 Good evening. As of late, the GMOD ARG scene has been a little bleak. A couple traces of inspiration here and there, sure, but for the most part, the community has been clinging to Gunslinger's Coat Tales for nearly an entire year. I imagine you guys are getting a little tired of that by now, so today, I want to shine a light on an ARG that does the opposite of that. It's not about living ragdolls, and it's not about TF2 or Left 4 Dead characters either. In fact, it doesn't build off of any easily recognizable characters people are already attached to. The main face you'll see throughout this project is just a regular old Half-Life 2 Rebel. I'll also warn you that if you're trying to get the bigger picture of this project, it really helps to have an understanding of Gary's Mod's history. You can still enjoy the project without it, but if you have any memory of Gary's Mod prior to GMOD 13, that'll go a long way in helping you appreciate the world building. I expect this video won't have quite the appeal the other ones do since I can't put any easily recognizable characters in the thumbnail, and the project is more nuanced than a lot of the other ones I've covered. But for those in my comments begging for something new, something more mature, something innovative from the GMOD ARG scene, you might want to stick around. The project we're going to be looking at today is called The Survivor of All. Now, it might surprise some of the Richter Over Time core fan base that I'm covering this project, since the person behind it is also behind the Gaming Gramps ARG, which I criticized in the past as being insensitive to the touchy topic of dementia, as well as predictable and sloppy. However, I'm very happy to say that with this new project, I think the creator really came into his own, improved his craft a lot, and created something really special. So, what is The Survivor of All? Well, to start with the basics, it's a YouTube channel that joined back in September of 2021, and it's been on my radar for a while. It doesn't have anything listed for its channel description, but its profile picture and banner both show a character, specifically the Rebel variant male 6 from Half-Life 2, sitting next to a fizz gun and staring out into the foggy distance. We'll talk more about this in just a second. The first upload on the channel, called Day 12, was posted on September 30th, 2021, one day after the channel's launch. Let's give it a watch. Well, this is different, isn't it? The setting of the video is GM construct, as it appeared in GMod 9, covered in a dense gray fog and littered with random props. The video alternates between two perspectives. The first being security feed from six different stationary cameras around the map, and the second being a live feed from a camera being carried by the Rebel we saw on the channel icon, who appears to be our protagonist. Since this ARG doesn't seem to give him a name, and he's represented with male 06, I'll be calling this character just six from now on. We see him move some props about, then go into the garage building by the map spawn, where a workshop has been set up. After a quick drink, Six begins to tinker with a tool gun he seems to have gotten his hands on. He tries to take it apart with a buzz saw, but is unsuccessful and ultimately gives up. The next shot is him on a couch, listening to some kind of broadcast. After an abrupt cut, we return to the security camera feed and see some strange eruptions in the pond through camera accompanied by a weird noise. Immediately afterward, we see camera three come loose and fall down, ending the video abruptly. How strange. The description, which seems to be written by Six, reads, still can't bypass the tool gun from my use. The security cameras have caught a weird phenomena in the water, accompanied by a low howl. No signs of players yet. So what is there to take from this? Well, if you're a certified GMod Boomer like me, you might have already picked up on it, but this ARG seems to be leaning into the setting of War of the Servers, which is a GMod parody of the film War of the Worlds. It's notable for its status as one of the first ever GMod machinimas, as well as for its impressive near two hour runtime. If you haven't watched it before, I highly recommend it because it's a bona fide piece of video game history. And though it's a little cheesy, it's actually aged pretty decently. To those unfamiliar, the Sparknotes version is that in War of the Servers, Gary's Mod as a game is portrayed as a world of its own, separate from real life. The characters you see aren't controlled by people, but rather they are people who aren't free to say disconnect from the game. The game is their life, they're stuck in there. You catch my drift? Continuing that theme, admins are portrayed as a central police force and different servers are portrayed as different locations, which are connected by a physical adaption of the server browser called the central server highway. The story revolves around an invasion of Minjbags, which was basically an old term for GMOD griefers who arrive at random servers in these strange tripod crafts and terrorize the players and admins. And that's the fabric of the parody. The Minjbags are invading GMOD servers, just like how in War of the Worlds, the aliens are invading Earth. By now you might be saying, well, that's all fine and dandy, Richter, but what in God's name makes you think this GMOD ARG from 2021 is meant to be connected to this weird machinima I've never heard of that's almost if not just as old as I am. Well, let me explain. First, the gray fog that we see at Survivor of All looks very similar to that which appears in War of the Servers. In the film, Minjbags have found a server backdoor to enable the fog as some kind of fear tactic against the players, and the admins find themselves helpless to disable it. Hey admin, what's with the fog? I didn't turn it on, I can't turn it off. Second, while I don't think the audio itself is actually from War of the Servers, the radio transmissions we see Six listen to are very reminiscent of the online radio the protagonist in War of the Servers uses. I put on the online radio to see if any other server had been affected by what had happened in our server. That just answered my question. And finally, to seal the deal, you can see in the feed of Camera 3 what looks suspiciously like the devices from War of the Servers dubbed admin cannons. Anyway, with all that exposition out of the way, let's get back to the ARG itself, namely Six and his current predicament. Six is stranded alone in an abandoned GMOD 9 server in his combining security cam feed with footage from a camera of his own to create a journey log of sorts. This computer we see in his garage workshop seems to be the way he's transmitted out to the world, presumably the explanation for how we and the audience are receiving it. The remark in the video description about him trying to bypass the tool gun is interesting. If I had to guess, these tool guns are considered very powerful in this universe, but are limited to admin use only. And Six can't get into it because he's obviously only a regular citizen. We see him trying to use a buzz saw to break it open. That's his way of trying to bypass the limitation, but he's not having any luck with it. So altogether, Six is stranded alone on construct with a creepy fog, being advised by radio transmissions to barricade his windows and doors, and his security system is alerting him to some weird paranormal shit going on elsewhere in the map. If I had to guess, I'd assume he wants access to the tool gun because it can help him spawn or delete props, and would generally be a great help in getting the hell out of his current position. That was almost definitely the longest exposition I've ever written for a single GMOD ARG upload, but I promise now that the explanation of War of the Servers is out of the way, the pace should pick up. Let's have a look at the next upload log titled Days 13 to 15. Six runs outside on Day 13 to investigate Camera 3 after we saw it fall down in the last video. He places it back in its original position using his Fizz gun, and we see that the dark room has been boarded up with boxes. In the description he writes, I woke up to find Camera 3 was somehow moved by something or someone, but my player detector didn't show anyone in the server. The audio feed was also cut, and it was pointing at a blocked off entrance to something. I can't move the props blocking the entrance with my Fizz gun. If someone else is on the server, they seem to be hiding from me. Construct is only so big. On Day 14, we spot him using his computer for a brief moment, before he returns to the scene of Camera 3 and seemingly fires the admin candidate I mentioned just a moment ago. Cutting to Six's hand camera, he approaches the dark room to spot a man tied to the wall with a makeshift light fixture illuminating his body, which has had its head crushed with a cinder block. We get some clarification from Six in the description. I finally got one of the abandoned admin cannons to work and I tested it on a dead player. On Day 15, Six is shown sitting on the same couch from earlier listening to another broadcast. This could be a reference to any number of events that happen in War of the Servers, or it could be totally unrelated. Regardless, it's interrupted by an alarm that goes off in the garage workshop, alerting Six that a new player has been detected in the server. This is immediately followed by camera feed showing a mudskipper flight craft landing outside, with the video ending immediately after. Note that crafts like this appear all the time throughout the War of the Servers film. For this log's description, Six wrote, a player was detected while I was asleep. Checking the camera footage, it seems something crashed into the pool of construct. I checked the wreckage, but I couldn't find anything, like it was removed. Camera five also lost signal and has vanished. I believe someone else is on the server with me, but is somehow not being detected. A tool gun might work getting into the blocked entrance. So to pull all of that together, after the weird anomaly shown on the security feed, Six is understandably getting paranoid and has armed an admin cannon in case he needs to defend himself from someone or something. Not long after that, someone crash lands in his server, but cleans up the wreckage. They've either found a way out since then or they're hiding. Also, it seems like the source of all this paranormal activity might be within the dark room that's blocked off, but it's kind of hard to know. Anyway, the next video is called Days 16 through question mark, question mark. Seems like Six has lost track of time. Let's have a look. So various camera feeds accompanied by a soft piano is what we're working with here. We see Six walking around the pond, then crouching to the floor and doing something, putting something together. It's hard to tell. He cooks up a bite to eat and we see that he's boarded up his windows like the original broadcast told him to. And speaking of broadcast, we hear a quick clip from the online radio saying, Five objects were confirmed to have entered and bird set. Six goes doomer mode at his computer desk and then we see a flash of a white void with some strange blue particles raining down. We're shown a scene of Six sitting down by the pond before a radio washes up on shore. Then another particle void flash. This time more intense. Six takes the radio that washed up to his workshop but peers out his boarded up windows to see some kind of freaky movement. His camera feed then all disrupts with camera four briefly capturing some kind of huge eruption. So what the fuck is all that about? Well, the description does give us some insight. Six writes, something's wrong. After that object crashed into the pond, the server has been acting strange. Every time I close my eyes I see some sort of vision of a white room. I constantly feel like someone is watching me. A radio washed up from the pond where the object had crashed and it keeps playing a message in Morse code. I can't keep track of the days anymore. I feel like I'm starting to forget where and who I am. A loud sound emitted from the pond and took out all my cameras. It also shook my room violently and broke my player detector. I am almost out of food and supplies to sustain me so I'm going to have to leave this server somehow. I need to decode the radio message. If someone knows how to decode it I would greatly appreciate it. I was able to record the whole message using my camera. I'll upload the full message. It seems like shit's getting real in Six's server and it's freaking him out. More paranormal activity, more ominous radio transmissions and a radio that washed up from the pond emitting Morse code. Very strange. The next upload is the recording Six made of the Morse code radio taking the audience to help him decode it. I won't play it since it's just a minute of 14 seconds of beeping but I do want to highlight the comment section of the video. A user named Dotty offered their translation which is something like warning, warning. We are under attack, need backup, need backup. We are in the city and they have attacked. Only Cephas, help, help. I don't know what Cephas means. This would seem to be some kind of transmission from the Minjbag versus Admin war seen in War of the Servers asking Six for help. And that would be cool enough but the survivor of all actually replied to the comment with this. I'm running out of food and water and have no way of making it to the city with what I have left. Sitting here in waiting isn't helping me anymore but I don't know what I should do. I've been looking and planning different routes and I have two options. Either go straight for the city through the server highway which can be very dangerous but I could hopefully make it in about two days before I run out of food and water or go a long way around that should be safe or it has some places I could possibly loot for food but the journey could take over five days and who knows if whoever sent that message will still be there. What would you do? At that point, another user named Landane left a reply urging Six to go the safer route to which he replied, I'm getting ready to leave. I just hope whoever sent the message is still there when I get there. I tried using the cannons on the dark room entrance but there is also a metal prop blocking the door that won't budge. How ominous. I wonder what's in there. The next video is called the long route and it seems to be picking up the story a little bit. Have a watch. It looks like Six packed his shit including the tool gun he can't use just in case and got started on his journey on the server highway. Despite seeing a sign reading turnaround there everywhere Six presses on and we get a quick glimpse of that weird white particle void once more. He comes across some ruins of a, looks like a Soviet era building with a radio inside starts a fire and begins to rest. However, his sleep is interrupted by droning and we catch a glimpse of something huge outside. Yep, this looks to be a minch pod from the war of the servers. It looks like our friend Six is in serious trouble and the lack of a video description seems to corroborate this. The next and latest video on the channel is called Awakening and it's only 22 seconds so let's get it out of the way. More visions of the weird white void with particles before we see the perspective of someone waking up on the floor of an actual white void. It looks like Six might have been captured. Lord knows what happens from here. No video description on this one either. So basically what's going on here with this ARG is you've got this guy, he was stranded in a server, shit was freaking him out, he ran out of food and he dipped. Now he seems to have been captured. But now that we're through all that, what is it that I like about this ARG that compelled me to cover it? Well first, I really like how it shows reverence and respect for GMod's history and culture. While other ARGs have definitely shown the respect for the early machinima scene of 2009 and 2014, I think this one really takes it to a new level by going all the way back to 2007 or it might have been earlier, I'm not really sure when the war of the servers was first made. Second, I really like how unique its premise is. In a landscape of copy and pasted sentient ragdoll and shadow figure ARGs, the survivor of all brings an entirely new angle to Gary's mod horror. Third, I was really impressed with the set building and camera work, especially in the long route video. It helps to make the videos very immersive. And finally, I think the fact that it builds off war of the servers is really cool because it keeps the film's legacy alive in a fun and creative way. It even appears to be using the actual custom maps that were created for war of the servers all those years ago, which is a brilliant touch. I'm excited to see what happens to Six next now that he's seemingly been captured and I hope you guys enjoyed diving into these videos as much as I did. I did notice one major continuity error in the ARG though, that being that the tool gun design scene was added in Gmod 10. In Gmod 9, the tool gun was just represented with a crossbow, you can see that more of the servers. But who really cares? By the way, here's a cool, fun fact for you. The first video I ever worked on was a video for radiation hazard about a Half-Life 2 deathmatch map called DM Equilibre. Equilibre? I'm not French. Well, funnily enough, that map was created by a French Canadian developer named Zitis who also worked on the custom maps for war of the servers. You can even notice some of the same buildings if you compare the maps. Anywho, that's all I've got this time. Hopefully I didn't bore you guys with this one. Thanks for watching and have a good day.