#beta stuff

First off, everything looked different.

Artstyle looked completely different, more reminiscent of Eric Robles’s other main claim to fame that is Fanboy and Chum Chum. It changes a ton in the 2015 Pilot and Trailer that also came from this era since it was made by a team of artists instead of one Eric Robles, but you can get the general picture for character design from this, plus it seems like all of the non-artstyle stuff would have carried over in this version. The one exception is BITT, who did change design significantly between Pitch Bible and Pilot, but he’s an exception and I’m out of pictures I can use, so just watch the Pilot or Trailer to see his design.

Also that huge robot is BITT. Forgot to mention that. Apparently in the original concept for the show, BITT was actually a main character, and belonged to FIVE instead of Phil. (It kind of makes me wonder if Alpha in the real show is a slight reference to this. A big tanky robot owned by Five.)

Five’s hairstyle is completely different and he’s white in about 50% of all the pictures in the pitch bible, but I can ultimately see the resemblance between him and the real deal. Miko changed significantly more over time. Her haircut was short with pigtails instead of the long cut she has now, her hair in general was pink instead of purple, and that yellow cat shirt she wears everywhere used to be a black and white striped shirt. Also, I’m like 40% sure Beta Miko’s Plaid Skirt went on to become that blue hoodie thing she keeps around her waist.

Also, the colours of Hinobi and stuff with the Hinobi brand on it used to be light brown and green instead of 2020’s Blue and White.

The premise is the same, Hinobi hires secret team of elite monster hunters to deal with glitches that come from their own games, just with some larger differences in the specifics. (Also the Pitch Bible brings up that part of the reason tech support is so slow and involves being put on hold a lot is because the those same techs are busy dealing with glitch monsters, which I think is kind of funny.)

For a tiny example, it turns out the town of Bailey was originally called Bushnell Pines. (Another fun fact, the Strip Mall where the Hinobi Store is located in canon is called the Bushnell Mall, which probably comes from this little detail. (And yes, I do know about Nolan Bushnell, who both Bushnell Pines and The Bushnell Mall are definitely named after))

Main Characters:

Limiting my use of images because of tumblr’s limit, but Five and Miko still existed as themselves in 2015, but were different in a few ways.

Miko is the most unchanged. Immune to Resets, has a lot of natural skill with games, bores easily without any kind of stimulation and has a tendency to act without thinking things through, it’s Miko.

She does have a few changes though. For one, both her and Five are younger. Miko’s age isn’t stated, but assuming she and Five are the same age she’d be 13 instead of her canonical 16, or possibly 14 if the detail of Miko being a year older than Five but held back a year at some point was a thing at this point.

For two, she might not have any siblings, or at least not not to our knowledge. The Pitch Bible only mentions her being raised by her father and moving from town to town for most of her life, with no mention of any siblings or even her mother.

For three, Beta Miko is stated to have a lot less of an interest in being a glitch tech and moving up through the ranks compared to Five, and is stated to have no real loyalty to Hinobi as a company, more content to just have fun with her new job. In canon I’d say that they’re both equally interested, but also I have to point out that Beta Five has a massive interest in moving up the corporate ladder in a way that Canon Five and Canon Miko just don’t. Even Canon Mitch doesn’t seem to have the same fixation here, so this detail probably got cut as Five and the entire plot of the show was changed over time.

Speaking of Five: He’s a completely different person.

You can see the similarities between Beta Five and Real Five, they’re both heavily detail and plan-oriented, lacking in that natural skill that Miko has but making up for it in knowledge, practice and an ability to strategize, and you can see how one morphed into the other, but compared to Miko and her Beta Counterpart they’re very different.

For one, Beta Five STARTS as a glitch tech, albeit a low-ranking one, with Miko being recruited in the pilot episode, instead of canon where both are recruited at the same time.

Also, this isn’t present in the pitch bible but is instead a part of the Pilot from the time, Five has some slightly different father issues this time around. We don’t know the specifics, just a single line from Phil chewing Five out and mentioning “I’m just glad your father won’t see this”, but just the fact that Phil brings him up means that not only is Emilio Nieves in this timeline either in prison like canon, dead, or who knows what, but the man was also probably a glitch tech instead of just a programmer. Most likely a high ranking one.

Beta Five is a lot more focused on the job. From what I can gather from the plot overview his main motivation is becoming a Corporate Agent, aka the highest possible rank of Glitch Tech achievable, and he’s a bit more serious than Canon Five because of it. This focus on rising up the ladder and by-the-books loyalty towards Hinobi is also why Miko is called out for having no real loyalty or desire to move up in rank. It’s so she can contrast Five’s single minded determination towards achieving more.

And then you have BITT:

Unlike Canon, BITT is closer to Five than Phil, is 100% Sentient with a full personality, and actually fulfills his roll as a Binary Intelligence Tech Trainer. Or in the case for this BITT, Binary Intelligence Tech TOOL.

He was originally just a robotic backup and tech trainer given to Five since he’s still a tech in training (and also because a 13 year old probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive), but Beta Five has modified him over time to make him into a proper friend with an actual personality. He’s described as a big softie, and Five’s best friend. He also has a tendency to call Five “Sir”, but it’s just a remnant of his original programming. “When Bitt says Sir, he means Buddy”.

Also apparently Five and Miko sneak him into their high school and pass him off as a regular (but weird) kid on several occasions, which I find cute.

He was also meant to be the balancing force between Five and Miko’s opposites, in comparison to canon where the two of them bounce off each other without any real force like that being present (Unless you somehow count Mitch, but I’d say he more gets dragged into their situations and causes problems then he balances anything.)

Side Characters:

“But if BITT’s like this, what’s Phil like?” I hear you ask.

Apparently not much actually. As mentioned in the Pitch Bible, Phil Altiere exists, and the creators had a vague idea of what they wanted his general vibe to be, but they hadn’t properly developed a personality for him, and were “Wide Open on takes”. Also, he’s younger in the Beta than canon, being somewhere in his 30s instead of 40s.

My guess is that once Five lost that detail of “already being a tech” along with that focus on climbing the corporate ladder, BITT as a friend and trainer kind of fell apart, and was given to Phil with the job of running the store and being a helpful little guy who’s a lot more robotic with very little personality.

Also Mitch exists and he’s worse now:

Ok to answer the first question you probably immediately have with Mitch, mainly why why the hell he looks like that, Beta Mitch is supposed to look like the real-life person he gets his name from, the infamous video game champion Billy Mitchell. Also by the time of the 2015 Pilot and Trailer, his hair was changed to be dyed blue, although you can’t tell since the pilot is an animatic. I know this from a bit of concept art from the time.

(I also have a conspiracy that his Beta Design would later go on to inspire the designs of Bergy and especially Nix but that’s just a theory.)

Canon Mitch is a dick (Affectionate). Beta Mitch is a dick (Derogatory). The same personality traits, but in a worse way, and not redeemable in the way Canon Mitch is. In Canon, Mitch is being forced through character development by Five and Miko to make him less of an asshole and get him to work more as a team member. In the beta, a plot point of the later seasons is the risk of Five letting his rank go to his head and making him more like Mitch.

Also, Beta Mitch just has a lot less redeeming qualities to him. In Canon, Five looks up to Mitch heavily and credits him for basically being a big reason he knows how to play games the way he does. In the Beta, Mitch is little more than a bully who likes to mess with the newbie that is Five, chasing him down with a tech van that he’s modified into a tank while mocking him the entire time and planning to steal the glitch of the pilot by killing BITT (who in this version of things is basically Five’s best friend) via self destruct.

Beta Mitch is still a big name as well, but in a different way. Canon Mitch is a former streamer of both his own channel and the Furious Four, and he’s been participating in various gaming tournaments for years including in the first episode of the show, meaning he’s still active to some degree and people definitely know who he is, but at the same time he seems kind of niche, only really known by hardcore gamers or people who actively keep up with certain competitive gaming scenes and not exactly someone you’d recognize on the street or really care about unless you’re part of a small group of people, Five included in that group.

Meanwhile Beta Mitch is a local celebrity straight up, with it being mentioned that he or at least some part of his family is a brand name that can be found on basically anything, from food to furniture, and a “potential episode plot” found in the pitch bible implies that he’s pretty wealthy too. Hardcore Gamers basically worship him, but anyone who actually knows him as a person keeps their distance because he’s an asshole who lets the fame go straight to his head.

I have no idea what changed for him (although I do have a conspiracy that the design change might have happened in part due to Billy Mitchell suing Cartoon Network due to a parody of him in Regular Show around the same time as the Pitch Bible and Pilot being made), but I’m very glad we got the Mitch we got in 2020. We dodged a bullet here.

Sadly, the beta versions of existing characters stop here, as Zahra, Haneesh, Bergy, Nix and even Simi didn’t exist at this point in time.

A few more techs ARE mentioned and shown, but none are particularly interesting or play any kind of larger role, and all seem to have been scrapped a long time ago.

Now that I think about it, the leftmost tech in the image MIGHT have eventually inspired Bergy, but I also might just be going insane because I struggle to tell the difference between brown hair and orange hair a lot of the time. (I literally thought Ridley had orange hair for a long time it’s a genuine problem of mine)

Other important side characters:

Hinobi Corporate, and Hinobi as a whole:

Going in no particular order: Agent 68 might look a bit familiar. To me at least, he looks a bit like the tech specialist from Im Mitch Williams. Or at least like the skeleton of the Tech Specialist, like you can see how one could eventually become the other.

Other big thing I have to say about the guy, he’s very obviously (to me at least) the beta equivalent of Inspector 7. Corporate Hinobi worker whose name consists of a title and number. Even the suits match, at least when you take into account how Hinobi’s main colours in this timeline are Brown and Green instead of White and Blue.

Moving to Woz, Woz is very important to the story of 2015 Glitch Techs, but I don’t think there’s any way that that story still applies to 2020 Glitch Techs. Too many elements are different for it to work, and 2020 Glitch Techs was building towards Bolypius by the looks of things, who seems to be completely absent in 2015. Or at least, they’re not present in any form we’d recognize.

To put him simply, Woz is the cofounder of Hinobi, designed a large amount of its early technology, and based on the wording from the pitch bible, was likely demoted at some point, given that he’s a FORMER creative partner, but wasn’t fired, given that he’s still very high up in the company.

Woz seems harmless, but in reality is a lot more malicious than he seems, being responsible for glitches entering our world (glitches work VERY differently in this timeline), purposely spreading them, manipulating events behind the scenes and being somewhat of a puppet or right hand man for a much larger outside-context threat.

Said threat is definitely not Hinobi. The guy named Hinobi. Hinobi’s CEO. That Hinobi. Hinobi The Guy (fuck it, I’m just gonna call him The CEO) has basically nothing in terms of lore or relevance compared to Woz, and I’m almost willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s basically harmless, with priorities more in-line with your typical big tech company CEO; Make money and keep Hinobi as a household name. If anything, he’s probably the reason Woz is a FORMER Creative Partner and is probably responsible for a lot of Hinobi’s better qualities.

Also worth noting is that Hinobi as a company is very different in the Beta vs Canon.

In Canon, Hinobi is definitely shady, especially when you look at the higher ranks of corporate, and they’re willing to do bad things like whatever might be in Phil’s files, possibly some stuff related to Emilio Nieves’s imprisonment (although there isn’t much evidence for it) and anything else they might have covered up in the past, but ultimately they haven’t shown any signs of being properly EVIL. They’re a big company with plenty of shady bits, but ultimately they seem to be more “doing bad things for ultimately beneficial reasons” than actually evil.

They don’t make Glitches on purpose, more just studying them and attempting to figure out how they work with their most shady and restricted parts most likely being morally questionable or unethical experiments and tests, or stuff they had to cover up for the sake of Hinobi’s secrecy. Even whatever they’re planning with Miko being referred to as “the Subject” seems to ultimately be an attempt at locating and either capturing or destroying an extremely dangerous and intelligent glitch that’s evaded capture for years and probably caused countless problems for them over that time.

Agents are rarely (or in the case of the show, never) seen, and Inspectors seem to just be a regular occurrence by store standards. Sure Inspector 7 specifically has some things going on with her with the whole “locating Bolypius” thing, but Inspectors as a whole do seem to only be called out to stores for yearly inspections and to oversee maintenance.

Now to play devils advocate, this is just what we know. Hinobi COULD be completely evil and it would have been revealed in season 3, but I do think it’s unlikely. Canon Hinobi is shady and willing to abandon conventional morals in its attempts to hunt and study glitches while keeping it a secret from the world, but they’re ultimately doing things for a good cause. At least, a good cause in the “Hinobi successfully saved this town from a problem their own technology caused, and the public doesn’t know” kind of way.

They don’t have much of a reason to go full “take over the world” mode because why would they? They’re an international organization that probably influences stuff on a global scale just from being a massive corporation with a near-bottomless budget. They don’t need to take over the world and start replacing governments. They’re already stronger than some governments and that’s before you bring out the mind-wiping technology.

In the Beta though, Hinobi is explicitly evil, although it only really hits that point once you hit the mostly Woz-controlled upper echelon that is Corporate. Agents frequently meddle with and cover up cases, and the company itself is filled with conspiracies just below the surface. I’m willing to give the CEO the benefit of the doubt and say he’s probably fine, and is probably the reason Hinobi as a whole hasn’t immediately descended into villainy, but he seems to have much, much less power than Woz, who seems to basically run things from the shadows despite seemingly having been demoted, and even he has a master above him with very bad intentions for the human race as a whole. Not to mention that becoming an Agent in this timeline involves having your mind and memories completely erased, making you a permanent part of the corporate collective.

Most store-level techs are fine, but once you step into corporate territory things get shady and dark fast, with corporate in Beta-World crossing lines that Canon Hinobi would probably hesitate at, with ultimate plans for making the world into little more than a playground for forces beyond comprehension.

Speaking of those Forces beyond comprehension:

Glitches (that aren’t really glitches)

In the Beta, glitches are NOTHING like glitches from canon, and i think that’s one of the main reasons why the original beta plot for Glitch Techs no longer applies, and why Hinobi isn’t evil in the canon we got.

In canon, Glitches are artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on artificial and whatever the opposite of an emphasis is on intelligence. With a single canonical exception, Glitches are limited in intelligence and are restricted purely to their programming (Chomp Kitty focusing on anything it recognizes as a pellet, The Team from Oversight Squadrons calling themselves “Team [Enter Name]” because they aren’t connected to any actual team of players, etc) and a tiny bit of ad-libbing to avoid crashing when they see something they don’t understand (Count Nogrog using referring to two people at once in a one player game, Team [Enter Name] making up Map dialogue in what their code believes should be a new map, etc). They can’t think for themselves, and they aren’t intelligent. Even plixel constructs like Ally and BITT, as smart and lifelike as they appear, are still just code, with BITT being closer to a Large Language Model (albeit one that’s leagues more advanced than anything in our world) than something with genuine human intelligence.

Meanwhile in the Beta Timeline, Glitches are fully intelligent. They’re heavily focused on the forms they take, for example the Rock God Wizard that appears in the 2015 Pilot acts like he does in-game, but he’s also fully intelligent just like any human being.

Just going off some entries from The Pitch Bible’s list of glitches, one Glitch from a Candy Crush game is capable of developing a crush on BITT, and another one called The Chief (a combination of Master Chief and Samus Aran) does his thing simply because he gets bored of the real world not having any real wars or armed conflicts to fight so he decides to wage his own war against the local glitch techs. They’re capable of the full range of the emotional spectrum, and are fully intelligent, even capable of being reasoned with.

Then there’s the fact that Beta Glitches aren’t AIs. They’re explicitly supernatural, closer to aliens or the ghosts from Danny Phantom, coming from their own alternate world INTO ours through Hinobi’s technology (Helped by Woz). In fact, Plixels as a whole are never mentioned in the Pitch Bible, and probably don’t exist. These things don’t have root forms, root forms as a whole don’t exist, and they aren’t created when plixel tech goes wrong. They’re beings of pure energy released into our world, with your broken PS4 creating the portal.

Woz’s master? The thing he takes orders from? That thing, whatever it is, is a glitch of some kind, originating from this alternate dimension and wanting to breach into and either destroy or enslave the human race. It might have also eventually become Bolypius once things turned into canon, but I have no evidence for that. Just vibes.

Also there’s this thing called Ava-Thrar. Can I talk about Ava-Thrar? I really want to talk about Ava-Thrar.

Hmmmm…

“Glitchy parasite”

“Becomes a living avatar that possesses the user”

“User gains super strength along with other supernatural powers”

“If the parasite feeds for too long it will no longer be able to be removed from its host”

That’s a fucking possessor glitch. You can’t fool me I know what a possessor glitch looks like.

Or at least, it’s the thing that would eventually inspire the creation of Possessor Glitches. Since Root Forms don’t exist at this point and all that.

(Also also, I know about a Season 3 episode called “Avatar: The Last Glitch Tech”. I have an animatic of its climax/ending (and will provide if asked). There’s no way this thing didn’t at least slightly inspire the glitch of the episode.)

Anyways, at some point between 2015 and 2020, the lore of glitch techs changed massively. Glitches went from Interdimensional aliens capable of intelligent thought, to AIs made of plixels, unintelligent game code acting on a pattern, and as a result, the whole Woz thing and Hinobi working with glitches to enslave humanity no longer works.

Woz no longer has an Alien Eldritch Abomination to take orders from and these new glitches as a whole don’t care about destroying the planet or enslaving humanity, they’re just code now with at most a pale imitation of intelligence, it’s like taking orders from a trained dog or maybe an automated blender, so Woz or Hinobi corporate or whoever no longer has a reason to take orders from glitches or intentionally spread them, so there’s no longer a point for Hinobi to be completely evil, so Hinobi goes from Evil Incorporated to a secretive, shady organization that’s ultimately trying to do good (or at least protect their own reputation and bottom line).

That of course, opens the door for a new final antagonist since the old ones don’t work anymore, and in steps Bolypius (who might have been Woz’s original eldritch abomination boss before everything changed but we don’t know that).

Also another cool detail that I can’t fit in anywhere else: Glitches would originally keep their unique artstyles when leaving their games! It’s not noticeable in the Pilot due to it being an animatic, but the coloured and fully animated production trailer shows a 3D Computer Animated Rock God Wizard existing in the 2D Artstyle of Glitch techs. I get why it wasn’t done in the real show, too expensive probably, but it’s such a cool concept.

And finally…

Equipment:

Tech Gauntlets exist. They look quite a bit different but they’ve always been a thing. And Tech Vans have gone almost completely unchanged save for a change in colour to Modern Hinobi’s White and Blue.

To be honest, i don’t have much to say about tech gauntlets other than one little change. In the Beta, there are something called Tech Journals. Basically just Hinobi Smart Tablets for research, calling other techs and basically just being a tablet.

Wanna know why they exist? The answer is right there in the photo that mentions them.

Because Tech Gauntlets from this era don’t have screens.

At some point between 2015 and 2020, the Tech Gauntlet and Tech Journal were merged into one single thing, and the end result was the tech gauntlet with build-in screens we see in 2020. It’s a tiny thing but I think it’s neat.

(Also I think Tech Gauntlets having a precursor in the form of the Hinobi-Mote is extremely cool and will be incorporating it into my headcanons)

Extra Stuff i thought was neat:

Taken from the Pilot, Miko’s line about being “The One” and “Chosen by destiny” has existed in every single pilot episode. From the 2015 Pilot to the First Real Episode of the Show to the only recovered clip of the Pilot from 2020 that uses everyone’s final designs. That one little line has survived every change the show’s gone through and I think that’s cool.

Same goes for the gag in the first episode of Miko beating Five in various games and Five holding a slight grudge over it. Only difference is in the 2015 Pilot Miko actually realizes who Five is.

During the plot overview, an important character that gets brought up is named Tester. He’s described as a kid who originally had the job of testing hinobi’s video games, but somehow gained glitch-like powers from some tests that were run on him. He then proceeds to use those powers to go against Hinobi, trying to discover their more sinister details while evading capture. I have no evidence for this. Just a pure get feeling. But until I see evidence for the contrary I am choosing to believe that Tester would go on to eventually become Ridley. I just know it in my bones. Some lore changed and all of a sudden Tester was no longer needed, mainly since Hinobi was no longer explicitly evil, so they made him into a hacker with the knowledge of how to manipulate and modify glitches. I just feel it in my bones.

A mentioned episode plot idea involves Miko overusing a bunch of stat-boosting glitch items for selfish purposes which proceed to get stuck to her and eventually force her to transform into a dangerous glitch, with Five needing to fix it before any other techs try to kill her. Now where have I heard of that plot before… Miko using some hacked, glitchy item to cheat at something and turning into an extremely dangerous glitch….