childhood psychic damage memories

[huckleton]

okay. i figure if i ask in discord "what is something you experienced as a kid (probably in a video game or on the internet) that was unexpectedly haunting/strange/powerful and has stuck with you" people wouldnt be able to summon experiences to mind on the fly. so im gonna make a thread for it instead.

it doesnt HAVE to be from your childhood but im citing it becasue when youre a kid i feel like youre more vulnerable to seeing like. a weird powerful significance in otherwise normal or strange-but-not-too-out-there occurrences. that and people just put Whatever The Fuck in front of a child's eyes without thinking too hard about it

[faultychips]

Oh this is a very fun question. For myself, when I was like under 10 years old I watched a lot of television growing up, and during this period I saw multiple episodes of various TV shows centered around....mind control? More specifically mind controlling someone to the point where their entire personality and self changes. Though the only actual episode I can properly remember where this happened is "Beetle Romania" from Timon & Pumbaa (1995).
 
Along with other generally loaded material, the episode plot has Timon getting cursed and turned into a bug, then getting eaten by Pumbaa and then having to worm his way through his (cartoon-ified but honestly actually pretty nasty) guts to his head, where Timon messes with Pumbaa's brain and suddenly Pumbaa is soooooo smart and very smug and can do one million smart guy math equations. This doesn't happen in the episode (I just checked to make sure) but I also remember a continuation of this concept that I must have imagined myself, where Pumbaa becomes a college professor and leads a completely different life while Timon is trapped inside his brain and controls him from inside. This thought was enough for me to run and cower behind the couch so I wouldn't see the show anymore (instead of just turning the TV off. Naturally). Sometimes I wonder what kind of effects watching a show that actually went that far, like Invader Zim or whatever, would have done to my psyche. Though looking back on it, this episode is still a weird kids-show trope triple-whammy: getting transformed (in a scary and not cool way), small-ified body tours, and of course the mind alteration. Sometimes I wonder how it felt to be the people actually animating these...anyway, I found the whole episode on dailymotion here if you want to witness the whole thing yourself.

But yeah. I grew up with stuff like lavender town rumor videos when I was pretty young, but nothing from the youtube era scares like old TV does.

[huckleton]

i grew up on flash games and i developed a morbid obsession with "Cover Orange" because its a very bright and cheerful game but the way he dies if you fail to cover him is just plain morbid. he develops these black spots and then disintegrates into a jagged dark roughly-circular shape with no eyes. i was scared to death of this flash game but i drew him dying in the margins of my school papers

[cheet]

this one is like abysmal but when i was a kid and i got my first guinea pigs i decided to look up Guinea Pig Flash Games and the first one i found was one where you are a cat that jumped on them to make them explode into blood. and then i didn’t look again

[starsystemerror]

Something that haunts me to this day is a program my school used for teaching what I think was phonics or some kind of reading skill. The lessons were accessed by clicking on a door in a dark hallway, in what was probably supposed to be some kind of school setting but as a kid I always interpreted as something much more sinister. The lessons were not any sort of gamified cute thing like a lot of the other educational software I used, they were just on blank screens with a monotone voice over. I was so scared of this program and had nightmares about walking the dark hallways and opening doors to find blank voids. I'm pretty sure the school didn't use the software for long, and I much more clearly remember other, more colorful programs I used more often later.

I've recovered at least some of the other educational software I used in school, but I have never been able to find this one again, since I know so little about it and it was likely only distributed to schools, and possibly not very widely. It's my personal "lost media" mystery.

[brilokuloj]

Oh man I have been thinking about this. This thread is one of the hardest questions I have ever been asked. This is one of my favorite topics ever. It was like, one of the first things I started blogging about.

I will come back to this for sure. I will probably post a LOT in this thread but I don't want to take it over so I'll try to let other people take turns.

For now, I'll start with one that I actually have a video recorded of me talking about and still just haven't gotten around to editing (I'll be using another person's Let's Play for this post): FUCKING SHEEP RAIDER.

Sheep Raider is a Looney Tunes licensed PS1 game about Ralph Wolf, who you might not have even known was a separate character from Wile E Coyote. Ralph Wolf's goal is to steal sheep from Sam Sheepdog or risk being pummeled into paste. It's an incredibly bizarre game, cycling from bullshit stealth sections to OK platforming to bullshit puzzles.

Oh yeah and it gave me nightmares

• Level 2, with its impenetrably thick PS1 fog and introduction to the stealth premise, was bad enough it actually did give me a series of bad dreams. What were the dreams about? Just playing this fucking level.
  
• Level 8... in order to progress you have to TIME TRAVEL... TO LAVA WORLD. WHYYYYY. This one was so uncharacteristically bad I was certain it was part of another Looney Tunes game instead of this one. Made worse because I didn't understand that you were traveling back in time and for some reason thought you were traveling forward to a bad future
  
• But oh my god, Level 10. Look at the pan-over. Cannons that shoot you! An evil castle! BEES! And... oh and Gossamer. FUCKING LOW-POLY GOSSAMER.
  

Cannot emphasize enough that Gossamer haunted me. My mom made fun of me because the episode he's from is one of the funniest Looney Tunes episodes and he's just generally stupid-looking, but seriously in this game he is nightmarish. My wife was incredulous until I showed her and then she understood. Fuck this game. Pretty good soundtrack tho

[huckleton]

I will come back to this for sure. I will probably post a LOT in this thread but I don't want to take it over so I'll try to let other people take turns.

i am going to be 100% honest. you seem like the kind of person whose aesthetic / artistic vibes wouldve been/are at least partially influenced by experiencing 5 million childhood psychic damage events and that is exactly what i want to tap into here. this last part goes for anyone else in the thread but i would never get sick of hearing it

[brilokuloj]

Well, at Huck's encouragement I'm back with another one, and this one is -

The NNNNNNNN password

You might know Ecco as another cutesy Sega character, or as one of the mascots of vaporwave, or you might know about the Vortex Queen (which I may cover another time). But Ecco the Dolphin is a deep franchise... as unnervingly deep as the ocean itself.

Ecco the Dolphin was a game for the Sega Genesis that I only knew about in passing as one of Sega's classics. The Sega Genesis in itself was weird and terrifying to me - it seemed to have much darker games than even my beloved PlayStation, at least in sheer atmosphere - but Ecco was unparalleled.

The game starts you as a cute dolphin. The tutorial level instructs you to jump as far up into the sky as you can, introducing you to the core mix of swimming and platformer mechanics. As soon as you do that, a vortex comes down from the sky and sucks up all of your family and friends, leaving you alone in the ocean.

It doesn't get better after that, with Ecco having to defend himself from extremely fast hostile crabs and sharks and that fucking giant octopus. And the Vortex Queen. But the real highlight for me was not at all the admittedly memorable final boss, but rather what comes after that...

GameFAQs

Where am I in all of this, anyway? This is my childhood psychic damage memory, not a gamer listicle. Well, this would have been the mid-2000s; I was a wee preteen, which at this point of my life meant that I was spending half of my day on fucking GameFAQs.

Most people I know have used GameFAQs at least once or twice, or even vaguely know what it is, but I have yet to meet anyone who remembers how deep the community was on that website. LUEshi, anyone? (I'm a poser, I was never part of LUE.)

One of the reasons I was on it all day every day was because of a little-known secret about it: every video game listed on the website had its own board. This meant that people would have discussions about ancient obscure video games, or even set up their own micro-communities on "dead boards". GameFAQs was full of infinitely small micro-communities, and I considered myself an explorer, never settling down but content to find whatever shit people were talking about.

One of these boards, of course, was Ecco the Dolphin. But this one did not have a rich community of people posting dick jokes. This board had exactly one thread at the time, titled:

Am I the one who used to get scared by this game?

Bizarre grammar aside, doesn't that feel like the setup to a creepypasta?

There's only one page of this thread still on the Internet Archive, but it's dense with implications.

I really did. It started out happy and you swimming around, but then it gets all dark.. So I turned the game off and burnt it.

This game used to scare me too, and another weird coincadince it suvived a car fire...

You might be thinking, what the fuck? This is 2004 and they're talking like some of that newfangled Pokemon Creepy Pasta shit! But, yes, these people are likely fucking around or at least exaggerating, because video game creepypasta has indeed been around for longer than it had a name.

I was 10. I took all of this shit at face value.

The one archived page of the thread culminates in this exchange:

The scariest thing is if you accidentally input NNNNNNNN when you're new to the game.
I remember discovering that when I was a kid...
O_O

I made that same N password mistake when I was little. I had it on the sega channel. The Machine gives me nightmares. Especially the music...and the fact that it's welcoming you.

Wait.....what N thing?

This TORMENTED me.

There was nothing I could do but downlo-- ahem, acquire the game, and see it for myself.

After some consideration, I decided the climax of this story would be better told in the form of a video. And, once again, a reminder that the first few levels and public conception of this game is that it's about being a dolphin in the ocean.

Video description

Ecco the Dolphin title screen. I press start. Ecco is floating in an underwater cave. I swim to the left, which sends me to the password screen. I type in the letter N eight times. Text appears reading "Welcome to the Machine". I am dumped unceremoniously in a sci-fi futuristic autoscrolling level, being chased by some sort of Xenomorph squid, until it corners me and I die instantly. Imagine this and you are 10 years old.

[huckleton]

apparently i have multiple transferred memories from my brother. like when i was a kid i was so bad at differentiating myself from my brother that i thought various scary things that happened to my brother happened to me instead. one is falling down the stairs. one were these sticky star-shaped lights that my parents put on the walls of my brother's bedroom and it terrified him

my brother falling down the stairs happened before i was born and it happened because my mom was busy gambling

edit: they were star shapes