In Easter, we thought it was only right to share with you some of the most epic Easter Eggs in MMORPGs. And a few of those, such as The Shining in Fallout 76 and ManBearPig in Red Dead Redemption were some pretty creepy Easter Eggs. But now we’re at an altogether spookier time of year, we’ve decided to step things up a notch. What better way to celebrate a holiday wherein society voluntarily decides to turn itself into a ghoul-filled, horror-laden nightmare than with a list of the scariest Easter Eggs in video games.
Warning from Editor: MMOGames.com holds no legal or ethical responsibility for your lack of sleep tonight and forever hence forth.
In Fable II, they’re watching you, they’re watching you, they’re watching you
You could fairly assume that nothing good could reside behind anything labelled a “Demon Door”. And yet most of the Demon Doors in Fable II are harmless, whimsical loot troves. That is, apart from two of them.
The first, The Winter Cottage, will haunt me until my dying day. And talking of dying days…upon entering the Demon Door, you are met by a wintry walk leading to a chocolate-box picturesque cottage - candlelit, cosy and magical, and straight from a Disney flick. That is, until you step through the door, unwittingly plunging yourself into dark corpse littered ruins.
No explanation is ever given for this surprise horror show and the fates of the family who once lived there, though there are some that relate it to another of Fable’s even more nightmare-inducing Demon Door – The Cottage of Terry Cotter.
Upon entering another modest cottage, players will discover a corpse surrounded by inanimate suits of armour (Terry Cotter, get it?). By the corpse's bed you can find the dead man's journal's charting his lonely journey into a cave and finding the "The Knights Aberrant". We'll leave you with the third and fourth entries of that journal: "I will never be lonely again. The Knights Aberrant watch over me. They will never leave. Never ever ever leave." and finally, "They watch me. They watch over me. They watch me. They watch over me. They watch me. They watch me. They watch me.”
If you’re not a fan of peaceful sleep, discover more on the origins of the Knight Aberrant and the lonely resident in the stream above.
Terry's skeletal remains indicate that he died a considerable time prior to your arrival, and yet you can’t help noticing that there are still fresh flowers on his mother's grave. And like the fools we were, we just had to go looking for a cave behind the house. And boy we wish we didn’t.
Sonic may not be what we think he is, perhaps he never was
Way back in 1993, a terrifying video game Easter Egg was inserted into one of the most iconic games of all time – Sonic the Hedgehog. We only just found out about this one, and something about it being almost 30 years old makes it all the creepier. When playing Sonic CD, players could run a sound test by pressing “Down, Down, Down, Left, Right, A”. Then if FM is set to 46, PCM to 12, and DA to 25, Sega's beloved hedgehog became a mutant spawn of hell.
On the secret screen that appears, it’s unclear whether Sonic is wearing a hideous human mask or whether, as it appears to us, Sonic’s usual face is a mask which when removed reveals a grotesquely distorted human form. It’s overlaid with sinister chiptunes and horrendous laughter as well as Japanese text which translates to “Infinite Fun Sega Enterprises Image by Majin”. Majin when translated from Japanese translates roughly to “demonic race of people”.
While it sounds like something straight from creepypasta; it is in fact real. But that hasn’t stopped the deep dark depths of the internet mutating it and reimaging it in even more sinister ways. The internet truly is a weird, horrible, insatiable place. Demon Sonic even made its way into Friday Night Funkin’.
There are some internet sleuth’s who suggest Demonic Sonic was never intended to be scary, but we’re not sure we buy their explanations. What do you think?
A paranoid schizophrenic poet-scientist lives in Portal’s walls
“Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath, The Reaper came that day; 'T was an angel visited the gray path, And took the cube away.” Just one of the nightmare inducing scrawlings in the den of Portal’s Doug Rattmann – the sole survivor of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The lines above are actually taken from The Reaper and the Flowers by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow albeit modified and modernised “gray path” was once “green earth”, and “cube” was once “flowers”.
The terrifying penmanship you see in the screenshot above was found in one of several dens hidden behind the walls in Portal 1 and Portal 2. You never meet Doug Rattmann, and I’m not sure you’d want to. The horrors he’s seen are left to the imagination, and we only have his perverse scrawlings and bizarre drawings to go by, hidden behind the walls of the vast complex.
Of course, players could rest easier if they knew that Doug had eventually met the same end as the other Science Enrichment Center employees. The problem is, he’s still very much alive, and most likely watching you throughout your playthrough. In one of these hideous hideaways, Test Chamber 17, when positioned against the wall at just the right angle, Rattmann’s anguished ramblings can be heard echoing between the cracks. That's the sort of Easter Egg that only the most dedicated gamer finds, and their reward? Sheer terror.
Unfortunately for us, someone has transcribed his tormented whispers. Check it out above. And if you really wish to discover more, you can learn about Doug Rattmann’s lore.
Did a serial killer make a 1998 Atari racing game?
What with the soul-destroying Chan communities that spun off Reddit toxifying the minds of young WoW playing men everywhere, in some ways, it’s reassuring to know that elements of the gaming community have always had a dark sense of humour. That is, if we’re assuming that the following California Speed Easter Egg is indeed a joke.
Picture credit - https://www.reddit.com/user/jvcthome/
Midway Games’ California Speed was first a coin-operated 1998 arcade game before moving to the N64. A pretty innocent game, one might even say “forgettable” if they weren’t a little nervous about the developer’s murderous wrath. Though should a player pull to the side of the course at the right moment on one track, they would find something not so easy to forget: a billboard that reads:
“SoMETIMES/God TaKes MOMMIES/aNd PuPPIES AWAY.../And SoMETIMES.../Just SoMETIMES.../I do.”
A terrifying confession? The Zodiac killer revealing one last clue? It remained a mystery for a long time until one savvy blogger, Randal Rigdon, decided to dig deep into the mystery and managed to get in touch with the billboard’s author:
“Unfortunately, as we were in a tight situation to even get the most basics of the game stood up on the N64, we didn’t have anything handy or relevant to put on the billboards. So I plugged in a placeholder billboard texture so ****ing stupid there would be no way it could possibly be confused for a real shipping asset.”
It turns out that the developer had no idea that his placeholder texture, designed to be so ridiculous that it would never be imported to N64 was never replaced. He found out via YouTube 18 years later. Assuming we believe the developer (we do), this has got to be one of the most accidentally horrifying and hilarious moments in gaming history.
Your name and death are whispered to you in Black & White 2
Lionhead Studios, the developers behind god-simulation PC game Black & White 2, don’t want you to forget who the real gods are. Or should that be devils. Those who remember this underappreciated game of deific destruction, adorable and/or murderous mascots, and divine power tend to remember it fondly. That is, when it wasn’t whispering personal messages to them that chilled them to the bone.
When one of your villagers passed away, and as I remember it, that was often. The game whispered “deaaaathhh” in sinister hushed tones. For those wearing headphones, this was a chilling experience. But it gets worse, so much worse.
Very occasionally, as in just occasionally enough that you doubt whether or not it really happened, the whispers would instead say your real name. Now I know what you’re thinking, back in 2005 when the game was released, text recognition software was nowhere near good enough. At the time of writing, it’s Halloween 2021 and Microsoft Word’s read aloud software can’t pronounce half the words in the English language – let alone whisper in elongated tones so sinister that you start missing your childhood teddy bear.
Gaming forums are full of reports of freaked out people, and we wonder how many people snapped their CD-roms in terror or doused their PCs with holy water before working out the developers’ devilish trick. We still don’t know the exact method the programmers used to integrate players' real names, whether it was from their gamer profiles or Windows itself (some reports claim the game integrated itself with your email software and named villagers after your friends).
What we do know is that the developers went to great lengths to record creepy name-reading... for every available language. This is next-level early noughties trolling, and we have to the late great Lionsgate for their commitment to terrifying their customer-base for a cheap laugh.
Honourable Mentions:
The chained beating heart inside The Statue of Liberty (“Happiness”) in Grand Theft Auto IV
The entire island of Lost complete with smoke-monster-stalker-soldier in Just Cause 2
Grand Theft Auto 5’s well-publicized ghost of Mount Gordo
Pokémon X & Y’s Vanishing Elevator Girl
The Shining-style ghost in Hitman Contracts
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