. It’s the third video where things get really interesting.
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Here are the three videos, in order, if you care to watch them.
Russian BOOTLEG Nintendo games!
MORE Bootleg Russian Games!
Lost piece of gaming history UNCOVERED
While the first two Game Grumps videos explore bootleg Russian games, a majority of the third video is spent on trying to get a single cartridge working for the Russian “Dendy” console. Arin finds a strange adapter inside the console and makes several attempts to get it to work before he’s finally successful.
The game that’s revealed is purportedly a 30-year-old Russian Battle Royale game called On Point Jumping Friends (First). After a short conversation, Arin reveals that there is going to be a beta pre-release of a purported ROM dump which will ultimately be titled “Soviet Jump Game“.
One question remains, though — is any of this real? According to a submission on the /r/gamegrumps subreddit, this may just be an elaborate, viral ARG announcement for their next game.
“I kind of get a weird feeling that this is an ARG for a game that the Grumps actually made and not a game from the 80s,” states one comment in the thread. “Something just feels very off. Like how clearly scripted the video was and how the game looked when Arin played it.”
The flip side of the coin argues that it’s a real game that is more or less being “refurbished” by the Game Grumps.
“[Here’s] my guess – It’s actually both things,” read a comment with a counter-argument. “This cart is real and the modified Dendy with a modem attachment is real. They dumped the ROM from the cart but can’t get a playable game from it (without server-side code there’s no way they could). So they are going to use the assets from this game to make whatever Soviet Jump Game is, maybe something akin to Mario Royale that got taken down this summer.”
To make matters more interesting, the Game Grumps’ Twitter account recently liked this tweet from developer Fantastic Pass’ Thom Glunt, which shared the box art for Soviet Jump Game along with teasing “more info coming really soon”:
https://twitter.com/thomglunt/status/1201977603063611392
An ARG is an “alternate reality game” which merges reality with fiction, allowing participants to interact with the ARG in order to increase immersion. Many ARGs take the form of puzzles, with game companies in the past using them to drop clues for upcoming releases or downloadable content.
So, is Soviet Jump Game an original Game Grumps creation or did they really stumble upon an unfinished Russian Battle Royale platformer game from more than 30 years ago? It seems like things are leaning more towards the former, but we won’t be able to say for certain until we actually play it. You can find out more by signing up for the Soviet Jump Game beta.
