Nostalgia Trip (A Videogame Creepypasta)

Chapter Six

I've been debating even uploading this next section to the blog. I figured that if I was going to do it, I'd need to be as coherent as possible. Typing this part out the other day would not be conducive to meeting that end, so I took a break to calm my nerves. I'm still shaken up, but if I don't type this out now, then when?

Sam told me that Mr. O was his father. All of my prior theories had been wrong. He was no ghost, and he wasn't my imaginary friend. As is often the case, the truth is far simpler than we take it to be. He was a real fucking person. He was someone that I knew, and he was someone who knew me.

Sam said that when we were kids, I would frequently come to his house for our little playdates. Sometimes, I would even spend the night for a sleepover. He told me that his father always took a special interest in me. Oftentimes, he would be the one to ask Sam whether he wanted me to come over for a visit.

Sam's father had a history in software development and engineering. When he saw how much I loved my Nintendo DS, he wanted to connect with me through that medium. He'd been pondering over how he would accomplish this for weeks on end. Sam told me that at times, it was all his father could think about.

"My memory is a little fuzzy here," Sam began, "But I think one night after you left my house, you accidentally left your DS behind. When he found out about that, he went out to the store. Told me he was going out to get a game. He came back with a copy of an Animal Crossing game cartridge, and he went down to the basement with both the game and your DS." '

"And what did he do with them," I asked.

"He told me he was going to make a modified version of the game. One that he'd use to build a world for you specifically, where you could spend time with him even when you weren't visiting us. He often rambled about how much you would love it. Even went on and on about a special room he would make for the game, that you could enter if you did a "good job", as he put it."

My thoughts shifted to the locked door in the school. I vividly remembered the sign next to it, labeled "Mr. O". I refused to even imagine what awaited me in that room.

I didn't remember any of this. No matter how hard I tried, everything Sam told me felt like brand new information. At that moment I wanted to meet Sam's father. I wanted to ask him why the fuck he would ever make such a sick game for a kid like me. I looked Sam dead in his eyes, and asked,

"Sam, where's your father? How can I reach him?"

"You can't contact him," he told me. His voice had begun to tremble. He was starting to choke up. "He's in prison. He's been in prison for years now... Only family is allowed to see him, and I never want to see that piece of shit again."

I didn't respond. Thousands of thoughts raced through my head, but I didn't speak a single one of them into existence. Instead, I allowed Sam to proceed with what he had to say.

"When my mother found out... She couldn't take it. She just couldn't fucking take it, man. She's gone because of him. It's his fault. I'm so sorry man. I'm sorry for what he did." I noticed his body visibly shaking. I placed my hand on his shoulder and rubbed it gently, attempting to calm him down.

"It's alright, Sam. Just take a deep breath. What did he do?" Sam looked up at me. He wiped his eyes with his arm and sighed.

"He... he molested children. They locked him up for molesting God damn children." My heart fucking sank beneath my chest. I leaned back in my seat, looking towards the ceiling. There was no way for me to process what I had heard.

That fucking monster made that game for me. A game that he filled with replicas of himself, for the express purpose of surrounding my character with. He made it to condition me to grow closer to him, and as I learned who he was, I felt as if I were going to be sick. Even though I had forgotten much of the contents of the game before revisiting it, it still had control over at least some of my behavior. My unwillingness to even mention what the game contained to my mom immediately came to mind.

I recalled the images I found in my DS Camera roll. Sam had told me earlier that I spent a lot of time at his home. I had been alone with Sam's father before. In fact, it was likely that we had been alone together multiple times. Not only had I been in the presence of a monster during my childhood... I couldn't remember any of it. I don't know what the fuck happened between us. I don't know what happened to me.

Maybe it's for the best that I don't remember. Perhaps if I could recollect the events that happened years ago, I would succumb to a depression far deeper than the one I'm currently finding myself in. The photos of myself that I found in that black digital camera... several of them portrayed me as having a deeply disturbed, anxious look about me. Even as a child, I must have known that something was wrong. I've come to reason that I had suppressed my memory of Sam's father, not wanting to deal with whatever it was I had experienced.

Despite these recent revelations having left me horrified, I still feel awful for Sam. It must have been terribly difficult for him to have lost his mother, and to have learned what he did about his father. I can't imagine having to live with all of that, but it was something I could at least minimally relate with, having lost my dad to suicide years ago.

There's one thought in particular that I've been wondering about most of all. Why hadn't I heard of this sooner? Even if I couldn't remember what happened to me, why... why did my mother never tell me about it? She told me that Mr. O was my imaginary friend. Why did she fucking lie to me? How could she do that? I deserved to know the truth. I just don't understand...

I need to take a break. This is becoming too much to handle for me. I just need some time to think. I've decided to keep in contact with Sam. Even if he serves as a reminder of that monster, I feel as if we should stick together. For years, he's been affected by what his father has done. I think I should be there for him like I was when we were kids.

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