Number 7: Lavender Town Syndrome Also known as “The Lavender Town Suicides,”
this creepypasta is centered on an increase in illnesses and suicides among children in
Japan between the ages of 7 to 12 following the release of Pokemon Red and Green on February
27th, 1996.
According to the creepypasta, once a child reaches a level in the game called Lavender
Town they would hear its theme music that contained extremely high frequencies.
These frequencies can only be heard by young teens and children due to their higher hearing
sensitivity than adults.
It then details how at least 200 hundred children committed suicide by jumping from heights
or hanging themselves after hearing the Lavender Tone, and that many others suffered from severe
headaches as well as other afflictions and illnesses.
The game’s programmers thus developed a new theme song for the level after the reported
incidents.
As the story goes, the original audio track of Lavender Town was analyzed in 2010 using
special audio software.
Towards its end, the theme music produced images of Unown.
Unown is a Pokemon that has the shape of an eye and, through its appendages, resembles
a symbol or letter.
This was considered controversial due to the fact that it was a Pokemon released only in
the second generation of games several years later.
Number 6: The LSD Dream Emulator “Linking the Sapient Dream” (or LSD) is
a first-person perspective game set in a 3D environment developed for the Playstation
console.
An artist working for the game's production company named Hiroko Nishikawa had been keeping
a dream journal for over a decade; and this is what the LSD Dream Emulator is based on.
The game is set in a dream world where players can interact with any object, which usually
results in them being transported almost instantly to a different environment.
This system is referred to as “linking”.
Bumping into animals or people will commonly produce a more surreal environment.
The dream worlds also feature a number of strange creatures such as a celestial nymph
that flies through the air, a pterodactyl, a gigantic man that fills up an entire room,
and a man dressed in a grey trench coat and hat, which players refer to as the ‘Shadow
Man’ or ‘The Grey Man’.
One particular creepypasta regarding the game involves someone who plays a copy of the game
through an emulator and starts experiencing increasingly more bizarre occurrences in the
dream worlds.
After encountering the Grey Man, the player sees two red dots glaring from under his hat.
A white flash appears and the player is taken back to one of the game’s first levels.
But instead of the normal textures on the walls, he sees images of real-life murders,
children being torn to pieces, cannibalism, rape, torture, and a Japanese man using a
hammer to break his own fingers.
The player walks through the corridor and the images get progressively worse the deeper
he goes, with the music becoming more distorted.
On the walls he sees even more gruesome acts such as pregnant women cutting out their own
fetuses and people eating pieces of a young child.
Despite his urge to vomit, the player eventually reaches the end of a corridor that shows a
line of text before fading to black.
He copies the link, which then sends him to a page showing a picture of the Grey Man at
the bottom along with Japanese writing.
The player asks one of his friends, who had lived in Japan, to translate the writing for
him.
The link does not work anymore and thus, the player shows his friend a copy of the writing
he had made.
Horrified, his friend told him that it said “You have seen the man as he is.
What he did to me as I slept, as I dreamed his dark nightmare.
You have also seen it.
Those violent images were him.
He had no form, only the dream man.
He caused all this, those events in the images, he took those innocents and possessed them.
He made them do it.
He made me make that game.
GRAYGRAYGRAYGRAYGRAYGRAY.”
His friend urged him not to tell anyone about it.
Several weeks pass and the player learns that his friend travelled back to Japan to murder
LSD's head designer Osamu Sato, then proceeded to commit suicide.
Number 5: Earthbound Several creepypasta pasta stories that have
been circulating the Internet concern the final boss in the video game, “Earthbound”.
The final stage of the game—called the Devil’s Machine—is considered by some to resemble
a woman’s cervix, while the third form of Giygas—the final boss—has been said to
look like the outline of a human fetus.
The imagery has been interpreted by some as having an anti-abortion message.
Others believed the main character travelled back in time to fight the boss in his more
vulnerable form in order to successfully abort him before having the chance to become more
powerful.
Shigesato Itoi, the game’s creator, said that Giygas was actually based on something
he saw when he was a child after walking into the wrong cinema theater.
He had witnessed the murder scene from “The Japanese Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty.”
But at the time, he thought it was a rape scene.
The images would shock Itoi, and his interpretation of what he had seen would ultimately turn
into Giygas.
Giygas's lines during the battle (such as “I feel good” or “It hurts”) have
been cited by some as being indicative of the darker twist the game allegedly has to
it.
Number 4: Super Mario 128 This creepypasta begins with the developers'
alleged intention to give the game more mature, violent content in order to keep up with their
competition.
A player manages to get his hands on a beta copy of the Super Mario 128 game and soon
finds out how horrifying it really is.
It begins with a message from Bowser saying “Mario, I have taken Princess Peach and
she will not live to see the sun rise tomorrow unless you take her place.
You know what to do and where to go.
Do not try to stop me unless you want to hasten her death.”
The environment is darker than any other Mario had appeared in.
As the player progresses, everything becomes more realistic with people starting to give
Mario angry, cold expressions.
It ends with a Bowser that is more grotesque than any of his previous versions, stabbing
Mario with his claws and eating him.
But the killing takes place without any bloodshed.
The final image shows Mario in a black space and the image of a tombstone with the word
‘”innocence” engraved on it.
The creepypasta is said to allude to the idea that innocence is lost in current videogames
and that the content keeps getting more graphic.
Number 3: Herobrine Widely known throughout the Minecraft gaming
community, Herobrine has been the subject of creepypasta and speculations for quite
some time.
The character is a white-eyed human entity that bears the likeness to a dead miner.
According to the game’s developers, Herobrine is not part of Minecraft and the character
was removed from the final version of the game.
Still, many players claim that Herobrine has appeared to them while they were playing.
There have been several pranks and situations where some would use the Herobrine skin to
scare other players.
The existence of phantom players who do not have name tags has been explained as a probable
result of mob glitches.
Markus Persson—also known as Notch—is Minecraft’s creator and was among the founders
of the Mojang gaming company in 2010.
In the most popular Herobrine creepypasta, the character was speculated to be the ghost
of Notch’s dead brother.
Notch had told numerous Minecraft fans in one of his tweets that Herobrine was not real,
and that he had never had a brother except for a half-brother whom he had never met.
Nevertheless, various creepypastas and reported sightings have continued to emerge online.
There are two ways in which Herobrine is said to appear.
One version is that Herobrine stalks the player and disappears as soon as he is spotted, and
that Herobrine becomes visible if the render distance is placed to “tiny.”
Another version is that of “Dead Constructor,” in which Herobrine would manipulate the in-game
world in order to leave the player hints regarding his whereabouts.
These include building sand pyramids in the middle of the ocean and trees without any
leaves.
In most Minecraft fan books, videos, and movies, Herobrine commonly appears as the antagonist.
Number 2: BEN Drowned Haunted Majora’s Mask (or BEN Drowned) is
a popular creepypasta about a haunted Legend of Zelda: Mask of Majora Nintendo 64 cartridge.
It was posted in a thread by 4chan user Jadusable on September 7th, 2010.
As the story goes, while he was in college, Jadusable received a suspicious-looking Majora’s
Mask cartridge from an old man.
He went to his dormitory to play the game and noticed the file of a saved game with
the name ‘BEN’ on it.
He ignored it at first, but soon noticed that despite creating a new savegame file, the
in-game characters kept calling him BEN.
Jadusable believed that deleting the BEN file would fix the problem, but after doing so
the characters did not refer to his name at all.
After using a glitch in the game that enabled players to get another day, he was transported
to the final boss battle.
He noticed that the text was not displayed improperly, and he could hear that a reserved
version of the game's song, “Song of Healing,” was playing.
Jadusable was then teleported to Clock Town, where he noticed that apart from the distorted
music and missing textures, none of the regular characters were present in the town, and it
was completely empty.
The game became increasingly creepier the more he played it.
According to the creepypasta, the copy of the game was haunted by the soul of a boy
called Ben, who had died in a drowning accident.
He revealed himself to Jadusable via Cleverbot, which is an A.I.
capable of holding conversations with users as if it was a real person.
Ben then allegedly began controlling Jadusable's computer and his posts, stating an ability
to spread everywhere.
In the end, the player decides to rid himself of the spirit and limit its influence by burning
his laptop and the Mask of Majora cartridge.
The story became very popular and catchphrases such as “You shouldn’t have done that…”,
or “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
became frequent among 4chan users.
Number 1: Polybius Polybius is a creepypasta regarding a 1981
arcade game.
The game was developed by a company called Sinneslöschen, or German for “Sense Deletion.”
It was a cross between a shoot-em-up and a puzzle game (similar to Tempest in gameplay)
and was only released to a couple of suburban areas in Portland, Oregon.
The game’s popularity caused people to form long lines just to play it.
Before long, people started reporting strange things regarding the game.
Players claimed being able to hear a woman crying or seeing grotesque, horrifying faces
out of the corner of their eyes during flashes.
Players started experiencing blackouts, amnesia, nausea, headaches, and nightmares.
A number of them reportedly committed suicide while others completely gave up playing video
games, even becoming anti-videogame activists.
As the story goes, one arcade owner who had the Polybius game installed claimed that men
in black suits would come and collect information from the cabinet.
They were not at all interested in the money the machine had collected, but instead were
only concerned about the gameplay data.
This led to a theory that Polybius was part of a government experiment on the use of subliminal
messages.
Strangely, all of the cabinets mysteriously vanished only one month after the game’s
release.
There have also been rumors of Polybius games resurfacing, only to quickly disappear again
soon after.
There have been attempts of recreating the game, but the original ROM has never
been found.