CreepyPasta Stories

Story 19: Glitchy Red

About a month ago, I bought a second Pokémon Red cartridge off eBay so I could start a new game and screw around without messing up my save file. As soon as I compared it to my old one, I knew it was either a bootleg or produced somewhere else. You can see in the picture how the sticker doesn't fit the front of the cartridge, and the red plastic is cheap and almost see-through (if you look close, you can see the internal battery on the second, while the first can't be seen through at all). When I started it up, it only had one option - New Game, and unlike the well-loved cartridge I'd been using, it didn't have any wear marks from being inserted into the GBC or anything indicating it'd been used.

Well, what the hell, I figured. I'd poured plenty of money into the franchise and one bootlegged game wasn't going to kill me. I popped it into my GBC and started playing.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost my GBC for a while, so I had to play it on my SP. No huge deal, I thought.

When I started the game up, oddly enough, the backlit screen of my SP went out, like I was playing on an old Game Boy Advance or a Color. I thought that was pretty weird, considering the lower setting of my SP's screen was brighter than the "high" setting on all my friends' SPs, as I took good care of it, and it was unlikely that the backlight would be going anytime soon. But as soon as I switched to playing Sapphire, the screen lit back up. I'd played my other Red on this SP plenty, and it'd never dimmed for an old Game Boy game, so I just attributed it to the game itself being poorly made (which makes no fucking sense, I know).

About now, you're probably wondering when I'm going to start telling you about how there were Unown in my party and the Buried Alive guy in Lavendar Town started eating my player character, because any preowned bootleg game story is bound to be some creepy hacked ****. Well, it wasn't that simple. I played through Lavender Town, the Pokémon Tower, all of that, and nothing unusual happened. I didn't go mad from the music and feel suicidal, my Pokémon never turned white and started crying tears of blood, or anything like that.

However, as I continued playing, it became apparent to me that this game had some glitches. Just like the cheap plastic casing and sticker that barely stuck, the game itself was flaky. I've never played Pokémon on an emulator before, but if I had to guess, I would say that when it was copied, a lot of the data was corrupted, and I had to be careful when playing or it would freeze.

For example, sometimes the graphics around the player (I'm going to call him "Red", as that's what I named him. I'm a bit of a Red fanboy) would turn into big colored bars and the game would stop, and the background music would stop on whatever note it had hit and play this high-pitched, staticky whine until I restart. This happened whenever I tried to get on my bike inside a cave or building.

I was almost sure this was just a normal bootlegged game until I examined the SNES in the Celadon department store. Don't judge me, but, being a Red fanboy, I've always liked when the game said things from Red's point of view, like how he says "Dad would like this!" when you examine the SNES, or "I should get going..." when you examine the TV, since you never get to see the player say anything, to the point where, as a joke, the developers made Red say nothing more than ellipses when you encountered him in G/S/C.

Anyways, when I examined the SNES where Red would normally say, "Dad would like this!", instead, I saw the text, "Where is DAD?"

I examined it again, and, same thing. I kind of laughed it off, thinking, for some reason, it was poor translation (don't ask how I thought that made any sense). In the back of my mind, I was kind of hoping for a hack game, because hey, if I got some screencaps and posted them on 4chan, I'd be able to at least kill an afternoon laughing about it.

I went to the next floor, then went back down and checked the NES again. To my surprise, the message had changed. Now, Red said, "Who created me?"