Plenty of video games feature their own lore and legends, but fanmade Creepypastas expand the scope of horror games and even unassuming titles with tales that often bring their hauntings home to the real world. Video games are full of unsettling occurrences and anything from creepy characters to jarring glitches can cause players to concoct ghost stories disturbing enough to become the stuff of internet legend. Aside from scary horror games, even the most innocent of titles can produce Creepypastas that are the stuff of outright nightmare fuel, treating players with plenty of content to keep them wide awake this Halloween.
Like many urban myths and legends, Creepypastas tend to be word-of-mouth-style stories written to read as though they could have happened in real life. These horrific tales are typically short, making them easy for readers to copy, paste, and share across different forum sites and discussion threads. Some popular Creepypastas will even expand into an extensive collaborative lore as fans post their own stories and creations inspired by these terrifying internet folktales.
Video games make excellent inspiration for Creepypastas - regardless of whether they're a horror title a relaxing co-op game to play with kids - blending digital horror and creative folklore to evoke fear that follows the player into the real world long after the game has turned off. The medium creates the perfect space to inspire these types of tales and urban legends, and many games lend themselves to a shareable experience that has the player asking their friends if they saw that weird thing happen, too. Creepypastas have inspired tons of scary video games in turn, giving gamers a digital playground of sheer terrors to dig through whenever they’re in need of a good scare.
Slender Man Is One Of The Internet's Most Notorious Creepypastas
While many video game fans may know Slender Man from Slender: The Eight Pages, the Slender Man Creepypasta originated from a meme initially created for the Something Awful forum in 2009. Slenderman appears as a tall, thin, faceless man in a neat black suit who is “always watching” despite having no eyes. Slender Man even received an Among Us minigame. Tales of this terror typically involve him stalking and kidnapping his victims, leaving them with trauma that often causes memory loss.
Slender Man quickly inspired several online fan creations, the most notable of which being the Marble Hornets series that ran on YouTube from 2009 to 2014. Slenderman’s growing internet popularity led to the release of Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival, which majorly contributed to his establishment as a notorious pop culture icon soon after. Slender Man also inspired Minecraft’s Endermen, though these block-stealing mobs don’t share his appreciation for eye contact.
BEN Drowned Is A Classic Video Game Creepypasta
Majora’s Mask is already considered to be one of the creepiest games in The Legend of Zelda series, but its infamous BEN Drowned Creepypasta takes its horror to a whole new level. The story began as a series of fictional posts uploaded by a college student who had obtained a haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge from a yard sale. Upon booting up the game for the first time, he discovered that the save file for someone named BEN had already been created.
The student’s playthrough quickly took a terrible turn, however, as the mysterious BEN began haunting him through the game itself. Each of the BEN Drowned Creepypasta posts were incredibly detailed and included video “evidence” of the many terrifying glitches that occurred throughout the course of the game. In the end, the entity known as BEN manipulated the student into uploading it to the internet, setting a three-part ARG into motion that ended only recently on Halloween of 2020.
The SCP Foundation's Collaborative Creepypasta Is Absolutely Massive
Before SCP became popular on Twitch, The SCP Foundation began as a massive collaborative Creepypasta project comprising over 4,000 Wiki entries written by fans around the world. The overarching premise of the story centers around the SCP Foundation, a secret society tasked with securing, containing, and protecting anomalies that defy the laws of physics. As such, articles on the SCP Wiki tend to be written in the form of scientific reports and logs that carefully document each anomaly.
Each anomaly is given a number in the SCP universe, which is thereafter used to refer to it across the Creepypasta’s plethora of content. While many of these anomalies are horrific creatures and violent entities that threaten human survival, others are harmlessly defiant of natural laws. The SCP Foundation Wiki has inspired several novels, and some of the creepiest horror games were based on or inspired by this massive Creepypasta project.
Pale Luna Is A Text-Based Nightmare
Like many good video game Creepypastas, Pale Luna began with a highly repostable microfiction story about a text-based adventure game that led to the scene of a real-life murder. According to the original post, a strange game titled Pale Luna had been circulating among gamers and developers local to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. While the game was aggravatingly difficult and crashed each time the player chose the wrong path, one proficient player was able to beat it and reach the end of the game. His reward was a set of coordinates which, once located, led him to the body of a girl who had been murdered over a year prior.
Despite the plethora of Pale Luna text adventure fan games that have been created since the original post started circulating online, the associated murder mystery is not a true story. Still, these Creepypasta-inspired text-based adventures offer enough chills without an actual murder being tied to the game’s true ending. Between the fan games and internet folklore surrounding the story, there is plenty of Pale Luna content available online for horror fans to dig through this Halloween.
Sonic.exe Created A Terrifying Creepypasta Fanverse
Sonic the Hedgehog has inspired a seemingly-infinite amount of fan content over the years, but the Sonic.exe Creepypasta is certainly a contender for the most horrific. According to the Creepypasta’s story, a Sonic fan received a cursed disc from a friend who had warned him to destroy it. Like a good Creepypasta protagonist, the fan booted up the disc anyway, causing the eldritch entity that was unlocked through Sonic's character file to haunt him.
While the original story of the Sonic.exe Creepypasta may seem fairly straightforward, the series of games and other fan-made content that it inspired offers plenty of demonic Sonic gameplay for fans to enjoy. A rewrite of the original story was also uploaded in 2017, which confirmed that the malevolent Sonic.exe character was intended to be an eldritch entity as some fans of the Creepypasta had previously speculated. Fans have even created a Sonic.exe mod for Sonic Origins, allowing horror game players to download the Creepypasta’s content directly into their own yet-to-be-haunted console this Halloween.