Previously: “Bongcheon-Dong Ghost” And Beyond: Inside Horang’s Eerie Webtoon World.
In 2008, a curious video made its way around the internet — a video that purported to show what happened if you tried to view a YouTube channel belonging to a user with the name 666. Indeed, that’s where the video got its title: It was simply called “Username 666.” Posted to YouTube itself under the channel name nana825763, which seemed to belong to someone who called themself PiroPito, the video was presented as a screen capture shared by the user trying to make sense of what had happened to their computer when they found their way to what looked like a possessed or demonic version of YouTube.

Was it real? Could it be real? Was that even a possibility? At the time, these were major questions — along with, of course, the question of who exactly nana832763 or PiroPito might be.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
These days, of course, we know better. “Username 666” has long since been revealed to be a piece of art — what most would generally term a video pasta: An early creepypasta presented solely in video format, with no written component, exemplifying a subgenre and style that later came to be called “screenlife” (that is, a piece of storytelling that takes place entirely within screens — think the 2013 film The Den, the Unfriended franchise, and both 2018’s Searching and its 2023 followup, Missing).
We also know who its creator actually is: Nana825763 — that is, PiroPito — is a Japanese visual artist, animator, and experimental filmmaker.
And we know, too, that “Username 666” is actually the second iteration of this particular story: A few months prior to its YouTube debut, PiroPito had posted the original version, titled “SM666,” to the Japanese video sharing site Niconico, then called Nico Nico Douga. (The rebrand from Nico Nico Douga to Niconico occurred in 2012.)
“Username 666” has proven to be a formative early creepypasta (or a formative early creepypasta-adjacent piece of online media, if you want to get picky about it), with the kind of longevity any artist would hope their work might have. But here’s where things get even more interesting: “Username 666” is not the only video PiroPito has created that features this odd, demonic, “otherside” version of YouTube — what I tend to think of as Bizarro-land YouTube.
There are at least two more. And together, these three videos, short though they each may be, hint at a larger universe — one that speaks to fears of the unknown, of the uncanny, and of what horrors might be lurking beneath an otherwise mundane, familiar-looking, everyday kind of surface.
So, let’s take a look, shall we? Let’s dive into PiroPito’s Bizarro-land YouTube.
It’s… quite the rabbit hole.
The Artistry And Aesthetic Of PiroPito’s Digital Horror
PiroPito hasn’t made much biographical information about himself publicly available, so we don’t really know much about him. According to his Twitter bio, he lives in Kanagawa Prefecture, which is just south of Tokyo; the port city of Yokohama is its capital, if you’re familiar with the geography. He also, per his now-defunct GeoCities website, first started using computers in 2000 and began posting his art to the internet shortly thereafter.
(The GeoCities site is, alas, no longer live; Yahoo!, which acquired GeoCities in 1999, shut down the U.S. version of the service in 2009 and the Japanese version in 2019. Bits of PiroPito’s old site are accessible via the Wayback Machine, but it is, as is the case with much of the internet, imperfectly preserved.)
We do know quite a bit about his interests, however, both through his work and through his social media. He gardens (vegetables, mostly; his potatoes this past spring were admirable); he used to raise ants, although whether he still does now is unclear (the queen ant he took care of for a full decade, who he called A-chan, died in 2019, with her colony following her to the grave shortly thereafter); he’s really into Minecraft and has been documenting a know-nothing-about-Minecraft-going-into-it playthrough since 2017; and, in recent years, he’s been teaching himself game design, with the end goal of creating a video game set within his unique horror world. (He’s using the Unreal engine, for the curious; the game’s current title is Metaphysical Region.)
As for how old he is? An article about his still-ongoing Minecraft playthrough that was published at BuzzFeed News (RIP) in April of 2018 stated that he was 30 at the time, which would put him at around 36 or 37 now, at the end of 2024. That’s assuming that he actually was 30 in 2018, though; although BuzzFeed News did speak briefly to him for the piece, I’m not sure if they actually verified his age with him or whether they were just going off of all the comments from Twitter and Tumblr that asserted he was 30.
If he was, in fact, 30 in 2018, then that would also mean that when he first started using computers in 2000, he would have been about 12 — and that at the time that “SM666” and “Username 666” first went live, he would only have been about 19 or 20. If this is correct, then between “Username 666,” “No Through Road,” and “Backrooms (Found Footage)”… well, let’s just say that you should never underestimate what a talented teenager can do with the right tools.
In any event, PiroPito has continued making weird art and short horror films in the years since first introducing “SM666” and “Username 666” to the world, including one of my all-time favorites, “My House Walk-Through.” And throughout all that time, his works have been consistently united by a distinct, cohesive aesthetic: The color palette is predominantly red; there’s a lot of grime and decay; and everything looks unsettlingly fleshy. If the textures that appear in nearly all of his horror works existed in real life, you’d expect them to be warm and wet to the touch — squishy and kind of… moist. (Apologies to anyone for whom the word “moist” is the ultimate in disgust, but, well… that’s the aesthetic here. These works are meant to feel gross in the same way that the word “moist” is gross.)
PiroPito’s three Bizarro-land YouTube-focused videos exemplify this aesthetic, so let’s take that as our cue to take a closer look at what exactly happens in each individual video.
We’ll start where it all began: With “SM666” and “Username 666.”
“Username 666”: An Introduction To PiroPito’s Bizarro-land YouTube
For the purposes of our discussion here, I’m going to talk primarily in terms of “Username 666,” rather than “SM666”; it’s the most easily accessible version of this first video, and the one that more people have seen. If you do want to check out “SM666,” though, everything we’ll talk about with regards to “Username 666” still applies, more or less.
First, though, a little background on the two versions of this video:
Originally taken online in December of 2007 as an entry for an online short film festival run by slashup05, “SM666” predates “Username 666” by about three months. They both feature pretty much the same content; it’s just the framing platform that’s different — Nico Nico Douga vs. YouTube. PiroPito noted on his GeoCities website that, at the time, he preferred viewers to watch the video on Nico Nico Douga; however, he created the YouTube version to account for the fact that NND wasn’t available in all countries, thus allowing the video to reach a wider audience. (This was clearly a good move, as it’s what eventually led to the video going viral.) Per a livestream he broadcast in May of 2024, “Username 666” took two to three weeks to create.
“SM666” can still be viewed on Niconico today; a mirror has also been uploaded to YouTube, so it’s viewable there, as well. And, of course, “Username 666” was among the first handful of videos PiroPito uploaded to his nana825763 YouTube channel, with a publication date of Feb. 26, 2008.
At three minutes and 48 seconds, “Username 666” is quite short, and yet it’s still the longest of the trio of Bizarro-land YouTube videos. All three of these videos’ brevity is part of what makes them so effective, though — they get right to the point, without any overly elaborate setups or explanations required to justify what’s happening.
In the case of “Username 666,” it’s clear right from the start that we’re watching a capture of someone’s computer desktop. The first thing we see is our unseen narrator placing their cursor in the navigation bar of Microsoft Internet Explorer — the former name for the browser now called Microsoft Edge — and manually adding the number “666” to the URL that’s already present: YouTube.com.
Initially, this action — that is, attempting to navigate to a channel located at the URL youtube.com/666 — simply brings our narrator to a page that says the account has been suspended. However, they then repeatedly refresh the page — and after about 13 refreshes (I see what you did there), things start to… change.
First, all of the thumbnails for videos offered up for the narrator to view disappear, replaced by broken images that all seem to have the same file name: 666, of course. And as the narrator continues to refresh the page, more things change, from the text on display within the browser to the page’s color palette.
Eventually, they arrive at… this:
As our narrator explores this red and weirdly fleshy version of YouTube, they view a number of videos that all seem to feature equally red and weirdly fleshy subjects. But curiosity, as they say, killed the cat, and soon, our narrator loses control of the situation: They find the back button on the browser to be unresponsive when clicked; they can’t exit the browser, either; they can’t even shut down or restart the computer. Every button they click, the computer ignores. Even the desktop background beyond the browser window begins to distort; whereas initially, it has simply looked like the artistic abstract blur many computers use as their default desktop background, it now looks like… hair.
And all the while, increasingly odd and unsettling sounds play — sounds that intensify the more the narrator clicks, the more they see, the more they watch.
Eventually, we start hearing a sort of thumping sound layered on top of the already-upsetting soundscape — as if someone were banging a hand or a fist against a flat surface. And while this happens, the videos our narrator views on this otherworldly version of YouTube seem to begin showing a face — a person.
A person who, we soon discover, is banging on the screen, waiting to be let out — waiting to escape.
I should note here that, for all three of these Bizarro-land YouTube videos, it’s worth turning on the closed captions, even if you don’t usually need or want them. They provide additional context for what we’re seeing in the videos themselves — and they help fit all three videos together into one universe. They’re arguably the least important in “Username 666,” as, for the most part, they’re just the narrator making jokes about what they’re viewing; there is one particularly funny joke right at the very end that lands beautifully, though, so they’re still worth checking out.
In any event, “Username 666” initially stood on its own as a single video. A few years later, however, PiroPito added to the narrative it had begun with a second video: “Another YouTube.” And here, the plot thickened.
“Another YouTube”: The Experimental Feature From Hell
Unlike its predecessor, “Another YouTube” was uploaded simultaneously to Nico Nico Douga and YouTube on April 10, 2010. It also stuck with a single platform as its frame — the one with the wider reach: YouTube.
At the start of “Another YouTube,” we’re again watching a screen capture from the computer of an unseen narrator. This time, though, instead of manually altering the YouTube URL, the narrator navigates from the YouTube homepage over to the section of the platform called Test Tube.
Test Tube (officially stylized as TestTube) was formerly YouTube’s beta program for experimental features. Its history isn’t well documented, but for what it’s worth, the TestTube landing page was operational by the end of 2006 — or at least, that’s when its first captures on the Wayback Machine are dated — and seems to have gone the way of all things by the end of 2019. Wayback Machine captures for TestTube are still available in early November 2019, but captures from the middle-end of the month indicate that at that time, what used to be the URL for the TestTube page began redirecting to the Playback And Performance page in each user’s Settings menu.
By early 2020, access to YouTube’s experimental features had migrated over to YouTube.com/new, where it still lies today — although as of November 2023, it’s only usable for people who have a YouTube Premium subscription. That’s right: You now have to pay for the privilege of something that used to just be part of the standard user experience — and which was ultimately always for the benefit of the company, not the users, in the first place. As always, late-stage capitalism is why we can’t have nice things.
Anyway, when our narrator gets to the TestTube section of YouTube, they see something curious at the bottom of the page, underneath the listing for Feather. (Feather was the lightweight, low-latency version of YouTube for low-speed internet connections that launched for testing in December of 2009. Like many experimental YouTube features, it seems to have been quietly retired at some point; by the summer of 2014, it had vanished from the TestTube landing page).
There is, our narrator sees, a feature that’s just called “Another YouTube.” The brief thumbnail description for it reads only, “warning.”
When they click on this feature, they see this:
The closed caption for this unexpected reveal reads, succinctly: “The fuck?!”
Our narrator clicks back and forth between the “experimental” feature and the regular TestTube page a few times, wondering in the captions why something like this would be in TestTube; eventually, though, they start to get curious. They want to see what happens if they navigate to the main YouTube homepage while in “Another YouTube” mode…
…and immediately regret their decision to do it.
They’re still curious, so they click through a few videos, all of which look very much like what we previously saw in “Username 666.” Soon, though, our narrator has enough second thoughts to want to exit out of YouTube and close the browser. However, they find they can’t do it — not for lack of trying, but because, once again, the computer won’t obey their commands, no matter how much they click. Pop-ups begin appearing, first as advertisements showing… something for sale for $6.66, but then as something more disturbing: A window that appears to be showing live footage of themself captured by their own webcam.
Our narrator clicks the back button, intending to return to TestTube and toggle this “Another YouTube” mode off. But although they do manage to navigate to TestTube, they then watch in disbelief as the button for the “Another YouTube” feature itself vanishes right before their very eyes.
Here, the captions provide us with a direct connection to “Username 666”: As our narrator continues to panic, they note in the captions that this so-called “feature” has made their computer useless “just like that 666 channel.” And, just as they did in “Username 666,” they try to restart their computer, only to find that they can’t: The machine won’t obey their commands. Task Manager doesn’t work, either. The screen continues to distort. The webcam window continues to pop up. Things reach a fever pitch — until, finally, our narrator yanks the computer’s plug clean out of the wall (which, of course, we can see, thanks to the webcam window the computer keeps bringing up).
After they’ve pulled the plug, the screen goes dark and the video abruptly ends.
After that, we see nothing from this narrator for quite some time — enough time that we might imagine any number of different endings for them to explain the silence: One in which they survive, but stay away from computers and the internet for the rest of their life; one in which they, uh, don’t survive; take your pick.
But then, almost seven years later, we get a video titled, somewhat perplexingly, “SecreT DooR?” — and here, we get one final entry into this Bizarro-land YouTube trilogy.
“SecreT DooR?”: What Lies Beneath
Uploaded on March 15, 2017 to YouTube only — there’s no corresponding Niconico upload this time — “SecreT DooR?” is the shortest of the three Bizarro-land YouTube videos, lasting only a minute and 24 seconds. It’s actually my favorite of the the trio, though, largely because I think it’s the most sophisticated. (Funny what 10 years of artistic experience will do for your work, no?)
There’s one key difference with this video, compared to the other two: It’s not actually taking place within a screen. Instead, we seem to be looking at an actual monitor, as if our narrator is filming the proceedings on a separate device — a phone, perhaps.
The captions also matter the most in this one, giving us a little more of a narrative than the other two had. Thanks to these captions, we know that, just prior to the start of the video, our narrator — who may or may not be the same narrator from the previous two videos — had attempted to watch a video on YouTube, only to find that the video “does not exist.” We tune in at this point, as they initially say they’ll go to Netflix next; however, they then change their mind, opting to stay on YouTube to try to watch “Toon Catastrophes ▶ CARTOON CAT SONG (feat. CG5 & Annapantsu).”
Fun fact: This is a real song and an actual video. A collaboration between musicians Kyle Allen and CG5 featuring vocals by Annapantsu and animation by Scyrel, the song is an ode to artist Trevor Henderson’s creation Cartoon Cat. I do recommend watching it; it’s great fun.
Anyway, as our narrator moves the cursor to the YouTube search bar, they notice something odd: When the cursor passes over the bottom of the page’s header, the header appears to… move. As if the cursor is somehow pushing it up, the way one might open a window or its curtain — or, perhaps, a secret door. “Since when is there a secret door?”, the captions ask.
When the narrator finally succeeds in pushing the header all the way up, we see…
…a new header — one matching the grimy aesthetic of the alternate YouTube we saw in the other two videos.
Then, when they click on the YouTube logo in the header…
…we see, briefly, that he is taken fully over to that alternate YouTube.
In the captions, our narrator wonders briefly what the Cartoon Cat song and video would look and sound like in this version of YouTube.
Then, the video cuts out.
The Rules Of The Game: Towards A Unified Theory Of PiroPito’s Bizarro-land YouTube
It’s true that there’s not much of a narrative or story at work in these three videos; they’re all just snippets — brief glances into an otherworld of sorts. But they do all have enough threads connecting them to suggest that there is a pretty cohesive universe in which they all take place.
Following on that observation, then, questions start to emerge about what laws govern this universe, so to speak: What are the “rules” this world? How does PiroPito’s Bizarro-land YouTube actually work?
By looking at what “Username 666,” “Another YouTube,” and “SecreT DooR?” all have in common, here’s what I’ve surmised so far:
The alternate YouTube is accessed by hidden means. These means might vary; you might have to refresh a non-existent page repeatedly (as in “Username 666”), or navigate to a section of the platform most people don’t go to very often (as in “Another YouTube”), or manipulate part of a webpage that’s normally static (as in “SecreT DooR?”). But you have to look for it — it’s not readily apparent.
Related:
It requires intention on the part of the user to access. All of these hidden means for accessing the alternate YouTube require direct, intentional action from the user. Bizarro-land YouTube doesn’t just show up; you have to work to get to it. Whether there’s a further message about willful transgression here remains to be seen, but, well… it’s not outside the realm of possibility that this might be the case—something like, “Don’t go looking too hard; you might not like what you find.” Or, as I commented further up: “Curiosity killed the cat.”
The alternate YouTube is… possibly alive. Aesthetically, Bizarro-land YouTube is always fleshy-looking, red, grungy, moldy, and probably kind of goopy. It’s not just composed of wires or lights or electronic signals; it looks like it’s made of organic matter. It pulses — literally. Like it’s got a heartbeat. Like it’s full of blood. Ew.
It’s also probably sentient. The alternate YouTube has the capacity to take over your entire computer, and once it has taken hold, there’s not much you can do about it. You can’t navigate away from it within your browser. You can’t close your browser. You can’t stop the barrage of pop-ups. You can’t restart your computer. You’re stripped of control within the functioning of the computer. Bizarro-land YouTube will show you what it wants to show you, whether or not you want to see it.
It’s an interloper. It invades your actual human space, or it pulls you into its own space: Either something attempts to crawl out of the screen, as the entity at the end of “Username 666” does, or it brings your real life into the screen, as the webcam pop-ups of “Another YouTube” do.
It’s not all-powerful. There is one known way to break its control: By physically unplugging the computer, as the narrator does at the end of “Another YouTube.” We’ve not seen any instance of a computer under the influence of Bizarro-land YouTube that has been unplugged turning itself back on even when disconnected from a power source — a common trope in technological horror — so at this point, we can probably assume that once the computer is unplugged, Bizarro-land YouTube is rendered inactive… at least until the machine is turned back on.
Again, related:
The computer is the connection. The bridge, if you will. There’s our world. There’s the alternate YouTube world. And the computer? That’s the conduit between them. Without the computer, the two worlds can’t meet. With the computer… well, these three videos show us exactly what happens in that case.
We’ve not yet seen whether a phone can also be this connection or bridge… but it wouldn’t surprise me if that would be the case.
There are, of course, many questions that remain about how the world of Bizarro-land YouTube works — questions to which we don’t currently have answers (and to which, honestly, we may never have answers).
For instance, is Bizarro-land YouTube itself an entity, or is it more like a home to other entities?
And: Is what we’re seeing in these brief glimpses a hell dimension? A demon world? Something… else?
The biggest questions I have, though, tie into some of PiroPito’s more experimental videos. Many of these videos also feature a similar kind of universe switching, with the visuals bopping back and forth between a “regular” world — often a cute or kawaii kind of world — and a hellish horror world that has the same red, fleshy aesthetic as Bizarro-land YouTube (for instance, “POKOPOKOPIKOTAN”, which was originally uploaded to PiroPito’s channel in September of 2011).
These videos, however, are much more abstract and lack the concrete toggling actions taken by the narrator that the Bizarro-land YouTube videos have. Indeed, they typically don’t have a narrator at all; they’re more of a wild fantasia of sights and sounds — the content that perhaps makes up the videos seen within Bizarro-land YouTube, but without the narrative frame surrounding them. (Fun fact: The video on PiroPito’s channel titled “none” is, in fact, the video the narrator watches within “Username 666”; the entity that reaches through the screen at the end of “Username 666” seems to be what PiroPito has called “drowned woman” in the description box for “none.”)
That’s why I haven’t drawn any of the more abstract videos into the overall discussion here. But although they feel a bit different than “Username 666” and its fellows, I can’t rule out the possibility that they, too, might be connected to this same universe. Are they? And if so, how? Are videos like “POKOPOKOPIKOTAN” a more complete look at the full world that the Bizarro-land YouTube videos let us peek into? A view of whatever that otherworld is without the lens of an access point through which we’re seeing it?
Do I actually want these questions answered? I… don’t think I do, really. The possibilities they suggest are more tantalizing than anything more specific could be — and the joy of PiroPito’s work has always been, for me, the fact that the pieces can always be interpreted in so many different ways.
Art reflects the artist, yes, but it also reflects the viewer — and this two-way street, this dialogue between artist and viewer, is what makes art so wonderful.
The Legacy Of “Username 666”
“Username 666” is a relatively simple piece in the grand scheme of things, and PiroPito’s storytelling has grown much more sophisticated since. (“My House Walk-Through” is probably the pinnacle here; if you haven’t seen that one, I highly, highly recommend it.)
But despite — or perhaps even because of — its simplicity, “Username 666” remains a formative early creepypasta-adjacent work: It’s a sort of ur-creepypasta — one we can probably consider a trope-maker. It scared the bejesus out of many an early YouTube viewer — not necessarily because anything particularly scary happens in it, but because it’s such a wildly visceral thing to experience.
There’s a lot of fan work related to it, too. When it first hit the internet, those who loved it took it and ran with it; many, in fact, were so taken with the world it seemed to show us that they wrote accompanying stories to go with it.
I’d argue that any backstory beyond what the video itself gives us is largely unnecessary; that’s one of the things that makes it such an interesting piece: It stands on its own. But it says a lot about its effectiveness that so many people wanted to engage with its world, inhabit it, and build on it.
On that note: One of the things that’s notable about the earlier PiroPito videos in particular is how well they preserve the way YouTube looked and operated at the times they were released. The YouTube seen in “Username 666” — the YouTube of 2007 — looks very different from the YouTube of today, and in that respect, it functions as a sort of internet time machine.
If you’re curious what “Username 666” might look like now — well, that’s where the fan works come into play. With PiroPito’s blessing, YouTuber Zheg created a modern-day remake of “Username 666” and posted it to YouTube in February of 2024; it utilizes YouTube’s current look and format, along with more modern Windows PC conventions like the current iteration of the Blue Screen Of Death.
Is PiroPito himself done with his Bizarro-land YouTube world? Not quite. He’s said that he doesn’t currently have plans to make a sequel to “Username 666” or anything like that — but he has said the video game he’s been working on will incorporate the Bizarro-land YouTube universe: In a comment on a community post highlighting some of the textures he originally created for “Username 666,” he wrote, “No, I don’t make user666.part2 video, but I want to make the 666 world into my game.”
It’s probably going to be quite some time before we see the finished game; PiroPito has been working on it since 2019, and he’s still deep in the weeds. He’s been documenting the process, though — first in edited videos, and then, starting at the end of 2023, in livestreams where he also answers questions about himself and his work while he works on the game. He revealed both the game’s title — Metaphysical Region — and a trailer in September of 2023, around the time he switched from edited process videos to livestreams.
So far, he’s told us that the game — which he hopes to release either for free or for a super affordable price — is a horror RPG dungeon crawler in which you have one life, and one life only. You’ll get to choose one of four items at the start, each with a different effect — boosting your speed of movement, for instance — and then after that, you’ll presumably just have to… survive within PiroPito’s phantasmagorical world.
Choose wisely.
Watch your step.
And remember, if absolutely necessary…
You can always unplug your computer.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photos via markusspiske/Pixabay; nana825763 (2, 3, 5, 6, 7-10, 11-13, 14, 15, 16, 17), MOYA HORROR/YouTube]
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