Games that came out or offered strange elements, which marked the future of its success.
You love to know new things. At Meristation we know it, and precisely for that reason, if you missed our first installment on cursed video games, here we bring you a second part in which we review the most murky situations, legends that do not go beyond that, of fantasies expanded by the power of Internet, and curious and somewhat disturbing situations that we will never know the reality of. And they are not always related to horror games.
The age-old tradition of telling stories around a campfire has been digitally updated with creepypasta legends: scary stories that spread across online forums, turning into credible (or not) Internet stories, which are discussed so much within the virtual environment, as outside of this one. This time we bring you a new compilation of alleged legends and cursed myths directly related to some video games, and yes, we already told you that in some cases they are more surprising than they seem at first glance.
Mr. Mix
Do you remember a 90’s PC game called Mr. Mix? In this we had to test our typing by quickly typing the words that appeared on the screen so that our protagonist and cook, Mr. Mix, added all the necessary ingredients in a pot. What appeared to be a children’s game apparently hid other intentions beyond entertaining. Mr. Mix was a friendly cook with a round face and rosy cheeks with a disturbing, disturbing smile that held a pot throughout the game. For each ingredient you needed, we would see a drawing of it together with the word that we had to write in a time frame. If we managed to write all the ingredients on time, we advanced to the next level. Despite appearing a simple game, it turned out to be the opposite, since unlike many typing games of the time, Mr. Mix was so difficult that no player could reach level 6. Each level had a requirement of words per minute. , being the first level of 10 words, until reaching level 5, which required about 500 words. In addition to its particular difficulty, the game was also known for other reasons. The title of innocent appearance and simple mechanics, made a somewhat curious use of sound, and surely many of its players will still remember today. His particular palette of wailing sounds, growling louder and louder humming forced his players to quickly turn down the volume at certain points in the game in a puzzling way. Although in fact, the legend of Mr. Mix began years later, when the game fell into absolute oblivion.
Recently, a group of computer scientists took the copy of the game CD to hack its code and discover that it was beyond the impossible level 6. When they discovered what was behind the level, the technicians cursed their curiosity. When they managed to unlock level 6, the title locked and it started transferring a large number of files to their computers. The title had a protection system to prevent the secret part of it from being accessed, once it was passed to level 6. They allegedly found many highly sensitive in-game encrypted images that they refused to speak about later. Legend has it that even hackers never mentioned what they saw in the game, and that they suffered from severe post-traumatic stress. Some time later, one of Mr. Mix’s hackers was accused of an attempted kidnapping of an 8-year-old girl in a United States supermarket. His legend became popular with the hacker’s reaction when he was detained by the police, when he stated: “You can’t stop me, I’m Mr. Mix.” This legend about Mr. Mix gave rise to his own phenomenon “creepypasta”, being one of the main protagonists of the darkest video game stories on the Internet and that due to this popularity in 2014, a new adaptation of the original game of the Castelinan Games studio.
Second life
Second life seemed a priori a very interesting proposal. A title developed by Linden Lab in 2003 that promised a multiplayer experience in our own virtual world. Sounds good doesn’t it? In this case we bring you one of the most controversial and murky legends that has splashed the news of online video games.
Imagine creating your own virtual world, your own home and being able to do whatever you want. In Second Life all this and much more is possible. In fact, freedom is so extensive in the game that it even reaches some limits. With millions of online users, the title soon grew its own dark side for people with dark fetishes and various perversions. And it is that far from creating a paradisiacal environment, this game is known for the murky scenes that we will find created by its own community. We will find places to socialize and explore, but also secret or traffic areas to exchange images. They assure that supposedly in Second Life it is safer to transmit information or files than in the deep web itself. Each user has a private image bank in his account so we can send and receive files directly from our departure. The game precisely has quite a bad reputation for its alleged clans dedicated to traffic in highly sensitive artwork. Not only that, but many users who start from scratch are chased on the map by other characters just to find out their intentions and encourage new players to leave the game.
In the title we can find both colorful and peaceful maps, as well as other quite different scenarios. Murder simulations, murky scenes, illicit artwork, and ultimately, unreliable users in the game. If we thought that after so long after its launch the game would be inactive, we are very wrong. Despite all the controversy that Second Life has always brought, the supervision of authorities on the game remains minimal. Precisely the online title is more active than ever and that in fact, is the most curious.
Sonic R
We bring you the legend of Tails Doll, one of the 6 unlockable characters from the Sonic R racing game, which was released for Sega Saturn in 1997. It was a revolutionary 3D racing game that included some secret characters that could be unlocked as rewards . In this installment we will have the usual companion of Sonic, Tails, in addition to another secret character based on this, known as Tails Doll. This new character has a somewhat different and haunting appearance in the game similar to a lost look stuffed animal or rag doll. The Tails Doll legend begins in 1997 at a home in Los Angeles, California. A mother called her son to dinner since he had been playing Sonic R. for several hours. The mother, when the little boy did not respond, entered the room and what he found was most murky. He saw his dead son on the ground with a blue face and obvious signs of suffocation. The console was turned on and one of the songs from the game “Can you feel the sunshine” was heard with its characteristic cheerful tone that gave the scene a more creepy environment. The autopsy ruled that the boy died of an epilepsy attack from playing the game for too many hours in a row, although it was revealed that he did not have any previous health problems. At her funeral, the mother gifted her deceased son’s belongings, including the Sega Saturn, to one of her best friends, and to her friend’s surprise, she found that Sonic R was inside the console. When he started it, he saw that his deceased friend had just unlocked a new character: Tails Doll. The dark version of one of the protagonists of the game who looked like a stuffed animal and a red antenna on his head.
This legend began to circulate on the internet, and even other users related Tails Doll with other real massacres produced by sects in the United States in the 80s, where at the crime scene it was signed with the initials TD long before Sonic R was released. A few weeks after the boy’s death, under the influence of the myth there was a murder allegedly from another sect, under a blood inscription that said: “You have released Tails Doll.” Whether the legend is true or not, the most curious thing was that Sega did not take long to react and made Tails Doll disappear from all his products. We can say that Sonic R was undoubtedly one of the first cursed video game legends that spread like wildfire on the internet, and that in fact it has its own invocation rituals on portals such as Creepypasta Wiki or Wattpad for this to visit us. . Crazy, right?
World of warcraft
We like to bring you legends of all kinds. Many you will know and others surely not. In this case, surely the oldest WOW players in the room will recognize her. In fact, more than a legend, it is one of the mysteries that we find in the famous online title. Specifically, its mystery is due to its location on the map of Villa Dorada, also known as Valle de Cristal. In this area, we can find the usual cheerful Elwynn forest music. However, when we enter one of his houses the music changes dramatically. There is a house near the Cristal lake in which we will find a room with 6 children. And is that the children -NPCS-, at certain times leave the house daily in strange circumstances. Many players have seen that at 7am at game time, the kids get into pentagram formation and never break this formation as they make their way to the Stormwind entrance. As a game player indicated, his location is exactly 666 meters away from the house. Once the children remain at the entrance of Stormwind for a few minutes, they return to the Valle de Cristal house where again, the music changes considerably. Even if we click on any of his characters as “Dana”, we can hear a lament. The strange location of the children in the form of a pentagram has given much to talk about in their community, giving rise to speculation even related to ancient rituals of invoking ancient gods, even more murky theories. The thing is, while we’d really like to know what Blizzard’s intentions were with this, the company has never spoken on the matter.
Hall of tortured souls
On many occasions strange things happen where one least expects it. In this case we are referring to the hidden game found in Excel, the cell-based office software with which you are surely more than familiar. The fact is that the billionaire founder of Microsoft tried to add some kind of hidden subliminal message in the application. “Hall of tortured souls” or “Hall of tortured souls” is a game in the form of “easter egg” that is hidden in the office resource released in 1995. A game that was very easy to access and that currently cannot be played in any other later version of office. To unlock it, we just had to go down the usual Excel rows until we reached number 95, press the tab to select the second column and then go to the top of the program: Help / About Microsoft Excel. Once this combination of commands has been performed, the usual Help screen will open, so we must press: CTRL + ALT + SHIFT while pressing the “Technical Support” screen button. If you have followed the combination well, this curious game should open up for you.
In it we will move using usual directional keys with an aesthetic of the stage that may well resemble the classic Doom. We can see columns with many names written, being the real names of the programmers of the application. But there was still something else. If we type “ExcelKFA” in the game, a secret path will appear, where more images and more names will appear, as indicated by the game “of the tortured souls” of the technicians who programmed it. This fact caused many to look down on the founder of Microsoft for allegedly exploiting its workers. A short time later, the game was related to the suicide of one of its workers that appeared in “Hall of tortured souls” since the cause of the suicide indicated that it was due to the extreme working conditions to which the company exposed them.
Illuminati: The game of conspiracy
(SJ GAMES) Steve Jackson Games is a video game developer who was accused by the US Government of having a strange curse at the beginning with the launch of one of its famous card games in 1990. And it is that before making video games , they launched with the business of role cards. Its legend begins when the company decided to create its own popular card game: Illuminati The Game of Conspiracy. A card game that curiously predicted the future of many events, and that several decades later the company would adapt to video games. While Steve Jackson was creating the famous Illuminati game in the early 1990s, US government officials came to his study with a judge’s order to requisition his job. Steve himself published a video where he explains this event, and in fact, how the government brought him to trial to prevent him from launching his popular game. The reason the United States government put Steve Jackson on trial was because he called his Illuminati game a dark and anti-American game. Authorities accused Jackson of creating subversive, premonitory, and anti-American material, among other claims. After numerous costly litigation, the future of Jackson’s studio was on the verge of bankruptcy after paying $ 250,000 in court costs. A hard battle that finally won and he was able to recover part of his money to relaunch his studio again.
The most curious thing about Illuminati is that if we take a look at some of its cards, (and let’s not forget that this game was created in the early 1990s), curiously to this day it still has many similarities with reality 30 years after its publication. Magic-style cards, with Attack and Stamina points based on made-up historical episodes that might casually resemble today. Images of two twin towers crashing under the name of the letter “Terrorism”, an image of the burning pentagon and even the very destruction of the earth. In fact, there is a letter under the name of pandemic where you can see an image with surgical masks and gloves on the ground under the motto “Quarentine”. Coincidence? Judge for yourselves. The truth is that even today the game manages to make our hair stand on end.
Slenderman
Slenderman is a game that was created as a result of the popularity it achieved on the internet with its first supposed appearance in a photograph. It all started in 2009 on the “Something Awful” forums. The administrators of the page proposed weekly themes of publication and in this case, they proposed their users to edit and upload a photo to the forum that caused terror. The user “Victor Surge” did it, when he uploaded the first official image of what we know about Slenderman. In this image we see a scene from a real park with children playing and the silhouette in the distance of Slenderman. A faceless figure with long, bony limbs so characteristic of the character. With Slenderman circulating on the internet, more and more users joined in creating more images and related myths in it, until creating their own particular legend. A legend that unfortunately ended up being a real case.
In 2014, two Wisconsin girls (Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser) planned the murder of their 12-year-old best friend (Payton Leutner) because, according to them, they had to prove their worth to Slenderman. Up to 19 stabs were received by the victim, who luckily survived. The detainees did not show any regret and claimed that Slenderman forced them to make the sacrifice so as not to put the lives of their families at risk. The case shocked the media so much that in 2016 the HBO production company released its own documentary based on the case: Beware the Slender Man. In the documentary, we can see excerpts of the defendants at the time of the statement without showing any remorse about what happened and affirming with confidence that they saw Slenderman. The fame of this character became so popular that several web series about him emerged, such as Marble Hornets or Everyman Hybrid, until his first video game was published in 2013: Slenderman: The 8 Pages and soon after Slender Man: Arrival. A character who even starred in his own horror movie in theaters in 2018, resulting in a box office failure.
Kowai Shashin
It is a title of Japanese origin published in 2002 for PSX in the Japanese territory. In the game we play an exorcist whose job is to expel the spirits housed in photographs. A title very similar to Fatal Frame (Project Zero) with which it shares more than one particularity, since the photographs shown in the game are real. We do not know whether their intention was to cause further immersion or whether it was because the study did not have sufficient resources to design its own scenarios. What we cannot deny is that the result was quite original. Initially, the spirits featured in the game’s photographs were overlaid with real images that were later digitized and edited. We go back to 2002, when the studio aimed to offer a greater immersion in its players incorporating real images of paranormal events. The studio announced by different means its interest in obtaining paranormal images taken by unknown people. And supposedly, they did it. They contacted researchers specialized in this field to obtain the greatest credibility in each of the photos received and replaced them with those that they originally edited in their original version. With a totally superstitious attitude, the Media Entertainment studio indicated that their team began to live in their meats that they still cannot explain.
Specifically, one of the best known was when two employees ended up hospitalized while working late at night. Another development partner of the game, Aortó Kagawa, was another victim who allegedly claimed the game. After a few days when he didn’t show up for his job, his body was found hanged at a train station. In fact, that same station where they found it appears in the game, specifically on the 6th level, in the 6 photograph of the game. All the employees who worked at Kowai Shashin indicated that they had great respect for that particular image, where we observed a strange human appearance with a disjointed face at the train station. And that as the study indicated, the image is supposed to be real. The words of K-San, the game director were as follows:
“Kagawa’s death was quite abnormal for the team. We were under great pressure and we really believe that something happened.”
RalliSport Challenge
In this case we bring you a legend that despite being cursed has another type of ending, so this time you can go preparing the kleenex because things will get emotional. This legend begins when YouTube user “00Wartherapy00” explained his personal experience with the RalliSport Challenge game. His story inspired many people, so it did not take long for them to be echoed on other portals, even reaching the fanart. What the user told on the networks was that when he was 4 years old his father gave him an XBOX in 2001. He and his father played hours and hours together at the racing game RalliSport Challenge. Unfortunately, two years later, this user’s father passed away, so the user refused to play XBOX again without the company of his late father.
He kept the console in a closet for 10 years until one day he decided to play again. In 2013, being a 17-year-old teenager, he decided to turn it on again to recall old memories. By turning on the console, he could see that the RalliSport Challenge game was intact inside. He started the game until, at once, he realized something. In the title, when you manage to beat a record, it is saved, and it reappears on the track as if it were a ghost car, reproducing exactly all the movements we made in the highest score. The game aims to make us compete with our biggest rival: ourselves. Therefore, whenever we achieve a high score, it is registered in the game and it will appear on the track where we must try to overcome our own brand. This time, the last record was not from the user “00Wartherapy00” but from his deceased father. So it was as close to being playing with him again.
User 00Wartherapy00 wrote:
“My father’s ghost is still on that RalliSport Challenge track to this day”
The user continued to play the game for a long time, until he was able to reach his late father’s record. When he succeeded, just a few seconds before reaching the finish, he stopped the car in its tracks. He wanted to ensure that his father’s ghost car won the game again, in order to avoid erasing the memory of his deceased father, and to be recorded for eternity in the memory of the game.
These are some of the legends that we bring you in this second installment.
Did you know them?
