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!

Baked...Brains?

Good Morning, MMers! We had a disturbing report today from Ralph LeBlanc out in Westbrook. Ralph's wife died of brain cancer and his two kids live out west these days. Sitting down for his normal solo dinner, Ralph went into his pantry and grabbed a can of Maine's own B&M Baked Beans. You know, the big plant on the water right off of Interstate 295.

B&M's Factory

Anyways, Ralph was excited to have some beans to go along with his pork loin and mashed potatoes. But, when he opened the can, he didn't smell the normal pleasant scent of bacon and onion he was accustomed to. We reached out to Ralph to get some more information.

B&M's Famous Baked Beans

"When I opened the can, I just...I can't fully describe the scent. I guess it was a metallic smell mixed in with the scent of the beans. And it was mixed with...well, those those chunks certainly weren't bacon..."

Ralph, being a former member of the Westbrook Police Department, reached out to a buddy of his to check it out. Ted Blankenship, Ralph's longtime partner, came by to see it for himself. Here's what he had to say...

"Those beans? No. Those weren't normal beans. Ralph and I poked around, and I'd bet my paycheck that those were brains in there. No doubt about it. The most messed up part about the whole thing is that his wife died of brain cancer, ya know? That's messed up. "

Was this a some sort of gruesome mixup at the factory? Was this someone playing a prank on Ralph? Who's to say? All we know is that the next time you get a can of your favorite beans from Maine, make sure to check what's in that tin can. 

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Bitter Pill to Swallow

What's up, MMers? This story comes to us from Melinda Hardy, a nurse at Stephens Memorial Hospital. She tells us that one of the women she worked with for five years, another nurse (who wished to remain anonymous) told her this story. "[She] was totally the most honest person I have ever met. She wouldn't lie to save her soul," Melinda told us. 

The story starts about ten years ago, somewhere around 2010 or 2011. A patient came to see a doctor at a private practice where the other nurse worked before coming to Stephens. This patient suffered from chronic pain due to a motorcycle accident a year prior. He had recovered from his injuries, but the pain still lingered. Ibuprofen wasn't cutting it anymore, so he went to the doctor to get some relief. They tried a number of different prescription pills, but nothing seemed to take. In the end, the doctor gave him something different.

What did "Billy's" doctor prescribe him?

"My friend told me she hadn't seen pills like that before," Melinda said. "She didn't recognize the name, but that's not that uncommon. There's always new varieties coming out. She just assumed it was some new brand that a pharmaceutical rep had given to the doc."

The patient, we'll call him Billy, took the pills. He called the doctor's office two days later claiming he felt better than he had in months. The pain was gone. The doctor was pleased with the treatment and had Billy come back in a month later for a check up.

They continued a treatment of the medication, but the nurse was surprised that Billy kept coming into the doctor's office to get his medication. "Usually a patient gets a prescription filled at a pharmacy, right?" Melinda told us. "Doctors don't usually give out medication directly, but my friend, I guess for as weird as the situation was, she just trusted her doctor."

Two months go by, with Billy taking these pills. Maybe they're experimental, maybe generic, but maybe - as this nurse was beginning to suspect - it was something more illegal. "But the treatment was working, and when you're in healthcare long enough, you start to realize that whatever works is the best medicine," says Melinda. "He tells them that the pain is gone. He feels great, but that he feels a little numb, like he can't feel anything at all. Well, this alarms the doctor, who tells him that loss of feeling could be a possible side effect. He suggests Billy keep taking the medication unless something doesn't feel right, and that at his three month check up, they'll determine whether or not the numbness has gone away and how to treat that."

But Billy never showed up for his three month appointment.

It wasn't until a month later, that the nurse, now concerned because Billy had always been punctual, decided to call the police for a wellness check. They found Billy in his house; he had been dead for over a month.

"It wasn't an overdose, no siree," Melinda told us. "When the police got there, they could tell something was wrong. They call it in or whatever and when they go inside, there's blood all over the kitchen. They find a rotten leg in the kitchen sink."

It was Billy's leg. They found his other leg in the living room. In the bathroom they found his left arm. They found fingers from his right hand in a trail leading to the bedroom. Billy was on the bed. He had finally bled out. They found the battery operated carving knife he used to sever his limbs.

"He couldn't feel anything, you see?" Melinda told us. "The medication, it made him numb. It took away his pain, but it took away all his pain. He couldn't feel a thing, so when he took the knife to his leg, there was nothing. So he just kept going. 

"At least," she added, "that's the way my friend told it to me.

Pretty wild story. It has just the perfect touch of campfire ghost story to it. So, of course, we at Malevolent Maine did our research. It was a little difficult to find out much without specific names. However, we were able to trace Melinda's nurse friend back to a now closed doctor's office. Using that region as our search bubble we came up with one police report of a thirty-something male being found dead in his home. There was no mention of cause of death. A little more digging did uncover reports of a motorcycle accident about two years before the reported death. There weren't any names attached to the news stories, but again the area and physical descriptions seem to match.

So what do you think, MMers? Could there be some sort of pill out there that makes you feel so numb you could hack yourself apart? It's a a bit of a tough pill to swallow, but our guys are telling us it's probably true.

Be careful what you put in your bodies, MMers

Stay safe out there, Maine.