Free Games I've Got From SML

Do you have that one piece of media that, while you do have some nostalgia for, you promised yourself that you will never revisit it under any circumstance? To me, that's SuperMarioLogan. I found the channel when I was around 9 years old, and I started watching it on a semi-regular basis, despite some of the jokes making me feel pretty uncomfortable. I had a diverse group of friends at the time, but that channel was chock-full of stereotypical characters and jokes about marginalized groups.
However, what interested me the most about it was the fact that they offered a free video game if one posts "the funniest comment" on one of their videos, which was meant to be themed around the "SML Question", and could be anything ranging from it being related to the episode or something completely random. It was clear to anyone who wasn't a child that this was nothing but a cheeky way of boosting engagement on the channel for that sweet algorithm boost and ad revenue, but I, like many others, didn't know any better, so I started brainstorming the best joke I could come up with just for a chance to get a free game, whatever it could be.
I moved on from the channel a long time ago, and I have no idea how it's going for them, but I recall hearing that some character called Jeffy was introduced and became the face of the channel. I also heard that Nintendo filed a DMCA claim on them for using their characters to make offensive content. To be honest, they had it coming.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, a week ago, I received an email from someone who I am convinced tried to act like he was one of the crew members who worked on the channel. The email had a link attached to it, and the subject was titled "SML QUESTION VICTORY!". The contents of the email are as follows, changed so that the link and my username are private:
"Hello [my username],
I, Logan Thirtyacre and others, thought that your comment was so funny that we could not but repay you for your success in making us laugh our bums off! So here it is, a collection of SML games done by our biggest and coolest of fans, free of charge! 
[link]
All the best, Logan Thirtyacre, SML Crew"
I was pretty surprised to say the least, and a bit nervous, as for one, who the hell would send an email about winning a giveaway (if that's the right term for it) that would've ended years ago by now, and for two, the email address seemed pretty suspicious because it was just "supermariologan" followed by a bunch of numbers and the Gmail domain at the end. It also doesn't really make it better that those were fan-games instead of random cracked games or Steam keys for said games, which is something that I would expect from something like that. Nevertheless, I decided to check out these games for myself, but before I did anything, I made sure to try them out on a virtual machine, cause God knows if this was either a phishing link or an actual download link with the contents being tons of malware, or both.
After setting up the virtual machine and pasting the link through my actual desktop to the virtual one, I was greeted with the browser opening a new tab and the tab closing immediately after. A ZIP archive started downloading as well, which was titled "SML Games! Have fun!". I have no idea if this was a phishing link, but even if it was one, I was all good since this was just a virtual machine install, so nothing would happen to my computer if it turned out to be harmful. After downloading, I checked out the archive, which contained 5 folders, one for each game. The games listed were:
*Charleyyy And Friends: The Video Game V1.0.4
*Chef Pee Pee's Crazy Restaurant!
*Cody's Quest
*Jeffy! The Video Game
*Junior's Awesome Ride
Being confident that it'll be okay in the end, I opened up the first folder, "Charleyyy And Friends: The Video Game V1.0.4". To my surprise, there wasn't anything other a text file which contained some jumbled text. Not bothering to convert the game to an executable, I decided to search around the file for anything interesting, and I found a few words that weren't some corrupted mess. All instances that I could find were "happyFella", "fun" , "dingleberry", "coolcharleyyyvideogame" and "MoreLikeNails". I decided to stop messing with the file and move on to "Chef Pee Pee's Crazy Restaurant!" instead.
I have to clarify, however. I didn't make any screenshots of this game, because that idea simply didn't come to my head until much later, so I will try my best to describe how the game looked. "Chef Pee Pee's Crazy Restaurant!" is a Cooking Mama type game, and upon launching the game you are greeted with a story screen, which explains that you have become Chef Pee Pee's sous-chef after he opens a restaurant, and you have to help him cook food for various SML characters before "Bowser finds out then kills and fires you". The game then throws you to the stage select screen afterwards.
The stage select screen is nothing special. In fact, it felt like something I would expect from an alpha or beta version of a game. It consisted of a black background with a bunch of buttons you could click on, each labeled as "Order" followed by a number from 1 to 15. These act like levels, where each level has only one character ordering.
The characters also didn't sound like how they did in the channel, or at least how I remember them sounding like, which is what I expected from a fangame. The whole audiovisual setting of the game just consisted of screencaps of random episodes from the channel or nothing for backgrounds with the characters being represented with poorly cropped pictures of themselves all accompanied with royalty free music. Unfortunately, some of the characters were those stereotypes that I mentioned, examples being Black Yoshi or Jackie Chu, with their orders being tied to the stereotypes they represented. 
The gameplay, like I said, is similar to Cooking Mama, but with a small twist. Every now and again, either Toad or Chef Pee Pee himself will come in and try to interrupt your work in order to "help you out", which will always end up with a mess being made in the kitchen. The level will reset if you weren't able to get rid of either of them in time. It was quite fun, even when it was a little janky, mostly when you got to getting rid of Toad or Chef Pee Pee, as you had to spam-click on their hands to get rid of them. For some reason, it didn't work when you weren't empty handed.
The weird thing about this game is that sometimes Chef Pee Pee will start saying cryptic stuff like: "You will go to the Avenue if you'll do as horrible of a job as you are doing now!!", "20 years ago there was a COO, a COO!", "I want my pills.", "Fun, fun, funny, fun fun!", and so on, whereas Toad will just spout out random noises or yelps. Strange, but I persisted, thinking that those were just jokey placeholder voice clips.
Upon reaching Order 10, I had to cook a filet mignon for Mr. Goodman, who wanted it "cooked medium rare, no hair, no other bullshit!". Order 10 is also pretty much the end of the game, as no matter how well you cook it, Goodman will always throw away the dish and claim that he's sending you and Chef Pee Pee somewhere, as he puts it. Afterwards, I was greeted with a game-over screen, showing a stick figure with a chef's hat which was meant to represent the player, freezing in an ice cave. Chef Pee Pee was next to the figure, laying on the ground dead from the freezing cold. For curiosity's sake, I decided to try out Order 11 to 15, but nothing happened when I was clicking on the buttons, other than the game crashing. It's not really a big loss since it was obvious that this was a beta version of some kind.
The image wasn't all that scary, but what made me feel uneasy was the background "music", if you can even call it that. The soundscape consisted of distant laughter with sounds of cracking and cave ambience, which made the whole thing feel more grim.
"Cody's Quest", the third "game" in the archive also wasn't a game, much like "Charleyyy and Friends: The Video Game". It had three audio files, all of them numbered. The first file was just some noise, sounding similar to that if you were to put in raw data of any file that isn't auditory into an audio editing program. 
The second file was some conversation between two people, most of it after the start being unintelligible due to the low bitrate of the audio. I could understand some of it, though.
"I knew you were stupid but I had no clue you were THIS stupid?"
"What? Whatcha mean?"
"All you do is sit around- [unintelligible] nothing while we are busy to hell and back, [unintelligible] and making stupid games for stupid kids. I'm throwing you outta the group."
"Come the fuck on, could you at least-"
This is where the recording becomes completely unintelligible until the end. I have a few interpretations, but each one is stupider than the last.
The third and final file was actual raw data, but this time I managed to convert it into a file. It's an image of the moon surrounded by red question marks, accompanied with red text on the bottom which says "SurpriseReprise", and a few translucent, colored bars. I feel like it was the watermark of the creator behind this "game". Maybe that could be one of the people from the second audio recording. Hell, maybe one of them is responsible for everything in the archive.
Then it hit me. The text in the Charleyyy file that was full of random usernames. Could they be Surprise's targets, ex-group members, or both? In that case, why would Surprise decide to target what I think are grown up people under the guise of a YouTube channel for kids? Even then, why was one of the usernames "coolcharleyyyvideogame", similar to the name of the first folder? Maybe that wasn't a username, but more of a joke on Surprise's part?
Wondering if there is a bigger picture to this whole thing, I decided to think about this later and move on to the fourth game that I checked out in the archive, "Jeffy! The Video Game". I came to the conclusion that, before I start any sort of theorycrafting, I should experience everything the archive has to offer.
Having little to no idea as to who Jeffy is in the first place, I was pretty curious what this could be all about. The game starts with a title screen, showing what I think is Jeffy in front of a house, with text that says "Help me defeat the Green Beans Overlord because I HATE GREEN BEANS!!". The background music was a pretty bad remake of that royalty free song the channel is known for using a lot.
After pressing the start game button, I was greeted with an intro screen of some sort, in which Jeffy introduces himself and says that his parents are gone, but he assumes their disappearance was the cause of a green bean monster called "Greendious", and begs the player for help. Clicking on Jeffy will throw you to the first level of the game.
The game is a simple platformer where you control Jeffy. Your goal is to help him reach Mario's hat before a timer ticks down to 0, and after you get the hat, you're immediately thrown into the next level. The next level would start a 10 second shorter timer, as well as the background and color of the ground changing too. Most of the level design consisted of the player jumping above the ceiling or trying to find fake pieces of the ground which are traversable to get the hat.
The game was nothing outside of that until I reached the fifth level or so, which is where things change. Some weird, malformed clones of Jeffy show up and start bouncing up and down, and getting hit by one decreases the timer by 5 seconds. The background music was still that abysmal remake that I mentioned earlier. Every level, the backgrounds became more surreal in a way, a good example of which being the background for Level 5. It was some highly saturated screencap of an SML episode, but saturated to hell and back with Jeffy's face being featureless, apart from that black-red spot on his face which would probably be a mouth. Levels 6 and 7 are pretty similar, having the same background, but even more distorted than before.
The game ends at Level 8, which consists of 2 staircases you have to go through to reach the hat and 2 Jeffy clones you have to avoid, one of which being almost impossible to do so because of how narrow the space is. The timer started counting down from 20 seconds, so I had to go really fast. Despite everything, I got screwed over at the end, not because of the clones or the timer, but because of the hat. Even getting past that last part from pure luck, I was unable to grab it no matter what. The only thing I could do now was to wait until the timer reached 0.
Once the timer finished, the game redirected me to the game over screen, which consisted of nothing but a black background with some weird puddle of pink and blue colors, probably a squished image of Jeffy, alongside some white text on the top of the screen which said "You died! But don't worry! You can always try again!". Nothing happened after that, so I decided to quit the game.
Right after I did that, a bunch of command prompts opened and closed at a rapid pace, until my virtual desktop became completely black. After a few seconds, a screen showed up which displayed the background from Level 5 with more warped colors. There were those Jeffy clones from earlier in the background, with a text above them saying that all my files have been encrypted, but I could get them back for 213 bitcoin. Failing to do so in 24 hours would result in complete deletion of said files, and tampering with the program would only double the price. I fucking knew that this wasn't leading to anything good. 
The screen also displayed text which said "I GOT ALL OF YOU NOW" which only added more questions. Was it Surprise's or someone else's hacking attempt towards the group or just towards random people? Are SurpriseReprise, HappyFella, MoreLikeNails, Fun, and everyone else even real people to begin with? Is this all some kind of a horrid shitpost? At that point there was nothing I could really do outside of patting myself on the back for doing all of this in a virtual machine.
I closed and deleted the virtual machine as it was pretty much useless now. I was considering if I wanted to see what was in the fifth folder or not, but my curiosity got the best of me. It couldn't do any harm towards my files through it, after all. I decided to set up a new virtual machine, and after half an hour or so, I dropped the link into the browser that was open on it. I downloaded the 5 games again, and checked out what was in there. I guess the games were supposed to only be played in order, because for some reason, the fifth folder was completely empty.
I guess that's all there is that I could find related to this sick, twisted archive of five "games", three of which aren't even playable. I'm really lucky I remembered to set up a virtual machine to play these on, because one actually turned out to be ransomware. I could've just not played these at all for my safety, but I just wanted to know what the alleged owner of SML had sent me. I tried going back to the person who emailed me and making them explain what this was supposed to be, but they probably wanted to be safe from that, because the email was nowhere to be seen, and the account had vanished as well. Not even a Google search could help me find more information.
Recalling all the usernames mentioned in the archive, I have one question; Who are they?
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Category:Super Mario Logan