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.
Quote: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.
Quote: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:
Quote: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
Quote: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.
Quote: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.
![[+]](/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
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