NG Mod Scream4me

The SNK Neo Geo was my favorite console of all time. Notice that I say it WAS my favorite console. This is the story of how it became the most terrifying machine in the world to me in just a single night.
I was feeling nostalgic one day, itching to play some older games from my childhood. To satisfy my need for a ‘90s throwback, I went down to my local arcade, which I visited almost every day as a child. I was very much looking forward to a game of Street Fighter II with the owner, who I had befriended my first time at the small arcade. When I got to the dingy brick building, however, I was confused to see ambulances and police cruisers parked outside.
Despite knowing I would be in the way, I entered the arcade. What I saw shocked me. The owner of the arcade, an extremely old Korean by the name of Yun Nguyen, was sprawled out on the floor, eyes closed. Harold, janitor of the arcade and Yun’s best friend, was talking to a police officer about how he had discovered the mortifying scene.
When he was done, I asked Harold what was going on. He said Yun had had a heart attack and was dead. He told me that Yun had just bought a new Neo Geo game the day before and tested it last night. Since Yun had no wife or children, everything in the arcade had been passed to Harold.
Harold knew that I loved the Neo Geo. He remembered how I would feed the cabinet my whole allowance just to beat Metal Slug. He told me to take it. At first, I was taken aback, but he said Yun would want me to have it. The next day, I had the whole machine hauled up to my apartment across the street.
Before I even considered doing anything else, I move the cabinet next to my TV and plugged the machine into the wall. I flipped the switch on the back to see if it worked. The marquee on the top lit up, as did the screen. Then, I used the key Harold had given me to open up the front of the machine. All the guts were in place, the coin cache, the motherboard, and the four cartridge slots. Three huge plastic cartridges were inserted. The end labels revealed that the games I had received with my Neo Geo were King of Fighters 1996, Metal Slug 3, and even Gunlord, a new indie game for the Neo Geo that came out just last year. I didn’t know whether to be excited to own a Neo Geo arcade machine and three amazing games, or to be depressed about Yun Nguyen’s unfortunate death.
In my flurry of mixed emotions, I barely noticed the fourth game cartridge. It wasn’t inserted into a slot, but rather sitting askew beside the motherboard. The cartridge had scratches in its plastic exterior, and the contacts looked slightly bent. I bent them back in place with a pair of tweezers and inserted the cartridge into the remaining slot. The slot also seemed peculiar, its metal cover chipped and cracked. It looked as though someone had desperately yanked the cartridge out.
It was then that I noticed the cartridge’s end label. It had no printed text on it, but rather a person’s handwriting. The label read:
“NG_MOD_SCREAM4ME.”
It appeared to have been hastily written with a pencil. I dismissed the strange appearance of the cartridge, assuming it would be a crappy homebrew. SPOILER: It was not.
I turned the Neo Geo on again. As usual, the game select screen came up. I wanted so badly to play Gunlord, but my curiosity got the better of me. I selected the mysterious game titled NG_MOD_SCREAM4ME. The screen went black for a few seconds until I got an intro screen to this “game.” It was just a mess of white pixels and a black background. I pressed the start button, but nothing happened. I pressed other buttons, but none of them worked either. I squinted hard, trying to make out what the white pixels were meant to look like. I eventually figured out they made up a line of highly pixelated text. The screen read, “Please turn off all lights and lock all exits.”
Confused, I decided to give in to my Neo Geo’s demands. I turned off every light in my apartment and locked the door. By the time I had walked back to my Neo Geo, the screen had changed. How it had detected the change in light and the seal on my door, I had no idea. The screen looked like a command prompt, having several lines of random letters in white. At the bottom of the screen, there was a line of text that said, “Press start to mod games.” Slightly worried for the health of my Neo Geo games, I pressed the start button. The Neo Geo machine turned off immediately.
When I turned the Neo Geo back on, the game select screen no longer showed the fourth game, just KOF 96, Metal Slug 3, and Gunlord. I selected King of Fighters, my favorite fighting game in the world. Something was wrong with the game, however. Instead of an intro or game mode screen, it took me directly to the character select screen. I chose Mai Shiranui, my favorite character. The game automatically put me up against a character I had never seen before. The character had no name. Even stranger, the character was just a generic human sprite with no color. Every pixel of the sprite was black.
The enemy character did nothing. He didn’t attack, he had no animation, and he just stood there. I moved the joystick and pressed buttons, but only Mai moved. I made Mai kick the other character in the gut. Just as I did so, I felt a sudden, massive pain in my abdomen. I made Mai punch him in the face. My head was knocked back and my nose started bleeding. After both of my attacks, the other character’s health bar had only gone down a few pixels.
What was going on? What was causing me to hurt while I played? I made Mai use a fire attack that covered the other character’s entire body. It was too late when I realized that that was a mistake. My whole body burned. I felt the sensation of heat everywhere. I screamed in pain. When the horrible feeling went away, I noticed that bits of my skin and clothes had burned away.
I tried to stop playing, but I could not remove my hand from the joystick. It was as if my left hand was paralyzed, and I had no way of uncurling my fingers, which felt as though they were glued to the joystick. My right hand, the one on the buttons, was free. I awkwardly twisted and bent, reaching my right arm around the back of the red cabinet. I flipped the switch and turned off the machine, but it turned back on instantly.
“Play.”
The speakers had emitted a horrible voice, which demanded that I play another game. Since my hand was stuck to the stick, I had no choice. I selected Metal Slug 3 this time. There was no intro screen this time either, it just threw me into the first level. The enemy health bar from King of Fighters was still in the upper right corner of the screen.
As I played, my sense of danger grew. Each enemy had their normal sprite shape, but they were also completely black. I shot and killed the first enemy soldier. It was the most pain I had ever felt in my life. My chest hurt so badly, it almost felt as though my heart had exploded… it was like I had been shot. I kept playing, and the sharp pain came back every time I killed an enemy. I was screaming and sobbing in agony the whole time I was playing. With each soldier or alien killed, my torso exploded with pain again, and again, and again.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I would unplug the machine and see a doctor. I twisted my body and reached for the cord with my right hand, but it wasn’t there. The Neo Geo was unplugged and somehow running without electricity.
“Play more.”
Not this again. It was the speakers, demanding in the same demonic voice that I continue playing. Metal Slug 3 stopped and the game select screen came up once more. I selected Gunlord, even though I was no longer excited to play it. Through the tears and blood in my eyes, I was able to make out the level. It looked normal, at least from the playthroughs I had seen. I moved the character around and played as normal. This game was even stranger, because instead of blacked out enemies, there were no enemies at all. I just strolled through the level. When I got to the first boss, I was horrified by what I saw. It was me.
Instead of the normal first boss of the game, all I saw was a pixelated version of my face. I nervously made the Gunlord character shoot at it. As I shot at the pixelated face on the screen, it began flashing red and white. This was what drove me over the edge. My head was bursting with an awful pain, even worse than the one from Metal Slug 3. I screamed, but this time I could not even hear my own cries of agony.
I could feel chunks of flesh peel away from my face, I saw my own blood trickle over my eyes, and I felt a tremendous heat, even hotter than fire, on my brain. It felt as though I was being impaled, shot, burned, and beaten all at the same time. After minutes of this unfathomable pain, I could hear again, but it wasn’t my own screams that I heard. I heard the sobs and screeches of people, hundreds of screams at once. At this point, I could even see shards of my own skull flying out in front of me. The life bar from KOF 96, which was still in the corner of the screen, was quickly deteriorating.  
The terrible pain this machine was causing me had driven me insane at this point. I fell to my knees, my left hand still tightly clutching the joystick. It was then that I remembered that I had not locked the door on the front of the machine. I opened it up, the coin cache nearly hitting me in the face as it swung open. I grabbed the cartridge, the mysterious one in the fourth slot, and yanked it out. The Neo Geo turned off, and my left arm fell to my side. All of the pain had stopped, but the mental pain, the memory, was still there.
I stood to my feet, amazed that I had survived. I touched my face. There was no blood, and every inch of my skin was still attached. I turned on the light and unlocked the door. I picked up the cartridge that had caused my psyche so much damage. It had a small sticker on the side, which also had messy handwriting on it.
“Give this to someone else, or it will all become real.”
Not wanted to test it, I gave the cartridge, along with the Neo Geo arcade machine, to a man selling video games at the local flee market. I now know the cause of Yun Nguyen’s heart attack and death.
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