In this modern day and age, we’ve now developed ubran legends and myths about our technology.
While some are clearly fiction, and some stories are cautionary tales, others, like the creepy
pastas you can find online about video games, are quite entertaining, regardless of whether
or not you think they’re inspired by true events.
So today, we’re returning to our list of the top 10 gaming creepy pastas, part 2 this
time around!
We’ll be talking about some more famous urban legends that have been floating around
the interwebs for years now, a handful of myths and urban legends, and also discussing
some other ones that are lesser known but just as intriguing.
So with that in mind, let’s jump in!
10 Unknown Format Ripping and pirating are things we probably
shouldn’t do, but that hasn’t stopped thousands and thousands of gamers from giving
it a go from time to time.
Unknown Format is a cautionary tale for those who like to illegally download rather than
buy.
It’s in the form of a letter from a friend addressing his pal, who tells of how he started
ripping games.
Running into some copy protection problems, he ends up trying an obscure torrent site,
and downloads a Japanese program called Shikami no Tengen, which roughly translates into Four
Gods in Heaven according to the author.
He gives it a go, but it seems kind of glitch.
A warning pops up on his screen reading that Files will be in unknown format.
Rename .iso and mount external.
Do not try to run.
It’s tedious, but he manages to go through most of the files and renames them as instructed.
It works, and he manages to play a bunch of different games.
Eventually though, he decides to run Portal 2; one of the games whose files he didn’t
fully rename.
An error message in Japanese appears that he can’t read.
He switches the computer’s language into Japanese to see, but surprisingly, the game
starts working.
But it doesn’t run like it should.
Instead, it’s filled with a ton of disturbing imagery.
So he shuts it off and tries another game with files he didn’t rename.
Civilization; it gives him really bizarre and inappropriate research options.
He tries another; Serious Sam, which depicts grotesque things like human sacrifice.
When he tries to uninstall everything, he speakers begin to play sounds of people speaking
in Japanese, which then turns to screaming.
9 Evil Otto Many of these creepy pastas and urban legends
concern games created in the 80s and the 90s, and Berserk is no different, except that it’s
urban legend is based on something that’s 100%.
The game is rumoured to kill players if you get a very high score.
It was an arcade game that was fairly popular back in the day when it was released in 1980,
which had 64,000 levels.
Essentially, you play as a green stick man and fire lasers at foes as you navigate simplistic
mazes filled with robots.
But where it gets difficult is when Evil Otto comes into play; your main nemesis in the
game, Evil Otto, who appears as a smiley face, speeds up the pace of the game, and unlike
most other bosses or villainous foes, you can’t kill him.
He can travel through walls and can only be escaped.
If he touches you, you’re dead.
Two real life deaths have been associated with Berserk.
One, Peter Burkowski, a 18 year old, died after setting two record high scores within
the space of 15 minutes at an arcade in Illinois.
He died of cardiac arrest.
The second is Jeff Dailey, who died in 1981 at the age of 19, scoring 16,660 points in
the game, dying of a heart attack right after he entered his initials into the machine.
8 The Number Stations From a game that originated in the 80s to
a title much more recent, the myths about the Number Stations from Fallout 3 are downright
creepy.
There’s a few fictionalized takes on this one, but they all generally contain the same
information at their core; the Galaxy News Radio station in the game repeats heavily
coded number and messages that correlate with major events and deaths in real life, all
of which occurred after the game was released, along with other phrases that shed light on
those events.
One is the exact time of death of Gary Coleman, which was followed by the message “what
you talkin bout?
You’ll be missed”, the ‘what you talking bout’ being Coleman’s character’s catch
phrase on the show Different Strokes.
And another is a set of numbers that predict the BP Oil Spill, with the message “accident
in the gulf, several dead, oil spill apparently averted”.
Many have speculated that the numbers in the game tell the future, although Bethesda has
denied that theory has any sort of truth in it.
7 Jack the Ripper This creepy pasta tells of a man who revisits
an old game he remembers playing as a child called The Murders of Jack the Ripper; a game
considered to be a hidden object game where you must like for a list of objects in order
to progress, with the goal of this game being to investigate the murders of jack the ripper.
The man plays the game despite receiving a bunch of errors and warnings going into it.
During his play through, he notices some odd occurrences, and by the end of the game, he
starts to see more realistic artwork; artwork that a game created back then would not have
been capable of.
It’s realistic depictions of the murders.
After he plays through again, a bonus level is unlocked, and it features the suspect who
the detective in the game assumed was the Ripper.
The man is crucified.
He shuts off the game and never returns to it.
6 Attract Mode Attract Mode is a three part creepy pasta
that is set in an arcade, following the author and his not-so-nice friend Nicholas.
The two of them stumble upon an arcade game called Skull and Crossbow, which is essentially
a rip off of the game Centipede.
They start playing it, and the author begins to develop an obsession with the game and
defeating a skeleton snake character known as Oad in something called Attract Mode.
Nicholas ends up shoving the author out of the way when he’s on his last life, causing
him to lose.
Upset, the author tries to get his quarters back from the machine, and squeezes in behind
it.
This is when he discovers that there is no backside of the arcade cabinet.
Nicholas goes inside of the cabinet and completely disappears.
The rest of the creepy pasta follows the author hunting down the creators of Skull and Crossbow
in an attempt to find his missing friend, but slowly begins to go mad himself while
doing it.
5 Super Mario 128 After Mario 64 was a mega hit, there were
rumours that Nintendo was dabbling in a sequel that featured more realism.
This is the basis for Super Mario 128; apparently this was a game that was never fully developed,
but contained some of realistic violent graphics that consoles like the original Playstation
was capable of at that time.
We follow the story of a player who tries this unfinished game out, who had managed
to find it online.
The first thing they noticed was how much darker in tone the game was from others in
the Mario franchise.
Bowser threatened Mario with Peach’s death.
Characters like Toad were cruel to Mario, and suggested that he just surrender to Bowser.
Mario would drop and become still for long periods of time before letting the playing
regain control of him.
And the game ended with Bowser eating Mario in a fairly brutal manner, with the final
level titled Mario’s Eternal Home.
The level featured Mario walking around aimlessly in an entirely black space, with voices fading
in and out, as if the character was stuck in purgatory.
4 Polybius (po-lib-e-us) Polybius is perhaps the most famous gaming
urban legend to date.
The stories about the game started circulating online around the year 2000, and generally
all tell of an arcade game that appeared in Portland, Oregon in 1981 that was incredibly
addictive.
The machine itself was unmarked, minus the title of the game at its top.
It was so addictive that people would form lines in order to play it.
According to some, men in black would visit the machines, collecting data from them.
The machines were apparently being used as part of a government run psychology experiment,
and the gameplay would have intense psychoactive and addictive side effects.
Players would leave their arcades feeling ill, having hallucinations, insomnia, night
terrors and amnesia.
A month after the machine’s release, it complete disappeared without a trace.
There are different versions of the story embellished in creepy pastas that you can
find online of people claiming to retell their own experiences playing Polybius, too.
It’s worth a google if you’re curious.
3 The Gray Man This Creepy Pasta is based on a real game,
the LSD Dream Emulator, which is a pretty trippy game to begin with; it’s a game based
off of one of the programmer’s dream journals, and definitely worth taking a look at.
In the game, there’s a shadowy figure that appears known as the Gray Man; he appears
at random times, and will slowly approach the player, eventually disappearing in a flash
of light if he gets too close.
This Creepy Pasta follows the story of a 17 year old who plays LSD Dream Emulator with
his pal for his friend’s Let’s Play series on his YouTube channel.
They encounter the gray man, and it’s freaky as per usual.
But then his friend starts to see the Gray Man in his dreams.
One night, he goes to visit his pal, and to his surprise, finds him in a frantic state.
He tells our protagonist that he just woke from a dream with the Gray Man, where the
Gray Man had been drowning him for what felt like a week.
From then on, his friend becomes increasingly distant, would fall asleep in class and awake
screaming, and became what the author describes as ‘a shell of a human being’.
He later tells the author that he can’t go to sleep without being tortured by the
Gray Man.
That’s when he finds a file on his friend’s computer, labeled psxfin.exe, which opens
the Dream Emulator.
He plays where his friend left off, but doesn’t encounter the gray man at all.
That night, he sees Mike in his own dream.
The next day at school, his friend had disappeared.
After a day, the police began searching for him.
A few weeks later, his body is found in the woods, with forensics later concluding that
he had bludgeoned himself to death soon after the time he had gone missing.
2 Pale Luna Pale Luna is a story originating from the
80s; from a time where gaming aficionados would meet in person to swap games, and early
programmers would design their own computer games to share in their circle of acquaintances,
often passing off the games by word of mouth.
Pale Luna is said to be one of those games, although it never circulated outside of the
San Francisco Bay Area.
Most copies of the game have been destroyed by now, but it’s story still prevails.
It’s a text adventure that begins with a blank screen and a line of text that reads,
“You are in a dark room.
Moonlight shins through the window.
There is gold in the corner, along with a shovel and a rope.
There is a door to the east.
Command?”
Depending on what you would do, you would get another line of text that read, “Reap
your reward.
Pale Luna Smiles at you.”
As you progressed, if you tried to use the commands Use Gold, Use Shovel or Use Rope,
the game wouldn’t let you.
Most people would give up there, feeling that they hit a dead end.
But one player allegedly tried a bunch of different text combinations, reaching a new
area that repeated Pale Luna Smiles Wide, and eventually gave him coordinates that led
him to the real life Lassen Volcanic Park.
Armed with a shovel, a compass and a map he repeated the turns he took in the game to
get to the coordinates.
This is where he found a patch of uneven dirt.
He began to dig until finally, his shovel hit something.
The head of a decomposing little girl, later identified as an 11 year old that had gone
missing a year and a half prior.
Efforts to find the programmer of Pale Luna failed, and the rest of the girl’s body
was never found.
1 JvK1166z.Esp – The Haunted Morrowind Mod While the Elder Scrolls games are full of
creepy moments and creatures from time to time, it’s this creepy pasta concerning
Morrowind that takes the cake when it comes to the franchise’s scariest of the scary.
This mod didn’t really make all that sense at first.
When you loaded up the mod, it would lock your game for an hour, and corrupt your install
and all of your saves.
If you run it in an MS-DOS emulator, it got even weirder; reports would say that the mod
would do things like cause many NPCs to die immediately, leaving their corpses around
for you to find.
As you continued onwards, more NPCs would die, until many locations were practically
ghost towns.
Those who didn’t die would look up into the sky at night and say “Watch the sky”,
or not even speak to you at all when you tried.
In addition to this, your own health would slowly decrease, with it decreasing faster
if you stood still.
And lastly, there was a dungeon that the mod added, which would display images from your
My Pcitures folder on it’s walls.
When you exited the dungeon, something weird happened.
The night sky was no longer the sky of Tamriel; it had changed to a “depiction of a real
sky”, with it starting around the date of Feb 2005.
Every time you died, or went back into the Citadel, it would start over, returning to
that point in time.
Characters still looked up at the sky, but their eyes would bleed.
The game started to get so dark that you had to use a light spell at times.
And for one user, an assassin appeared with spindly spider legs.
After this occurred, players reported dreaming about the mod and the sky and the assassin.
While links for the mod can be found online, no one has been able to recreate these events
from the mods, leaving many people to speculate that this is simply a creepy pasta, and that
this version of the mod never actually existed.