There's a guy in Old School RuneScape trying to eat over 500,000 trout, everyone keeps giving him more, and he might actually be a master market manipulator

Old School RuneScape (OSRS) is no stranger to madcap individuals doing harebrained tasks: 10,000 hour grinds, taking eight entire months to grind out a single baby mole, you name it. But trout guy, who has been attempting to make a dent in a stack of over 500,000 trout, might just be a secret genius.

As posted to the OSRS Reddit, "trout guy", or Lousifer in-game, has been trying to eat 500,000 trout for almost a week straight. "He keeps getting trout donations and the crowd keeps growing," writes user IronWurmple. "Last night it was about 40 people deep."

Just to make sure my leg wasn't being pulled, I made an OSRS account and booked it to Edgeville and, sure enough, at the time of writing, Lousifer is still eating trout with crowds of adoring fans.

"I lived through this," one player says. "Troutman, have my wife", says another. Whenever trout guy stops eating, everyone barks at him to eat more trout. Whenever he moves tiles, a manhunt starts until he is discovered again amongst the swarm. He cannot escape.

Edgeville is so flooded with pilgrims bearing fish for Lousifer that, at one point, the man himself even posted a screenshot to the subreddit, flaunting not only an inventory flooded with trout, but a Jagex mod coming along to pay him well-wishes. "Godspeed, trout man," says Mod Nin, before returning back to work: "Trout skill releasing Winter 2027."

However, this seems to be the tip of the iceberg. See, there are rumblings—some commenters in the aforementioned threads believe that trout guy might be manipulating the fish markets for their own personal gain.

"I spent 539k on 5000 trout at 107 gp each," writes one player. "That may be the highest trout prices have ever been in OSRS." Another adds: "What if trout man is merching everyone?"

It's definitely possible. If I hop onto osrs.exchange and search for trout, there's a massive spike in trout prices, which almost doubled on October 20 from 70 to 120 gold. If we take that five-day timeframe as gospel, that means trout guy, savvy fish scoffer that he potentially is, spent two days scarfing fish to gain notoriety, waited for the fish market to deplete, then offloaded his donated fish to an alt and sold it at a higher price.

I've reached out to Lousifer, and I'll update this article if I receive a response from the guy. Until then, keep on scoffing, trout man. Even if you are playing us all for fools, what's the harm? That we might believe in something? That even a small fish can make it big on the grand exchange? We must believe in the smaller lies to believe the bigger ones. We must believe in trout guy.