Video Game Virus?

Happy New Year, MMers! We hope your holidays were happy and bright and you haven't broken your New Year's resolutions yet. We've got a bit of an interesting one for you today and it involves video games. This one came to us from Bill in Camden. 

How many hours did we spend on this baby?

In 1991 Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. It was a massive hit. Many of our readers have fond memories of Mario, Yoshi, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, and many other classic video games. At the time, most games were still developed in Japan and then imported here in America. While we got plenty of the major games, there were still a number of games that never made the transition over to the US, including Final Fantasy V, Shin Megami Tensei, and Tales of Phantasia. Most of the time this happened because it wasn't financially worth it to import the games, but in the case of Dark Hour: Story of a House there was a far different reason.

Dark Hour was developed by an independent programmer, something unpopular at the time. In fact, so the rumor goes it was developed by one man, Mita Shuji, a former employee of Nintendo.. The story goes that Shuji made twelve copies of the game to share with developers at Nintendo. No one would ever talk about their beta testing of the game, but officials at Nintendo refused to give the copies back to Shuji. Several employees who played the game swore they would never speak about what they had witnessed, but did claim to feel sick afterwards. Dizziness, fatigue, nausea, and fainting were all common side effects. Reports even indicated that several of the people who played the game suffered from chronic headaches, mood swings, and general fatigue as much as six months after playing the game. In the end, Nintendo confiscated all twelve copies and destroyed them. 

Except, according to the rumors, there was a secret thirteenth copy that Shuji kept for himself. He mailed this to a random gamer in America, from a list of name she pulled from Nintendo Power magazine subscribers. According to the internet, this unnamed gamer received the game in the mail and assumed he had won a prize. He popped the game into his Super Nintendo and started to play Dark Hour: Story of a House. The game was in Japanese, of course, and he couldn't understand much of it, but he found he couldn't stop playing the game. 

He spent hours playing it, neglecting much of his personal life. He went to work, came home, and started playing Dark Hour. He stopped showering, stopped eating. He was wasting away playing the game. And when he wasn't playing the game, he was working on translating it. Remember, this was in the day before the Internet had really taken off, so this gamer, who the online community has named DGZ - Dark Gamer Zero (or sometimes just Gamer Dark) did most of this translation the old fashioned way, learning Japanese and painstakingly translating each line of dialogue.

We imagine it looked close to this.

No one really knows what Dark Hour is about. Most claim that the game starts in an abandoned house. The player wakes up and has to make his or her way from room to room. That's where the stories differ though. Some versions of the legend say that each room of the house gets more and more disturbing until the final rooms are so sinister that the player can no longer stand it. Other versions of the story claim that each room gets bleaker and bleaker, more simplified, more white space. By the end of the game the player is faced with the void and is left questioning how the house is any different than their own lives.

Either way, the stories all agree that the game only truly ends when the player is driven mad. The stories claim that DGZ finished his translation and made twelve copies of the game. He put these in the mail to twelve random people, then he went home and killed himself. 

What could get worse than this?

Whatever happened to the twelve English copies of Dark Hour is unknown. The story goes that each person who plays the game to completion is driven insane. Rumors have circulated for years that eight of the physical copies of the game cartridge have either been confiscated or destroyed. Each cartridge was labeled with a Japanese character for numbers 1-12. Only cartridge 三  (#3), 八 (#8), 九 (#9), and 十二 (#12) still exist. Several sources claim the game has been uploaded to the dark web, but a cursory (and really cursory; you never know what you will find - or what will find you - on the dark web) search did not turn up any hits. Still, the rumors persist that it can be found, played, copied, and shared if one truly knows where to look.

How does this game induce sickness and madness? Why would Shuji create a game to do this? And what is it really? What do players see in those final screens? Those are unanswered questions we may never discover the truth of. Video games are meant to be a fun source of entertainment, and for as much as some choose to rail against the violence in these games and their corruption of the youth of the world, it appears that is only true of one game: Dark Hour: Story of a House.

Stay safe out there, Maine!