MARIO

Mario's first appearance was in Donkey Kong, released in 1981, and he has been in over 200 games since then, making the Mario Brothers franchise the most profitable game series in the world. It stands to reason then that there would be good Mario creepypasta out there somewhere and again, I'll leave it to the reader to decide if the story is real.

"MARIO" is a 'Super Mario World' hack posted on popular ROM site SMW Central. The story is written by a user of the site named Adam and the ROM patch was uploaded by a user named M A R I O though the latter account no longer exists. The original ROM can be downloaded here (though I haven't personally tested it): MARIO

The following is Adam's story.

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(Note: This is a true story, and sums up what was going through My mind as I was playing this, and I had no idea I was about to be bullshitted the way I was when I played this and I can say it is by far the creepiest hack I've played. If you were on IRC you would have heard me talking about it as well, but anyways it's late at night, and I don't have a lot of time, and I need to get to sleep, so this is all I have time for...)

So, it all happened, on tonight of all nights. I was bored, obviously contemplating what I thought I could do to waste time as I chatted with the people in #smwc. We had good times, and shared a few laughs together. Out of boredom, I decided to patrol the "Hacks waiting to be moderated" section. Seems that we had quite a bit, 33 if I recall correctly. The first few hacks I saw when I sorted them by date were a couple really horrible ones with bad screenshots to boot. Naturally showed these hacks to the centralites currently on #smwc. We were laughing at how bad some of them were, but then I got to a hack called "MARIO". Just that, nothing more, nothing less. The description seemed quite odd, as if some Japanese hacker was trying to translate the original plot of Super Mario World into English and failing horribly. I showed this to kieran and he started laughing at the description, it reads as follows:

"As you play the role of Super Mario plumber, verify that you are beautiful Purinsesutozutouru again Bowser kidnapped the evil king. It is your job to save her! This hack includes six levels of very long."

I simply dismissed this as someone trying to act Japanese and release a crappy hack with some edits, or so, that's what I thought this was, at first...

Curiosity got the best of me. I decided to download the hack. Not knowing what I was in for, since the single screenshot of the hack was the title screen with nothing but the letters "MARIO" from Super Mario World's title screen. I thought it was a little odd how there were no dates or anything either, as hackers usually place their names and dates on the titles to mark when the project was started.

So, when I opened the hack, I was greeted by 2 files. One called 3007014, a simple .txt file 27 KB in size, and the IPS file, simply named "MARIO". For some odd reason I wanted to see what the author of the hack had to say, but I opened the hack in Notepad but there was nothing but indistinguishable symbols and letters and punctuation, sort of like how when you open a rom in a text editor like Notepad. Seemes like the author just completely copied his ROM to .txt form, though I could be wrong. Taking a closer look, at the top of the .txt file mixed in with the gibberish I find the only thing that looks like English there. Here is a piece of what I found:

Luigi's Mansion

(You won't find this picture in the game but it was the original back drop for the "Game Over" screen that was scrapped for something a little less frightening.)


I'm sure everyone's heard of Luigi's Mansion but just in case, here's a recap.

Luigi is finally the star of his own 3D gamecube game. After receiving a strange letter from his brother Mario, Luigi travels to a mansion that he thinks he has won in a contest. When he arrives at the mansion he is greeted by mad scientist, Professor E. Gadd who explains to him that he just met, and lost, a man with a red hat. He then explains that the mansion had just recently appeared and is haunted by ghosts. He equips Luigi with a flashlight and the Poltergust 3000, a vaccum-like ghost container that resembles something from Ghostbusters, and sends Luigi on his way.

When it comes to graphics, Luigi's Mansion, though not quite as groundbreaking as Super Mario 64, has it's share of impressive effects. When it comes to dynamic lighting and attention to detail this game was pretty ahead of it's time. The shadows cast and areas lit by Luigi's flashlight behaved very realisticly and the movement of ambient objects affected by the Poltergust were extremely convincing. Fabric would stretch, fires would die from lack of air and small objects would race towards Luigi when using the vacuum. Shadows and highlights could be traced easily to their sources of light as through they really existed. And that's part of what makes this story so strange.

If you played the game before you may remember the telephone room. It was a small, simple attic room with a ringing telephone that you could answer. However, if you answered the phone and waited for a lightning strike, you could see something a little too creepy for a children's game in the back of the room. The shadow of Luigi's body, not touching or connected to the floor in any way, appears on the back wall and ceiling of the room, as though Luigi had hung himself.

Below I've outlined the shadow as best as I could to show what parts of the body are visible. I can't tell if the shape on the right is his arm or the Poltergust. Even if it is a glitch, it seems strange that it's the only glitching shadow area of the game.

I'll let you decide for yourself what the shadow really is, but don't forget about all the other creepy stuff you can find in pretty much any Mario game.

Four

I just want to preface this post by saying that I love pawn shops, comic book stores and buy-sell-trade video game places. The following story is like many of the others, posted anonymously on an internet message board and it follows the same basic "bought a used video game and something scary happened" line. It's called 'Four' and this is the tale:

Four

"I collect old video games; whether they're on the NES, the Genesis, the SNES, or even obscure things like the PC Engine. I visited a Pawn Shop in the city which was reputable for collectors of retro technology. While in there, I stumbled upon a game that was "given back" multiple times. The clerk gave me an SNES cartridge. It was oddly-shaped and colored, kind of like those unlicensed Bible games from Wisdom Tree. The cartridge was a very neon-ish Yellow tint to it, and the label seemed to have been hand-drawn, albeit with good detail.

The name of the game was simply "4", and had an illustration of four colored blobs all next to one another. Thinking it was a generic platformer, I took it home to play. When I started the game up, I was surprised to find out that the language wasn't English. I couldn't match it with a part of the globe, but I would have to say it best matches Southeast Asian typography. The first level of the game was mildly eerie. It was a Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired game where you played as four different characters. The multi-char thing was a ripoff of Donkey Kong Country, as you had to break them from rusty cages. The level was urban-themed, and involved the player escaping from (what seemed to be) blob-thing catchers. All of the sounds in the game were either taken from other SNES games, or seemed to have been recorded. I noticed many low-quality voices, grunts, etc. Besides the characters, the enemies and objects were terribly-rendered and designed. Most of them were geometric shapes, or sprite edits from other games. I noticed that every time you killed an enemy, the Hell Knight scream from the original Doom played, and a sentence of text appeared on screen.

As creepy as it was, the red flags started to appear. Each time you "lost" a character, the scenery and sprites changed to become darker, and less colorful, until everything is black and white. As you progressed further in a level (regardless of how well you're doing), the scenery becomes gory, and somewhat psychedelic. The levels are all cliche. Urban, forest, clouds, snow, etc. In the middle of the game, it appears as if it's designed so that the player cannot progress, and continuously dies. When you lose all four characters, the screen becomes very dim, and to my shock, a low-quality scream, as well as unintelligible sentences BLAST at high volume, accompanied by pixelated, low-res images of generic gore pics; presumably from wars. The final picture shown was a pixelated image of an Asian family at a wedding. The dimmed background turns white, as a sentence appears on screen, and a voice speaks the unintelligible language.

I thought the game froze, but upon inspection, it wasn't. I turned up the volume way up. A low buzzing noise could be heard from the game, as the screen dimmed again. The Game Over screen was a close-up shot on the four main characters looking happy. The screen gets darker, line-by-line. Their faces get visibly sadder and sadder, as a generic "Wah wah wah" song comes on. The game did another buzzing sequence, prompting me to turn up the volume. Surprising me due to the noise and creepiness, a loud, long sound byte was played; which sounded like a man + woman arguing. This went on for a while, when it just stopped. The screen turned black, and in white text, three sentences appeared on screen. I tried turning the SNES off, but I couldn't. I took out the cartridge, and the image on the screen became distorted, as the upper half was white. Becoming genuinely scared, I pulled out the power cord, and re-plugged it.

I couldn't turn my SNES on. The whole "Corny horror movie" emotion overwhelmed me, so I took the game back to the pawn shop. The clerk didn't give me my (small amount of) money back, simply because he said he wouldn't know the cash value."

Just as a side note, the Japanese word for death is 'shi'. It's the same pronunciation as the word for four.

Killswitch by Karvina

I suppose this is possible, but another game called Killswitch was made for PS2 a few years ago so it's nearly impossible to find useful information on the subject.

"In the spring 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived.

The game was “Killswitch.”

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folksongs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character–he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.

Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth–she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons which will become obvious, his work was lost.