Not Another Videogame Pasta
Hello.
I am a long time fan of video games, and this paragraph is establishing my credentials as such. I enjoy a number of popular titles, although I have a nostalgic fondness for games on older systems.
Recently I started thinking about a particular older title, and minor obsession took hold. Rather than emulate it, I elected to purchase it from a pawn shop, a frustrating experience you can relate to. After several failures, I found an old store that had it in stock. No one at the store seemed to care that the cartridge was malformed in several ways, unlabeled, or cracked. Indeed, the employees were sullen, silent and unhelpful.
This is not particularly unrealistic. Later in this story, I will attempt to find this store again. They will have gone out of business and moved out. Upon loading up the cartridge, there was no title screen and the save files were named in an unusual or provocative way. Like many gamers I chose to load the save file of the person playing before me, to establish comradeship with those who have gone before.
When the game loaded, I was struck by several discrepancies from the normal gameplay. The graphics were in a style considerably more realistic than usual, and the audio warped in a style very hard to convey through text, although I will try repeatedly through the course of this story. I continued to play, perhaps wondering if I had a rare prototype or beta version of the game.
While the game proceeded as normal at first, soon enough even more unusual things began to happen. Characters began to act in ways unusual to their standard pattern. Enemies would be missing or dead long before the player avatar got there. Additionally, the enhanced graphics set me ill at ease, and the audio continued to play unnervingly and grew more so as time passed. Text and voice began to desynchronize, displaying one thing while saying another. Violence was exaggerated to the point of nausea, while any kind act available to the player in the base game was nowhere to be found.
Mild terror ensued, but I did not stop playing for reasons poorly explained. It is at this point that things began to go gently batshit. Characters in game reacted with violent accusation and open anger to the presence of the player character. Options began to close, as doors all lead to the same area, often one of tremendous violence. The game appears to directly talk to me with barely veiled threats. It is at this point that I attempt to find the store that sold the cartridge. They have gone out of business and moved out.
With no other possible option, I continue playing. The game grows more glitchy and intense, with moments of gut-wrenching terror that take an unnaturally long time, several minutes or more, to conclude. I decided to contact the development team and had a surprisingly easy time doing so. When the development team is finally contacted about this, they near-universally deny the existence of this version of the game. One does not. He talks in hushed tones about the depression the famous project lead was enveloped in, the strange hatred to the world he displayed during the creation of the prototype game. Often one or more people on staff had committed suicide. This is incidental background detail, with big important names sprinkled in to lend an air of authenticity to this story. Finally I arrived at the end of the game.
By this point my soul felt dead and my eyes glazed at the horrors I had been forced to perform. I had also blankly accepted the communication from the game, the unusual behavior, and the strange acts I was pressed to do, nothing like the game I remembered. For some reason I continue to consider this a beta or a glitch, in spite of the overwhelming evidence otherwise. As the main character's face stares into my eyes through the screen, distorted and with low-frequency audio tones sending terror and disgust humming through my gut, I realize this game is haunted or possessed by some means, and I am now doomed.
This line hints that perhaps the game is manifesting into the real world in vague and terrifying ways, as well as concluding the story.
Credited to Mmandator
Originally uploaded on February 1, 2012
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