Video games are capable of igniting many different kinds of emotional responses from their players.
It’s a wonderful interactive medium that can lead a player to feel and respond in unique
ways when given the agency – or have it taken away – while navigating through a
virtual world.
Horror games in particular are known for eliciting powerful responses; frightful narratives have
become more immersive than ever.
But in the past, there has been cases where games manage to frighten players when they
normally shouldn’t be.
We’re talking games that are rumoured to be haunted; the ones that have left players
feeling uncomfortable, or in the presence of something otherworldly outside of the images
on their screen.
So today, we’re going to explore these particular titles in our list of the top 10 haunted video
games.
And warning, some of this is rather spooky.
10 Berzerk Berzerk has gone down in history as one of
the arcade era’s most influential and popular games.
It also is the first video game to be linked to the death of a player.
It’s a multi-directional shooter video game, where you navigate a maze and fight off robots,
all leading up to a boss battle with the game’s antagonist, Evil Otto; a smiley face.
In 1981, a man named Jeff Dailey died after playing the game.
A year later, in 1982, another young man would die - an 18 year old in good health named
Peter Burkowski, who had achieved a high score, and after placing his initials into the game,
he collapsed dead.
Scientifically, both causes of death were heart attacks.
Jeff Dailey’s score was 16,660, which many have noted that when you remove the binary
numbers, reads 666.
9 Polybius The arcade game Polybius has spawned a major
urban legend that resurfaced in 2000.
It first appears in an arcade in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s, and it’s gameplay combined
elements of other arcade classics like Pac-Man and Tempest.
Except when people would play it, they reported feeling ill, with issues like headaches, seizures,
blackouts, amnesia and hallucinations.
The myth also tells of players who would commit suicide after playing.
To add more mystery, the game was reported to be periodically visited by men dressed
in black, causing people to speculate that it was a government experiment, creating psychoactive
and addictive effects on players.
The arcade game also disappeared from arcades, too.
Note that Polybius is the name of a Greek historian who was known for his assertion
that historians shouldn’t report what they can’t verify through interviews with witnesses.
Whether haunted, a government experiment or just a flat out myth, the game has left quite
the legacy, and even appeared in an episode of the Simpsons, have inspired games of the
same name, and appeared in GamePro magazine, where they claimed the existence of the game
was “inconclusive”.
8 Hall of Tortured Souls Available on the Windows 95, players discovered
that if they followed a specific set of instructions and held certain keys on their keyboard, a
new window would appear on their screen called Hall of Tortured Souls.
It’s a 3D game, that involved walking through a series of rooms that led to a small chamber.
Once you typed in the magic word ‘excelkfa’, it would open into an inner chamber, with
pixelated images on the walls that some have claimed appears to look like the last supper.
While some think it’s just an easter egg, others believe it’s Bill Gates’ attempt
to steal souls.
Whatever that means.
7 Sad Satan Reported to be a file discovered on the Deep
Web called sadsatan.exe, this horror game features weird abstract black and white visuals
containing ghosts of children, with the voices of famous American serial killers acting as
a soundtrack.
As you navigate down it’s decaying hallways, weird jarring images appear, including one
of Franz Joseph, and another other Jimmy Savile, a British pedophile, posing with Margaret
Thatcher, and worse, some feature images of child pornography or scenes of gore.
The game also proceeds to spread malware onto your computer that wipes it out, so maybe
it’s worth not trying to hunt for and download.
6 Pokemon – Ghost Girl In Pokemon X&Y, there is a ghost girl character
who abruptly appears in one of the buildings of Lumoise City; the music stops, the screen
flashes, and she floats by you saying “no, you’re not the one” before disappearing.
Later on, in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, another ghost girl appears again during the
cut scene before your battle with Phoebe.
While her first appearance is arguably intentionally placed in the game by developers, many have
questioned whether or not her vague appearance during the scene with Phoebe is intentional
or the works of a haunted game, since no answers have been discovered yet.
We mentioned this one in per top 10 pokemon fan theories, so definitely check out that
video for the full explanation and theory as to who the Ghost Girl is.
5 Taboo The Sixth Sense A 1998 NES game, Taboo the Sixth Sense is
essentially a tarot reading, in which after you enter your name and age, it predicts the
future for you, using algorithms, and a tarot deck.
But where it becomes creepy is the fact that it predicted the death of some of the people
who played the game, causing the game to be pulled off the market.
4 Pokemon Red and Green – Lavender Town Known as the Lavender Town syndrome, back
in 1996, it was rumoured that the first release of the Japanese Pokemon games led to a large
number of suicides and illnesses in children who played the game, ranging from ages 7 to
12.
This happened after the reached Lavender Town in the game, which had a specific musical
score that caused headaches and nausea in children.
The music levels were altered before the North America release.
3 Killswitch Rumour has it that Killswitch, a horror survival
game, was created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation back in 1989, with limited
copies made, around 5000.
You could pick between playing as girl or as an invisible demon, with the demon being
almost impossible to navigate with, hence everyone choosing to play as the girl, Porto,
instead.
The game would delete itself after being played.
There was a copy of the game that was sold at an auction in 2005 for $733,000 to a Tokyo
man named Yamamoto Ryuichi.
He intended to film the gameplay and upload it, but the only video that surfaced of him
playing is a one minute 45 second clip of Yamamoto at his computer, crying.
2 Morrowind Elder Scrolls’ Morrowind is one of the most
beloved games in it’s franchise.
It also has a slew of mods available online, with one in particular resulting in some pretty
creepy stuff.
Titles jvk1166z.esp, the mod is rumoured to have driven those who install it insane.
Initially, when it first came out, the mod appeared to be a virus that froze your game
and corrupted your save files, but then, someone ran the game in DOSbox, which allowed it and
the game to function.
The mod kills all of the main characters at the start of the game, and if you stood still
for too long, your health would begin to drop.
So naturally, someone stood still long enough to die, and was welcomed to a creepy surprise
- a new character revealed himself, which players have named the assassin, and he had
long, bent arms and legs like a spider.
Other additions the mod created was that during the night time, the remaining living characters
would go outside and say “watch the sky”, the assassin could be seen moving around the
corners of your screen in the distance, and a new dungeon was discovered, called the hall
of portraits, featuring portraits of images from the player’s My Pictures folder on
their computer.
At the end of the hall was a locked door that no one could open.
Apparently, people went insane after playing the game with the mod for too long, becoming
gradually obsessed with opening this door.
1 Majora’s Mask Originating from 4Chan, the story about a
haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge was about a blank N64 cartridge that a player obtained
that had Majora’s Mask written on it in black marker.
With photographic evidence and videos in his post, the player went on to tell a story about
how the game contained one saved file titled Ben.
When he started a new game, all the NPCs called him Ben, so he deleted the save file, but
that backfired; the games music started playing backwards, his character was followed by a
statue, the game would severely glitch and the Ben file reappeared, along with a new
file titled Drowned.
Any time he played after that, his character would always die and this message would appear
across the screen “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
There we have it!
Are you all spooked?
Which of these haunted games do you think may actually be haunted for real?
Let us know in those comments below.
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In the meantime Ive been Kelly Paoli and this has been top 10 gaming.
Catch you all in the next one!