One Small Scratch

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I have a small problem. No, actually, a curse would be a better word for it.

It dates back to when Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption was fairly new. I rented the game at a small video rental place as I was browsing the aisles. I took one look at the game and decided I would rent it and see if it was worth buying. I played it for the week and was hooked. I decided I would buy it, but not having enough money to get it at its 50-60 dollar price range, I had to wait until the price went down.

I scraped up about 40 bucks and picked up a used copy at my local GameStop. I've never been very trustworthy of used copies, as they would often have problems and GameStop never really looks into that in most cases. As the cashier was ringing the game up, I asked him to check the disk for any noticeable problems or scratches with it. He kind of half-glanced at it and reassured me that it was fine. I decided I would trust the guy's judgement so I wouldn't waste his time, as he had quite a bit of customers in the store he needed to attend to. I quickly drove home in excitement, popped the game into my Xbox, and continued from where I left off from before. Nothing seemed wrong with the disk, so I was happy that I didn't need to go back to the store and get another one. I loaded the save at the part where I was just starting to meet Nigel West Dickens. As I was riding my horse over to the mission, I started to notice that some objects and textures wouldn't load properly.

I kind of groaned thinking, "Oh no, something's wrong with the disk. I knew it, I just knew it."

I decided I wouldn't focus on it right there because you could hardly tell it was happening. As I was viewing the cut scene to the mission, I noticed that Nigel West Dickens's character model was a bit morphed. Some of his movements were choppy and weird, and some of his textures were having trouble loading. Even his face was weird. His eyes would wander to the back of his head and his mouth wouldn't move whenever his character talked. It was actually quite funny at first.

The way this mission worked was West Dickens is badly injured, and I need to drive him back to town to get him healed. As I'm driving to town, a couple of bandits start chasing me. I quickly gun them down and then readied myself for more to come. For some reason, no more came. It was just those two bandits and that's it. I also started to notice a lot of the scenery that wasn't loading in and the hills in the background were very square-like and not their own shape. I was starting to become agitated, as I was starting to lose all immersion from this game. It was as if the disk was slowly breaking the more I played it. As I entered the town of Armadillo, I noticed only four buildings loaded in, while the rest had not, but you could still run into them.

The end of the mission is in front of the Doctor's Office. Before I could ride up to the objective marker outside of the shop, the game just froze right there, just inches from the end of the mission. Now, I quite often get mad at games, especially broken ones, so this made me pretty angry. I opened up the disk tray and took a look at the disk. Lo and behold, it had a fine scratch etched into the middle of it. I decided I would give the game one more try just to see if I could play it any further. The exact same thing happened: It froze right in front of the Doctor's Office.

I cursed to myself, "This damn disk, why didn't I look at it at the store?!" All of a sudden, there was a sharp pain in my right eye. I doubled over in pain, clutching my eye like I was trying to stop it from bleeding. It felt like there was something being carved into it.

My mother took me to the doctor's to check it out. The doctor had a look at my eye when the pain had kind of wore off. He told me that there was "just a small scratch" going from the top of my eye to the bottom. He told me to get some rest. The scratch would be permanently there, and there would be some problems with sight in that eye, but I would be fine in the long run. About three weeks later is when I started to get used to the scratch, but odd things started to happen. Even though the scratch was on my right eye, my left eye also suffered problems. My eyesight would be blurry to the point where I couldn't see. But when it wasn't, some objects would be blurry or just wouldn't be there. My head would hurt when this happened, like it was trying to process these items so I could see them. I immediately came to the conclusion that this somehow correlates to the scratched disk. Why did this happen to me? I have no fucking clue.

I'm just assuming it's because I cursed at it. As this went on, my eyesight began to deteriorate even farther. Many items in my house wouldn't "load" in, but when they did, they didn't look the way they should and just looked weird. My mother and father would periodically ask me if my eye was okay, and I would always reply with "It's okay, nothing to worry about."

I didn't want to tell anyone about my situation because I would look like I'm out of my mind, so I just kept it to myself and trucked along. Funny thing is, as the weeks went by, it got worse and worse, just like it did in the game. The breaking point was when I decided to take a walk downtown. Everything looked normal, or as normal as my situation could get. That is, until I turned down another street. Nothing "loaded" in. There were no people, there were no lamp posts, cars, streetlamps, signs... The only things that were there were badly textured buildings and streets. It's as if I were living in an extremely broken game.

I fell to the ground yelling and crying for about three minutes until I was pulled up by a couple police officers. But even then nothing returned to normal. People had surrounded me, but from the way they looked, they definitely were not people. Their movements were all choppy and they all just looked at me with blank expressions. I panicked in the officers' arms, trying to break free from this nightmare. The officers held me down and tried to calm me down, but it was no use. I was freaking out, unable to control my actions. I must have blacked out during my episode because I suddenly woke up in the hospital. I could see clearly. Some things were a bit hard to see, but I could see as clearly as I could.

I stayed there for a few days, just so I could "calm my nerves." No one could come to a conclusion as to why I flipped. I didn't want to tell them why I did, either. That would only make me seem even more crazy. At home, I was put on high alert. My parents wouldn't let me out of the house except for school. I wouldn't talk to anyone and no one would talk to me. It's strange because I kind of like it that way.

My eyesight now hasn't changed very much. It's actually gotten a bit better, but it's nothing to celebrate. What have I done with the disk you might ask? I sold it back to GameStop. I kind of felt reassured that someone might buy that disk and suffer the same problem as I did. I liked the idea that someone might be able to actually understand the curse that I have.



Credited to Pepsi596 

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