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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-10-03 22:36:44+00:00.

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Around a week after I got that tape, the body was found. Off in the woods on the outskirts of town, there was the charred body of a person. They never found their identity, as far as I still know, but it was ruled as a drifter committing suicide. Guess I couldn’t expect the cops around here to really do anything about it at that point.

I think we finally got ourselves to write it off as just a weird coincidence, but it didn’t stop us from sticking around for each other’s shifts. The two of us were still REALLY freaked out from what had happened, and it’s not like anyone believed us. Even Pete gave a spiel about how he didn’t care what we were getting ourselves worked up about, just that we better not clock in when we’re not supposed to be on the clock. Bastard was always more worried about hours than he was safety.

At a certain point, it was the farthest thing from our mind, though we still made sure not to be alone after dark just in case. The tapes were quickly forgotten as the source of fear, because the weirdness started extending well outside the return counter at Cal’s.

Tuesday afternoon, late fall, the first game return came in. Innocent enough, just a copy of Sonic the Knuckles for the Sega Genesis. Really, not the worst game, and it was one of the usual movers that came through. The woman that returned it was PISSED though, and it took me almost ten minutes to get her to calm the hell down to tell me what was going on.

The warm Southern daylight pouring in through the windows was nothing compared to the cold I felt. Now, the ice that dumped over me when she finally calmed down made me know things were about to get much, much worse at Cal’s.

”Is this some practical joke you guys play? Mess with these stupid videogames? I’m going to take this all the way up to the Supreme Court! Tipper Gore warned us about this!” She was fucking hysterical, “My child hasn’t slept for the past two nights because she says the game won’t let her! What the hell?”

”Woah, woah, okay. Please, can I see the cartridge?” I asked, holding my hands up and practically begging her to shut the hell up. Nothing looked different about it, just the usual Genesis cartridge, the outlines of the characters on the outside, No tampering on the outside shell and everything inside looked fine. If someone hacked it, then they did a good job of making it look totally normal after they were done. I walked her over to the game corner, unlocking the case around our store Genesis. We had just about every console out at the time, with promo sending them to us as demo units for more game sales. No better way to get rentals than to get kids hooked on a game that was nearly impossible to beat, even when they took it home.

Give the cartridge a good puff for dust, make sure it’ll start fine, and load it in before starting up the system. These things were particular, and if you didn’t change out games properly, it could throw the entire damn console back in the day. Amazing how far we’ve come.

“Alright, so what happened to the game while your son was playing?” I asked, doing my best to keep the friendly customer service exterior but barely able to contain my own nerves. “Where did the problem start?”

”See for yourself! It happened every time he got a game over. Sonic died, the screen went black, and suddenly there’s this… this video. It looks like the game so it’s hard to tell, but I swear to god my son was in the game.” She said, stuttering through flustered anger and fear. “This thing was showing my son killing himself. I swear to god, it had our home recreated in these damned pixels, and showed him walking into his father’s gun cabinet, take out the shotgun, and blast his head away with no way for him to turn off or restart the game.”

”Okay, there’s no way they could code your son specifically into the game, ma’am.” I said, almost laughing at how ridiculous it sounded despite my recent experiences that proved otherwise. Regardless, to get her to calm the hell down, I started up the game and threw myself off a cliff multiple times, leading to the standard ‘Game Over’ screen and theme before zipping me back to the main menu. “I’m not sure what your son was seeing, ma’am, but it wasn’t anything on here.”

That was a bullshit lie and I knew it at the time, though it was as much a lie to myself as it was to her. Naturally she wasn’t happy about not being believed when it comes to seeing this terror (can’t blame her, I had felt the same recently) but what the hell could I do? Just tell her, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve been getting weird tapes too, so this isn’t very out of the ordinary’. God no, Cal himself would bring his decrepit ass down here and fire me for affecting his bottom dollar. Instead I told her I would send this back to Sega (I didn’t know how the fuck to do that, of course) and give her a refund plus credit for a free rental. It kept her calm for the time, but I swear she never came back after that. Another customer for Blockbuster a few towns over I guess.

After she left I just put the game in a defective bin, but I swear to god it gave me this eerie feeling for the rest of the night, and I just couldn’t shake that SOMETHING about it was off. A few hours later, when Dustin finally got there after sunset for our usual plan these days, we finally did something.

Of course, we both sat leaning on the counter for nearly thirty minutes, just looking at the cartridge like it was going to come to life at any moment and grow teeth to eat us with. Call me a coward, but after the immolation on live tape I saw, I wasn’t fucking around. Finally, we both moved over to the game corner, unlocking the console and loading in the cartridge. Both of us took a deep breath before I hit the start button, throwing us into the game.

Normal Sonic and Knuckles started up, with the little cutscene of Sonic getting his ass beat for the Chaos Emeralds leading in. Something seemed off about it though, with pixels glitching out occasionally, changing colors, and. generally disappearing. By the time the gameplay started, we were convinced it was just a defective cartridge and a kid’s over-active imagination. Fucking wrong.

The first odd thing, other than the pixels popping, was Tails. Usually the cute little fox would just fly around after you, picking you out of danger from time to time and acting mainly as a sidekick. Right from the start of the level, he jumped into the nearest spikes, immediately doing the bounce off with a terrified face. Okay, weird glitch, but nothing too out of the ordinary. AI in these days could be either as stupid as a bag of rocks or as unbelievably hate filled as Mortal Kombat. There wasn’t much in between.

Then the game took over. It was like it was in some kind of demo mode, Sonic moving without any controller input from me. I tried guiding him forward in the level, jumping over one gap to keep goi9ng toward the rings ahead. Instead, he turned back to the gap, pausing for a second before doing that annoying-ass finger wag gesture, then immediately jumping into the pit to die. We went from three lives to zero, immediately, and the screen changed.

It loaded in a completely different screen, this resembling an average street with dim lights at night. The game itself was almost like a top down-ish RPG, but with more detail than I had ever seen. One, lone sprite stood at the left side of the screen, a bright green shirt reading ‘Cal’s’ in the obnoxious yellow neon. I didn’t even think to move, unsure of what I was seeing on the old CRT mounted up above the shelves full of games.

MOVE OR DIE

The screen was nearly covered with the words, prompting me to begin pressing down on the D-Pad to make the sprite get moving. As the street passed by, shadows moved in the background behind my character, bright red eyes peeking out from the darkness.

As the screen changed, revealing a pixelated version of Cal’s complete with neon signs and old movie posters, I could see something was different here. The windows were splattered red in spots, with a small puddle of what appeared to be blood oozing from under the front door. I paused for a second, not sure if I should continue to the door or not. Suddenly, from both sides of the screen, the shadows began moving from the background toward us.

I don’t mean toward us as in the game, I mean toward US. Dustin and I were standing there, perplexed as the dark figures, bright red eyes glowing on the CRT monitor as they became more clear. Look, in the nearly twenty years since then, I’ve seen game graphics get really, really fucking mindblowing. This though… the pixelation was too subtle, the darkness of the figures too clear, too defined to fit on a 16-bit system. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some good fucking graphics but when the darkness began to overtake the edges of the screen, curling outward over the edges of the CRT, Dustin snatched the controller from my hands, furiously mashing the d-pad down to make our sprite move into the room, over the pooling blood at the door.

The screen blacked out for a moment, loading in the new environment. Cal’s was faithfully recreated, though some of the shelves were arranged differently. The store was divided, game corner gone, with Betamax tapes on one side, VHS on the other, and one small shelf in the front holding Laserdiscs. The decor was the only real hint to the time period though, with a huge cardbo…

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