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Some video games are haunted. Like the disturbing urban legends that surround Hollywood films such as The Wizard of Oz’s dead munchkin, or the ghost of the little boy in Three Men and a Baby, there are titles in gaming history that contain a certain kind of dark energy.
We’re not talking about horror games like Resident Evil or Alien: Isolation. Sure, those games are sufficiently spooky. But they’re manufactured as such. You go into Silent Hill knowing that you’re going to get spooked. Scarier is the experience of being an 8-year-old kid, innocently enjoying a juicebox after school in your living room, then stumbling into Lavender Town in Pokémon Blue and finding yourself in whatever the waking equivalent of sleep paralysis is. The inexplicable high-pitched bells of the soundtrack. The soft grey and light purple shading of the primitive Game Boy graphics. The fact that everyone in the town feels quiet or adrift. Eight-bit ghosts. Such mysterious digital etchings are the ingredients of our childhood nightmares.
While not every game on this list is intended to be scary, all of these titles contain strange and disturbing details that give players the sense that there’s something wrong with the cartridge. Was there a poltergeist in the development studio? Did someone go mad in the manufacturing process and cast a curse on the game? Or, as in the case of the now-infamous Majora’s Mask creepy pasta, perhaps the former owner of the cartridge was a drowned little boy, burdened to forever walk the polygonal halls of the 3D-rendered castle contained in the cartridge. We don’t know what led to these eight games becoming so creepy. But they definitely still show up in our nightmares.
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