Previously: “Don’t Go Gazing.”
This week, a creepypasta so old, we don’t even know who wrote it: The video game creepypasta titled, simply, “The Perfect Video Game.”
One of the things I miss about the early days of creepypasta is the urban legend-style format and tone many of them had: A lot of stories centered around rumors or incomplete information, and there was a lot that was left unexplained. The good ones almost always ended with a really great zinger, too — something that changed how you thought about everything you had just read.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
“The Perfect Video Game” has all of that in one neat, tidy, concise package. It first appeared on the Creepypasta Wiki in 2011, although it’s possible it existed elsewhere before that, given that there’s no author ascribed to it.
It’s short, nostalgic, and a little bit gruesome — just like a good classic creepypasta should be.
Find an excerpt below, and read the full story over at the Creepypasta Wiki.
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I heard rumors about a video game console, released in the early ‘90s, that promised the most immersive games imaginable. It bore a strong resemblance to the Super Nintendo, except it had no cartridge slot, no reset button, and only one controller port. It was released in an extremely low quantity; it’s possible that less than fifty were ever available.
People I talked to who remembered it from their childhood only mentioned the first game in the list. Other games were included on the console, but this one was, they say, the perfect game. Lifelike graphics and sound, even by today’s standards, an endless supply of new, fun content, solid gameplay (the controls were responsive to the point of precognition, they recall), and the single controller port was all that was necessary; the NPCs in the game were “smart” enough to be just as entertaining as real players.
It was quite literally a game nobody wanted to stop playing, and the people I interviewed all remarked, somewhat bitterly, that their parents forcibly dragged them away from the television set after a few days of continuous playing and threw the console in the trash. I was intrigued by what I knew so far, so I went looking for more people who remembered this relic of gaming history.
***
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!
[Photo via Pixabay]
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