Burnout Paradise: The Ghost of DJ Atomika

Burnout Paradise was a late 2007, early 2008 release on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC platforms. It was the first of the series to be adapted to an open-world environment, allowing players to drive around an extensive model - a fictional Paradise City. Explore the area, and complete events and collect stuff all around. This isn't a console hack or a mod of any type. This actually happened on my own copy of the game, as well as a lot of others. To me, it makes it one of the scariest, and DEFINITELY one of the most unsettling glitches I have EVER heard of, or ever experienced in my life.
The first thing you will notice right off the bat during gameplay is that the city sidewalks... Are empty. There are no people in this game. There's no drivers, there's not a single living soul to be found anywhere in the game within miles, not including the drivers on the Bikes, and the F1 Indycars. The only human interaction you hear is from a mysterious radio broadcaster called DJ Atomika. Now you can search high and low for this guy. You can spend as much time as you want looking for a radio tower, or something similar to that, you can drive around until you are on your death bed. You will not find this guy. I heard theories saying that he's broadcasting in an underground place of some sort, theories saying that he's hiding from that alien to highjacked cars trying to take over the city, yadda, yadda, effin yadda. Whatever.
Now, I have my own theory... Let's start by talking about the fact that he makes two types of announcements. There are radio broadcast messages, which come at random. There's tutorial messages that are scripted to play that give you tips and guide you when you complete or fail certain events. Both however, go through the radio in which you are listening to. Music soundtrack you hear isn't part of the radio. They are in-game audio, they do not have any correlation to DJ Atomika's broadcasts.
It was here that the conclusion can be drawn as these are not to be interpreted as live broadcasts: the pre-recorded messages from a living DJ Atomika, who, as far as we're concerned, is and was the only person to ever exist in Paradise City. Now this is where it starts to get really disturbing... A crash happened to me right when I exited the South Bay Expressway road. I was driving the Watson Burnout Roadster when it happened, too.
Well, nothing out of the ordinary there. It sounded like any other wreck you'd have from the game. Well after this particular wreck, the rest of DJ Atomika's broadcasts weren't exactly... Normal. They didn't sound like DJ Atomika, or ANY human speaking at all, for that matter. A minute or so afterwards, another radio broadcast message played with a lot of loudness and radio malfunction. So what the hell is this all about? Well after a few more of these messages, I decided to go back to the wreck footage and examine it a little closer. Upon reviewing it numerous times, I couldn't find anything wrong...
...I was looking in the wrong places.
I went by the wreck, frame by frame, and during the time of the impact where the screen brightens a bit found what looked to be a silhouette of an invisible figure driving the car. This lasted for about a frame or two. I never would've seen this if I hadn't taken the time to go back and observe it carefully. A couple months after the game's release, a handful of people witnessed the same glitch. There are a few in which they would actually see the silhouette, despite his prescence before they took the time to look. So to most people, the messages started getting distorted for no reason, and they never saw the silhouette. A few days passed by, and the music would stop playing after playing for a certain amount of time, then the audio would cut out altogether, making the game virtually unplayable.
The common theory is that DJ Atomika is and has been dead for a long time. What people were seeing here may have been an aprimition of the figure that claimed to be DJ Atomika's deceased spirit. It's a common belief that ghosts and supernatural beings can interfere with real world technology, which could explain the distorted audio behind the messages. As for the figure itself, I haven't the faintest effin idea. People call it a glitch, a haunting, anything to make them feel better so that they act like they know what it is, and it doesn't seem bad to them when the reality is that no one has an idea what the hell this figure is suppose to represent, where it came from, why the audio was distorted, no one.
They are called theories for a reason, and you can't really put realistic relations in video game logic. Maybe it was an easter egg that was left in the game, and it scared people too much so they had to take it out in an update. I really have no clue. This game was released, like I said, in late 2007, early 2008. It is semi-late 2015, and this mystery surrounding this glitch has still yet to be explained.
Category:Video Game Creepypasta