A year or so ago I came back from the inner workings of the Internet with some pretty interesting Urban Legends regarding Nintendo. After another thorough search of the Internet, I’ve found this new Nintendo legend that will surely make your skin crawl.
Like most Urban Legends, this one begins at a flea market where an unsuspecting customer finds an interesting Pokémon game that no one has heard of. The buyer stated that the game fires up like any old Generation One Pokémon game, but when it cuts to the title screen it says Pokémon: Black. After pressing start, the gamer was greeted by Professor Oak and looked like the normal beginning to Red or Blue. However, once the gamer chose their main Pokémon, they saw that they had an additional one, Ghost. This Pokémon resembled the ghost Pokémon’s in Lavender Town before obtaining the Silph Scope.
Ghost has only one move in this title, “curse”, which kills the Pokémon you are battling against. Your foes cannot attack seeing as they are too scared to fight, and once “curse” is used, the screen blacks out, a muffled scream is heard and the trainer is down one Pokeball in their queue. After you defeat the Pokémon you are given the usual reward, but this time if you don’t choose “run,” you can use curse one more time. Upon returning to the overland map, the trainer is missing and replaced by a tombstone. As you continue through the game you basically murder everyone you battle. Once you beat the Elite 4 and your nemesis and become the champion, all that surrounds you are tombstones.
This is where the game really takes a turn to the macabre; after the screen flashes to black, you are shown an older, slower sprite of a trainer that is presumably you. You wander around the empty world, only being able to go to certain places seeing as you have no HM Pokémon. If you happen to wander into Diglett’s Cave, you can get back to Pallet Town, where it all began. Once you enter your house, another scene appears and all of the Pokémon you killed flash onto your screen, then the trainers. As all of this is happening, Lavender Town’s theme music is playing and getting slower and slower until it is a haunting melody. Another cut screen and suddenly you find yourself in battle, with ghost. You have no other option than to battle this Pokémon, and you will not succeed, once you are out of health, “curse” is cast and you are no more. The “New Game” screen brightens up your pupils and you’re suddenly back for more.
No one really knows where this story hails from or why it came about, but it is pretty creepy. It doesn’t sound like the game is haunted by an angry ghost or that this cartridge is possessed. To me it sounds like someone made a bootleg of Pokémon and decided to go a different route. Murdered Pokémon, murdered trainers, tombstones everywhere and an eventually dead protagonist. We may never know the full history of this tale or cartridge, but I do know that it has cursed me with the goosebumps.
Source: Polygon and the Interwebs