Video games have always been a prime source of entertainment, but if you think that video games cannot be a source of mystery…….THINK AGAIN!
Gamers have carved themselves their own independent culture. In this culture, they have their own slang, rules of etiquette and folklore. Everyone loves a good creepy urban legend and gamers are no exception.
Gaming, like all things, have mysteries that have stumped even the best and brightest. Some of these mysteries could just be the developers trolling players, and some are most likely rumors, but others have just never been solved. Here are gaming mysteries that remain unsolved to this day.
The Mount Chiliad Mystery – GTA V
Inside the cable car station at the summit of the mountain is a large map hanging on a wall that appears to be a map of Mount Chiliad. Scattered across the map are various odd symbols, seemingly pointing out the locations of secret objects on Mount Chiliad.
A strange symbol can be seen drawn above Mount Chiliad on the map. The symbol appears to be an eye. This symbol is called the Eye of Providence, also known as the All Seeing Eye, which could be a reference to the Illuminati. The symbol could also be the UFO, either the sunken wreck or the one above mount Chiliad itself. The symbol is similar to the symbols that give clues as to when the character can find the UFO. This tease had players frothing at the mouth, frantically looking for any way to get their hands on a jetpack for the first time since GTA: San Andreas. The mystery remains unsolved, but players are still cracking away at it, hoping to solve the unsolvable…
Super Smash Bros. Melee – The Eye Behind Daisy’s Hair on Her Trophy
This game was a personal favourite of mine and I couldn’t have guessed that there’d be such a mysterious twist in it! Super Smash Bros. Melee added trophies to Nintendo’s premier fighting franchise. These detailed, colorful statues were a joy to collect and show off, but one of them held a dark secret. If players manipulated Daisy’s trophy in the right way they would discover an eye concealed under her hair. This concealed eye has puzzled players since the game’s release. Its inclusion is most likely meant to be a strange joke, but the true meaning behind it may never be known….
GHOSTS OF HALO
The Ghosts of Halo are unidentified AI and/or players that tend to spawn out of nowhere during Multiplayer games, exclusively sighted in Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo: Reach.
Such ghosts tend to behave bizarrely and possess odd features. Among other things, they do not carry gamertags, do not show up on the scoreboard, and move erratically. They can be hostile if provoked, though some have been known to attack actual players for no reason. On some occasions, they are also invulnerable and will not die.
Some believe that the Ghosts of Halo are caused by stress on the game engine due to lots of activity going on as well as severe network lag. But we’ll never know for sure……
Mario Sunshine Mystery Book
The level “Red Coins in a Bottle” in Super Mario Sunshine tosses our favourite little red plumber into a bottle and tasks him with swimming around it in order to collect the 8 red coins. At the bottom of the bottle is a small brick structure. Players who manipulated the camera could see a small book inside, lying on a table. There was no way to get into the tiny castle, and the book, which looked like it could have been part of a scrapped level. Was it? We think it will remain a mystery….
Elder Scrolls 3
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind has an expansive online community where users mod the game to add custom quests, characters, weapons and armor. Legend has it that there is a very creepy and sinister mod to Morrowind that exists that could potentially drive a player insane…..
It all began a couple of years ago, when the mod popped up on the internet and was mistaken for a virus as when you loaded the game with the mod, your game would freeze on the title screen and corrupt all the save game files essentially ruining the game. However, it was soon discovered that if you ran the game in DOSbox, the game would work properly.
When the player starts the game with the mod all the main characters in the game are already dead. Also, if you stay in one spot for too long your health would slowly begin to deplete. If you died from standing still too long a new character would reveal himself. Players took to calling him the assassin. He appeared to be a man except his legs and arms were long and bent like a spider. Players began to notice that if you paid close attention the player could see the assassin around corners or scurrying up the walls, but only for brief moments. Another creepy element added to the game was all the characters left living would come outside at night and just stand there. When a player would attempt to interact with one of the characters they would simply say “Watch the sky.” A new dungeon was also discovered.
Inside the dungeon was what players called the “hall of portraits.” The hall was lined with picture frames and inside these frames were photos from the player’s My Pictures folder. At the end of the hall was a locked door. No one has ever posted proof that they figured out how to open the door, but there are some unbelievable stories of players obsessed with trying to open it, playing the modded game for days straight with very little sleep. Some claim after long hours of playing they began to hallucinate seeing the assassin in real life quickly crawling on their bedroom ceilings or down their hallways as they took a bathroom break from the game. As fantastic as this story sounds, the creepiest part is that this mod does in fact seem to exist, but download it at your own risk…..
Earthbound Final Boss
In order to defeat the powerful alien Giygas, the main characters travel back in time where Giygas will be “weaker.” What is creepy is that when they travel back in time to fight the weaker Giygas, he looks remarkably like a fetus.
The game’s creator has all but come out and said the final boss battle is an abortion. He has, however, admitted that the ending of Earthbound was inspired by a movie he accidentally saw as a child and was traumatized by called The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty….
Herobrine
Ahhh…minecraft…a brilliant yet simple game, where all you have to do is break stuff and make stuff. However, some players claim that something sinister is happening behind the scenes…..
Some players claim to have found mysterious structures appearing on their maps. Others even claim to have seen the source of the structures, a mysterious, white-eyed version of the game’s protagonist. Theories regarding the existence of Herobrine range from the logical, he is a glitch, to the extraordinary, that Herobrine is the ghostly manifestation of the game creator’s deceased brother. Mojang, the team behind Minecraft, do not do much to discredit the legend of Herobrine as in many of the games updates they list that one of the improvements made is the removal of Herobrine.
Killswitch
Killswitch is a game that was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989. Only limited copies of the game were produced (between 5,000 to 10,000 copies) and it was very popular among Soviet gamers. You had to choose between two characters, a girl or an invisible demon. The goal of the game was to navigate through an abandoned coal mine while battling demons and coal monsters. As it was hard to navigate the game with an invisible character people choose to complete the game with the girl character. Unfortunately, No one ever completed the game with the demon, because upon beating the game all trace of it would be erased from your hard drive!
Lavender Town Syndrome
This is one that I’ve heard of when I was little, and I always thought it was fake….well not anymore….
We’ve all played the pokemon games, and pokemon red and green were my personal favourites, but as awesome as the game was, it held a dark horrible mystery hidden from the players….
The game was first released in Japan and it supposedly correlated with a huge spike in suicides and illness in children ranging in age from 7 to 12. The children did not fall ill or commit suicide until reaching Lavender Town in the popular game. The game’s score was said to be the source of the sinister ailments in children. The piercing tones of the music caused headaches, nausea and eventually suicidal tendencies in young children. The music in the level was changed before the game was shipped overseas. The below clip is taken from the original Japanese version of the game….
Berzerk
Berzerk is considered to be one of the greatest games of the arcade-era of gaming. In the game you battle an onslaught of robots. It also has one of gaming’s most iconic boss battles in Evil Otto, which was a simple smiley face. Berzerk also holds the macabre honor of being the first video game linked to the death of a person. The game would then go on to kill again a year later.
Jeff Dailey was the first person to die after playing Berzerk in 1981. Then again in 1982, a healthy 18 year old named Peter Burkowski was playing Berzerk. Within 15 minutes he was placing his initials in to the game for getting a high score. Burkowski took a few steps away from the game and then collapsed dead. The causes of death in both cases were ruled as a heart attack.
Polybius
Believe me when I say that I saved the best for last!
The legend of Polybius is likely the oldest gaming myth to exist and it’s never been confirmed till date….Polybius was an arcade game that mysteriously appeared in an arcade in Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s. The cabinet was completely black except for the green joysticks and the logo at the top of the machine. The game combined elements of classic shooters like Tempest, mazes like in Pac-Man and spatial puzzles. When played, it supposedly caused all sorts of health problems including amnesia, blackouts, nausea, seizures, headaches, night terrors and, in some cases, players were reported to commit suicide not long after playing. It is also said that men dressed in all black would often be seen messing with the game leading some to speculate that the device was not a video game but a government experiment. Whether or not this insidious arcade game ever actually existed is not known….
What do you think? Any creepy gaming mysteries we missed out on? Do let us know in the comments below!
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