The Creepiest Mysteries Discovered in Video Games

Mixing horror with video games is an idea as old as the medium itself. The oldest horror games date back to the 1970s, though they would obviously be hilariously tame by modern standards. Compared to games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, these old games are a laughable relic of the past.

Of course, few video games are capable of creating a genuine feeling of horror or fear in the player. Horror games often rely on cheap jump scares that may be startling, but don’t instill any real sense of fear. I’ve been playing video games nearly my entire life, and there is only one game that ever truly scared me. That game was Eternal Darkness for the Nintendo GameCube.

Eternal Darkness was a creepy survival horror game with a unique mechanic. Most games had a health bar for your character, and if there was magic involved there would also be a mana bar used to cast spells. Eternal Darkness had both of those, but it added a third resource: sanity. As your sanity was depleted by enemies, weird stuff would happen in the game.

You might see blood dripping down the walls, the camera could get distorted or tilted, and you could even see monsters that weren’t really there. Those monsters could still kill you, but they would disappear if you restored your sanity. However, the developers were also dicks, and they decided to toy with the sanity of the actual player rather than just the character you were controlling.

One night I was playing Eternal Darkness and decided it was time to save my game before going to bed. It had been an hour or two since the last time I had saved my progress, so imagine my terror when I went to the game menu, clicked on “save game”, and was suddenly met with the blue screen of death instead of seeing my game save as normal. Eventually the game went back to normal and I was allowed to save, but by that point I had already frozen in place and dropped my controller in horror.

It is probably the most clever thing I’ve seen done to scare a player. Granted there is no blue screen of death on Nintendo consoles, but this was back in 2002 when getting one from Windows felt like a near daily occurrence. The implications of that screen were so ingrained in all of us that I didn’t have time to logic my way through the fact that it couldn’t have been real.

However, not all creepy things found in video games have been so innocuous. Sometimes the things that appear on our screens could have truly sinister and mysterious backstories. And this isn’t restricted to just horror games, either, so now it’s time to talk about mini golf.

Sente’s Missing Children

Sente was a small arcade game company created by a few former members of Atari. In 1984, they were acquired by Bally Midway of Mortal Kombat fame. Bally Sente only existed for a few years until the division went bankrupt in 1988 and became defunct, but they were able to pump out dozens of games in the few years that they existed.

Now imagine the year is 1985. I know you’d be like negative two years old at this point, Simon, but hear me out. You go to the local arcade with a fistful of quarters to kill some time, and out of the corner of your eye a new machine catches your eye. The game is called Sente Mini Golf, possibly the first ever Mini Golf game designed for arcade cabinets.

You walk towards the machine as it runs in attract mode, cycling through its screens like any other arcade cabinet. You see the game’s title screen, the developer credits, and some demo footage of the game. By the time you reach the cabinet the high score list is being displayed, but just as you’re about to reach down to insert a quarter into the machine, you suddenly find yourself face to face with this image:

The concept of images like this showing up in daily life wasn’t that unusual for those of us from the US. By the time I was a kid it was no longer common, but anyone old enough to visit an arcade in 1985 likely had seen plenty of missing children notices like this on milk cartons. But nobody had seen it in a video game before, and there’s something a bit unsettling about the images.

The grainy black and white pictures emanating from an otherwise colourful screen, combined with the almost overexposed quality of the image on the left, made this an eerie and unsettling sight for a lot of people. So much so that, despite Sente games not being particularly successful, people remembered these pictures decades later and began asking about them online. And in places where these old arcade machines are still in use, these images may still be appearing.

The above pictures of Tahj Allen Merriman and Steven Phillip Curtis are the most well known, but they aren’t the only missing children to be featured in Sente’s arcade games. This next image featured two girls who had gone missing, Malinda Marie Smith and April Rose Yates, and it also identifying the organization that was running the search.

These two screenshots both appeared in different versions of Mini Golf, with another Sente game, Stompin’, featuring pictures of Daniel Godfrey Owens and Charles Brandon Morris, both of whom disappeared in 1985. So what exactly was happening here?

Fortunately, we do have some idea what was going on. In an interview, one of the creators and developers of Sente Mini Golf was asked about the missing children images. He explained that he was asked to add them into the game as a new way to test spreading the word about missing children. Other interviews state that the FBI had specifically reached out with the request, which is certainly plausible since the images were sourced directly from the FBI. However, why they would have reached out to such a small developer instead of a larger one remains unclear. Perhaps it was because the biggest game developers were all in Japan at the time, so they were just contacting whoever they could in the United States.

Of course, there was no commercial internet to speak of at the time. There was no way to connect the arcade cabinets to a server where information could be updated, which meant that these images had to be hardcoded into the game. Arcade cabinets feature a number of dipswitches that control various features of the game, such as the price per play and difficulty level. These were historically only accessible to people who owned physical cabinets, but emulation has changed all that.

The premier arcade emulator is known as MAME, or Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. One of the many features of MAME is that you can see and adjust the dipswitches. Mini Golf was essentially completed by the time the request came in, so the developers just added three dipswitches to control the missing children message. The first switch, labeled “Display Kids”, caused these images to appear on the screen during while it was running in attract mode. The other switches are “Kid on Left Located” and “Kid on Right Located”, which would put the word “located” in red text over the corresponding image.

It was honestly a clever idea in theory, and it’s not like arcade cabinet attract modes didn’t feature other messages as well. For example, anyone who grew up in the 1980s has almost certainly seen an arcade cabinet flash the FBI logo and the message “winners don’t use drugs”. Notable people who didn’t see that message include Lance Armstrong, Maria Sharapova, and Dock Ellis, who threw a no-hitter while tripping balls on acid.

But while it may have been clever in theory, in practice it appears to have been an unsuccessful campaign. Among other reasons it was unlikely to work, it was just way too fucking creepy. The images were so sudden and jarring, and they were made all the more eerie by the game’s normal and upbeat sound effects playing in the background behind the images.

Although these images have been the subject of discussion on the internet for decades, there is still one question that remains: what actually happened to these children? Sources typically state that, of the six missing children shown, only Tahj Merriman was ever located. In a forum discussion about these missing posters, a user managed to find an old newspaper article stating that Tahj was the victim of a family kidnapping, having been taken by his mother. It’s unclear when he was found, but she was convicted three years after his initial disappearance.

Previous investigations have also found a Steven P. Curtis who was the right age, down to the month, and living in the same general area as where the boy had gone missing. Though it’s likely this is the same person, it’s not a particularly unique name. Similarly, an appropriately aged Daniel Owens and Charles Morris have both been identified as well.

I can’t say with absolute certainty that those three men are the same boys that went missing back in the 1970s and 80s, but there’s a decent chance they are alive and well. While there are pictures available, it’s hard to compare a picture of a man in his 40s with a low quality picture of a 5 year old kid and say that they’re the same person.

Fortunately, I managed to find something that other investigations were unable to regarding one of the missing girls. Thanks to a 1997 yearbook, I can say with absolute certainty that April Rose Yates was recovered. Not only did the high school photo share some rather astonishing similarities to the picture of her as a young girl, but there was a childhood photo of her in the yearbook as well. It wasn’t the same photo used for the missing poster, but it is unmistakably the same person.

That just leaves Malinda Marie Smith. Though Smith is a painfully common last name, that spelling of Malinda is a bit unusual which should narrow down the search quite a bit. Unfortunately, that search turns up absolutely nothing. Neither I, nor anyone else, seem to have been able to find any information on if she was ever recovered or if she might be alive somewhere today.

I also mentioned earlier that Sente was a small developer who folded after just a few years despite being owned by Bally. As a result, there aren’t ROMs available of all of their games. Some of the games they produced have faded completely into obscurity, lost to time. This means that there may have been other missing children featured in some of Sente’s games whose images haven’t been rediscovered.

As such, there’s no way to know how many people went to the arcade back in the 1980s only to come face to face with the image of a lost child who was never found.

Corpse01.mdl

Hey Simon, wanna see a dead body? Don’t worry, it’s just going to be a screenshot from a video game. Allegedly.

Half-Life 2 was the much anticipated sequel to Valve’s critical and commercial success, Half-Life. And Half-Life 3 is the much anticipated sequel to Half-Life 2, and a thing that is definitely going to happen someday, I promise. However, Half-Life 2 went through some serious changes during its development. The original game was much darker, but a lot of the grittier elements were toned down after a beta version of the game was leaked.

But not all of the darker elements were removed. There was a minor character in Half-Life 2 known only by his asset file name: Corpse01.mdl. In the original beta version Corpse01 had a larger role than in the released game, but he was still a minor character. However, the character model was extremely popular and has been prominently featured in many other games built on Valve’s Source engine, such as Garry’s Mod. For anyone unfamiliar, this is Corpse01: [Editor’s note: The original source included a screenshot reference here, noting that it was “even creepier than it first appears.”]

This character model appears many times throughout Half-Life 2 on corpses whose lives were ended in a variety of different ways, but there’s always been something about this texture that people found particularly eerie. Though not as dark as the original beta, Half-Life 2 is still a pretty dark game. Even so, something about this character model just seemed off. Almost like it was too lifelike. Perhaps that’s why Corpse01 became such a popular asset in other Source engine games, because it was so different than all of the other models.

And for nearly 20 years, that’s all Corpse01 was. Half-Life 2 had cutting edge graphics at the time, and this was just an overly realistic video game asset thought to be a leftover relic from the game’s much more intense original beta version. But in late 2022, that all changed, thanks to a post on the subreddit r/eyeblech. Before it got banned from Reddit, eyeblech was a community for sharing some of the most brutal gore on the internet. Just reading someone’s descriptions of videos that were posted there is enough to make me extremely uncomfortable.

A user posted some pictures to eyeblech that they found particularly gruesome. The user claimed that these images had come from a forensic pathology textbook, though to the best of my knowledge that textbook has never been found. It’s possible the book was identified on the original thread, but “unfortunately” the way that the Wayback Machine works doesn’t allow you to view subreddits that are marked as 18+ so I can’t go scour the eyeblech archives. However, the original image is very easy to find for any of you that truly want to.

Of course, there’s very little need to seek out the original image, as it’s almost identical to the face of Corpse01. The only change they made was duplicating the empty eye socket, as the original photo still has one of the eyes almost completely intact. Perhaps the developers at Valve decided that leaving the one real eye in the image would have made it far too unsettling for their audience. Or maybe it would have just become too obvious that there was a real dead body in their game.

However, this all begs the question of who this person is and what happened to them. The person is clearly a burn victim, with their entire face having been burned off. The weird thing is that the rest of their body is completely unscathed. The neck, shoulders, and chest are unharmed, with the only black spots being charred bits that fell off from the person’s face.

There are potentially ways that something like this could happen I suppose, but the strangest detail is that the man’s long hair was completely unaffected by the fire as well.

It’s as if someone intentionally burned the person’s face off, and this has become the main speculation. The most common story that appears online is that the person was the victim of a mafia hit, and that his face was burned off with a blowtorch. I’m certainly not going to suggest that the mafia wouldn’t do something like that, but since the man’s identity is unknown this is pretty much just baseless speculation that has been repeated so many times it’s turning into fact.

Then again, there’s not really a better explanation for what happened. I’ve seen the idea floated that the body could have been donated to science, and the face was then burned off to demonstrate severe burn damage for the purposes of a textbook. However, as far as I can tell something like that would be extremely unethical and would never actually happen. Maybe in the 1930s or something it could have, but the photo is too high quality to be anything that old.

Whatever happened to this man, it almost certainly happened before he wound up in the hands of forensic pathologists.

But what that was and who he is may forever remain a mystery. Even if the original textbook is uncovered, medical confidentiality standards mean that no names would be included to identify the cadavers contained within the textbook.

Station.exe

This mystery isn’t nearly as morbid, it’s just downright weird. The game was first posted to 4chan’s paranormal board /x/ in 2013 as a single file, station.exe. According to the user that uploaded the file, they had purchased a CD containing this disc at a tech expo. Some reports say that he purchased the disc intentionally, while others say it was hidden in a jewel case beneath the disc he was intentionally purchasing.

I can’t confirm for certain which is the official story, but it doesn’t really matter since it’s undoubtedly bullshit anyway.

Rather surprisingly, however, people downloaded station.exe and started playing it. This is honestly shocking, since it was just a year after the release of Lostboy.exe on 4chan. Lostboy was an unsolvable maze full of images that were designed to be creepy just for the Hell of it. By itself the game was nothing special, but it became famous as the game that hacked 4chan. Sort of, anyway. The game itself was harmless, but it was being distributed using a MediaFire link.

Piggybacking off the popularity of the game, another user started distributing a different MediaFire link that claimed to be Lostboy.exe. This file was actually a RAT, or remote access Trojan, that was downloaded by a surprising number of 4chan users. Some were fucked with by receiving e-mails with images from their own webcams, while others had their bank accounts emptied. For many, it was a painful reminder of why you should never run random executable files you find online, especially on 4chan.

And yet, despite this only taking place a year later, people began downloading and running station.exe. Fortunately it wasn’t a virus this time around, but I can’t stress enough what a bad idea this is in general. With that public service announcement out of the way though, what exactly was the game?

Station.exe was a game made using Blender, and it’s about as simple as a game could possibly be. The game is set at an abandoned station with a bunch of generators. The building has two floors, though the second story is completely empty, and there’s a dock leading off to the water. That’s the entirety of the setting. Everything is barely textured, and there’s nothing to do except wander around the desolate location.

After a couple minutes, some weird ambient sounds would start to play in the background. The audio was slowed down for the game, but the sounds have been identified as recordings of the mysterious sky trumpets heard around the world. Mysterious to some people, anyway; there’s a really simple explanation for all of them. Following the sounds commencing, the player would start to be chased by three disembodied, circular heads that oddly resemble Thomas the Tank Engine’s face, but creepier.

You can run as much as you like, but the environment is really small so within a minute or so the heads are guaranteed to catch you. And once that happens, the game crashes. The end. It’s a really shitty and seemingly incomplete game, and by itself there wouldn’t be anything particularly interesting about it. But it’s also really small, both the game environment itself and the decompiled code of the game, so if there was anything secret hidden inside it wouldn’t take long for people to find it. And they did.

Inside the game, hidden on the bottom of one of the walls, are the numbers 62.616057, 113.947335. These are clearly coordinates, so people put them into Google Earth to see what was there. As it turns out, those coordinates are the location of an abandoned diamond mine deep in Siberia. Station.exe is a one to one recreation of the mine, at least as far as we can tell from Google Earth.

The station and dock were both there, but there was also another structure not present in the game: a silo labeled “CC-18 Satan”. My best guess is that the silo was (or possibly is) home to the Russian R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile. NATO’s reporting name for those missiles was SS-18 Satan, and if I know that then obviously the Russians know that.

They may have chosen to mark the silo with NATO’s nickname for their missile to taunt them, but the letter “Es” in Cyrillic looks like the Latin letter C, hence it looks like CC-18 to Westerners rather than SS-18. That’s just my personal speculation, but it’s the most logical thing I could come up with for why there would be a missile silo labeled “Satan” in the Siberian wilderness.

Anyway, obviously the first step to follow that lead was for someone to go check out the station in person, but this was a nonstarter for a couple reasons. First, it turns out that there aren’t a lot of anons that live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in Siberia. Someone in Russia who was close enough to make the journey was eventually found, but they were stopped by military guards before they could get anywhere near the station. Turns out it’s located in one of Russia’s restricted zones, so nobody can actually go there.

However, there were other discoveries made in the game’s code. There were numerous references to and quotes from /k/, 4chan’s weapons board. A couple other images were found in the game as well that contained two more sets of coordinates. One was for a scientific research center for genetic experimentation and disease control, also in Siberia, and the other was a biological weapons testing facility in Uzbekistan.

But perhaps the most interesting part of decompiling the game was the code itself. To people familiar with Blender, it was clear that the program was not originally created using the game engine. Instead it was coded in some other language, then modified by hand so that it would compile and run in Blender. This was weird, to say the least, and it fueled speculation that this was originally some old, Soviet era program that was converted to a Blender game.

Personally I don’t buy that bit of the story for a second, but it’s still a weird detail I have no explanation for.

Hidden inside the code was also a link to a now defunct website called semperprotinam.com. The name translates to “I will always resist”, and it contained images of and documents about military bases and weapons. However, while the different folder names and their sizes were all visible, everything was password protected.

People were able to get in briefly using the username “instrument” and password “glockenspiel” so some of the images were seen, but the password was quickly changed after being discovered and the new password was never broken. The site’s owner denied that any of the images that anons had found there existed, making it both highly suspicious and a dead end once everyone was locked out.

For as much as has been uncovered about station.exe, nothing meaningful is really known. Why was this “game” created and uploaded to 4chan, and why does it point to the specific locations that it does? Is this actually connected to the Russian military in some way, or was everything deliberately set up to create as much mystery and intrigue as possible?

Many people view it as some sort of failed alternate reality game or ARG, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The whole point of an ARG is to tell some sort of story and for players to make their way to the end. But they were immediately locked out of the website associated with the game once it was uncovered, and the physical location is inaccessible to anyone without specific Russian military clearance.

I know I already touched upon Lostboy.exe which was a deliberately unbeatable maze made for the lulz, so perhaps this was meant to be an unbeatable ARG. That just doesn’t feel right to me though, and I believe there’s almost certainly something else here. What that something else is, however, nobody knows.

Sad Satan

Finally, we’re going to end today with one of the darkest and most infamous mysteries in all of gaming: the story of Sad Satan. As a preface to this, do not seek out this game. Do not download this game. There are multiple different versions running around, but just assume none of them are safe.

Thinking that you’ll be fine playing Sad Satan is like telling yourself that you’ll be fine only smoking crack recreationally. It is a terrible idea, and please do not do it. The reasons why will become apparent shortly, but please do not tempt fate. I realize that probably sounds like the start of a God awful creepypasta, but this is a genuine warning.

With that out of the way, let’s travel all the way back to June 25, 2015. This was the day that the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner (OHC) introduced the world to Sad Satan. OHC was, ironically, an obscure horror channel. His entire channel was dedicated to let’s plays of obscure horror games, except he was completely silent throughout the videos; it was just gameplay footage.

This is not a great way to gain a following, as it’s the personality of the host that makes let’s play videos entertaining. Unsurprisingly, his videos didn’t get many views. Even now, after his original Sad Satan video has received over 4 million views, most of OHC’s videos only have a couple thousand views. So what made this game different?

OHC posted a link to his video on Reddit claiming that Sad Satan was a game that had been given to him on the dark web, the typical setting of all bullshit spoopy internet stories. The game was given to him by a user who identified himself only as “ZK”. Over the next week, OHC uploaded four more videos of gameplay footage. In the middle of all those uploads, the website Kotaku published a story about Sad Satan along with a brief interview with OHC.

The gameplay itself was…bad. Obviously the point of the game is just to be scary, but nothing about it actually seems fun. You wander around aimlessly through a bunch of corridors where somehow everything is disturbingly backlit. That’s the entire game; as far as I can tell, there was no ending. You just walked around while creepy images occasionally flashed on the screen and disturbing audio played, much of which plays backwards.

Or at least the images were supposed to be creepy, but perhaps it was just the surprise factor. The first one of these images to appear in OHC’s play through was just a screen grab of Will Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. That might be terrifying for Chris Rock, but back in 2015 all it would likely do is make people laugh. However, while not showing anything too outrageous, the images do start to take a darker tone.

For example, there is a picture of JFK smiling from his Dallas motorcade moments before being killed. Other pictures feature Rolf Harris, an Australian musician and actor who was convicted of sexually assaulting four underage girls, and Tsutomu Miyazaki, one of Japan’s most infamous serial killers who exclusively targeted girls aged 4 through 7. There was even a picture of Jimmy Savile, smiling alongside Margaret Thatcher while they both held up badges promoting the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Oh yeah, and there was a picture of Satan with tits, because why not.

The audio included a good amount creepy ambiance and some screaming, but like I said before there was a lot of backwards audio included as well. Naturally, the creator of the game had to include Led Zeppelin’s hit Stairway to Heaven, as it was the source of the game’s name. In 1982, some batshit insane televangelist went on a tirade about demonic music, claiming that if you play Stairway to Heaven backwards it says the lyrics:

Here’s to my sweet Satan The one whose little path would make me sad Whose power is Satan He will give those with him 666 There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan

While technically the portion in the song does sound a bit like that when played backwards, it’s obviously a coincidence. There are millions of examples of stuff like this because backwards audio is weird, and I bet if you play enough clips of Simon backwards you’ll eventually find one that sounds like he’s saying “Send me all your bitcoin”. Whatever, Led Zeppelin doesn’t need me to defend their work. But even though it is clearly a coincidence, it still sounds creepy.

Another bit of backwards audio that’s more relevant to the images I mentioned comes from The Doors. In their cover of “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)”, Jim Morrison changed one of the original lyrics. The slightly altered lyric, which is what was played backwards in Sad Satan, is “show me the way to the next little girl”. There’s also a bunch of audio clips of Charles Manson thrown in there as well, and those aren’t backwards masked.

You get to clearly hear Manson say “If I started murdering people there’d be none of you left” on a loop, which is fun.

In the descriptions for OHC’s gameplay videos and in his original Reddit post, he had included a dark web .onion link to the game, but the link didn’t work. That’s not a huge surprise since he had claimed to have received the game months earlier and .onion links have a bad habit of disappearing after a short period of time. However, the day after the final let’s play video was uploaded, someone finally noticed that the link OHC provided never could have worked, because it contained the number 9.

Onion links are created in Base32, which contains the letters A through Z and the numbers 2 through 7. A link containing a 1, 8, or 9 could never have been real in the first place.

This created a lot of questions surrounding the authenticity of the game. Was this actually some obscure horror game OHC had discovered, or was it something he made himself as a publicity stunt? On July 7th, nearly two weeks after all of this began, the Kotaku interview with OHC was updated. He had responded to the writer’s request for an updated statement in which he claimed that he deliberately gave everyone a broken link because the game was full of gore and illegal pornography that he had to edit out of his videos, and he didn’t want others to download the game.

But 18 minutes before this update was posted on Kotaku, there was a new development on 4chan. Someone claiming to be the dark web user ZK was pissed off at OHC for lying to everyone. ZK claimed that OHC wasn’t showing them the real Sad Satan, so he provided a clear web link to a download of what he claimed to be the True Sad Satan. People had been eager to download the game ever since OHC first showed it on his channel, so they jumped all over this link.

I know I already talked about this in the last entry, but for the love of God stop running random executable files you find online, especially from 4chan.

Maybe everyone thought everything had been a bluff, but the True Sad Satan contained everything that OHC claimed was in it. It was full of images of gore and illegal pornography, including brutal gore right on the title screen. To make things even worse, as if that was necessary, most of the images of gore also featured children.

However, despite ZK claiming that this was the True Sad Satan, it was clear to players that it wasn’t the original game featured on OHC. Despite still being referred to as the “true” or “real” version of Sad Satan, it was just a clone somebody threw together based off the original gameplay videos, making sure to add all sorts of illegal images. And of course viruses.

These weren’t your run of the mill viruses either, like the Lostboy.exe RAT. If a person really knows what they’re doing, viruses can cause irreparable damage. Writing in assembly, while much more difficult, gives a person low-level control over a system’s hardware. You can just tell the machine to send voltage somewhere in quantities that the system should absolutely not allow.

Someone with enough knowledge can easily destroy a person’s CPU, and whoever wrote the viruses included in the cloned Sad Satan definitely had enough knowledge. The viruses were sophisticated enough that, even when installed and ran on a virtual machine, they could break out into the actual computer and completely brick it.

Eventually a couple users banded together to remove the malware and illegal images to release a clean version of the game, but don’t go looking for that either. At this point there are at least seven different versions of the game running around, only one of which is clean. It’s just not worth the risk. Especially because, and I cannot stress this enough, the actual game itself is boring as fuck. Just watch someone else’s playthrough on YouTube if you care that much.

This all leaves us with a few mysteries, all of which remain officially unsolved to this day. Who created the original Sad Satan, is it possible to play anywhere, and who created the cloned version?

The easiest of these to address is whether or not the original Sad Satan, as featured on OHC, is available to play anywhere. The answer to that is no, and it never has been. OHC was playing it on his channel so at least one copy of the game exists somewhere, but nobody else has ever uncovered a copy of the original game. And that ties into the first question of who made the original version, because it is believed that OHC made it himself as a publicity stunt.

There’s pretty strong evidence for this as well. The story of the game’s origin is obvious bullshit, and it’s a game that nobody else in the world has ever found. That’s not definitive of anything, because even if the dark web story was a lie, it could still have been an exceedingly rare game that nobody else online was aware of. More compelling is that, roughly five months before the Sad Satan videos released on his channel, OHC was on Reddit asking how to make his own horror game.

You could certainly argue that’s just a coincidence, but it seems unlikely. Technically this is considered unsolved as nobody has proven the connection and he hasn’t admitted to it, but it is largely agreed that OHC made the original Sad Satan. But that’s where things get really weird. He sent a revised statement to Kotaku claiming that he deliberately posted a fake link because the game contained illegal content, but it clearly didn’t.

Aside from there being no obvious splices in his footage, why would OHC fill a game with illegal content knowing that nobody in the world but him would ever play the game and that he couldn’t include that content in his YouTube videos? I know that stupid people do stupid things all the time, but this sees to defy reason. So if Sad Satan and its fake backstory were designed as a publicity stunt, is it possible OHC sent his statement to Kotaku to further capitalize off the added hype from the cloned version posted to 4chan by ZK?

There was an 18 minute gap between ZK’s post on 4chan and the Kotaku update, though we don’t know the exact time that OHC contacted Kotaku with his updated information and whether or not it was before or after the cloned version was published to 4chan. But even if he was trying to ride the wave of free publicity, what exactly was his goal? His YouTube channel was abandoned after all this, never posting another video, and the original version of Sad Satan was never released. If he wanted to ramp up excitement so he could sell his shitty game that would be one thing, but since that didn’t happen I struggle to figure out exactly what OHC’s play here was.

But none of that addresses who created the cloned version with all the illegal shit in it. Under different circumstances I could say that why they did so was yet another mystery, but not when dealing with 4chan; this is the exact sort of thing I would expect to happen on 4chan, so why someone did it isn’t a question at all.

Currently, there are two main suspects for who created the cloned version of Sad Satan. The first is Gary Graves, aka Scarebere. Gary had a tiny little YouTube channel called Scarebere that mostly featured music, but fortunately there was one horrible “comedy” video in which he was featured as well. This is a good thing because it gives confirmation about what he looked like, which can be matched to the known mugshot of Gary.

The first bit of evidence connecting Gary to Sad Satan was a video on the channel titled “Sad, Sad Satan” which has since been deleted. This video was released roughly three years before the entire saga involving OHC began, and the title was likely just a coincidence. After all, the title is just a reference to Stairway to Heaven.

There was also a Reddit user by the name of ScarebereZK who made a few posts related to Sad Satan. The account was registered before the clone Sad Satan game was released, but after the Kotaku interview was published citing “ZK” as the dark web entity from whom the game originated. This means that there’s a high probability it was just someone (probably Gary) trolling and pretending to be the creator of the game.

That’s all pretty flimsy evidence that Gary created the cloned version, so what has people so convinced? That would be the mugshot I mentioned earlier. On February 5th, 2017, Gary was sitting in a cell in Lubbock County Jail on a burglary charge. His girlfriend was back home using his phone, and she discovered multiple images of illegal pornography on it. She immediately called the police, though Gary was fortunately already in the right place. He was convicted in late 2017 and sentenced to 108 months in prison.

While it makes sense that the creator of the clone Sad Satan could be a person who would wind up in prison for such a crime, it’s still a pretty weak connection. Many people claim with absolute certainty that Gary was the one responsible for the illegal version of the game, but I’m not particularly convinced. I’m not saying that he definitely didn’t do it, just that the existing evidence leaves a lot to be desired.

That brings us to the other main suspect, which is OHC himself. People called bullshit on his dark web story, and rightfully so. It was a clearly fake story designed to create an extra sense of spooky mystery around the game, and a number of people fell for it, including someone at Kotaku. However, a lot of people didn’t. 4chan was full of people mocking OHC and what they saw as a dumb little creepypasta designed to promote his dumb little game.

Because of that, some people argue that OHC created the cloned Sad Satan himself as a way to silence the haters. If he wanted them to believe it was really a dark web game, then he had to release a version filled with dark web content. Oh yeah, and he also had to get back to the Kotaku writer who was also now calling bullshit so he could publically claim that this stuff was in the game all along.

If that’s all the case, then OHC should be sitting in a cell right alongside Gary. And yet, nobody knows where he is. After running a YouTube channel that garnered little to no attention, OHC pulled off a publicity stunt that raked in millions of views for his Sad Satan videos. And then he just vanished. The videos aren’t even monetized, so it’s not like he’s collecting passive income from all of this nonsense.

Though it’s all but a certainty that OHC was behind the original version of Sad Satan he featured in his videos, the mystery behind who created the cloned version may never be solved. Though a case can be made for either Gary or OHC being the person responsible, neither case is terribly convincing. The true creator is likely a completely unidentified person. All I know for sure is that I hope this remains the darkest internet mystery for a long time so we can talk about more wholesome things, like why Tiger Woods 99: PGA Tour Golf has an episode of South Park hidden on the disc.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the oldest horror game mentioned in the article?

The oldest horror games date back to the 1970s.

Which game is described as the only one that truly scared the author?

Eternal Darkness for the Nintendo Gamecube.

What unique mechanic did Eternal Darkness introduce?

Eternal Darkness introduced a sanity mechanic where weird stuff happens in the game as your sanity depletes.

What was the creepy feature of Sente’s Mini Golf game?

Sente’s Mini Golf game featured images of missing children during its attract mode.

Who requested the inclusion of missing children images in Sente’s games?

The FBI specifically reached out with the request to include missing children images.

What was the significance of the Corpse01.mdl character model in Half-Life 2?

The Corpse01.mdl character model was extremely popular and featured in many other Source engine games due to its eerie realism.

What was the mysterious game station.exe about?

Station.exe was a game set at an abandoned station with generators, featuring disembodied, circular heads chasing the player.

What was the controversial game Sad Satan?

Sad Satan was a game featuring creepy images and disturbing audio, with multiple versions containing illegal content.

What was the origin story of Sad Satan according to OHC?

OHC claimed to have received Sad Satan from a user named ZK on the dark web.

What happened to the creator of the original Sad Satan videos?

The creator of the original Sad Satan videos, OHC, vanished after the controversy and his YouTube channel was abandoned.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Creepiest Mysteries Discovered in Video Games
• Hero image source by Bigul Malayi / openverse, cc0.