An Old Bruz: The Glitch

The Summary

If you like unexplained mysteries, especially gaming mysteries, then you're in for a treat. I'm going to make a book based on a strange and unexplainable glitch that happened to Brendon Graeber, a part of IGN, while he was streaming the game Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Here's a summary of what happened, just to get you all enticed.For those of you who haven't played Shadow of War, which, from the looks of things, is all of you, Shadow of War is a game where you get to assemble your own army of randomly generated Uruks and Ologs to help you capture fortresses located around Mordor and make them yours. However, before you can dominate Orcs to make them join your army, you have to recruit an Olog called Bruz the Chopper. He acts as a sort of tutorial character, but he also acts as one of your assault leaders when you start a siege against the first fortress in the game. He expresses the desire to be the selected as the Overlord for that fortress, which the game doesn't allow you to do. Later, the fortress goes under siege. When Bruz is told to help defend the fortress by Talion, the game's protagonist, Bruz argues, saying, "That sounds like a job for Overlord what's-his-name, seeing as I was passed over for that position."Talion tells Bruz to do what he is told, after which, Bruz tells Talion that he was joking, saying that he would "Defend the fort as if it was his own."After the siege ends, Bruz stabs Talion with a spear, killing him, saying, "I told you I'd defend the fort like it was my own. Turns out, it is."Luckily, Talion is unable to die permanently, due to the spirit of Celebrimbor inhabiting his body. He later gets revenge on Bruz by shaming him, which makes him deranged.After deranging Bruz, Brendon targeted Bruz repeatedly to shame him over and over.However, when he eventually deletes his old file and starts a new one to stream, something unexpected happens. Bruz is back.Bruz ambushes Brendon near the beginning of the game, much sooner than he's suppose to appear in the story. This Bruz is level 40, which is a much higher level than he is when you first meet him in the story, his level usually starting as 19.Bruz appears in a glitched state where he is unable to speak, but instead just snarls and hisses.After escaping this new Bruz, Brendon checks the army menus to find that Bruz has somehow wandered out of bounds, meaning that Bruz was starting to become smarter than the game itself.Later, when he goes to the mission where Bruz is meant to appear in the story, Brendon is relieved to see that the usual level 19 Bruz appears, rather than the strange glitched Bruz that somehow defied deletion.Brendon dominates Bruz, as is required for the mission, and, believing that the game was back to normal, he went to check the army screen, only to see that the glitched version of Bruz was on the army screen. Brendon never touched that save file ever again.The strangest part of this story is that it's true. I'll link a video at the top where this is discussed. The video is made by Oddheader, and it was the only video that I could find that talks about this glitch. (Skip to 7:00 in the video) If I could find a video that only discussed this glitch, rather than a top 8 video, I would link it. Now, whenever I heard this story, I liked to imagine that the glitched version of Bruz that defied deletion had become self-aware, which obviously isn't true, it was just a glitch. But I like to imagine what would have happened if Brendon continued playing on that save file, and I like the idea that this version of Bruz learned that it was in a game, was tired of being shamed repeatedly, and defied deletion to get his revenge. So, I created this book to tell a reimagining of this glitch. I hope you enjoy.

Link to an article about the subject from Brendon Graeber   ->