In March 2017, a YouTube channel called Petscop began uploading video footage of someone playing an unreleased PlayStation 1 game they'd received from a family member.
The game appeared to be a simple, colorful pet-catching title — Newmaker Plane, a grassy area where you caught small creatures. Childlike, cheerful, low-poly. The kind of game that could have been released in 1997 and forgotten.
Then the uploader found a hidden room, and the game became something else.
The hidden room contained a note explaining that the true game was not what the player had been shown. Below the colorful surface was a second game, darker, stranger, accessed by a different set of controls. Below Newmaker Plane was something called the Newmaker Plane too, but different — grey, empty, industrial.
The series continued for two years. Forty-three videos. What it revealed, incrementally and without ever explaining itself clearly, was a game that appeared to be about real events. Specific, identifiable events. Events involving real people, real traumas, real names that appeared encoded into the game's mechanics and environments and NPC behaviors.
The game appeared to have been made by someone who knew the uploader. Or someone who knew about the uploader's family. The more the player explored, the more the game demonstrated that it was aware of them — not in the vague way of a horror story's dramatic convenience, but specifically, with details that couldn't be coincidence.
The final videos, in 2019, didn't resolve the mystery. They deepened it. The channel went silent without explanation.
What Petscop is — an elaborate ARG, a genuine artifact of something stranger, an autobiographical project by someone processing real trauma through a fictional game — has never been definitively established. The creator has never come forward. The game has never been made available. The video series exists as found footage of someone discovering something in a game that was watching them back.
It is one of the most unsettling media objects of the 2010s, not because of what it shows, but because of how carefully, how patiently, how knowingly it withholds.