Creating the Perfect Video Game Creepypasta
Happy Spooky Month!
Content Warning - some of the topics here can get a big gruesome
October is here! so here’s the mandatory spooky video game post. This year I’ll attempt to do something beyond my current writing capabilities: I’ll write my very own video game creepypasta.
From Nintendo64-era creepypastas, like Ben Drowned and Wario Apparition, to the more classic ones, like Polybius and Giygas, video games have been a great source for creepypastas. But for me to write one, I first need to understand what specifically makes the pasta creepy. I am not a horror writer, or a writer at all for that matter, but if I check all the boxes of what makes a creepypasta scary, I should be able to make a successful one… right?
With that in mind, here’s what I found in my research to create the perfect creepypasta.
Ben Drowned
I think it’s safe to start with one of the most well-known creepypastas out there, at least enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page: Ben Drowned. This story circles around a series of posts from college sophomore Jadusable who claimed to have found a haunted cartridge of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
Right of the bat, I learned that most creepypastas are shared in public anonymous forums, such as 4chan, and published as a “true story”. So, you know, failed step one.
The story revolves around this copy of Majora’s Mask having an existing safe file simply called “BEN”. Jadusable kept playing around with it and encountered some weird glitches that essentially broke the game. This included a mysterious laugh in the background, no music, no NPCs and a bunch of broken textures.
To avoid being stuck in this glitchy game, Jadusable decided to drown Link to force a game over, but the game played a very visceral animation of the player character drowning…. and thus this is how Ben Drowned.
More things happen and, being published in 2010, of course we had real “footage” uploaded to youtube of all the creepy things that happened to Jadusable. Of course, this guy was a real writer, and this ended up being a long ARG, getting fans looking for clues and fake URLs to get to the conclusion of the story.
Another good lesson I got from researching into this creepypasta is that most of them come from “haunted” cartridges, usually spotted in a garage sale or something. I ended up getting ahold of the original ROM file used to capture the footage. And it was indeed very creepy. Being the coward I am, I barely slept after playing it, and the little I did sleep, was plagued by nightmares.
Tails Doll
Ben Drowned was already affecting my sleep schedule… but come on! it’s spooky month, we gotta carry on even if we’re scared!
As a huge Sonic fan, of course I had to research Tails Doll; the reason for not one, but multiple creepypastas. One fact that I learned about creepypastas is that sometimes it isn’t a story, just a general theme.
Most Tails Doll stories begin with an excited father bringing their son a copy of Sonic R for Sega Saturn. A racing game with so many flaws, but a killer soundtrack (I know, you could say this about most sonic games). After finishing the game, the father and son get access to play as Tails Doll, a decoy created by Dr. Robotnik to catch Sonic.
However, playing and losing a race with this character would bring a terrible fate. Depending on the story, either the father gets killed by the Doll coming into existence from the game, or the kid hangs himself while Can you feel the Sunshine plays in the background (please stop what you’re doing and listen to the song for full immersion).
Once again, for my research, I played an old ROM of Sonic R. No hacks or anything, just played through the “story”, which is just 5 races. I sucked at it and got bored. Tails Doll isn’t actually playable, but I went ahead and downloaded a hacked ROM that allowed me to play as Tails Doll just for fun.
While Tails Doll didn’t magically manifest into my bedroom, it still didn’t help me sleep with all the creepypasta I was reading, my mind is really susceptible to video game nightmares, especially since I was doing this research mostly at night.
Billy the Kid Returns
This one’s a classic! An NES game no one ever heard about being brought back from obscurity thanks to internet creepypastas.
Similar to the Russian Sleep Experiment, the story behind Billy the Kid Returns is kind of gruesome. It began with a group of teenagers being selected to play test this NES game in 1990. Upon beating the game, the screen flashed in multiple colors, causing serious eye strain on the playtesters.
Afterwards, the teenagers were not able to sleep again, as they only saw the aforementioned flashing screen whenever they closed their eyes. This led to mental exhaustion and erratic behavior. Out of the 8 testers, 7 were found with their eyes ripped out, being the only way they could find peace.
So… yeah, what a wild ride. One good creepypasta lesson coming from this is that you can center a story on something that’s actually kind of true? no, the playtesters didn’t rip their eyes out (hell, in the NES days, there weren’t even playtesters), but Billy the Kid Returns was supposed to be a PC DOS only game, with a NES port that was being developed but never released.
Tying a creepypasta with something real you can fact check is brilliant. Certainly something worth trying when writing my own. Speaking of real, the developers of the NES port eventually did upload the ROM since it was no longer under NDA, so I wanted to continue the tradition of playing the game from the creepypasta.
My first impression is that the game looked extremely familiar, guessing it’s because most NES games looked the same. It’s a simple cowboy themed shoot-em-up, so nothing revolutionary, that might give an idea on why it wasn’t released after all. Speaking of NES tropes, the game is HARD. It’s clearly a short game, only 3 levels were ported from the PC version, so you can tell they increased the difficulty significantly to increase play time.
Being the last game I was looking at, I wanted to play it from start to finish. Let the real spirit of Halloween live through this 30+ year old unreleased game about cowboys.
I died so many times in the first level, the game was clearly never finished, it had a bunch of glitches and loves doing this flashing effect that plagued all media before the infamous Pokemon Porygon episode. The flashing only got stronger whenever you beat the level, which I learned the hard way by beating Level 1.
“Continue?” appeared on the screen. Weird, this normally appears when you lose in a game, but of course I want to continue. “Are you sure?” showed up next, never thought I would require double confirmation for Level 2. But here I go! The difficulty didn’t really scale compared to Level 1. Same format, just the enemies were a bit different, glitchier as well, but I did manage to beat it without issue.
After a strong flashing from the screen once again. “Turn Away Now”. Had to rub my eyes to makes sure I was reading that correctly (and also because of the strong flashing). OK I get it, the original developers knew there was an urban legend around their game, so they decided to have a little fun that actually managed to scare me. A simple press of the A button allowed me to carry forward
Level 3 was barely playable, more memory glitches, weirder enemies, a bunch of Missigno-like objects in the game. And if that wasn’t bad enough, huge difficulty spike all of the sudden. I lost most of my lives here, but on the last one I was able to beat it. Some strong flashing later, the game suddenly closes itself. Not even a “Congratulations”?
I recognize the eerie messages were the developers having fun, but it managed to spook me. Guess it’s another night of not sleeping well, as I kept having this recurring dream of a dark figure chasing me. It’s One Of Those dreams where everything feels real, you wake up in your bed, you go to the kitchen for a glass of water, and a tall figure puts a knife through your eyes, and you wake up in your real bed again.
Rinse and repeat for the entire night.
Since I wasn’t getting sleep, I kept having smaller naps during the day. And every time. Tall silhouette appears. Stabs me in the eye. I wake up. It got to a point where I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. I would even dream of writing this very post for hours, only to be surprised by the tall figure again.
I would get attacked at work, at the mall, in the bathroom. I just didn’t feel safe. Sometimes the nightmare would last for hours. I would go through my entire routine: breakfast, cleaning the house, working, lunch… only to suddenly get attacked and I was back in bed at 3AM.
It would always target my eyes, without question. Sometimes It would not use a shiv, but its own thumbs. Truly horrific stuff, but never painful. As soon as it happened, I was back in bed waking up from the nightmare.
The last encounter was 2 weeks ago. I saw the tall figure approach me once more, roughed me up a bit but then it just. stopped. It stared at me and it was actually the first time I’ve had time to look at the tall figure carefully. Through the ragged clothes, I could barely see one piece of jewelry hanging from its neck: a necklace with 14 human eyes. I tried to look at the face of the tall figure, but it was an unrecognizable disfigured face, barely enough to pass as “human”.
After looking at me for what felt like hours, it simply walked away. In a less than brilliant moment, I actually went to chase it, but It was gone. I let out a sigh of relief, I am finally free… But… am I still dreaming? the tall figure only shows up during nightmares, but it left and I haven’t woken up. Everything around me is normal, but I know this must be a dream
After a few days I wondered if time was passing through in the outside world. Am I just in a hospital bed in the real world and time is passing through, or will I wake up at 3AM in my own bed again? I started to doubt if I was actually dreaming, but something about my environment always felt a bit off, a little to the left. I could never figure out what, but I knew none of this was real.
Pinching myself doesn’t work, I have tried burning myself, hitting my head hard. It hurts like hell but it doesn’t do anything to wake me up. I feel like days pass, normal days, I go to work, I have breakfast, throw out the trash, but when it’s time to sleep, I simply can’t. Of course I can’t, this is just a dream.
I just don’t want to do anything drastic because what if I’m wrong. Everything and everyone looks normal. But I KNOW it isn’t. It cannot be. The tall figure left. I did not wake up.
I can’t do this anymore
I’ve started to miss the tall figure, at least when it was around, I would always know I would wake up. I keep thinking about that last encounter, the way It just stood there. Maybe It got tired of killing me and left, or maybe this is some new kind of torture?
I can’t do this anymore
I don’t know how much time has passed. Every day I pray for the tall figure to appear again. I need to get out of here. I don’t care what it takes, I need to get out of this never-ending nightmare.
I can’t do this anymore
A thought had been floating in my mind for months now. But I haven’t been brave enough to do it.
I can’t do this anymore
I grab a small knife from the kitchen. Thinking about the tall figure again gave me one last idea.
I can’t do this anymore
I grasp the knife firmly in my hand, and inch it closer to my face, scared of what will be the outcome. After all, these dreams always ended in the same way.
this is true i was the knife