Maxwell Yezpitelok
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M. Asher Cantrell
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Michael Kane
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When you're caught up in a good video game, you're usually in a pretty oblivious state: you can barely notice your bladder is about to explode from not taking a bathroom break in 15 hours, let alone pay attention to every little detail on your screen. What better time for a developer to go ahead and slip in an inexplicably terrifying Easter egg that most people will never see?
As we've discussed two times before, we unfortunately have seen the horror lurking beneath the surface of your favorite video games, and now we're continuing our Halloween tradition of passing on the curse to you. Behold:
Few groups of people are better at making shit up than GTA fans. For example, remember when everyone said you could run into a woman's ghost in GTA IV? Let's set the record straight: there's no lady ghost in that game, people. Come on.
It's in GTA V.
Rockstar Games
If ghosts exist in GTA, there's no way our character isn't being haunted by roadkill 24/7.
Yep, that happens. Presumably as a way to address the rumors of ghostly activity and the accusations of misogyny in one fell swoop, Rockstar Games went ahead and hid a she-spook in the latest game. If you want to see it for yourself, you'll need to: 1) be at Mount Gordo between 11 p.m. and midnight on the game's clock, and 2) make sure your cat isn't in the room while you're playing, because if it jumps on you when the ghost appears you're gonna die for real. Then there'll be two ghosts here, and we're not sure if we can handle that.
You can see the ghost only through a sniper scope, since it has intimacy issues and tends to disappear when you get too close. However, if you do have the balls to go stand on the rocks where the ghost used to be floating, you might notice it leaves a message written in blood:
Rockstar Games
Holy shit! The killer is a sideways rabbit!
It says "JOCK" -- and what do you know, there's a character called Jock Cranley in the GTA universe who appears as an actor/stuntman in previous games and is running for governor in this one. Jock is mentioned in billboards, radio ads ... and, if you dig a little deeper, in this old news clipping about how his wife, Jolene, died in a mysterious accident on those same rocks, just as she was about to "ruin" his career:
Rockstar Games
We wholly support his quest to find the real killers.
But what if you don't own GTA V and still want to experience this fun Easter egg? Well, you can always visit Mount Gordon in Pennsylvania and find out if the real-world version of this legend is true. There's just one little difference: that particular lady wanders around without a head. For once, we're OK with Rockstar making a female character less realistic.
Just Cause 2 is your average third-person action game about a badass with guns trying to overthrow a Southeast Asian dictatorship. There's nothing supernatural about it (other than the laws of physics not working in this universe), and nothing too creepy in the story.
Square Enix
Except those socks.
However, all of that changes if you go out of your way to fly over a particular island on the game's huge map, at which point your plane will spontaneously burst into flames and crash. Sound a little familiar? That's because the Just Cause developers hid the entire island from the show Lost (complete with its magnetic plane-crashing powers) in the game. You know, just because.
Square Enix
Those aren't ruins in the middle, that's Hurley's Twinkie stash.
This isn't just a throwaway Easter egg, though -- the frightening level of detail is on par with a 60,000-word Lost fan-fiction novella starring the polar bear and Dynamite Guy. For instance, you can find what looks like the charred remains of the show's Oceanic 815 flight:
Square Enix
No Michelle Rodriguez -- sorry to disappoint everyone.
The giant S.O.S. Bernard made in the sand:
Square Enix
In this version, Bernard is dyslexic.
And, if you follow the arrow up there, even the infuriatingly mysterious hatch:
Square Enix
Don't open it, though, or it will trigger Season 2.
They could have left it at that, but nope: if you make it to the northern stretches of the island, you'll find yourself face-to-face with an impossibly hard to kill enemy soldier. He'll never lay a finger on you. Not even if you open fire on him. Oh, and also, he's constantly shrouded in a thick, black, veil of smoke -- yep, either he's got a bad stomach problem or he's the freaking smoke monster.
Square Enix
"Both, actually. Sorry."
Some players even report hearing his signature eerie mechanical sounds, but the creepiest part is the persistence he shows in following you around the island. You can dash, jump, grapple hook, and para-glide your way through the entire forest, and still find him lurking a mere 10 feet behind you when you finally stop. That's some Mario Kart shit there.
And, of course, in the spirit of the show itself, none of these curious happenings are ever explained. Probably for the best.
The Fable games are most notorious for one thing: broken promises on the part of developer Peter Molyneux. And also open-world fantasy action-RPG gameplay. But mostly it's the first thing. Anyway, scattered throughout the game are large stone doors with demon faces carved into them, creatively called Demon Doors. They're completely optional to explore, for the most part, so there's a chance that you'll never see the abject horrors Molyneux hid for you behind two of them.
The first, called Winter Lodge, features a simple wintry cabin, like something straight out of a Christmas-time credit card commercial. But then, the second you walk in the door ...
Lionhead Studios
Man, that's one potent fart.
... it turns into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Skeletons and torture devices litter the dilapidated cabin, and a chest with a sword sits in an upstairs room ... and that's it. There's nothing else to do in the area. There's no explanation for the massacre, except that the developers hate you and don't want you to sleep at night.
Lionhead Studios
Those skeletons are disturbingly small. Who'd do that to a leprechaun?
Then there's the Terry Cotter's Army Demon Door, where you're again confronted with a cottage. This one looks pretty normal too -- until you go upstairs and find the room filled with empty suits of armor surrounding a dead guy lying in bed. If for some reason you don't say, "NOPE," and turn around right away, you can find the guy's diary and read about how he found some armors in a cave. Things went creepy as fuck from there. "Terry Cotter" says in his diary that the armors are his new friends, and then follows that up with this final entry:
Lionhead Studios
To be fair, with a name like that he was asking to get cursed.
So, apparently, Terry couldn't even leave his bed once his army decided to stare him to death. But the rabbit hole goes even deeper: behind the house, you can find a path to a cave, and guess what it's in there. Guess.
Lionhead Studios
Batman's wardrobe?
Dozens and dozens of empty armors. You can smash them, but they don't do anything. At least, not in the game. Who knows what it does to your soul. (Probably nothing. Molyneux couldn't get it finished in time.)
In No More Heroes you play as an anime-obsessed, apartment-dwelling loner named Travis Touchdown, who purchases a lightsaber online and enters a life-endangering tournament to become the world's greatest assassin. Yeah, it's basically the game you came up with when you were 14. While pretty violent, it's also a freaking Nintendo Wii title, so there's nothing too shocking or gruesome, and any heavy moments are leveled down by tongue-in-cheek humor. For example, this is what the dramatic final boss scene looks like:
Grasshopper Manufacture
SPLRS!
You get to the boss, and it turns out to be your half-sister Jeane, but when she's about to explain her motivation, the scene is purposely sped-up -- she rambles off a bunch of unintelligible nonsense, and it's laced with shots of Travis' comically over-acted reactions. It's a wacky joke straight out of Spaceballs!
Or not, because it turns out that the fast-forward effect is just to protect your innocent ears from her creepy, fucked-up story. You see, fans have since used the wonderful power of incredibly basic video editing software to slow down that footage and finally reveal what Jeane is saying ... only to instantly regret it, probably. See for yourself:
While the worst thing the fans were probably expecting was a message from the developers asking them to get a life, what they found was even more terrible: Jeane starts off revealing that their father molested her all her life. After living in poverty and being treated as a sex slave, she was forced to become a prostitute to pay for fighting lessons, thereby allowing her to seek bloody revenge on her own goddamn father. Which she did. And then she killed Travis' mom, too, while she was at it.
Grasshopper Manufacture
Most disturbing part: why is he still reacting like she's talking about what a huge sandwich she ate?
Yikes. And we thought Travis' life was sad. Suddenly, living alone in a seedy motel surrounded by anime figurines and Nintendo games sounds like paradise.
There's no shortage of spooky stories about Pokemon all over the Internet. Google "Pokemon creepypasta," and then grab a night light and some NoDoz to help you through all of it. But with all the legends of haunted songs and possessed cartridges, it turns out there is at least one real ghost in the Pokeverse.
Pokemon X & Y, the most recent game(s) in the series, features Lumiose City, where players can explore to their heart's content. But if you enter one specific building and go to the second floor, you're treated to this unexplained little cut scene:
Nintendo
What a cheap shot, scaring their fans like th- OH SHIT LOOK BEHIND YOU!
The music stops, the lights begin to flicker, and a girl suddenly appears behind you. OK, she's probably like a ninja or something. However, she then starts hovering around your character, who stands still, presumably frozen in fear.
Nintendo
Surely at least one of the 8 zillion Pokemon can conjure you some clean pants.
She then says, "No, you're not the one ..." and disappears. It gets even more eerie, though. If you visit the Lumiose City hotel's fourth floor, you can find a girl who looks exactly like the elevator girl, which normally isn't a big deal, since the game reuses artwork more often than a Tom & Jerry cartoon. The weird part is that if you try to talk to her, she'll tell you to shut up because she can't "hear the elevator."
Nintendo
Uh, maybe she's just very intently waiting on a pizza.
That's either a reference to the elevator ghost, a very bad excuse for rebuffing your advances, or both. Adding to the what-the-fuckery, there's also a secret message in the same city's train station. If you go stand behind the arrival/departure board and press A, it says this:
Nintendo
There was a creepy message in the bathroom stall too, but we can't reproduce it here.
So many questions: what place? Help with what? Who the hell goes around Pokemon games pressing A behind every object? Nobody freaking knows. It's just vague enough to be terrifying and unsolvable, like a Hellraiser puzzle box in video game form. And if you do figure it out, demons probably fly out of your 3DS, so we're in no rush.
Animal Crossing is usually a cute game about the whimsical daily lives of a bunch of talking animals living in a village ... until you forget to save your game. Then the horror begins. The next time you try to play, you'll be ambushed by a character called Mr. Resetti, who scolds you for being so goddamned irresponsible. The more you do this, the longer he yells at you.
Nintendo
"... FURTHERMORE, THE VIDEO CLEARLY SHOWS THAT TOWER 7 FELL BEFORE THE AIRPLANES HIT, AND ..."
Most players know about this, because most players have tried to cheat by resetting without saving. Less know about the terrifying variation of this punishment that basically turns Animal Crossing into a Disney remake of Friday the 13th. See, all over your village you'll see these weird little statues called Gyroids, which look like fire hydrants with appalled faces.
Nintendo
Since like half the game's characters are dogs, we can see why.
You can use Gyroids to save your progress, something you should never, ever forget to do if you're visiting another player's village in the GameCube version of this game. Why? Because if you turn off your console while in the other village and don't save first, you won't lose your items -- you'll lose your soul. At least judging by the creepy Gyroid face you'll be sporting the next time you play:
Nintendo
Fun Fact: All three are buttholes.
Also, we lied, you do lose all your items, but strangely enough you won't be scolded by Mr. Resetti this time (he's either too disappointed to even face you, or he's too afraid).
There are several videos of this happening on YouTube, with the appropriately hysterical reactions. But wait, there's another layer of creepiness to this whole thing. The Gyroids aren't some random item Nintendo made up: they are based on ancient Japanese burial statues called Haniwa, which were placed on (or sometimes in) people's graves and were said to contain their souls.
via JTB USA
Forever frozen mid-Macarena.
So, wait ... are the dozens of Gyroids you come across in Animal Crossing stuffed with dead animal souls? Oh shit, is that what the name is about? And is your character turning into a Gyroid as ironic punishment for not saving? We'll let someone else provide the answers to these questions, because we are never touching this game again.
Fair Warning: We're going to show you something that might bring back traumatic memories for anyone who was a teenager in late 2001. Ready? Here it is:
Microsoft
You thought this was gonna be about the movie Glitter, right?
The freaking original Xbox dashboard menu. Back in the day, Xbox didn't have to point cameras at you 24/7 to be unsettling. Instead, it did it with weird little menu sounds that came at completely random times, making you look like a crazy person in front of your friends when you told them about it. Of course, there was always the kid who tried to one-up you by claiming he heard voices coming out of his Xbox at night -- but he probably just hallucinated those after a Mountain Dew overdose, right?
Don't listen to the following clip (specifically, at the 9:30 time mark) if you want to continue believing that.
No, that's not an alien phone sex line: those distorted, unintelligible words are hidden among the Xbox's ambient sound files, programmed to come out only at certain times. If you turned on the console and started navigating the dashboard right away, you'd never hear them ... but if you lingered on the menu for a while the voices would start coming at you more and more often and in increasingly higher volumes. Now, picture falling asleep with the Xbox on and being awoken in the middle of the night by the rantings of a schizophrenic R2-D2.
Some players thought they heard the voices saying things like, "I own your soul," or, "Give no fear 23 your games," but what do they really say? It turns out it's probably stuff like, "Buzz clogged the anti-gravity toilet again," since according to Microsoft's Major Nelson, the sounds were actually public domain NASA transmissions that they tweaked beyond recognition. OK, that solves that mystery. Bye, everyone!
Wait, one more thing.
That's the comment from a reader that inspired us to investigate this matter (thanks, Kaspar!). Here's the thing, though: we listened to every single audio file hidden in the original Xbox console and there are no sounds of doors opening or footsteps. None whatsoever. Yeah, we'd soak that Xbox in holy water if we were you.
For more from Ashe, check out Weird Shit Blog and The Book of Word Records. Maxwell can be found on Twitter, his free robot action comic ACK, and the country of Chile.
And be sure to check out 8 Creepy Video Game Urban Legends (That Happen to Be True) and The 7 Most Horrifying Moments from Children's Video Games.
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