MatPat

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · YouTube · Also known as Matthew Patrick; Game Theory; The Game Theorists; Film Theory; Food Theory; Style Theory

What it is

MatPat is the online name of Matthew Patrick, an American who made videos for YouTube, a website where anyone could upload videos and viewers could comment on them. From 2011 to 2024 he ran Game Theory, a series in which he took the made-up stories inside video games and picked them apart with maths, physics and psychology, as if they were real cases to solve. Spin-off channels did the same for films, food and fashion.

Where it came from

Patrick studied theatre and psychology at Duke University, then spent about two years in New York without much acting work. In 2011 he started making videos as a portfolio to show employers he could research, write and edit. The first Game Theory episode, in April 2011, was about time travel in the 1995 game Chrono Trigger. The channel grew slowly until he took on Five Nights at Freddy's, a 2014 horror game about killer robot animals in a pizza restaurant, whose story was deliberately hidden in scraps of clues. Film Theory followed in 2015, Food Theory in 2020 and Style Theory in 2023.

Why it mattered

He set the template for a kind of video many channels later copied: the long, confident explainer that claims to reveal the hidden story of a game or film. For a lot of young viewers it was their first experience of building an argument from evidence, even when the evidence was a cartoon bear's teeth. His channels together passed 40 million subscribers. When he stepped down as host in March 2024, fans and other YouTubers posted tributes, mostly from people who'd grown up watching him.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Young people online would happily sit through twenty minutes of maths about a children's game if it was framed as a mystery. The comment sections, full of rival theories and corrections, did nearly as much of the work as the videos.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.