I think Dropout’s hit game show Game Changer is celebrating the end of its seventh season with an alternate reality game. Admittedly, when fans of the show posted to the streaming network’s subreddit, the show’s host Sam Reich clearly and repeatedly denied the claims, writing “NOTHING TO SEE HERE” and “THIS IS NOTHING, LOOK AWAY”. These denials were reinforced by the show’s co-executive producer Paul Robalino, who went even further with his statement:
There was nothing hidden at the end of the last episode. There’s no ARG. There are no QR codes. There is no secret to unlock. What is everyone talking about
Paul Robalino, on Twitter
Admittedly, I was convinced there was a Game Changer ARG two years ago, when the team teased there might be more to the season after the “final episode” of season 5. And then I did it all over again last year, when a particularly glitchy episode released during season 6.
But please, ignore my spotty personal track record for this and the team’s explicit and suspiciously specific denials: this time, I think Game Changer really is running an alternate reality game that gives its players a peek behind the fictional-curtain of the show, to help unlock the “real” ending for the season. But before going over that, I should probably own up to past missteps.
Third Time’s the Charm? The Last Two Times We Suspected a Game Changer ARG
Admittedly, the Dropout fandom doesn’t have the best track record of finding ARGs in episodes of Game Changer. The first time we missed the mark was after the season 5 episode Escape the Greenroom. The episode introduced viewers to Samuel Dalton, Sam Reich’s great-grandfather and occultist. During the episode, Dalton kidnapped and replaced the real Sam Reich, subjecting the episode’s guests to a custom escape room designed by Stash House‘s Tommy Honton.
At the time, this episode was thought to be the ninth and final episode of the season. But immediately after it aired, Sam Reich posted a cryptic message to the Discord, hinting that there might be more to come.
In retrospect, the solution to this was relatively straightforward: zoom into the series’ key, and Sam Reich had an extra “13” up his sleeve, hinting that the show would have not just one surprise episode, but four: a multi-part Battle Royale homage to the Survivor franchise that served as the true end of the season. That didn’t stop fans (myself included) from deconstructing every tidbit of occult lore shown as part of the escape room, suspecting we hadn’t seen the last of Samuel Dalton, time travelling magician and occultist.
The next year, suspicions of an alternate reality game started to really percolate after the season’s sixth episode, Deja Vu. The episode centered around contestants reliving the episode on a time loop, with the episode’s footage glitching out more and more after every loop – a theme familiar to fans of Ranboo’s Generation Loss ARG from the prior year. Ranboo would make their own Game Changer debut through a series of guest appearances culminating in the season finale.
This theme was also familiar to Game Changer fans still looking for Samuel Dalton to make an ARGish return. Was the time loop happening because Reich’s time travelling great-grandfather returned to torment a new batch of contestants in a neverending loop? The episode’s frequent glitches and nearly impossible challenges did task contestants with exploring external websites, like the FixItMan78 YouTube channel which provided helpful instructions on how to repair the ElectroBobbleWobble QZ.
So, fans started poring through Deja Vu to interpret the glitches, and even started skimming through past episodes to see if there was a pattern in Sam Reich’s introductions that might reveal whether he’d been secretly replaced by his identical great-grandfather. Multiple promising leads emerged, but nothing that manifested into anything definitive.
The next episode, Beat the Buzzer (which brought back Tommy Honton as a consultant) only fanned the flames of speculation by subjecting the show’s contestants to a number of challenges to earn the right to press dozens of buzzers hidden throughout the studio: this time, famed magician and time traveler Samuel Dalton even made a cameo on an advertisement for his show, next to a literal callback puzzle that challenged contestants to order a buzzer from a fake pizza company.
After the episode aired, some of those games (like Crack the CAPTCHA) were even made playable on Dropout’s site. But ultimately, in season 6 there wasn’t even a card up Sam’s sleeve – sometimes, a time loop episode is just a time loop episode.
The Dropout ARG is Real This Time, I Swear
Which brings us back to earlier this week, when a third round of hype around a potential Dropout ARG started taking hold. Game Changer‘s seventh season ended with an election for the next CEO of Dropout, and many campaign promises were made: one of the more bold ones involved a promise to air the entirety of Avengers: Endgame after the episode’s credits. And at least part of this promise was fulfilled: the final moments of the finale pays homage to the MCU’s iconic Marvel logo introduction by flashing through a highly cinematic crawl montage of key moments from past Dropout episodes, mapped onto a 3D rendering of the brand’s 😀 logo…before cutting to a copyright claim explaining the episode’s ending was removed “due to a (legitimate) copyright claim.”
After the episode aired, Dropout’s minigames site saw the introduction of a new game themed around the episode called “Cast Your Vote”. Select one of the show’s five contestants, and cast your ballot. Only…players are also allowed to enter the names of write-in candidates. And during the episode, Brennan Lee Mulligan attempts to game the system by ceding his nomination to Sam Reich’s wife Elaine Carroll. Enter her name, and she replaces Brennan as a candidate. Vote for her, and a fragment of a QR code appears behind her name.
Piecing Together the QR Code Puzzle: Behind the Scenes with 1S Studios
Once this discovery was made, fans started digging into the other minigames created for prior episodes, and discovered edge cases that would reveal additional QR code fragments. But even more curiously, they discovered the website for the game studio responsible for these creations, 1S Studios, redirected to a bare-bones LinkedIn page that in turn linked to their Github repository. While exploring that codebase, they found a secret VIP login page, with instructions on how to email support for a password reset.
Fans eventually realized they could spoof Brennan Lee Mulligan’s credentials by using bleem_d20dm as username, and ecce amice tu cornibus ferries as password, to enter the VIP Feedback mode.
Once there, feedback notes between 1S Studio (cmyk and joker_ling) and Dropout (MrWenis and bleem_d20dm) became visible, offering nudges on how to unlock the various QR code fragments using behind the scenes conversations as hints. For instance, Cast Your Vote‘s commentary included Brennan Lee Mulligan saying, “official request: take me out and put Elaine in”.
Survive the Maze can be solved thanks to a hint from cmyk reminding Sam “have you tested your account name for the secret ending”, Power Up Jacob hints at a “Maximum Mode” that takes more than quick tapping to reach, and Crack the CAPTCHA places a special request for a round of playtesting from the West Coast. The piece de resistance, however, comes from the lighthearted Chrome Extension Buttling Buddy, which adds cartoon butts to your screen. Completing the requirements for that particular task unlocks a QR code fragment made out of tiny cartoon butts.
Elote of Trouble For What? The Final Piece of the Puzzle
Within the Feedback section for “Survive the Maze” in particular, Sam Reich encourages 1S Studios’ joker_ling to remove references to “the corn game”, prompting joker to reference how much they love elote. This nudges puzzlers to hunt down a secret Elote Street Corn page, featuring a pixelated image of a corn cob with seven colored squares on it, paired with an elated comment from joker_ling saying, “HAPPY PRIDE!”
Each row of the corn cob corresponds to the length of a different season of Game Changer, with one pixel per episode: and referencing the highlighted episode of every season reveals a different unique description tag for each episode. Sort those in rainbow order, and a final instruction is revealed:
RED – s5e9 (Escape the Greenroom) – ASSEMBLE THE PUZZLE
ORANGE – s4e7 (Don’t Cry) – PUT THE LETTERS
YELLOW – s1e4 (Whodunnit) – IN ORDER
GREEN – s6e7 (Beat the Buzzer) – AND SEARCH
BLUE – s2e2 (Do I Hear $1?) – FOR
INDIGO – s3e5 (Ham It Up) – THE REAL
VIOLET – s7e10 (Outvoted) – ENDING
So, we’re beginning to put together enough pieces of the puzzle to know what’s going on. While porting over minigames that were used during Game Changer for public consumption, 1S Studio inserted a handful of easter eggs into the games, alongside fragments of a QR code. Once assembled, the code will presumably scan to a final puzzle that will reveal a keyword that Dropout subscribers can search for to see the real ending to a season that otherwise ended with a faked copyright claim.
Assuming it’s an ARG in the first place. After all, I’ve been wrong twice before, and Sam Reich and Paul Robalino were quite convincing with their arguments that there’s nothing to see here.
Game Changer and the Art of the ARG
It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with Dropout’s game show programming. ARGNet’s coverage of the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt was almost exclusively dedicated to celebrating a single puzzle’s narrative and mechanical homage to Um, Actually. When I was in charge of running live events for the 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt, one of the events I’m proudest of creating adapted the recurring Game Changer segment Sam Says into a time loop puzzle designed for a crowd of over 100 people (and yes, that took place a few months before Deja Vu). I even competed on an ARG-themed edition of Um, Actually to celebrate the ARGonauts podcast’s 101st episode. I also know I’m not the only member of the ARG community who’s fallen deeply in love with the streaming service’s programming, and Game Changer in particular. Part of that love comes because structurally, Game Changer delivers an experience for its viewers and contestants that’s highly similar to that of following an ARG.
At the beginning of every episode, Sam Reich welcomes his guests with a deceptively simple question: “now, you all understand how the game works?” And almost without fail, contestants will answer no, allowing Sam to explain the only constant of the show: “our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning.”
And by and large, that’s the experience of playing an alternate reality game: there’s no set way to signal the beginning of a game. It can start with something as innocuous as a bottle of honey with strips of paper shoved inside, or as extravagant as an invitation to deliver a secret passcode to a corner newsstand. And the nature of gameplay itself can be just about anything, from solving a string of puzzles hidden in a video to digging through fictionalized historical artifacts. The only constant is that you learn the rules of the game by poking at its boundaries, and seeing what behaviors the game encourages with the implicit promise that the results will be worth the time investment.
That doesn’t mean ARGs will never resemble each other: for instance, the current Game Changer ARG bears a lot of structural similarity to the Chain Factor ARG, which served as a minigame-based sequel to an episode of Numb3rs by hiding a story in the error code messages of a casual game now known as Drop7. But it does mean that approaching something that feels similar still requires caution, as new twists in gameplay (or “Loop de Loops”, as Game Changer likes to call it) may have been introduced.
So, no. I have no idea what kind of ARG this will be. But, as the saying goes: the only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning. And the only way to begin is by joining the discussion at r/Dropout, checking out the minigames yourself, or subscribing to Dropout and binge watching Game Changer yourself.
UPDATED TO ADD: Around the same time this article went up, the r/Dropout subreddit realized that the instructions to search for “The Real Ending” was a literal instruction, leading to extended cuts of Dimension 20: On A Bus, Brennan’s Exit…and a “Real Ending” video that feels like it’s still one step away from the ARG’s grand finale.
Fans have also managed to assemble enough of the QR code to discover the website ep11.love, which is where they can enter the answer from The “Real Ending’s” prompt…to unlock a secret 11th and final episode of Game Changer season 7. A megathread has also been created in r/Dropout to consolidate the discussion.
…and part of that conversation includes the “magic word” itself: entering SAMALAMADINGDONG on ep11.love (a Sam-centric spin on the YouTube video linked in the description of Dropout’s “The Real Ending” video), with secret episode 11 unlocking after 100K people enter the magic word.
Updated 8/25 with the finale: After the password “Samalamadingdong” was entered 100K times, a countdown to August 25th at 1pm EST unlocked, at which point Sam Reich went live with a (now archived) 30 minute Instagram Live stream explaining how the Dropout cast conspired to inflict a secret 11th episode upon him – “the most expensive ever piece of Dropout content…the only episode of Dropout not helmed by me, but helmed by Brennan Lee Mulligan. An awful taste of my own medicine. It was humiliating, it was terrifying and I…if we’re going to be honest…loved it.”
That episode is now live for Dropout subscribers.
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