Unknown Format

Dear Nick,
Remember last month, how you let me rip your game collection, before 
your family moved? First of all, thanks.
You've always been a really 
awesome friend. Now, I'm not really sure how to start this, but I don't 
think we're going to get to talk too much after this. Some important 
stuff is about to happen, and I don't know if I'll get another chance to
 talk before that. I just wanted to let you know what's happening from 
me, before you started hearing about it from everybody else. You know 
how Steve and Chris like to twist things around.
I guess the best way to start this is right from the beginning. 
After you left your games with me, I started trying to rip them right 
away. Daemontools and Alcohol had trouble with the copy protection on a 
few, though. I tried looking on forums for workarounds for an hour or 
two, but no dice. Couldn't get 'em to work. Finally got fed up, and went
 to look and see if there were any programs that worked better. Most of 
what I turned up was stuff you and me tried and didn't work, or that you
 had to shell out three hundred dollars and let them put a keylogger on 
your machine to ensure you didn't misuse it. You search the same sites 
as me, you know the ones.
Anyway, I finally turned up something on this obscure torrent 
site. I've gotten a couple things from them before, but it's pretty much
 "Ye Olde Site of Desperation"...heh, remember that site? Yeah. The guy 
who posted it looked like he'd put the description through Google 
translate. What it was, was some Japanese program, "Shikami no Tengen". 
The guy said the name meant "Four Gods in Heaven". Probably not, though.
 I think his Japanese was probably as good as his English. What he 
claimed, though, was that it could get around any copy protection, and 
rip the disks as  smaller files than any other program. If I know you, 
you're rolling your eyes SO hard right now.
Thing is, I looked at the reviews, and it seemed totally legit. A
 bunch of people gave it high marks, and were praising this guy for 
uploading the program. It had a good amount of seeds, even. I mean, 
sure, there were people complaining that it frakked their computer, or 
that every file they made came out messed up, but you see that on any 
torrent, right? They all got the usual, "Read the damn instructions, 
noob." replies, so I figured it was good to go, and started downloading.
 In no time at all, I was ready to install it.
The directions with the file were pretty straightforward. Switch 
the computer to Japanese unicode, run the installer, switch back to 
English and apply a crack to make it work. It didn't take long. The 
installer was supposed to show pictures and play music while it ran, I 
think, but the images were broken and just did a slideshow of solid 
color screens. The "music" just came out as static, and I turned off my 
speakers until it was done. I was a little worried it wasn't going to 
work, but it had all those positive ratings, so I gave it a chance. Sure
 enough, once I went through all the steps, it ran fine. Simple 
interface, pretty easy to use. The only thing was a warning that came in
 the readme file: FILES WILL BE IN UNKNOWN FORMAT. RENAME .iso AND MOUNT
 EXTERNAL. DO NOT TRY TO RUN.
That's literally a copy and paste of the warning. Made sense to 
me, though. The program was Japanese, patched to work in English. I 
figured that probably messed up the file extensions. I tried it with Civ
 4 and that obscure as hell shooter you're so proud of, though, and it 
worked fine. Heck, it really was as good as they said. Really did even 
make the files smaller. The only thing was the file extension. It came 
out as "(NAME).4" for both games. When I switched them to iso files and 
mounted them through Daemontools, though, they worked. Absolutely 
flawless. No errors or copy fail that I could see. So I did the rest of 
them. It took a while, and I got tired, but you know that I had them 
back to you the next day.
I've had a lot of good times with those games. Played the hell 
out of Hellgate. Reaffirmed that I'll never be a pro at Starcraft 2. 
Completely forgot that Skyrim had a main quest. All the kinds of stuff 
we used to do on gaming nights when you were here. (I totally platonic 
miss you, bro.) So, eventually I worked my way through the files and 
found a couple I'd forgot to rename. I must have been tired. Just for 
the hell of it, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to run 
Portal 2 as a .4 and see what would happen. I figured I'd just get the 
usual Windows error for when you use an unrecognised extension, but no. 
It came up with an error message in Japanese that I couldn't read. Well,
 that got me thinking. If it popped that up, it must be able to read the
 file. Maybe I could switch the computer into Japanese again, and it 
would work? I decided to try, and surprisingly it worked. Not only did 
it work, but the file ran just like it had been mounted to the virtual 
drive.
It wasn't like normal, though. On the loading screen, it showed 
the inside of dingy, run-down a test chamber, with Chell sprawled out on
 the ground. She had the portal gun in one hand, but her head and limbs 
were at odd angles, and the things on her legs...her longfall boots? 
They looked cracked, with the strut things on the back bent out of 
shape. It looked like it was showing what would happen if the boots ever
 broke, and she just hit the ground too hard. It freaked me out, but it 
wasn't on screen long. At the title screen, GLaDOS's eye seemed redder, 
and there were flickers of flames just out of sight in the background. 
Instead of leaves, these little embers would drift by from time to time.
 To be honest, I wasn't sure what to think, but I remembered that time 
way back when we played Fire Red on an emulator, and the ferryboat guy 
said, "If you like this game, buy it or die." I figured it was probably 
something like that, just a trick to scare people into not playing a 
pirated copy. None of the other games I'd run through the Shikami 
program had a problem, but maybe it only properly bypassed the 
protection when you ran it as an iso, right? It wasn't stopping the game
 from being played, and once I got over the initial shock, it actually 
seemed kind of cool. So, I kept playing.
Everything was darker, and there was a kind of fog along the 
ground, even in the part of the game where everything was clean and new.
 The picture you were supposed to stare at was just a red space, and the
 music was nothing but static, but oh well. The data wasn't supposed to 
be read this way, so it was understandable there would be errors. When 
it got to Wheatly, though, he was a lot meaner than usual. He asked me 
to say apple, then just started laughing and said, "You can't! You're 
brain damaged!" and laughed some more, that harsh, cruel laugh he uses 
later in the game. He told me right out that everyone else was dead, and
 I had to help him or I'd die too. I can't be sure, but the way he 
talked made it sound like he knew that Chell had killed GLaDOS, too, and
 he wanted to bring her back. When I got to the second of the old test 
chambers, and there were mangled bodies on the floor (not gory, mind 
you, just broken bodies looking as old as the rest of it). It's not like
 I don't play some gory games sometimes, but the shift in tone was just 
really unnerving the hell outta me.
So, I stopped playing Portal. If it was a way to deter pirates, 
it had worked on me. I wasn't even sure I'd be willing to try it as an 
iso later to see if it worked normal that way. Still, I had a few other 
.4 files...actually they'd changed to whatever the Japanese version of 
four was, but that's not the point. I had other games I could try, and I
 didn't feel like switching my computer back just yet. I figured I'd 
just play something more relaxing to take my mind off it. Need for Speed
 seemed like a good pick. The opening sequence showed a fifteen car 
pileup during a thunderstorm, while news reporters talked about the 
death toll in the background. Nope.avi
So I tried Serious Sam HD. No idea how I forgot to set that one 
up. The gameplay...some things are better left unsaid, but I KNOW that 
game never had human sacrifice in it before. At that point, I was pretty
 damn freaked out, and I was starting to have a suspicion about what was
 going on. I put the computer back into English, and tried a couple 
games for a few minutes each. Nothing wrong with any of them. Even 
Portal 2, when I switched it to a .iso extension, was perfectly normal. 
On a whim, I changed a couple games back to .4's, and switched it over 
again.
I only got around to trying Civilization. My save file worked 
with it but...just...what the hell. There was new research I've never 
seen before, things that there's no way were coded into the game. Some 
of them seemed harmless, like "Manifest Destiny", while others were 
along the lines of "Tyranny" and "Xenophobia". They got you upgrades 
like slave markets and concentration camps. There was a new religion, 
too. Ever heard of Yezidi before? I hadn't. There were also events like 
plagues, accidents and natural disasters, where it would show a clip of 
your city's population suffering. Just like with the other games, 
playing it as a .4 made the game darker in tone. I don't know how the 
hell that's possible, but it did. I thought that, maybe, it was some 
kind of novelty software, and when you ran the game through it, it 
streamed a mod for whatever you were playing. Yeah, stupid idea, I know,
 but some people will go to a lot of trouble for a prank, right? Like, 
remember that time when we wanted to get back at your sister for giving 
away those concert tickets she won, even though she knew that you and I 
loved Radiohead, and we got all our friends and some of their buddies in
 on it? So, yeah, I tried disconnecting my router and restarting the 
game. On my first turn it announced that England was working on a 
Wonder...the Final Solution.
There was one more thing I had to try at that point. On a whim, 
I'd ripped my DVD of Inkheart one day. Put into the right format, it had
 run just as flawlessly as anything else. Now I tried it as a .4 file. 
The film played out how it should. All the actors said their lines and 
did what they normally would. At least until the market scene. It looked
 the same, but what was going on in the background shouldn't have been 
there. I watched, transfixed, as a beggar that was never there before 
was kicked savagely from a well-dressed man, and collapsed in a heap. A 
woman in a red coat twisted her son's arm until it looked like she's pop
 it out of its socket, dragging him off-screen as he resisted. A thug 
ran up and stabbed an elderly woman in the stomach, taking her purse and
 running as the rest of the crowd just stepped around her bleeding body.
 I shut off the player, feeling sick to my stomach.
So, at that point I knew that I didn't want this shit on my 
computer. Not ever. I deleted the files I'd ripped on the spot. Then I 
told the computer to uninstall Shikami no Tengen. To uninstall, it 
brought up the same buisness it did when I'd installed it. The graphics 
and audio weren't broken this time. The speakers played sounds of people
 speaking in Japanese. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but they 
sounded terrified. They screamed a lot. I could have turned it off, but I
 didn't. I have no idea why. They screamed, and the monitor showed me 
photo after photo crime scenes, accidents, disasters...anything where 
people had died horribly. There were shots that looked like a single 
frame of people being vaporized by an atomic bomb, just before the 
camera was destroyed, with the flash of the bomb somehow filtered out. 
There was a cave where a man sat frozen to death, surrounded by the 
remains of companions he'd killed and eaten trying to stay alive. In 
another shot, a woman who looked like she'd been drained of blood had 
the skin on her forehead peeled back, and some symbol I didn't 
recognize, probably something Japanese, carved into her skull. They were
 all horrible, the worst things I've ever seen, and I just sat there, 
numb, and watched and watched while the screams of the dying echoed in 
my ears.
As I was watching, though, I realized something. People always 
look away. They don't want to face the horror and tragedy in this world.
 They don't want to see. Horrible things happen all the time, 
everywhere, and we just pretend like it doesn't matter, like it doesn't 
affect us. It's not right. So, you see, that's why I'll be going away 
for a long time. Somebody has to do something about what's wrong in this
 world. Someone has to make them see. So, I'll be the one to open 
people's eyes to the horror. I'll make this right.
Always your friend,
█████
That's the last thing my best friend ever sent to me. Three weeks 
later, the police found him living in the bomb shelter of an abandoned 
house in our old neighbourhood. He was wanted for a string of violent 
crimes in the area, including what they called "ritualistic murder", 
arson, and tampering with traffic direction in an attempt to cause a 
major accident. They said that they found various poisons and 
bomb-making supplies in his hideout. It was a huge shock to any of us 
who knew him. His family was pretty poor, but he'd been our class 
president, on the debate club, even a track star. He got along with 
everybody. Thinking that he could have snapped like he did is just 
unbelievable.
I guess that's why I followed up on his crazy story. I wanted to 
believe that there was something like that, that had caused him to turn 
into what he did. Searching the internet didn't turn up much, though. 
There was no trace of a program called "Shikami no Tengen" anywhere. 
Though, I did learn that a shikami was a type of Japanese demon. I'd be 
prepared to leave it there, but I was a little confused about how the 
person that had supposedly translated it had come up with "Four Gods in 
Heaven". So I did a little more digging and found that "kami" is 
Japanese for God, and shi is four. Four also has a special connotation 
in Japan, though. It's considered an unlucky number...because it's 
pronounced the same way as their word for death.