I Wanna Be the Guy/WMG

The programmer who made this game added a feature so that he can watch us fail repeatedly at his game.
And he laughs

The game is a Freudian coming-of-age tale.
This theory came up on the game's official forum, but the thread has been at least temporarily lost.

The idea is that the events of IWBTG take place entirely inside The Kid's imagination. In reality, he lives with his highly abusive father and copes with the pain by playing classic Nintendo games. Thus, these games form the backdrop of his imagined adventure in which he, equipped only with his very small gun (because he's just a kid and Freud Was Right), seeks to defeat his father and upgrade to a much larger gun, thus becoming The Guy (that is, a man) and leaving his tragic childhood behind.

Full theory here


 *  IWBTG DEFINITELY has freudian themes though. I dunno about the rest though

The Kid, The Guy, And Grandfather The Guy are all the same person.
Upon defeating his "father", The Guy warped space and time to protect himself from anyone who might challenge his position. This also brought his past self into the battle; who made the same assumption that this was his father, and that his father killed "his" father. The Kid kills The Guy, who then becomes the Guy and is killed in retaliation by the Kid.
 * Alternatively, Grandfather The Guy killed The Guy's grandfather, and The Guy set about on his original quest to avenge his grandfather. Likewise, The Kid, after becoming The Guy, will see his kid try to kill him to become The Guy. In other words, it's an endless loop spread through countless generations of revenge and becoming The Guy.
 * Every time the game is played represents one such generation. The Guy even mentions he has more than one child. Everytime you die, that was a child who didn't make it. This family has a lot of kids.
 * This seems to be partially confirmed by the sequel "I Wanna Save The Kids", which is I Wanna Be The Guy plus Lemmings.
 * ...Now I really want to be The Guy. Think about it.

The game is actually a test.
Those who complete it will be drafted into the greatest army assembled to fight all sorts of Cosmic Horror.
 * On impossible. That explains the tropers who've beat it not being abducted yet.
 * Anyone who can beat "I wanna be the guy" with sanity intact isn't gonna be phased by something as simple as Cthulu, after all.
 * Didn't some dude in the IWTBG forums said he beat it on impossible? What happened with him?
 * Or, it's all "Ender's Game" style, and every mistake we make, someone actually dies.
 * Hopefully the enemy. Because if our side was dumb enough to have troops die whenever someone loses IWBTG...
 * What bothers me is the idea that I've been fighting a war all this time...and I don't even know who either side is.
 * My...my God. That's just similar enough to the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Child Under the Mountain" (in which a video game is actually the government's missile launch system) to be plausible...
 * No no no, Camp Half-Blood created it to find demigods. Anyone who beats it on Impossible obviously has superhuman reflexes and is extremely obsessive.

The game is cursed.
Practically all of the Let's Players who tried to play this game either gave up partway through or stopped being a part of the Let's Play community shortly after completion. Obviously, there's something in the game's coding that saps away at the initiative and motivation of whoever plays it.
 * They're called giant cherries.
 * No, they're called Delicious Fruit.
 * Hey, who said you could post a plausible theory?
 * OBJECTION! There's at least one guy who LPed this game and made it through. It's not that hard to find on Youtube.
 * What he's specifically talking about are well-known LPers who, after completing the game, basically quit being well-known LPers. Two examples I can think of are Cloud8745 and UltraJMan, both of whom are on YouTube. Cloud8745 closed his YouTube account entirely, and UltraJMan, though still active on YouTube, lost a lot of his LPer clout. Long story short, both of them quit being classy not too long after playing this game.
 * UltraJMan also became very embittered with the LP community as a whole, essentially becoming a bane to both the YouTube and Something Awful LP communities. So, clearly, the game was created with a curse preventing anyone from trying to speedrun and/or LP it, lest their will be broken and they either vanish from the face of the internet or fall into Small Name, Big Ego madness.
 * Please Stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be - Thank you God! It stopped you! Look at that - the game doesn't even want you doing this!

The Guy is God
I just needed to do a Rage Against the Heavens plot. Also, TARDIS.

The game was made to discover the second coming of Jesus.
The first person to beat it on impossible, on their first try...

Every time The Kid gets killed, someone on earth dies in real life
Self-explainatory
 * If that was the case, I'd have been arrested for wiping out the entire population of South America.
 * Dear God! It's the video game equivalent of a Death Note!
 * It'd only be worse if every time we lost, an entire universe got destroyed a la Bokurano.
 * How do we know that DOESN'T happen?
 * Guys, Quick! Stop playing!
 * You know, in real life, people die of famine every three seconds or so in Africa.
 * Oh God that's depressing.
 * Technically, this theory holds true, since 1.8 people die every second anyway.

I Wanna Be the Guy takes place in the Homestarrunner 'verse, and Stinkoman is The Kid's sucessor.
Where else could such stupid stuff happen but in the Homestar Runner univirse? Anyway, The Kid remains as "The Guy" untill sometime around the year 20X6, when Stinkoman beats him and becomes the new "The Guy". Three reasons for this theory:
 * 1-Up says Stinkoman is "The Guy"
 * The town in the opening video looks suspiciously like a suburban version of "The Field"
 * Apparently names with "The" in them, (like The Guy, or The Cheat) are acceptable in this world

Oh, and The Kid beat The Guy at most, 8 years ago, since the game takes place in "200X".
 * It's 20X6. It doesn't mean 2016 specifically. it could be 2026 (18 years) or all the way up to 2096 (88 years).
 * Actually, it could be anywhere from 96 years (2000 and 2096) to one year (2005 and 2006) to Stinkoman actually predating The Kid as The Guy (2009 and 2006). Now, recall that Strong Bad does have a history for being a giant floaty head that shoots things out of his eyes at you...
 * Or 20106... truly "twenty-xty-six."
 * Don't forget that Stinkoman calls 1-Up "just a kid". Hmm... 1-Up? The next The Guy? Hmmmm...
 * That must be his plan - the line quoted above runs in full "You're The Guy, Stinkoman. I Wanna Be the Guy too!" When 1-up makes his move, Stinkoman will have to kill him, or die.

The events of Bowser's Inside Story took place during Bowser's time as the Guy
All Guys are Badass, and let's face it, you've never seen him so Badass before or since this game (Well, also Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros, but that's a whole other story).
 *  Okay thats canon now

There will be a sequel made called I Wanna Be the Girl.
The game will be a parody of all the stereotypical girl-centered games made in gaming's history. And the ending will reveal
 * Or one of the kids from the implied sequel I Wanna Save The Kids, the Escort Mission from hell (even more so than most escort missions).
 * Or it turns out you've been playing on Medium all this time.
 * The problem with that theory is that one can count all the girl-centered games on one hand.
 * Don't even joke about that.
 * Strangely, this troper has actually seen an image on deviantART called "I Wanna Be the Girl". It features girls from Blaz Blue being attacked by Dracula and the moon while Bound and Gagged, and one of the girls tied to a Delicious Fruit tree. So... yeah?

The game leads you to another planet.
There's no way this cannot be possible.
 * Damn you!

Stinkoman was The Kid.
Self Explanatory.

The Kid is Zombie!!!
Explains why he explodes into chunks.

This game was designed to convert people to Buddhism
Works partway with "the game is cursed" above. When people have been angered and enraged to the point of tears, they eventually stop feeling angry and enter a state of Zen, wherein they start doing very well.


 * OR it leads people to become really really angry, leading their minds to become full of chaos and destruction that they reach Reverse Nirvana, like Axel from Ansem Retort.

The Kid is made out of TNT and tomato sauce
How else do you explain the explosions of gore?

The Guy is Kira
Every time you die, he's actually just written your name in the Death Note. This explains how fruit can kill you: It's all just one big coincidence! The reason you explode upon death is because The Guy went for a more extreme heart attack.

The Guy is Epic Fail Guy
Look at how many times you die in this game. What does EFG do? Fail at things horribly, and occasionally harm himself. The position of Epic Fail Guy should need someone who can't take five steps without exploding, but also someone with rapid healing abilities.

IWBTG is The Game given form
Yes, the same game you just lost.

The Guy is Arthur Dent
And The Kid is Aggrajag.

Each new The Guy makes new levels to guard against folks who wanna be The Guy.
At the time this new The Guy is overthrown, Wuss level will be called Hard.

The title of "The Guy" actually has purpose.
Why do you think that the levels in IWBTG are so hard? Obviously the Guy is trying to stop you from killing him, but how could he possibly have built all that stuff? Simple. Being "The Guy" gives you the power to create levels. The next game "I Wanna Be The Guy forever" will be a level editor designed to kill other players in order to stop them from killing you as the final boss.

The Kid is an Anti-Anti-Christ, and The Guy is Satan
, and the levels certainly put the player through Hell, to say nothing of how The Kid must feel running and jumping through them. That kind of hellish level design can only be from the mind of Satan. And because of their relationship, that would mean that The Kid is trying to conquer Hell from. In a twist, though, whoever becomes The Guy has his will bent to be Satan's (as the current Guy's will after beating his predecessor Grandfather The Guy), meaning that once The Kid wins, he becomes Satan. The truly happy ending comes when

The Kid has an Omega-13 implanted in his body somewhere.
It activates automatically if he is killed.

The Kid is in purgatory.
The Kid did kill his father and become The Guy while he was alive, but was corrupted by the power. When he died, killed by whoever wanted to be The Guy, he went to purgatory. The Kid is a representation of his younger, innocent self, fighting against the corruption and evil that had manifested within him. That's why the game's so hard- he was really damn evil by the end of his life. The bosses represent different aspects of his evil. Mike Tyson represents his brutal facet, Mecha Birdo represents his love of destroying things on a large scale (I mean, come on, it shoots warheads), Dracula represents the scheming mastermind facet, etc. The Delicious Fruit also has some significance- each one represents one of his sins. At the end of the game, The Kid fights The Guy and realizes that he had become just like his father while he was alive. Once he defeats the combination of his father/ himself, he gains his salvation in the form of a bigger gun. From that point, depending on what ending you get, the ending is either hopeful or sad. If you made it past the last Delicious Fruit, The Kid ascended to heaven. If you did not, it shows that even at the gates of salvation, he was brought down by his sin and will be forced to repeat the horrible quest over and over for eternity, always getting close to salvation but failing in the end.

The six secret items make some sort of weapon.
Because all six items are conveniently placed next to each other in the 'Room of Divine Teleportation' when collected, you can see that they all look very mechanical and similar. When the game is finally finished, you can assemble the pieces and make a weapon to kill The Guy easily.
 * But before you can use it, The Guy will steal it and become even more powerful. Because IWBTG including a way to make the final boss easy is too implausible even for WMG.

The Kid is a Child Soldier Proud Warrior Race Guy who died in battle and is in Warrior Heaven. The Guy is the most powerful of said race in said afterlife.
It makes sense. No matter how many times you die (which is a lot of times) you come back with only progress lost, because you're already dead. Every screen contains either death traps or massively powerful enemies, things a Proud Warrior Race Guy would love to get through. Defeating The Guy means you become The Guy, because you've proven you're better than he is.

I Wanna Be The Guy's creator is Hazama.
The first and most obvious piece of evidence is the heavy usage of Guilty Gear music. (Guilty Gear being Blaz Blue's Spiritual Predecessor) The second piece of evidence is that you can die during the credits, sort of like how The third piece of evidence is The Kid's use of a gun, and that the game itself is very much like Mind Rape. After all that was done, he released the game to the public for shits and giggles.

IWBTG is the game version of Captain N.
Kid Hero with a gun who hangs out with video game characters? Check. Stretching video game logic to extremes? Check. Said Kid Hero has fought the likes of Dracula, Dr. Wily and Mother Brain? Check. Disliked by Link? Check!

the guy who made IWANNABETHEGUY is the Big Bad of all lets plays
go on youtube. search for "lets play I wanna be the guy". look at how many pages of results there are. now try to find a good one. you can't? of course you can't! he made this game specifically so that thousands of people will make crappy lets plays of it, flooding youtube with their awfulness & overlapping the good ones. now if you wanted people to see your decent Let's Play's, you'd have to pay $10 for a SA account. oh, yeah, & he brainwashed protonjon into making all those mario ROM hacks, I guess.

The Kid is in love with Ramona Flowers

 * The reason he has to kill The Guy as well as every former The Guy is because The Guy and his predecessors are all Ramona's Evil Exes. The Kid needs to kill all of these The Guys in order to date Ramona.
 * Also, the title of The Guy is given to whoever last dated Ramona Flowers.
 * Wow, Ramona is into some weird shit.
 * Does that mean that The Kid will have to kill Scott Pilgrim eventually?

The Kid will be in the next Dissidia.

 * Because, after becoming The Guy, beating up Sephiroth and Chaos should be easy (also amusing).

In-universe, all the fangames are the product of Lord of Games' bidding
The story didn't end after The Kid defeated The Guy. Then came I Wanna Be the Fangame and the threat of loomed near. The Kid, now the new The Guy, finds himself responsible to keep his new domain safe. And then came another fangame, and another, and another and another, each one forcing the kid through hell once again, even in games he didn't belong. The Lord of Games, clearly saw The Kid's ventures were popular and wasn't planning on giving him a break any time soon and kept inventing new, inventive ways to deliver a challenge to the gamers at the cost of The Kid's welfare.

It makes sense that L.O.G. created I Wanna Be The Guy when bored and as a kind of deranged joke to piss people off. He wanted it done quickly so he threw content from his other creations into the mix along with few original content. He didn't expect it to be popular, but after he found out people liked it, he went off to create more sequels to the game, not caring wether the kid wanted to keep going or not.

Put yourself in the Kid's shoes now, after conquering the worst obstacles, defeating The Guy and accomplishing your life's dream you'd expect it much easier from now on. Guess again, trouble keeps coming your way, and no matter how many times you succeed, more painful obstacles will always await you. And the worst thing is, you have infinite lives. If I was The Kid, I'd be pissed at whoever is putting me through this crap, and who is doing that now in the world of videogames? Lord Of Games!

Eventually The Kid will snap and go on a Rage Against the Heavens. Lord of games will then throw the worst he has at him and their final confrontation will shake the foundations of the vidogame universe.

The Kid is Sir Isaac Newton
There was a myth that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree. This would explain why cherries fall up and kill The Kid.

Every single room is the same room rearranged.
Each time you get to another room, you're teleported to where you would be when you et into the "new" room.