Shots Fired

Playing a few games are... usually fun, with them having lots of content to offer. But some of them can be bizarre, even terrifying during the right circumstances. And that’s what happened to me, playing this old game called “Gambler’s Gambit”. Gambler’s Gambit was a simple game that I used to play whenever I was bored on my computer and needed something to do. It was a simple minigame collection with no story, no nothing, all the marbles. And hell, the minigames stand out from where they’re coming from. 
It all kinda started once I remembered the game, at first I couldn’t even remember the name at the time. Eventually I searched it up and found out that it still existed, so I eventually scoured the forums of the original game to find the original game as I played when I was a teen. Eventually though, I found it on a website with tons of untrustworthy virus links and oddly enough.. pornhub ads. I guess I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I was searching for this one simple game. But finally, I found it after hours of digging and searching for it. However, it was attached to some sort of Trojan. So I decided to use a virtual machine to play it, and surprisingly, the Trojan didn’t really do much.
It was exactly how I remembered it, with it being a whole minigame collection. However, there seemed to be something I must’ve overlooked. The actual storymode, and the characters. These little characters made for the minigames seemingly are the hosts and hostesses of the little minigames, and all of them fit a certain theme of whatever what area they were placed in. A simple merchant like character with trinkets and red and green aesthetic for the ‘Luck’ minigames which took place in a simple tavern, a mermaid character with long luscious hair and scales for the ‘skill’ minigames which took place in a liminal pool like world, and so on and so forth. I particularly liked the Merchant like character, since his aesthetic matched well with the theming of the game. So I decided to play the storymode, and to my surprise, it was also some sort of nonlinear platformer. Particularly within the hubworld of the game, but as soon as I entered the tavern.. I immediately felt weird.
The Tavernkeep and his shop looked somewhat old, as if it has been there for possibly years without cleaning. Dust was everywhere, as the Tavernkeep seemingly coughed violently within what seemed to be his idle animation. Poor guy looked sick, as if he had the flu. But I was too interested to stop, as so I began to play the first minigame he had in store. And it was pretty easy, just pick which card you can memorize and match. It was going well up until the last round, where I chose a random card on purpose to see what would happen. The game crashed as soon as the card was revealed, as it made some sort of loud.. scream. A bitcrushed sound of a woman screaming, as I jumped back and looked around. Eventually I reopened the game, as the game seemingly rebooted itself. There was one thing I had a question for.. what was the face on that card? It seemed like one of the characters, so.. is IT the villain? I had no clue, but I was too far gone to stop now.
I reentered into the storymode and was greeted with.. an interesting screenshot I can say the very least, as I was greeted with that same entity again, stating the words as followed:
”Something has Happened.”
I was confused, frightened, but mostly excited. Could this be new content that I’ve never seen before? If so, I pressed continue and noticed I was outside the tavern. I went back inside and decided to finish what I started, but it felt.. weird. The final round music sounded jumbled, as if you put the wrong savestate into the wrong Sonic game and cause it to make loud jarring noises. Along with the sounds of instruments clashing together where they didn’t belong, I heard gunshots and loud shouts from possibly gang wars. As soon as I finished the final round.. I saw something that haunted me for fucking days afterward.
I was shocked and mortified as I stared into the face of what seemed to be the victim of senseless gun violence, as the music slowly turned into gunfire and rambling. Is THIS what that entity meant by “Something has Happened”? Is this a fucking joke!? Because this shit was.. I didn’t even know what to even MAKE of it. I was trying not to go hysterical over this, and started to read what was at the bottom. It shook me not to the core, but still made my blood run cold.
I exited the game altogether, and recollected myself as started to both cry out of fear and laughter as I started to analyze the screenshot. The face looked unrealistic to a comical degree, but still.. unnerved me to a sense. This was a face of a real person slapped onto an NPC, who died from a tragic event. From what I had to guess, the sounds of gunfire and screaming must’ve overloaded my senses and made me panic at the sight of it. Nevertheless, I never really opened the game back up after that awful experience. But, I still was curious of what secrets it could be hiding in the files.
I looked inside the code and found apart of the code which had the Case #1 code within it, which seemed to be apart of a “Specialty” module that I activated. But, I found something else in there that soon made my body freeze out of sheer unbridled terror.
There were 49 more cases, and they were all shot to death.
Category:Original Creepypastas/Lost Episodes
Category:Video Games