Urban Legends of every era always
seem to reflect whatever teenagers are doing at the time: Forty years ago, they
told stories about serial killers attacking kids making out in cars and
escaped criminals hiding in someone’s backseat, because they didn't have
jetpacks yet. Today, most young people seem to spend their time sitting or
standing in front of video game screens, so it makes sense that we should get
legends like ...
#5. The Girl Is an Atomic Bomb - Braid
On the surface, the
critically acclaimed indie hit Braid is a straightforward platformer
like so many 8- and 16-bit era games. You play Tim, a dude who can reverse time
and uses his powers to find a missing princess, Mario-style. But the simplistic
gameplay is deceptive; the symbolic and ambiguous ending hints at a larger,
stranger story (SPOILER: The "princess" you're trying to rescue isn't
exactly happy to see you). And beyond that, Braid has a creepy
secret that you couldn't
possibly find unless you're psychic. Or someone just tells you about
it. Whichever.
Hidden throughout the game's five worlds are seven
secret stars. The game doesn't give you any acknowledgment that they're even
there -- no achievements, no hints, no clues, nothing. You can get through the
whole game without even knowing they exist, and even if you know what you're
after, they're exceptionally difficult to find and obtain. One star requires
waiting in a screen for two hours just to get to it and another can’t be
acquired if you’ve already completed the second world.
So what happens after you gather the seven stars? Nothing, at first. If you
return to the game's final level, however, there's a slight difference. As we mentioned, the
level is pretty trippy to begin with: At first it looks like you're helping the
princess escape from a bad guy, but then it turns out you're watching the
situation in reverse and she's actually escaping from you. But play
it after you have the hidden stars, and the level is subtly changed in such a
way that you can actually catch up to the princess and touch her ... at which
point she begins flashing freakishly and you hear the sound of a nuclear bomb
detonating.
So that game with cute enemies, pretty environments and an innocent quest to
rescue a princess is apparently all a metaphor for the creation of the atomic
bomb: or, more specifically, how its creators possibly wished they
could turn back time and undo all the damage. Of course, that's so far removed
from this colorful run-and-jump game that it really proves how out-there some
of these conspiracy nuts are. Oh, wait, did we mention that the game's epilogue
features a quote from Kenneth Bainbridge, the head of the Trinity atomic bomb
tests?
""Now we are all sons-of-bitches" after the detoation of the first atomic bomb.
#4. Hidden Dungeons and Possessed Children? yes in World of Warcraft
In some ways, the virtual world of an MMORPG is
just like the real world; where the real world has creepy abandoned hospitals
and prisons that no one would dare spend the night in, games like World
of Warcraft have hidden areas that were closed off and abandoned by
game makers but still exist if you know how to sneak in. And they're equally
creepy.
For example take the unused dungeon just outside a game area called Karazhan
(sometimes referred to by players to as "Lower Karazhan"). It's a
dungeon that was apparently scrapped partway through development, and in front
of the entrance is an impassable gate. But just as with that old abandoned mine
outside of town, you can sneak in (in this case, you can get around the gate by
way of various glitches. And inside, you find this:
Among the typical WoW dungeon
maze of tunnels, you find The Upside-Down Sinners. It's exactly what it
sounds like: an underwater room chock full of handless,
eyeless people, chained upside-down and left to drown.
Popular speculation is that Blizzard backed down
from using the dungeon because they were afraid that it might bump the game's
rating to M, but there's no real way to know.
But that's not all the creepiness WoW has to offer. The first
town you encounter after the human starting area is a place called Goldshire,
and it has its own dark secret.
A house on the edge of Crystal Lake, which is just
east of town, is normally empty. At 7 a.m. on the game's server clock, however,
you can sometimes catch six little kids in the room, standing in a strange
formation.
Some players have heard strange
noises, like banshee screams or the voice of C'Thun, a former high-end
boss ripped straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos, saying, “You will die.” You
can even follow them from Stormwind City, the human capital, all the way to the
house, and they never break their cute little pentagram formation the whole
way.
Creepiest of all, though, is the music that plays
when you enter the room.
It's
completely custom music, found nowhere else in the game, and if there's one
thing Blizzard likes even more than re-using art, it's re-using music. (If you
don't believe us, go to any inn in the game.) That means it wasn't some lone
weirdo who programmed these kids' behavior. They had to get the music
department to construct an all-new piece to go along with them.
#3. GLaDOS Bound and Gagged - Portal
There are only two characters in Portal --
the one you control and a deranged A.I. called GLaDOS. You spend the entire
game jumping through GLaDOS' hoops, solving the teleportation-based puzzles she
leaves for you (on the promise of cake) and slowly piecing together that
something's fucked up here.
Finally, at the end of the game, you meet the real GLaDOS, a huge, robotic entity. You fight her and you win and everything's great (albeit in an "... or is it?" sort of way).
But have you ever taken a close look at GLaDOS?
At first she looks like a mess of machinery and
cables, but if you look closely, she actually resembles a human figure hanging
upside-down. That's not a coincidence: If you play through the game with the
commentary track on, Jeremy Bennett, the game's art director, says, "Eventually,
we settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling
out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS' raw power and her
feminity."
Originally, according to Bennett, she resembled an
upside-down version of Botticelli's "Rise of Venus":
But her final model doesn't
really look like that at all. The posture is all wrong. In fact, the people at
game-ism.com think she looks more like a woman who has been bound
and gagged:
So what does that mean? According
to the folks at that site, all GLaDOS wanted was to be free (a goal
you help her achieve when you kill her). As for how she got like that in the
first place, sometimes it’s better not to know.
#2. The Shadow People of Hell Valley - Super Mario Galaxy 2
In a game like Mario, you're usually
too focused on not falling off the crumbling catwalk into the lava below to
ever really stop and look around. Especially in Mario Galaxy, where
you are zipped across space from one world to the next, the vastness of the
game world just whipping by you in a blur.
But if you ever do get the chance to stop and stare
into the distance, you'll find some extremely creepy stuff. Specifically, in
one level of Super Mario Galaxy 2, if you switch to
first-person view and look in a certain direction, you can see shadowy figures
standing at the edge of the galaxy.
Anywhere you go on that level, if you look up and
to the left, they'll always be there. You can't come any closer. You never meet
those "people," and nobody in the game ever mentions them.
So this is basically a video game
version of the Slender Man urban legend. Fans have already started seeing
them in other levels, writing fan fiction stories about them and
speculating on what they could be: Local villagers (that is to say,
aliens) watching Mario from afar? Those weird-looking giants from Legend
of Zelda: Majora's Mask?
But couldn't they just be, we
don't know, trees or something? Well, somebody got curious and started
sifting through the actual files of the game. And this is where things get
really messed up.
Turns out the sky pattern for
that area is called "BeyondHellValley." "Hell Valley" isn't
the name of that level, or any level in Mario Galaxy. It
doesn't even sound like something you'd find in a Mario game. As for the shapes
themselves? They're called "HellValleySkyTree." Ah, see! They're just
trees. Now let's pull out the image file itself ...
#1. Luigi Is Dead and Daisy Is Deformed - Mario Universe
So Mario games are full of creepy
stuff apparently. Knowing that, we're not so shocked to find out that Mario
fans are always looking for hidden conspiracies in those games. We are,
however, a little disturbed by what they've actually found.
Take Luigi's Mansion for GameCube, which is about Mario's
taller, greener brother hunting ghosts in an old mansion. According to an
urban legend that keeps popping up in the always-reliable gaming
message boards, if you go to a certain room, stand in a specific spot and wait
for lightning to strike, you can see what looks like Luigi’s shadow hanging
from the ceiling As if he had just committed suicide.
But that's ridiculous, of course. We'll even go
ahead and disprove this rumor by taking a look at that part of Luigi's
Mansion and ...
That does look remarkably like
someone's shadow hanging from the ceiling, in a game about haunted
mansions and ghosts.
There's some debates about
what it actually is: Some say it’s a glitch while others claim the
game was originally meant to be much darker and this is one of the
many leftover from the beta version ... but they're all ignoring the
simplest answer: Luigi has been a ghost all along.
And then there's Luigi's
girlfriend, Princess Daisy, possibly the most fucked-up character in Mario
history. If you don't believe us, do a YouTube search for “Hi, I’m Daisy!” Apparently,
when they included her in Mario Kart: Double Dash for
GameCube, they only gave her a single spoken phrase ("Hi, I'm
Daisy!"), causing her to repeat the same thing over and over and over like
a murderous psychopath.
But in case you don't think that's disturbing enough, how about the fact that she has a third eye in the back of her head? If you win Daisy's trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee, go to the trophy gallery and zoom in until the camera clips underneath her hair. You can see something that clearly should not be there.
This could be a modeling error, but what's odd is that it doesn't look exactly
like Daisy's regular eyes: It's all misshapen and gross-looking.
This is so well-known that Daisy's third eye was later incorporated into her
character in M.U.G.E.N., a freeware fighting game that takes random
characters from different franchises. Oh, and it shoots lasers.
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