Urban legends, modern counterparts of ancient myths, have accompanied mankind for years. Those who like to be scared look for dark stories with interest, which they then pass on to themselves. As they pass from mouth to mouth, these stories change, the details blur and be replaced by other details. After all, it's hard to know how true a story is or how far it is made up. But there is no shortage of researchers who spend time researching city myths, sometimes succeeding and proving that the terrifying passes that few believed did actually take place. There are also many secrets in the computer games industry, some very dark, others fascinating. Some are probably imaginary, others are confirmed by researchers as 100% true. In a series of articles, I would like to present to you the most interesting of them. In most cases, without asking how much truth and how much falsehood there is, leaving the decision of whether to believe them to each reader individually.
The pale moon will show you the way
In the 1980s, when the Internet was not yet widespread, the distribution of computer games was completely different. Many fans of electronic gameplay then organized meetings with similar enthusiasts, during which they exchanged simple productions that could be stored on single floppy disks. Amateur programmers also used such "exchange points" to release their own titles into the world. Sometimes hand-to-hand games could spread across the continent like today's viral movies.
One of the games "distributed" in this way was Pale Luna, a part of the then-dying genre of text adventure games, which was wandered among players living in the San Francisco Bay. It was a very poor title, and it was also full of mistakes. When the player started playing, he was greeted by a black screen with the following text:
You are in a dark room. The moon is shining through the window. In the corner, there is GOLD, ROPE, and SHOVEL. There is a DOOR in the ENTRANCE. Give the command.
The game only accepted five simple commands: Pick up a shovel, Pick up gold, Pick up a rope, Open the door, and Go east. The player quickly left the room to be greeted by the following text:
Collect your reward. The pale moon smiles at you. You are in the woods. There are paths to the NORTH, EAST, and WEST. Give the command.
From this point on, the game became extremely irritating and repetitive. The player had to choose one correct path each time, and then he was greeted again by the same screen. Choosing the wrong direction completely crashed the computer, and the game only responded to three commands related to the use of items. When attempting to use gold, she answered Not here, an attempt to use a shovel was endorsed with the phrase Not now, and the rope was not allowed to be used, as you allegedly already used it.
The poor mechanics and the eternal crashes of the game drove most players furious and ended up throwing a Pale Luna disk into the corner. But there will always be someone with too much free time and the patience of a Tibetan monk. Michael Nevins, a young man, decided to check if Pale Luna was hiding something more. For five hours, by trial and error, he made his way through successive screens, and finally, after countless reboots, he saw a different text:
The pale moon smiles broadly. There are no more paths. The pale moon smiles broadly. The ground is soft. The pale moon smiles broadly. It's here. Give the command.
Over the next hour of typing in different phrases, Nevins finally came across the combinations of commands he had to give: Dig a hole, Drop-in gold, Bury a hole. This made the last text appear on the screen:
Congratulations.
—— 40.24248 ——
—— -121.4434 ——
After thinking about it, Michael concluded that the numbers given by the game were actually coordinates. He checked them and found that they led to a point in the woods of the surrounding park. Armed with a map, a compass, and a shovel, he decided to bring the mystery of Pale Luna to the very end. Breaking through the forest, he noticed with some fascination how his next steps corresponded with the paths chosen in the game. Eventually, he reached his destination, where he saw a pile of dirt. With increasing excitement he began to dig a hole in the ground, expecting at any moment to find some eccentric treasure left by the creator of the game. Instead, he found the head of a girl with blonde hair in a state of severe decay.
Frightened, Nevins quickly informed the police of the find. The girl was identified as 11-year-old Karen Paulsen, who had been reported missing a year and a half earlier in San Diego. Despite strenuous efforts to locate the author of Pale Luna, the semi-legal nature of the game swap meetings led to many dead ends. Today, collectors are willing to pay up to six figures for an authentic copy of the game, but this one remains almost impossible to get.
The rest of the girl's body has never been found.
Self-canceling game
In 1989, a small company Karvina Corporation released a title that could be called the precursor to survival horrors such as Silent Hill, entitled Killswitch. The game allowed players to assume the role of one of the two playable characters - a woman incapable of defending, occasionally randomly changing the size of a Porto woman, or an invisible, combat-capable demon Ghast. The latter was invisible not only to opponents, but also to the player, which made it extremely difficult to control and, consequently, users almost always chose Porto. The woman wandered through a mysterious mine, discovering the dark history of the place where she had worked before and where the directors, dissatisfied with the efficiency, sent prods torturing the employees to make them work more intensively. Human suffering unleashed ancient demons that took over the mining machines and began to murder everyone around. Porto tried to obtain evidence of what happened in the mine and then escape with them to the surface.
The game was extremely difficult and contained several puzzles that, despite many attempts, no one was able to complete. A mysterious member of the community gathered around the game, hiding under the pseudonym Porto881, came to the rescue, revealing solutions to extremely difficult puzzles several times. Thanks to his help, many players brought the title to the very end ... and after seeing the ending, they would say goodbye to Killswitch forever.
The game was designed in such a way that it could not be copied in any way, and after reaching the end of the adventure, it permanently and irreversibly deletes itself from the owner's hard drive. As the creators only created five thousand copies of their production, the number of Killswitchy in existence around the world began to drop drastically very quickly. This caused a lot of confusion among players, disappointed that they cannot learn all the secrets of the game, including, in particular, Ghast's storyline. When asked about this, Karvina issued a statement in 1990:
Killswitch is designed to be a unique experience. In a reality, it is unique, irretrievable, and illogical. You could say unspoken. Death is final, death is complete. The fates of Porto and her beloved Ghast are as unknown as ours. At Karvina Corporation, we want it to stay that way and we ask our customers to respect this wish. Don't worry, Karvina will still provide the West with the best quality games, and Killswitch is just one of our many wonders.
The utterance, because of one word used in it, instead of reassuring, drove the fans to obsession. It was about Ghast being Porto's "beloved". Throughout the woman's story, the demon did not appear once, nor was it even mentioned. This prompted fans to consider various theories, for example, that the end of the invisible being's story is also the beginning of the Porto plot. That Ghast becomes the gases that Porto inhales and therefore gains the ability to resize. The truth, however, remained unexplored - and it was impossible to obtain new copies of the Killswitch, as nearly all copies had been deleted. The few who kept their copies tried to get to know Ghast's story, but playing him was so difficult that they ended up giving up, choosing Porto, and all ending up on a white screen that would equal the game's deletion.
Until 2005, when perhaps the world's last copy of the Killswitch was auctioned off in perfect condition. It was bought for $733,000 by Japanese Yamamoto Ryuichi, who promised to record and share with the world how he went through the entire game. Instead, he only published one minute and forty-five seconds long video, which was removed from the network shortly after. During the recording, you could see skinny Ryuichi sitting in front of his computer screen, which showed the Killswitch character selection screen.
Ryuichi cried.
Killer record
In the 1980s, computer games salons experienced golden times, gathering the then youth in their interiors. They were often a rather unpleasant meeting place for problematic kids who regularly experimented with stimulants and were at odds with the law. The Friar Tuck facility in Calumet, Illinois, stood out against this background. The business run by the couple, compared to the gloomy amusements of the competition, was distinguished by a medieval inn-style appearance and a very pleasant atmosphere, which made many parents decide to spend the afternoons with their children right there. All the more shocking for many were the events that took place in such a seemingly safe place.
One of the most popular games in the early 1980s was Berzerk, a simple production in which, by controlling a green man, the player eliminated opponents and traversed the labyrinths of rooms, trying to get the best score. One of the machines with this game stood in Friar Tuck and it was on April 3, 1982, that Peter Bukowski decided to play. Peter was a nice and quiet eighteen-year-old in excellent condition. On this very cold day, he managed to travel a few kilometers, first visiting his girlfriend, then returning home, visiting a friend, and finally, with him going late at night to a nearby arcade. On the way, Bukowski did not feel well, he complained to his friend that he was thirsty and hard to breathe. So he went to the store and bought himself a drink. Although the drink did not make the boy feel better, when he finally reached his destination and started playing a well-liked game, the excitement allowed him to forget about his ailments. He played two games, it took him a total of about a quarter of an hour, maybe twenty minutes. He managed to get on the list of the best results each time. After the second game, he entered his initials on the list and immediately stepped away from the slot machine. He took a few steps and fell unconscious to the floor. Despite the immediate help provided by an employee of the facility and a quickly called ambulance, Peter Bukowski died on the way to the hospital. A later autopsy of the boy's body revealed a rather surprising fact - his heart turned out to be covered with scar tissue.
The surprising death of a boy in perfect condition, who had apparently been killed by a computer game, caused quite a stir. A legend has arisen around the infamous Berzerk slot machine, according to which entering your own initials on the high-score list would bring misfortune, in some cases even death. In addition to the case of Peter Bukowski, the story of Jeff Dailey, a nineteen-year-old from Virginia, who in January 1981 persistently played the infamous game for many hours in January 1981, finally suffered a heart attack and died unexpectedly. At the time this happened, his record score was no less, no more, but only 16,660 points.
Tales of a killer game usually end at this point - one solidly documented and one given the lack of precise information, possibly a fabricated story. Hardly anyone knows, however, that there is also a third act written by the infamous Berzerk, which took place seven years after Bukowski's death, and in addition in the very same pro-family Friar Tuck salon, at the same slot machine that finished the heart of an eighteen-year-old.
On an exceptionally warm March night in 1988, seventeen-year-old Edward Clark Jr. together with a group of friends decided to spend time playing computer games. Edward was not an innocent, he already had more than half a dozen minor disputes with law enforcement. First, the boy played a little Battlezone, then his interest turned to the machine on which Peter Bukowski spent his last moments years earlier. At the vending machine, Clark noticed a few stray quarter bills lying around. He decided to take one of them and used it to play Berzerk. Suddenly, a few moments later, the owner of the money appeared next to the boy, demanding that Clark Junior be returned. Wanting redress was Pedro Roberts, a very infamous 16-year-old who was better not to mess with. Both teenagers got into a serious fight, which was quickly interrupted by a salon employee. He first threw Roberts out of the arcade, then waited ten minutes, and then let Edward Clark Junior go as well, instructing him to take a different route than his adversary with his friends a moment earlier. Clark ignored him and followed Pedro with his friends. It was a mistake - as it turned out, the dangerous sixteen-year-old was counting on just that, and he jumped out of hiding in one of the alleys, stabbing Edward several times with a knife. The injured teenager did not believe the injuries were serious and declined the offer to rush him to the hospital. It was a mistake - when his colleagues decided he was wrong and put him in the car, it was too late. The boy could not be saved. He was killed about who had the right to play the game. The same one that had already led to the death of the young soul.
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