Wherever humanity goes we take our monsters with us. Ghouls and horrors live in the darkness at the back of our minds, always at the ready to seek out and populate fresh minds. In the modern era the Internet has become a thriving metropolis for spooky stories or haunted happenings giving rise to its own term for the internet ghost stories: creepypasta
For those not Familiar
Creepypasta are essentially internet horror stories, passed around on forums and other sites to disturb and frighten readers. The name “Creepypasta” comes from the word “copypasta”, an internet slang term for a block of text that gets copied and pasted over and over again from website to website.
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki:What_Is_Creepypasta%3F
Cursed Cartridge
One particular evolution of the creepypasta is the “cursed cartridge” story variant where a specific copy of a game has become possessed by a malignant spirit and playing the game sets the spirit free to wreak havoc on the author’s life. Ben drowned from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is an excellent example of this. Ben, a young boy who previously owned the cartridge drowned and when the author of the ben drowned creepypasta deleted Ben’s save data on the game things in game and otherwise take a sinister turn.
Ghost in the Machine
There is also the Ghost in the Machine style stories where the game is clearly haunted by something but it’s not necessarily sinister or malicious towards the player. Minecraft that lovable block building and crafting sandbox game is home to the alleged ghost of Notch’s brother: herobrine.
Herobrine is described as a blank eyed copy of the default player character that stays just as the very edge of the player’s render distance (how far a player can see) always watching them and then running off into the distance if approached or spotted. You can tell if he has visited your world because he leaves small man made structures around your game.
I saved the map and went on the forums to see if anyone else had found the pseudo-player. There were none. I created my own topic telling of the man and asking if anyone had a similar experience. The post was deleted within five minutes. I tried again, and the topic was deleted even faster. I received a PM from username ‘Herobrine’ containing one word: ‘Stop.’ When I went to look at Herobrine’s profile, the page 404’d.
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Herobrine
Spooky Game Devs
These ghost stories are not only being perpetuated by the players either, game developers themselves have dipped a toe into this dark well. Digital Extremes who created the game Warframe added an assassin known as the stalker, a red and black clad non player character (npc), to an earlier versions of their game. The stalker would cause the the lights to flicker and black flashes of smoke to appear while taunting the player before suddenly spawning into their match and attacking them. For a couple of years DE firmly denied the existence of the NPC and new and old players alike sought to get to the bottom of this mystery. This ghost of vengeance was eventually added to the game more concretely, as well as other faction specific assassins, but in the early days of warframe he was haunting spectre of death.
Team Salvato the creators of Doki Doki Literature Club took a different route and made their entire game a creepypasta. A simple dating simulator that takes a dark turn when one of the characters becomes self aware and obsessed with the player. The game begins glitching and breaking down as the character manipulates more and more behind the scenes until there is only….. Well I’ll let you find that out for yourself.
Haunted Games Minus the Game
The idea of the cursed game cartridge has become so prevalent people are making video diaries about games that don’t even exist. Such is the case in the youtube series Petscop . Petscop the game seems to be contain the trapped spirit of a serial killer. The entity within the game keeps trying to reach out to the player in some manner, either seeking to be freed or to convert the player into a monster themselves. Like any good creepy pasta the facts are always vague and the ending so far is inconclusive. If you are curious about Petscop there is subreddit devoted to unraveling it’s mysteries as well as a small series of videos from the Game Theorist.
….And yet I Love them So
I find it so interesting that in the era where our lights are the brightest and knowledge is instantly at our fingertips we are still drawn to this inscrutable darkness. We seem to crave a space where nothing is as it seems and the hair on the back of your neck stands rigid. The old folklores of the Dark Forest, What goes bump in the night, and What dwells beyond our lights are now joined by the Ghost in the machine and Cursed Cartridge. I wonder what forms they will take next?