Creepy - Game Over

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Nostalgia can be complicated...***Written by NickTBA***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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I'm not normally in the group, but we'll be just for this Q&A. Also this week, the 50-foot-Aunt story read by Atticus Jackson, we'll wrap up on Wednesday. After that, there'll be a break in the free content for the rest of the week, and we'll start up with a new story the week after that. We're putting all we can into the show to help people through these confusing times. I really do hope you've been enjoying it, and that we can do our part to make things feel a little less crazy and a little more creepy. Now, this is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world.

Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to disqualification. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. ...presents Game Over Written by Nick TBA When my mom passed away, I was the sole one responsible for cleaning up her house. I don't have any siblings and didn't know my dad.

As far as I knew, he was dead. So it fell on me to handle her affairs. I'm not the most organized person, so I have to say. It was a pretty intimidating task. I started with the usual stuff, getting her affairs in order, taking care of funeral arrangements, everything you have to do up until the body's buried. After that, it was just a matter going through all our stuff, piece by piece. To say my mom was something of a hoarder would be an understatement.

Okay, so she was hardly reality TV worthy, but she hung on to a lot of junk. It was overwhelming going through everything, but I won't lie. It felt nice. Each little trinket was a memory. Even the tattered doily she saved brought back warm feelings of my childhood Halleons. When she would lay it out, on the end table where we kept the candy bucket. I spent a few days going through all of it.

She had a shed in her backyard, the sizable thing where she kept most of her knick-knacks. It was cold in that shed, holes in the side of it letting in freezing winds. I wore my thick jacket and worked into the night. Just me and the twin sounds of wind and shuffling boxes. Before long, I let my mind wander to the loneliness of my task. the decreasing light outside.

I hadn't even realized it was getting so dark. And I kind of freaked myself out thinking about the wind whistling through the holes in the walls. I was more drained than I realized. There were plenty of boxes still to sort out, but only one left on the ground. Determined to finish this one and then enjoy my night. I lifted the lid and was pleasantly surprised. Inside was my own Nintendo and a stack of games. Now I'm hardly a gamer.

I have a current console, and I use it for one series that my friends and I play regularly, but that's about it. As a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, but I remember my mom splurging one Christmas and getting it for me. I only ever owned a few games, but I played the hell out of them. I remember my day's bunny hopping and the adventure of Link. I was really confused why they changed the gameplay for Legend. Zelda. A friend had to tell me that adventure of Link actually came second, which blew my mind. Link was the main character. Why wouldn't they title the first game after him? I had five, and I remember them all too well. The warm feeling of sitting in front of our TV

coming back to me as I pulled them out of the box and slid them out of their sleeves. That satisfying sound of plastic scraping against plastic, bringing a smile to my face. Final Fantasy. I spent hours trying to perfect the right party. Adventure Island, which I always replay, just used a skateboard. Ninja Turtles, which I beat as every character. There were five that I remembered so visibly, so I was surprised when I pulled out a sixth game. The cartridge was black instead of the usual gray,

which seemed like it should have sparked my memory right then and there, but it didn't. It didn't help. The title on top of the cover had been worn away, leaving me with just the art. As I stared at the image of a sinister figure clutching a tombstone as he rose from an open grave, it came back to me. I used to play this game every day. I'd enjoyed it because it was kind of dark. It felt like a forbidden thing that I shouldn't have been allowed to play. The whole thing took place at night, and I remember having to explore a dark castle to kill a demon.

Thinking about it, I couldn't recall exactly what made it so dark, because it wasn't like Final Fantasy didn't have skeletons and monsters. That really annoyed me. It's like trying to remember someone's name that you see every day, but it stuck in the back of your head. For something that I played all the time, it was unacceptable that I couldn't remember more than first entering that imposing castle, let alone the title of it. Right then, I decided I need to do that.

to try it out again. I wanted to relive those glory days, find out what I'd forgotten. In my head that castle was an imposing sight. Fully realized and beautiful graphics. Part of me just wanted to see how much of my memory was tainted by rose-collar glasses. There were two old CRT TVs in the shed, but only the small black one worked. I set it down on a bar stool, plugged into an extension cord that ran along the floor at the only power outlet in the shed.

I got the Nintendo hooked up too. I attached the AV cables to the TV, the controller to the console. Everything powered on just fine. I stared at the fuzzy penguins on the TV. A little joke my mom and I had. Let the static look like a bunch of jumbled up fuzzy penguins. I pressed a channel button

until I switched over to Channel 3 and was met with a black screen. I was feeling kind of excited as I pulled a cartridge from its sleeve. They reminded me a Christmas morning, getting a new game each year. My mom was always so happy watching me unwrap it. She always knew what I wanted because she'd bring home old issues and Nintendo Power from the houses she cleaned. And I tell her stories about all the cool games I saw.

Of course, I was always behind the times on the cool new games. But I didn't care because I loved what I had. no matter if everyone else had already played them. The lid popped up with a satisfying click. The spring squeaking ever so slightly. The mystery cartridge slid in, plastic scraping the sides of the machine, chipset clicking in. I pressed down, pushing the game into position, and hit the reset button.

Nothing happened. I was still staring at a black screen. Panic rushed through me, not a reel or earned. panic, but panic all the same. The thought that I might not get to play this game, after forever go without being able to remember the title, filled me with existential

dread. It's hard to let stuff like that go without it nagging at you forever, or at least for an extremely annoying day. I breathed and told myself it would work, pulling out the cartridge and doing the same thing every kid with the Nintendo

was all too familiar with. I blew into it. It looks like you're trying to play it like a harmonica, but it gets a job done. Lo and behold, I popped it back in, pressed the reset button, and the screen flashed as a game booted to the title screen. But it was just an image of that imposing castle. How could a game not include its title on the title screen? It didn't make any sense. There's only one option on the main screen.

Press start, so I pressed and was made. with an ominous beep. Music began, a bass-filled chip tune like an operatic orchestra. I'd never heard anything like it. I didn't even think it was possible to make something that wasn't high-pitched on an 8-bit system. The screen faded out with a pixelated wash of colors. There were no text boxes explaining my quest.

I was just dumped right into a forest. My character looked like an average person, just weren't playing. pants in a shirt. It looked nothing like the typical fantasy heroes, knights in armor or Belmont's carrying whips. I hit the right arrow and my character started walking while I checked out what my buttons could do. A jumped, but B did nothing.

My character didn't seem to have an attack. I didn't remember jumping on enemies to kill them, but then again, I didn't remember much of the game at all. There was a white square at the top of the first. screen that sat empty. For an NES game, the forest was creepy as hell. It started with a low layer of fog across the ground, an impressive effect for the time it was made. Batsflopped toward my character and he ducked underneath them. As further any got, the worst the forest became. Skulls hung from trees, candles in their eye sockets burning away, headless skeletons burst out of the ground.

I hit jump and my character landed on a skeleton. managed only to hurt himself. That obviously wasn't how I killed things. I hopped over the rest and continued along the path. I was expecting a boss, but the character reached the edge of the screen and it went black and the music stopped. Pretty anticlimactic, but I was in for a treat. This was what I remembered. The music came back, low and moaning like Gregorian chanting.

As my character approached the massive castle featured, on the title screen. The drawbridge lowered as my character approached. I felt uneasy stepping across the wooden bridge. The music stopped, unsettling me as all I could hear was the wind creaking through the holes in the shed and the trees overhead whipping the roof. The screen changed his character to step past the gate, and then he was inside the castle, greeted by a terrifying digital screech of pain.

The noise almost made me stop playing. The high pitch of once grating and frightening at the same time. It felt real, like the developers had digitized and the actual recorded scream. But more than that, I could feel the pain behind it. I had pressed the right arrow button and continued trudging on. The castle was nicely lit, almost welcoming if it hadn't been for that scream. There were no enemies at all. The level continued scrolling until I had to be.

I hit a staircase, and the game took control and sent my character down the steps. The screen transitioned out into a courtyard full of tombstones. It was a veritable graveyard, with a spooky tree that reminded me of this spindle-limbed oak in my mom's backyard. A set of tombstones ripped themselves up from the earth and stacked together into a walking sepulchre. The music roared with a tune fitting for a boss. The walking tombstone monsters spewed bones out at my character,

which had a startlingly hard pattern to avoid. I could already tell that this was one of those games that didn't go easy on the player. I hope maybe it was just one of those obnoxiously difficult first bosses because I didn't really feel like spending all night in the shed. It didn't take me long to get into the swing of things, though. In fact, it felt like muscle memory and action as I definitely dodged out the bones without taking a single hit to my character. When the first barrage was finished, I noticed the flashing bone left behind on the ground and walked my player over to it.

Walla? I had my first weapon. A bone icon neatly filling the white box at the top of the screen. I pressed B and launched a bone in a downward arc. It smacked the tombstone boss and its body flashed bright white for a moment, satisfyingly marking a successful hit. Each cellvo gave me a single bone to hurl at the box. I missed once when the things started flashing red and changing its attack pattern, adding it jumped into its repertoire. But otherwise, it was a perfect run and the boss finally crumbled before my character.

A grave was left unearthed in the ground. Certainly they wanted me to go inside, but my instincts told me to stay put. Because it would hop into an open grave. But the game didn't give me a choice, because it took control of my character again and he walked over, jumping right into the hole. The screen turned black and level two appeared on the screen. My character dropped down into a dark cave. Right away, I noticed that something was very off.

I was in a dungeon. Not all that different from the ones I'd seen before, but the decorations were very advanced and far more detailed than what I thought possible. Chains lined the walls, torture instruments too. I had to jump onto a pillar and use it as a little. a platform to reach a higher floor. I couldn't shake how dark this fell for an NES game.

Robed man carrying whips charged at my characters. I had to duck behind their attacks, then jump over their heads to continue. My character barged through a door and I continued on as normal. The candles lighting the dungeon walls grew dimmer with each passing step. There were dark splotches of purple on the walls that I could barely make out, which I took to be an artistic choice that had dead. the otherwise blue tones of the dungeon. Then everything faded to black except my character.

I waited, jumping in place like I usually did whenever I had to wait for a game to continue. The boss appeared faintly at first, blinking into existence. Then he flashed onto the screen, fully visible and horrific. Despite the pixel art, I could still tell this giant man was supposed to be an executioner. He was covered in blood stains and wore a black hood. A tremendous axe was in his hands, dripping with little red pixels. The background came back on screen, and my eyes went wide. Even by today's video game standards, this wasn't tame.

There were severed heads and viscera everywhere. Gutted bodies hanging up on chains. One person was still alive. His legs missing. his torso disembowled, and yet I saw his sprite screaming and clawing towards the screen as if begging for me to help him. The executioner laughed. I was in a bit of a daze and took some hits from the boss, but I got his pattern down quickly.

I had to run forward whenever he jumped and slammed his axe down to get underneath the weapon. Just like the tombstone boss, each impact of the axe would create a flashing stone pickup on screen that I could throw at the executioner. It only took six shots to kill him. And the whirlwind attack, he added, when he was close to death, was dodged something to the ducking. My character walked off screen. The text flashing again on a black background telling me I was on level three. It looked like I was still in the dungeon, but things had gone from bad to worse.

I realized that those purple blotches that I thought were shadow bricks were actually bloodstains. The torture devices were filled with so. squirming people. Their digitized voices begging for release. The enemies look like more of the same torturers but dressed in leather armor instead of

robes. However, I soon realized that their outfits were scandalously made of straps. And they appeared to have their genitals exposed as well as they could by 8-bit graphics. Whenever one of the enemies approached me,

if there was a torture victim between him and character he'd whip the victim. Chumps of flesh would break off in showers of blood. The little pixels representing their skin landed on the ground. Exposed bone would be left behind from their flint's skin. I accidentally hit B when I met to jump, taking a hit from a guard as you ran into me. And I realized the weapon square was filled by a bone icon.

The torture victim my character had been standing in front of, had a hole in their leg. a hole in their leg where their fumeer used to be. I almost felt disgusted when I realized I'd been the one to rip it out. I kept going, throwing the bone at one point, just wanting to get it out of my character's hand. I needed to finish this level. I needed to see how far this game went. I couldn't imagine it getting much worse, and yet, I was starting to remember bits and pieces

here and there. The dungeons seemed familiar. and I even thought maybe I remembered the torture victims, but my young mind hadn't processed what was really going on or how terrible it was. What I felt most alarming was the thought that my mom would have allowed me to play such a game. It took me longer than it should have to make it out of the dungeon. I was distracted by the sprites actively being tortured in the background art, being stretched out on wheels or burned alive or shoved into iron maidens.

But I got through it all and reached the end of love. Level 3. Grateful that there wasn't a boss waiting for me. What was there was so much worse. Level 4 started with the pair of sprites. Two flesh-tone characters I took to be humans, but one was massive. The giant one was thrusting into the smaller character. I had wrenched and disgust as a big character stepped away from the small one, leaving a pile

of gore. It laughed and ran away. And I finally had enough. I turned the machine off angrily. It was too much for me. It went beyond the realm of a video game and into pure tastelessness. I flipped a light switch and went to the house. I needed to calm down a little bit.

My adrenaline was pumping. I felt like a little kid seeing something completely forbidden. It's probably how I felt when I actually had been a kid playing that garland. garbage game. After having a drink, I got online and started doing a search. I tried maybe three dozen permutations of search terms. Anything I could think of to describe the game or the cover art. I wanted to find out what it was called once and for all, but nothing came up. I'd found stuff this way before, but no matter how many details I gave, nothing came up that matched. I get Castlevania or games like that. Articles about games banned for violence and sex,

but nothing similar to what I'd just played. It was like the game didn't exist. They caught me thinking that I had something special on my hands. Maybe it was greed. But if this game was one of a kind, some ultra rare cartridge that next to no one knew about, I could make some decent money to help pay for all my mom's expenses. I saw a picture of us together on our mantle and smiled at it.

I never realized how odd it seemed that the corner of the picture looked like it was missing someone. In our past, maybe. And I went back to the shed to treat the game. I stepped inside and flipped the lights on. The TV came on instantly. Weirdly enough, the NES did too, without me touching anything. The game booted to the start screen. I stepped over to turn the machine off, but before I could touch the control,

there was the same ominous beep I'd heard when pressing the start button. And the game began. I thought that maybe it was playing a demo, like how a lot of those older games used to do. But with that, the theory was that the character on the screen wasn't moving. He just stood there in his yellow shirt and blue pants right where I'd left him. Curiosity forced my hand and I picked up the controller, as I expected. This level got even worse. The torture became sexual in nature, sprites in the barrackle forcing themselves on others and masses of pixelated flesh.

The enemies appeared to be nude women bound in bondage gear. Their limbs twisted so that all they could do was walk towards me and make anguished moaning noises beneath their masks. About halfway through the level, I was given a whip and used it to attack the bondage woman. It had the opposite effect in what I expected. The enemies squirmed and writhed when they were attacked by the whip, and just kept coming, even as their sprites were reddened with blood. I jumped and dodged the rest of the way, trying to ignore what I saw in the background and just focusing on reaching the end.

The boss awaited me, the same big man from the beginning of the level. He was fast and constantly laughing every time he charged my character. He'd lash out with a whip occasionally just to throw me off. I dodged, but no weapon ever appeared even after a minute of this. The more I stared, the more I noticed my character. It was odd how unremarkably was for video game character. Brown hair, yellow t-shirt, blue pants. I looked down.

It was actually exactly what I was wearing. In my distraction, I got ran by the boss. But this wasn't a normal encounter. No mind my character would flash, bounce back, then be controllable again. This time, when he touched me, the boss grabbed me and pushed me over. I lunged forward and turned off the console just in time to avoid the image on screen. I breathed a sigh, utterly traumatized. Then the game came back.

I'd been staring at a black screen. And now my character was standing in there like nothing happened, being laughed at. The boss music was coming through the TV's tiny speakers. I leaned forward and turned off the TV. The button clicked beneath my finger and the picture faded away. I couldn't believe my eyes, but the TV turned back on too. It had to be something up with a wiring, I told myself. There was no other explanation.

This time I had a weapon in my head. hands. I noticed my health had a sliver left. Acting quickly, I pounded the B button, throwing daggers at the boss until I died. It was over, and the game moved on to the next level. But I had had enough. I hit the power button on the console, but the light remained on, no matter how many times I pressed it. I did the same to the TV, but it wouldn't turn off. I tried unplugging them both, but they stayed on. By this point, I was breathing heavily and completely freaked out. I pulled the AV cables out of the TV, hoping that would stop it. Certainly there was no way for a console to display its image on the TV if there was no cable connected. No such logic there.

I got up and switched off the power to the shed. The lights turned off, and for a moment I felt a rush of relief. But I saw the glow of the screen out of the corner of my eye and knew it was still on. Angry now I popped open the lid and pressed on on the cartridge, fully willing to just rip the thing out. But the mechanism wouldn't release. It was completely stuck. That was fine.

I could just leave it on and let it sit. I didn't have to play. Except my character started moving even though I wasn't touching anything. I watched him travel through a short dungeon corridor, expecting horrible things. Surprisingly, my character reached the end where the bright light was shining. He stepped through and was back outside. Maybe it was a stupid idea. But I picked up the controller.

I wanted to see what was coming next. They looked like the start of the game, but I assumed it was a new area. I didn't walk far before I approached a house. Not a medieval house, but just an average, modern, suburban home. I grew up in a house like that. A house like my mom's. In fact, I was at that house right now. I walked to the door and went inside.

It wasn't just like my mom's house. It was her house. The walls were painted the same. The furniture was the same. I swear there was a picture on the mail that even looked like the two of us together. There were no enemies as I explored the living room. I noticed toys scattered on the floor, trucks, and blocks. The TV was on playing fuzzy penguins.

The toys moved as I walked through them, kicking them out of the way. As I approached the TV a dark shadow on the wall behind it, twisted, moved until it turned to the shape of a dark figure with curved horns and sharp claws. The shape skittered along the wall, then jumped out towards me. crushing the toys on the ground. I ran, fearing for my life. It was artificial, but I felt like I was in real danger. The screen changed and I entered a bedroom.

It was a child's bedroom. Walls papered with dinosaurs. More toys scattered around the ground. One toy in particular stood out. A teddy bear with its head ripped off. I looked over my shoulder at the open cardboard box of stuffed animals I'd sorted through earlier that evening. My ripped apart bear sat just on the edge, barely in my view.

I shook and looked back at the TV. As I approached the virtual bear, the toy lifted off the ground. The body first, then the head. The head twirled around in the air for a moment and then reattached itself. A moment later, the bear grew in size, or maybe I shrunk. The shadow creature's claws burst out of its hands, horns ripping through the top of its head. It chased me back the way I'd come. The screen transitioned, not to the living room this time, but to a hallway.

I found myself walking towards an open doorway. Outside a female spread was crouched down and crying, her face and her hands. I thought this was odd after everything else I'd seen. In fact, the whole thing didn't make sense. but at the time I wasn't really thinking about it I just braced myself and entered the room It was a bedroom Darkened safe for a bolt of lightning coming from outside the window

The flash of lightning illuminating the shadow figure sitting sullenly on the bat The room returned to darkness And another boat filled it with lasting light This time the shadow did the shape of a man Completely normal looking He looked up at my character who was looking more and more like me by the second. Even composed as simple pixels, I could tell the boss was glaring at me. He threw down a glass bottle which broke, and then stood.

I tried to move, but my spray was frozen in place. Just like I was when I watched the boss approach. I was definitely smaller than before and shrinking still, becoming no taller than a child. I watched as the boss removed a belt from his pants and held it tightly in his fists like a whip. He approached me, preparing to reach for the front of his pants. I wasn't sure if it was to hold them up or pull them down. Still frozen, unable to think, unable to breathe. I watched in horror as the boss grabbed me and the screen faded to black.

A tear ran down my cheek as I listened to the sound effects playing in the background. The crack of a belt. A child crying. The darkness faded. And I realized I had control again. The boss was sitting on the back facing away from me. I had a knife in my hand. I took a step forward, clenched my teeth,

pressed the B button as hard as I could. Relishing it as the knife flew into the boss's back and killed him in one hit. He fell on the ground, blood spilling across the floor. The screen faded to black and credits began to roll. Within moments, the background changed to the cemetery from the beginning of the game. Someone was digging. It was the crying woman. She was shoveling dirt out of an unmarked grave as the boss lay dead beside it.

Above them, the cricketry loomed dominously. A crow nestled in it. I tried to make sense of the words on screen, but the names were called. garbled nonsense. I didn't care about solving this mystery anymore. My trembling hand reached for the power button on the console. This time the thing turned off and stayed off. I pulled the cartridge out as quickly as I could,

putting it in its sleeve and shoving it away in the nearest box I could find. I packed the NES in with my other games and left the shed with the box in my hands. I couldn't get away from that shed fast enough. As I stepped outside, walking towards a house and the light from the back porch, I stopped by the old spindly oak tree, dead and missing all its leaves. I stared at the ground by its base, watching and waiting, as if I expected something to happen. I closed my eyes, my whole body shivering, and then ran into the house.

I still never learned the name of that game. I stopped looking after that night. I never opened the box. I put it in again. Just donated the whole thing. Playing that game reminded me that there were some memories better left buried. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. at Creepypod on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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