Creepypastas are the urban legends born from the digital era. They are perfect bite-sized horror stories passed down from forum to forum and copied and pasted all over the web, managing to reach millions of people entertained by their premises and scared by their characters.
One of the most popular sub-genres of creepypasta is gaming creepypastas. As the name implies, they use gaming media to get under your skin. Classics such as Sonix.exe and Polybius constitute some of the best gaming creepypastas out there, but there are many more that deserve some attention from horror lovers.
While some are just an entertaining read, a few others can stick in your mind for years to come the same way that bonfire stories used to do.
So, let me present to you some of the best gaming creepypastas of the last decade.
Tails Doll Curse
This infamous doll was probably responsible for causing nightmares to many kids, including me, back in the golden days of creepypasta stories. Since then, the doll has become a recurrent antagonist of several other gaming creepypastas.
This demonic doll is based on Miles “Tails” Prower, Sonic’s best friend from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, with a glowing red gem on his head. While the doll’s origins and means of summoning have evolved throughout the years and countless creepypasta writers, the original means of encountering him is to win a race against the Tails doll after unlocking all the other characters in the game.
One thing that all the stories revolving around Tails Dolls have in common, however, is that encountering this entity is the last thing you’d ever want to happen to you.
Sonic.exe
Sonic.exe is an eldritch version of Sonic the Hedgehog with several dark twists to its design. The darker fur, bloodshot black eyes, and wide fanged grin reveal the nature of this version of the titular Sega character. While there are many different iterations of Sonic.exe, the original story follows a young man called Tom who picks up a cursed bootleg copy of one of the older Sonic the Hedgehog games before being plagued by nightmares about the demonic entity under the guise of Sonic.
Pokémon Creepy Black
This is one of the most infamous Pokémon creepypastas out there. The story follows a collector of bootleg Pokémon games and his discovery of a terrifying version of Pokémon Blue & Red. The cartridge he shows as evidence of his finding is colored black with the classic Generation 1 style.
As you can guess, this is not your average hacked copy. Instead, things take a turn for the creepy once he finds out that the starter Pokémon is one of the ghost sprites found in Lavender Town and is nicknamed “Ghost.”
Ghost only had one move: Curse, which would promptly cause the screen to cut to black and defeat the enemy’s Pokémon. It is heavily implied that every time Ghost defeated another Pokémon, they would die, with their Pokéball disappearing from the trainer’s belt rather than being crossed like in the main game.
The game then fast-forwards several years after the defeat of the Elite Four, with an older-looking protagonist facing a final battle was against Ghost. Ghost uses Curse against the player one last time, ending the game once and for all.
Lavender Town Syndrome
You really can’t beat the classics. As old as creepypastas themselves, Lavender Town Syndrome is the name given to the strange phenomenon that occurred shortly after the release of Pokémon Red and Blue in Japan.
It is said that kids would stay for abnormal lengths of time in Lavender Town, seemingly hypnotized by its melancholic tune. Apparently, the frequencies were so high that only children and teenagers could hear.
The effects of these frequencies would cause children to get ill, experience extreme headaches, or commit suicide along with other mental afflictions. According to some, those versions of the games were quickly disposed of, and Nintendo released another batch of games with fixed audio at a lower frequency. This got rid of the issue, but a lot still speculate that there’s a Beta version of the tune still available on the internet.
BEN Drowned
BEN Drowned, also known as Haunted Majora’s Mask, started as a creepypasta that later turned into an alternate reality game. As you can imagine, the story revolves around a haunted copy of Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask that seems to contain the soul of a boy named Ben.
The story developed in a series of posts in the Paranormal section of the 4chan forum. While many of these haunted-copy-of-a-game stories start out the same way, one could argue that this was the story that pioneered or at least popularized the trend.
The author finds the cartridge in a garage sale and plays it with no apparent issues other than some NPCs calling him Ben, the name from the save file that had been left there. After that, things start to get weirder and weirder the further he plays through the game with several odd findings, such as glitched-out music, misplaced dialogue that seemed to address him as a person, and an ominous feeling overall.
It all took a turn for the worst once he got stuck in a section of the game where his character kept drowning until being booted out of the game. Once he started it again, the save file name revealed Ben’s fate: Ben Drowned.
There’s more to the story, but I would highly recommend you to read it yourself. It is thanks to this gaming creepypasta that the words: “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” are carved into my psyche until the end of my days.
Polybius
One of my personal favorite gaming creepypastas, Polybius blurs the line between creepypasta and classic urban legend. This story emerged at the beginning of the new millennium with the disturbing premise of an experimental 1980 arcade game. Polybius was a game created by the United States government to induce psychoactive effects on the players.
People who have allegedly played the game reported seeing men in black checking on the arcade machine every once in a while to analyze it. After some people said to have experienced psychological side effects from playing the game, Polybius was taken from the market and never seen again.
This gaming creepypasta is brilliant in terms of the story’s plausibility. The story also allows other people to expand on it if they wished to do so. Many creepypastas seem to be based on a central character, such as a corrupted version of Mario or something like that, whereas here, the game itself, its effects on the players, and its origin are shrouded in mystery. It’s a classic horror story in the sense that you get more creeped out by the things you don’t know rather than the things that you do know.
Catastrophe Crow 64
Catastrophe Crow was an alleged game supposed to be released on the Nintendo 64. The game promised to be beyond anything Mario ever accomplished. Ultimately, this promise went unfulfilled with many loose ends.
Due to time constraints and the game’s creator slowly losing grip of his sanity while trying to create the perfect game, Crow 64 never saw the light of day, and the creator of the game went missing soon after.
Recently, a Youtuber found a developing cartridge copy of Catastrophe Crow and recorded himself playing it. The game is bizarre, with many hidden clues that seem to tell a story of the events that lead to its failure.
The source code of the game is available for anyone. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding this modern age legend, with a lot of lore waiting to be uncovered. The sensation that Crow 64 has caused has been like none other, causing anonymous people from all around the world to bind together to try and unravel this disturbing game’s secrets.
Petscop
Petscop is a gaming creepypasta series released on YouTube by the channel of the same name. The videos follow Paul while he explores the world of the PlayStation game, Petscop, in a Let’s Play series format. Paul plays the entirety of the game, capturing several creatures, or “pets,” and solving puzzles.
What seems to be a cutesy game with a charming art style increasingly turns more macabre as the game starts giving hints at a disturbing story that took place outside the virtual world.
Suffice to say that Petscop has a lot of clues scattered throughout the internet, with vital aspects of the plot and the game’s connection to Paul subtly hidden.
Killswitch
Killswitch is a less popular gaming creepypasta compared to the other entries on this list, but it deserves just as much credit. The game was supposedly released in 1989, and the company only created 50,000 copies for the public.
Killswitch allows you to play as Ghast or Porto. Ghast is a character with combat-focused gameplay but with the main disadvantage of being invisible, making it nearly impossible to beat the game. Porto was perfectly visible but could not attack, making the gameplay more akin to a point-and-click puzzle game.
But what made Killswitch unique was that, after you completed it, the game would delete itself. There were no replays and no retries. You only got to play it in its entirety once. According to the company that released Killswitch, Karvina Corp., the game is supposed to be a “unique gaming experience: like reality, it is unrepeatable, unretrievable, and illogical. Death is final; death is complete.”
Herobrine
Ever since Minecraft released its alpha version, countless players have reported encounters with a hostile mob that’s been described as using the same skin as the player. At the time, there was only one skin for the main character, now known as Steve.
This entity, nicknamed by the community as Herobrine, was a carbon copy of the character, save for its empty, white, glowing eyes.
Many rumors and videos started circulating throughout the internet, especially when Minecraft’s popularity started to take off. From tutorials on how to get Herobrine to spawn, to how to find its little shack in the woods, and even tips on how to defend yourself against it.
Theories flew all over the place. Was it a hidden mob intentionally left by the developer for people to encounter? Was it a bug? Or another player hacking into other people’s Minecraft worlds? No one knew. To this day, Herobrine remains one of Minecraft’s greatest mysteries, and although unofficial, one of the game’s most recognizable icons.
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