Catastrophe Crow

About

Catastrophe Crow, also known as Crow 64, is an Alternate Reality Game created by YouTuber Adam Butcher centered around a fictional video game for the Nintendo 64. The game was supposedly a 3D platformer like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, but the game was never released due to the obsessive madness of its creator, and supposedly vanished from existence until a development copy was discovered by Butcher.

Origin

On October 15th, 2020, YouTuber Adam Butcher posted a video titled "What Happened To CROW 64?" in which he described the troubled development of a supposedly lost N64 3D platformer called Catastrohpe Crow. In Butcher's tale, the game was developed by Manfred Lorenz of Opus Interactive and the game had some hype prior to its release date, but never came out as Lorenz became obsessive over the game and brought the studio deeper into debt, eventually locking himself in the studio for months and letting go all of the development staff. Eventually, the Nintendo Gamecube was released, and Lorenz disappeared with all of the development materials, possibly killing himself by jumping off a boat in the North Sea.

Butcher then begins a Let's Play of a "development" copy he's found. The game plays over little commentary, as the main "crow" character encounters increasingly disturbing scenarios which appear to allude to Lorenz' death. The video gained over 478,000 views.

Spread

Lore

The video was covered by Kotaku^[1] the day it was posted, where they compared the video to Petscop. However, viewers quickly discovered that multiple clues were scattered around the internet to develop the lore around Lorenz and Catastrophe Crow. This included "playthroughs" of the game that went largely unnoticed until Butcher's video. Channels including N64 Long Lost Lore (shown below, left) and N64ExcavationMan (shown below, right).

A video posted by October 8th, 2020 by YouTuber "Ultra64Forever" which included the end credits song to a game called Ocean Quest, which was the only other game Butcher stated Lorenz had worked on (shown below). The credit song features strange ambient bloops which are actually a code for "Thea, Nils, Marta, Thanks for playing." Marta was Lorenz' wife, and Thea and Nils were his children. This was discovered by YouTuber Jonathan Rose-Lyon.

Furthermore, there are several moments in Butcher's video where codes and strange writing known as "crow language" appear. Viewers were able to decode a frame at the game's opening, discovering it was a message to Thea apologizing for "not being with her in the end" (shown below) Other instances of "crow language" in the game have been decoded by the community, including messages like "I Am In Hell" coming from a character believed to be Lorenz' stand-in.

Online Spread

On November 25th, 2020, YouTube channel Inside A Mind posted a video going through the discoveries made about the video and the ARG to that point, gaining over 1.4 million views (shown below). On February 21st, 2021, Night Mind made a similar video, gaining over 349,000 views (shown below).

On March 13th, 2021, The Game Theorists posted a video about the ARG, bringing Catasrophe Crow to its biggest audience yet, as the video gained over 2.1 million views in two days (shown below).

There is a page for Catastrophe Crow on TV Tropes.^[2] A subreddit for the ARG, /r/CatastopheCrow,^[3] was created on October 16th, 2020, gaining over 4,200 members as of March 2021. A Google Document^[4] featuring all of the known lore and theories up to now is available online.

Search Interest

External References