This is a deep dive on a video made by Guy Collins Animation on YouTube called “孔明の罠 Kaizo Trap”. Asides from being a brilliant piece of animation, it’s also filled with tons of easter eggs and references relating to gaming and other related themes. There is an exordianry amount of attention to detail that I think most people would not even notice upon their viewing. So I decided to take some time to go through the entire video frame by frame and analyze all the things I could find. You can find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIES3ii-IOg

The title of the video is called 孔明の罠 Kaizo Trap and I just want to provide a bit of historical context. Many people will probably assume that the Japanese in the front just says Kaizo Trap but in Japanese. It actually says Komei’s Trap, or KongMing’s trap if translated to the Chinese pronunciation. KongMing was another name for the famous ancient Chinese military strategist Zhuge Liang. He was a respected tactician that has been compared to Sun Tzu. He appears in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms which is on par with Journey to the West in terms of historical significance. Komei’s trap refers to a famous Empty Fort Strategy involving baiting and tricking the opponent who has no idea what will actually happen. Kaizo (改造) in Japanese means to remodel or rearrange so it’s basically just the Japanese term for a videogame ROM hack. When the first Kaizo Mario game ROM hack was made, westerners just assumed Kaizo meant really hard or something due to the nature of the fangame. 

At 0:23, you can see a reference to Komei as there is a portrait of Zhuge Liang hanging on the wall. 

The console itself is obviously supposed to be a Nintendo NES 

at 0:41 in the living room walls there are two photos/paintings. The one on the left appears to be referencing the original Mario Kaizo with the red hat and the blue body jumping off a platform with coins below. The painting/photo on the right foreshadows later in the video when the woman is choosing between giving up and trying again. It’s a picture of the Y and N doors. It also kinda looks like an upside down Nintendo Switch but this was an entire year before the Switch was even announced so that’s just a coincidence. 

At 0:44 very briefly as the guy boots up the game you can see the eyes of the final boss appear on screen.

At 1:23 the woman falls through a wall of code that appears to be written in Assembly, which was what old consoles used back in the day. The code appears to have been from a Sonic game potentially as the text Sonic appears in a few lines along with codes detailing drowning. A lot of obj file names also match ones found in the source code dump of Sonic 1.

Beginning at 1:41 we see the woman read the instruction manual and the control scheme appears to have the buttons A, C, G, and T as opposed to the X, A, B, Y buttons commonly found on Nintendo controllers. This is most likely a reference to DNA sequences.

The player character’s moveset seems to mostly be based off of Mario’s moves but more complicated as there are moves such as sliding or adjustable jump heights as seen in the instruction manual.
At 1:44 there is actually an easter egg/clue in the instruction manual showing a mouse cursor pointing at the key block with a timestamp written on top. When the video first came out, the creator made several alternate secret endings that could only be found by solving puzzles and decoding messages. The first secret ending was found by following the instructions and heading to 7 minutes and 1 second into the video and clicking the key block on screen. Youtube disabled the annotation feature in 2019 so the video is no longer interactive. So sadly this cool detail no longer serves any purpose.

Throughout the video there are plenty of small details and interesting easter eggs. Multiple times in the video, symbols from the Bagua or the Eight Trigrams show up. In order of appearance, we have:

2:05 – the Earth symbol

2:09 – the Lake symbol 

2:13 – the Lake symbol again

2:17 – the Wind symbol

2:23 – the Wind symbol again

2:27 – the Water symbol

2:28 – the Water symbols again

2:42 – the Mountain symbol

2:44 – the Thunder symbol

2:45 – the Water symbol again?

2:50 – I dunno why this part is the Water symbol because it’s a mountain area

2:53 – the Fire symbol

2:56 – the Fire symbol again

3:10 – the Mountain symbol again

3:13 – and again

3:16 – the Thunder symbol again

These symbols show up repeatedly in the death montage but they’re mostly repeats of the same location

It appears only seven out of the eight trigrams appear in the video, tho it’s possible I missed the last one.

The video references many common 2D platforming game mechanics ranging from spikes, strong winds, and jumping on enemies to kill them; but the one that is the most iconic to typical Kaizo Mario levels is the shell jump. In which players juggle an item around to use it to gain height in otherwise impossible situations. This technique is used several times in the video.

There are numerous unique death animations during the death montage. This includes various forms of being bitten/eaten by enemies, various forms of being impaled by spikes, electrocution, getting burned, crushed, and getting cut in half. I counted at least 45 unique animations. Which is quite impressive.

It’s implied that in this video, similar to the game Super Meat Boy, when you die to an obstacle, the blood splatter stays in on subsequent attempts. So they build up throughout the video.

One particular death at around 2:40 is an interesting one. It is one of those Mario invisible blocks that only materialize when you hit them from below. Infamous in Kaizo Mario as they are normally helpful in the base game but act as hidden obstacles in ROM hacks. 

Another interesting death was at a split frame around 2:43 where she dies after a coconut falls on her head near the beginning of the level. Remember this death as it will be important later.

Another easy to miss detail is that as the death montage speeds up, the words “Continue?” begin to fade in and out slowly.

At 2:21 we get our first glimpse at the number cipher the video uses.

The implication being those symbols represent 1 through 8.

Later at 3:12 – 3:13 we get confirmation of what the last two numbers are.

So to summarize: 

At 2:23 we get this image, which appears to be an NES. The code on top translates to 1983, which is the year the NES was released. 

More consoles and video games show up after this but I don’t really recognize them. Reddit user SomeGuyNamedDavid identified one as an Atari 5200 and another as ET?

At 3:16, there is Japanese text written on the side of the tanks. They roughly translate into the following:

液体痛み – Liquid pain

敗者の涙 – Great suffering 

濃厚苦しみ – Tears of the loser

Last one’s a bit cheeky if you ask me

At 3:21 you can see there’s misleading signs designed to trick the player into going the wrong way. The signs say continue right but evidently the correct path is downwards since that’s where the key is. 

At 3:22 she obtains the key which will come into play at the end of the video

if you pause at the right moment at 3:32 you can see the following text:

which refers to a lot of techniques/hacks and tools used by speedrunners and gamers for difficult hard-to-perform segments in games. Save scumming refers to saving and reloading to retry segments, slow motion and frame advance involve slowing down the game to help make more precise inputs, rewind means rewind, memory display means viewing in-game data to gain extra info, code injection means inserting pre-recorded inputs to play the game.

Starting at 3:42, the woman gets blasted through a void with Japanese text in the background. It’s actually the lyrics to a song called “Can’t beat Air Man” (Air Man ga Taosenai), a Japanese meme song about how the player in Mega Man can’t defeat the boss Air Man. 

Here we can see the Y and N doors alluded to in the beginning. The symbols to each side of the countdown number appears to be the Sky symbol from the Bagua Trigram. Possibly alluding to the final boss being in the sky. It’s also entirely possible that’s just a coincidence and I’m digging too much.

At 4:12, we get this page of text and code. The DOS or disk operating system is called ZhugeDOS. This is a reference to Zhuge Liang again, the guy I mentioned in the very beginning. The Volume Serial Number when translated from hexadecimal code says “Eight Trigrams” 

There are also two dates on here but I can’t really tell the significance of either one.

They could have something to do with when Guy Collins first started this project. This is just speculation.

The following text at 4:13 is from the utterly horrifying short story by Harlan Ellison “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

The screen then proceeds to fill with this excerpt from the same short story. Earlier in the code you can actually see a line that is a command for this text to be repeated. 

$x=1;

While ($x>0)

{echo “$hate”;

Context: this piece of dialogue came from the artificial intelligence known as AM who despises humankind for creating it. AM hates that mankind has given it sentience so it calls itself AM in reference to the line “I think, therefore I am”. The story of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” tells about how AM wiped out all of humanity except 5 survivors. AM keeps these 5 survivors alive through all means possible in order to torture them for the rest of eternity, trapping them in a living hell. 

You see the parallels…

Starting at 4:31, the screen in the background displays text from “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” by Roger Williams, another story about artificial intelligence obtaining god-like powers. The text, while difficult to make out, appears to be from Chapter Two: “Lawrence Builds a Computer”. A later segment appears to be from Chapter 7: “Caroline and Lawrence”

Starting at 5:00 you can see lines of 57 and 77 flickering on the screen. When translated from hexadecimal code it’s just a string of capital and lowercase W’s. I’m not sure what the significance of this is. 

At 5:06 there’s a bunch of Japanese text that scrolls by really fast and I tried to search up where it is all from but I can’t seem to find where the text originated from. Typing those characters into Google doesn’t yield any exact matches. I previously assumed that it was just the same Japanese text as before, being the lyrics of that one Mega Man song but after translating a few lines it’s not. The reason why it peaked my interest is because I saw a few characters in there that I recognized, that being 四川, which is my mother’s home province. It is also where Zhuge Liang was from (or whatever the ancient equivalent of that area was). There were a few other lines I translated saying “escaping in vain” and “watch out for scattered mountains”. My best guess is that it’s an obscure Japanese article about Zhuge Liang as these seem to reference some old stories involving him. I am not sure tho. I’ll try to get a native Japanese speaker to help me with it.

At 5:07 we see some constellations in the background as well as morse code at the bottom. The constellations appear to form a YES/NO logic tree

“I THINK THEREFORE IAM”

The line is obviously another reference to Harlan Ellison’s short story tho the last two words have a curious typo, lacking a space in between the I and the A.

At 5:57, the woman is hit by one of the beams and begins to despawn. But then the guy pulls out one of the cables, specifically, the one attached to his heart. Causing the boss to glitch out and this brings the woman back to life. Which I think is clever since hearts are associated with lives in video games. 

At 6:12 after the guy starts pulling out even more cables, the game starts to break and visual glitches start appearing everywhere. The assets and objects become corrupted and messed up. One interesting detail is that a silhouette of the guy appears and starts making a safe path that the woman can trace 

At 6:53 while the woman is taking her guy back to the entrance at the very beginning, she cautiously makes sure to avoid the falling coconut. Which I think is a brilliant and hilarious call back to that one time she died from the falling coconut during the death montage. 

Starting at 7:09, they begin to travel through another vortex of blue text but this time it is not game code like in the beginning of the video. This time it’s actually text directly from the Wikipedia entry for “Black hole information paradox”. Which is quite appropriate given the circumstances. It’s an interesting paradox concerning how black holes are singularities and thus able to literally destroy information and break conservation laws. Readable lines include but are not limited to “difficult to test the Einstein–Cartan theory”, “Hawking himself conceded a bet he had”, and “concluded the battle is the holographic”.

Finally at the end after they make it back into the real world, you can see a long time has passed. The tape around the house read “no enter, abandoned house” implying they were in there for quite some time. The graffiti on the wall references several groups and gamers known to be associated with Kaizo Mario games. This photo below by SomeGuyNamedDavid on Reddit outlines who everyone is

Note: BaroBros is supposed to be BeardBros