Amy's Love Virus

WARNING:
 AMY
== Introduction ==
The Sonic Fandom has been one of the largest fandoms on the internet for a very long time now, starting somewhere in the mid-90's.So many fan games, movies, art & memories made within these circles, and then you can easily see how someone would take advantage of this naive, freshly made community. I am a Sonic veteran, and I've spent the last year researching and grouping together evidence for a computer virus that I remember making its rounds on the internet back in the day, but now seems to be completely obscure and forgotten, mainly thanks to the majority of the information being wiped off of the internet. "Amy's Love Virus". If you were there, I just KNOW that a shiver went down your spine right now, but for those who have no clue what this is.
Amy's Love Virus was assumably a RAT (remote access trojan) virus that was spread inside the Sonic community from early-1999 until somewhere in the late-2000's.The way the virus spread was through infected Sonic related video games, videos & image files. In the game’s case it was a separate .exe file dressed as the game's launch .exe, while in the video's & image's case it was baked inside the metadata itself so when you clicked it, it would immediately start infecting your computer. These infected games, videos & images then got uploaded onto forums, torrent trackers, and FTP (File To Peer) file-sharing services, where unassuming users would download the virus.Accounts of what exactly this virus does when launched is VERY limited, mainly because those who got infected never got to tell the tale. Almost all of them died or disappeared mysteriously after downloading the virus, but here's what we know from the few who said to survive it: The computer would first blue screen upon opening the infected file and then shut down while corrupting the hard disk, to the point it started smoking physically. After that when the computer owner tries to turn the computer back on, it would load the bios screen, but we’re then suddenly met with a title screen saying, "Amy's love".
Then, a 3D polygon looking head of Amy Rose from Sonic would appear on the screen with a pink colored Super Mario 64 like background. Most accounts here also noted that said head looked like a Sonic R version of Adventure Amy's design.
From there, a very deep buzzing sound would start to blast from the speakers, which the victims would describe as "calming and soothing". The Amy head would also start speaking directly to the user at this point with what was said to be a really good Adventure Amy impression and although we don't have the exact accounts of what she says, the victims remembered something along the lines of:
"Hahaha! NOW you have all the attention on me! But anyways, since Sonic is always busy, I am bored, and you know what a gal like me does when they get bored? THEY KIDNAP AND DIGITIZE PEOPLE INTO THERE REALM TO MAKE A CULT OF PERSONALITY OF COURSE! Now I'm giving you a choice. If you choose yes, you’re joining me into the digital afterlife as a happy & cute worshipper, but if you choose no, I unlock your computer and leave you alone, but you’re gonna suffer until you die. Choose wisely, [surname of the individual]!"
Then, a blank window with the options of "yes" & "no" pops up.
So, those who presumably chose yes were never seen again, meaning somehow this computer virus actually pulled them through the monitor into a digital world where they can never escape from, and those who choose no, well, all of the virus accounts came from these people. There computers did become virus-free after choosing no, but they said that since from that day, they suffer from heavy headaches, bleeding noses, nightmares, noises appearing in their heads telling them negative things constantly, development of various mental illnesses like schizophrenia, and finally bad luck.My theory is that those who were found dead later after downloading the virus had committed suicide due to how hardcore the side-effects of choosing no were.
No one knows who made this virus and where it originated from, which makes it even more creepy. Not convinced yet? I'm now gonna tell you three stories of disappearances & deaths that I think are very much connected to the virus, all of this with photo and video evidence, let's get started...
== Victim 1 ==
This is the earliest of the three taking place in 2000, on a Hungarian summer camp, created by a local Counter Strike 1.6 team called "Da V1p0rs".
One of the team members happened to be a Sonic fan and decided that this would be the perfect time to download the Sonic Satam series to watch on those lonely nights at the camp, and so when the team and some of the paying patrons arrived at the scene, this team member called "Mile$$h0t" started doing just that. He searched a little bit until he found a site called sonicrajzfilm.hu, where all the sonic cartoons at the time was said to be downloadable. Without any checking into the site, Miles downloaded the Satam season 1 zip file, and that would take up the entire day, so he would go out and do day 1 activities with his teammates, friends, and the paying patrons.
By around 10 pm, the download would finish. By then the entire camp would go out on a night hike in the nearby mountains surrounding the camp, but Miles convinced his fellow teammates to stay in the camp so he can watch sat-am saying that "they would go hiking again next night anyway and he waited during the entire day for this shit to download".
The only other people that stayed with him in the camp was the camp's constant staff, a disabled girl in the neighboring bungalow and Mile$$h0t's girlfriend who planned to watch the downloaded season with him.
After this, we don't know what happened with Mile$$h0t and his girlfriend, but after they arrived back from the hike and checked in Mile$$h0t's bungalow, they found his girlfriend hanging on the celling with a VGA cable, with Miles himself being missing. While all the others searched for miles and tried to give his girlfriend medical attention, one of the team members who eventually wrote this entire account down on a Hungarian Sonic forum site noticed that Miles's computer was still on, with the sat-am zip file still being there. Out of curiosity he checked the zip file and after opening the first video, he also got the Amy's Love Virus.
Op chose no on the select screen and immediately after heard a terrifying noise. 
Op swears that he saw a shadowy figure in the corner of his eye, so op got outside and quickly took a picture of the figure, although this picture is way too dark and blurry, so barely anything is visible on it.And that's it. No one knows what happened since and even the camp itself is demolished nowOp never gave any updates either and the forum where he posted about this incident has been now shut down.
== Victim 2 ==
A girl named "Jennifer Alison" or known online as "Jennifox" was known for making early lets plays and tutorial videos related to gaming for her own website "jennifoxx.com". She was a major Sonic fan and liked to make videos on Sonic related things. She also started a tradition where every week, she would actually livestream herself playing some games, mainly flash or fangames. She did this by creating a real media streaming station and shared the links for each stream on her site (streaming back then was in its starting point and just by the fact she somehow managed to pull this off in the early-2000's was nothing short of incredible).
2003.07.20. She started the weekly stream and tried to play a game called "Sonic and the Golden Rings of Nazadram" which was send by a viewer, but when she tried to play it, the stream suddenly cut off.A day later, Jenny wrote a post about this on her site stating she got "a strange virus with Amy Rose holding her files hostage". This was clearly the Amy's love virus. And then 2 days later, she committed suicide by shooting herself in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Immediately after this news broke out, Jenny's website shut down, and now all of her content is lost media.
== Victim 3 ==
This one's the most interesting. On May 10th, 2005, a video called "Amy's Love Virus" was uploaded to YouTube which was just unleashed to the public at the time. The video is said to originate from Brazil, and not surprisingly, this video, with the channel which uploaded nothing, but this video called "magicjuno" was deleted off of YouTube somewhere in 2006, leaving it lost media, well partially.After 6 months of intensive searching, I managed to find the first few seconds of the video thanks to a broken myspace link, the rest of the video can't be recovered. Here we see a crying kid trying to record the screen as someone with a heavily modified Windows XP is seen with solitaire on his screen. Some smoking of the hard drive is already visible. During the rest of the video, another kid was revealed to be sitting at the computer (presumably an 8–9-year-old), who says in Brazilian that "he just wanted to play Sonic Heroes", while crying his eyes out.The hard drive starts sparking, scaring the kids, then the entirety of the virus plays out, and by the time the selection screen pops up, the two kids are crying and screaming loudly. We don't know what they've selected because the video ends around there. What happened to these two kids are unknown, especially since again, this was the ONLY video this channel ever uploaded before being shut down.
== Author's note ==
Videos for victim 1 & 3 here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12GeZPh6W4PiA8IpowyiHobWm8p8z4m0j/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvETRF5opED5ZmYS2VgDZ6yAIazT9YQt/view?usp=sharing
Category:Viruses
Category:Video Games
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