When you talk about creepy gaming urban legends, what comes to your mind? Well, it could be almost any story that you've read about on a forum or heard about during a campfire. But one thing is for certain: they're all the stuff of nightmares, and the last thing you want is them happening to you firsthand.
In this article, we're going to share several of the creepiest gaming urban legends, and the stories behind them - whether they're even true or not.
Ben Drowned
The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask is already pretty unsettling in its own right, writes Grunge. Well, few things are creepier than seeing a moon with a grotesque face on it, among other things in this classic game for the N64. But this particular story is likely to bring you shivers all over your spine.
Legend tells of a supposedly haunted cartridge of Majora's Mask that a player bought at a random yard sale. When they popped the cartridge into the console, they saw that there was a save file from the old owner, called BEN. The player ignored the save and started a new game, only to find that the game world had weirdly different music and dialog and all NPCs only referred to the player as Ben.
But perhaps one of the most terrifying is a statue that looks like Link with bleeding eyes that followed the player around the game world. Aside from that, the music seemed to play backwards and the dialog boxes displayed words with insane spelling errors. To cap things off, even deleting the original BEN save file didn't help as it somehow "returned," along with a new save file called DROWNED.
After the appearance of the new save file, Link would just die over and over whenever the game was booted up. And an NPC would show up with the words, "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"
Portal's GLaDOS Is A Woman Bound Upside Down
In the puzzle platformer Portal, the only other character you interact with is an AI guide called GLaDOS. According to the developers, GLaDOS is supposed to represent the Roman goddess Venus, though some players didn't see it the same way (via TheGamer).
Some people pointed out that GLaDOS didn't resemble Venus at all, but an entirely different woman: one who has her hands bound behind her, hanging upside down with her mouth taped shut. Perhaps it's just a case of people experiencing a phenomenon called pareidolia (i.e. seeing familiar faces or likenesses in everyday objects), but it sure still is one for the creepy gaming urban legends list.
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The Madden Curse
It can be an amazing feeling for an NFL player to be featured in the cover of a Madden NFL game. However, a certain "curse" might make even the league's biggest superstars think twice about receiving the distinction of being a Madden cover athlete.
The so-called Madden Curse apparently says that anybody who gets featured on the cover for that year will be having a terrible season/succeeding seasons. According to IGN, NFL stars have already fallen for the "curse," like Dante Culpepper who made the cover in 2002 as a member of the Minnesota Vikings. The year after the cover, he ended the season with a career-altering back injury.
As per CBS Sports, the latest to fall victim to the curse is five-time Pro Bowler Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots. He featured on the Madden cover in 2017 following a double-digit touchdown season the year before. But during his Madden cover season, he was hampered with a hamstring injury and a herniated disk, alongside other injuries.
World Of Warcraft's Demonic Children Of Goldshire
Numerous World of Warcraft players reported seeing a group of children who they say are standing in the shape of a pentagram, who seem to appear sporadically in one of the houses in Goldshire, writes Engadget. But apparently that's not everything that these "demonic" children do.
Reports of the creepy kids first popped up on the WoW forums, wherein people also said that merely standing in the middle of their formation will make you hear noises like growls, screams, and crying. Perhaps it's a reference to the Diablo games (it is an Activision Blizzard title, after all), perhaps not. Either way, no creepy gaming urban legends list will be complete with this entry.
Polybius
It was said that back in the glory days of arcades in the 70s and 80s, there were multiple arcade machines with the name Polybius. According to legend, this game was reportedly so addictive, it managed to cause untold mental damage to those who played it.
Many people said that the Polybius arcade machines were part of a secret government experiment into the possibility of mind control technology. The thing is, no one can even confirm that the game - or the machines it was played on - ever existed at all.
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Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce