The CarnEvil Cult

## The CarnEvil Cult by unknown author

(Note: This creepypasta was originally told through a thread on 4chan's /x/ board. It has had some light editing done for this new format. To read the original unedited thread click here)

CarnEvil was an arcade light gun shooter that came out on October 31, 1998 and was both published and developed by Midway Games.

It was a best-seller and even outsold Mortal Kombat 4 that year, yet despite its popularity it never had a sequel nor has it been released on a home console or PC. The game is noted for its extreme graphic violence and surrealist dark comedy. But there's a much darker secret and I've been trying to figure it out.

If you're expecting some low-effort creepypasta then look elsewhere, This is real and I know what I'm talking about.

CarnEvil was a game developed mainly by a right-wing Celtic pagan folk cult and was meant to be part of a series in a complex set of rituals for Samhain, the Celtic New Year that has been commonly misidentified with Halloween by clueless redneck Protestants.

The game itself was the concept of Jack E. Hager, a Midway employee at the time who had no real connections to the cult and wanted to just make a spooky Halloween horror game.

For my former brethren working for Midway at the time, he's what's known as a "useful pawn"

This GamesRadar article published for the game's 20th Anniversary in 2018 is mostly just fluff, but there's useful tidbits of information in it.

Namely, it confirms the existence of the lost console port and its bizarre development that he was largely kept out of, and that Midway's higher ups were giving them some trouble.

The real mystery is the Tunnel, a level that was cut completely and the only thing remaining in the game's code is the song for the area of the game that was found by emulators looking into the code for cut content.

The music sounds like the smooth jazz elevator music you'd hear in softcore cable porn like on late night Cinemax back in the day.

It's obviously meant to be a Tunnel of Love, to keep in tune with the game's carnival fairground theme and because it's meant as a virtual sex ritual blending sex and violence, as was a part of Celtic pagan rites in the ancient times.

Midway's higher ups made sure the Tunnel was cut because it was too offensive and they did not want arcade owners to ban the game.

If you played CarnEvil, then you would know the Tunnel of Love would be really fucked up to be too offensive for the "Most Twisted Arcade Game Ever Made"

There's a bunch of other weird shit in the game's code, including placeholder images of Sailor Jupiter and a shopped image of Jeffrey Dahmer holding a severed head of the Midway executive that gave the devs issues, meant as a joke.

The devs who were part of the cult also were weebs, the old-school 90's weebs who were known as "otaku" and liked violent edgy shit and guro hentai.

Well, the game's credits even mention Princess Serenity in the credits under "Special Thanks" and this cult I was in did have members in multiple states and even a small group in Ontario.

The leader in the Canadian branch was a stereotypical otaku who was obsessed with Sailor Mercury and was on a Dateline report but a lot of his more overt NEET/otaku behavior was meant as an act to fool people into thinking he was an incompetent basement dweller instead of the Canadian equivalent of Lord Summerisle.

Video linked here. The segment with Greg the otaku/future druid begins at 10:5.

He was not the leader at the time the interview took place in the 90's though, and I'm not sure if he had any connections to CarnEvil, or more specifically the lost console version that was an entirely different kind of game instead of a mere arcade port.

The Tunnel itself was alleged to have contained shocking footage and "coded" messages that the cultists would get but would be meaningless to anyone else.

Some of the footage and imagery included an array of images related to Celtic paganism and guro anime artwork as well as clips from the following titles with the following directors and release dates.

"The Wicker Man", Robin Hardy (1973)

"Born to Raise Hell", Roger Earl (1975)

"Cannibal Holocaust", Ruggero Deodato (1980)

"Legend of Lyon Flare", Yorihisa Uchida (1986)

"Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend", Hideki Takiyama (1989)

Other footage I was informed of were the Budd Dwyer tape in a GIF format and some taped rituals possibly involving nudity, sex, and animal or human sacrifice.

The Tunnel and the console port were both going to have various clips from these assorted sources, but were cut for being illegal and difficult.

Budd Dwyer's death is legally available and not under copyright, so all that's left is either the taped ritual being illegal or more likely, the movie and anime footage being a case of copyright infringement and being unlicensed.

More proof of the cut images that did survive into the game like the Sailor Jupiter placeholder pic (which is entirely different from the other placeholders) and the shopped Dahmer image.

Where did I get this information regarding the clips? Close friend of mine worked at Midway on the dev team back then. We actually were both roommates in Iowa at the time and he had two places of residence, an apartment near Chicago he rented in his name, and the ranch in Iowa that the group owned that I lived on.

Midway Games had their main HQ in Chicago and they had several smaller offices in Illinois and Iowa for their arcade division

I know that sounds like one of those "My Dad Works at Nintendo" excuses, but it is true. I've met a lot of strange and varied people in the old pagan community.

As you drift further away from the Wicca and New Age garbage, a lot of people overlap or keep in touch with one another more closely

Like I said, I actually was part of a Celtic pagan folk cult mainly devoted to worship of Lugh, Ecne, and The Dagda, as well as The Morrigan.

A lot of creepy and disturbing rituals are associated with the Morrigan. She is NOTHING like the Wiccan goth girls and New Agers portray her as. If you read Celtic myth, you'd know that.

Two of the demographics the cult recruited from were Weebs and D&D nerds. They also did recruitment in the goth and metal circles as well, preying on outcasts and people from broken homes and dysfunctional families.

The longer you were in the cult, the more that was discouraged and if you wanted to advance ranks, you had to get deeper into the occult pagan and right-wing stuff.

I left the cult in 2002, a few months after 9/11.

Shit was getting serious and I bugged out of there. No longer live in Iowa and I don't keep in touch with anyone from the cult.

The game devs who were working on the console version of CarnEvil were a third party group contracted by Midway as opposed to the actual employee devs who did the arcade version.

Only two of those guys were cultists, my old roommate and another person. They were in the lower ranks.

And I actually met Greg (the Canadian weeb who loved Sailor Mercury) around 1999 or 2000 when the Ontario branch met up with the other Midwestern sets of the cult, he had lost weight and became less interested in anime and more fixated on worship and rituals so he could gain rank.

I'm not sure if the cult is still active or if they have rebranded. After Columbine and 9/11, the cult intentionally kept an even lower profile and there was a lot of fears of law enforcement getting involved since a lot of guys stockpiled weapons and some of them sold drugs too, and a lot of cultists did all sorts of criminal activities.

Some of the advanced rituals would also be considered felonies, and a lot of people started panicking and jumping ship in the early 2000's.

Some of the oldest members of the cult originally belonged to white gangs in the wider Chicago area like the Jousters, Gaylords, Stoned Freaks, and Uptown Rebels.

Like I said earlier, the cult worshipped Celtic gods and goddesses. The cult's rituals often involved sex acts both gay and straight, lighting candles, bloodletting and self-harm, and plant sacrifices.

More advanced rituals for certain holidays or special events involved sacrificing live animals, namely farm animals like chickens, pigs, sheep, and at one point, a calf.

There were rumors that some of the other sets in Michigan and Kentucky who went and did human sacrifices of kidnapped people such as potential informants or rival gang/cult members but I honestly doubt those claims.

Animal sacrifices were real and I saw them first hand. Took part in some of the self-harm and candle-lighting rituals.

Initiation rituals were similar to gang initiations and included beatings followed by group sex, often of a sadomasochistic bent.

Still have nightmares from my initiation into the group. Having a bunch of people beat the shit out of you and then literally fuck you in the ass back to back is not fun to say the least, but I wanted to prove myself as worthy of the cult.

I welcomed it at the time and signed off on those acts more or less, but I regret it deeply now.

I did have a car and I was a quartermaster and steward. My job was to acquire weapons, food, fuel, ammunition, and other basic supplies for our stockpile in Iowa.

A CD, a wallet, a knife, and some clothes were what I was able to take with me when I got in my car and drove away from the cult forever that snowy winter morning in 2002.

There were other aspects to the cult as well, and why we tried to infiltrate the video game industry (and recruited from certain "nerd" fandoms and IT workers).

You know how back in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's you had Christian conservatives who went on about how video games, D&D, rock music, and any form of fantasy or horror fiction was inherently Satanic and meant to program people?

We believed that the Christians were full of shit about games and movies were being used as Satanic recruitment tools, but we believed that they could be used as propaganda and for the purposes of thought control and to condition people to be violent when mixed with certain stimuli and specific mental and physical conditioning regimens.

Like we'd watch all sorts of extremely violent and dark movies, TV shows, and anime, and read all sorts of books of a similar bent in our spare time that wasn't tied to work or worship.

The stuff we watched were always either rated R, NC-17, or X, and we also watched hardcore S&M porn and all sorts of guro and demon hentai. It was supposed to desensitize us and "reconfigure" our minds to make us warriors for the Gods, sort of like the Fianna of the Fenian Cycles or the warrior hero Cu Chulainn.

We also did lots of LARP's and campaigns for D&D and Vampire: The Masquerade as a form of psychological training.

I don't think the programming was that effective but still.

Basically, the logic was "The Christians are wrong. These corporations aren't using media to brainwash people and make them violent...but we can and its up to us to do so."

TLDR-They read "Dark Dungeons" and thought it was a how-to guide.

Like I said, these guys were whack and I'm glad I left them completely.

My biggest concern is if whether or not the cult as a whole is still in existence and whether or not any of these people did successfully infiltrate the gaming industry after the failed CarnEvil attempt.

Even if the cult itself was disbanded, I could see some individuals retaining their fucked-up beliefs and trying to continue the experiments on their own with a new cult or something.

The two guys at Midway on the CarnEvil dev team were based out of Iowa and commuted to Illinois, but the small studio that was contracted to do the console version of CarnEvil (more of a remake/sequel than a true port) were from the set based in Michigan, only met two people from the Michigan crew at a Lammas gathering in the late 90's, a guy and a girl, both of whom were creepy even by cult standards.

The girl had a weird obsession with JFK. Kind of like that goth girl who claimed she was married to Sephiroth or something. Personally, I think she was batshit crazy even back then. Like, we're talking they could've been characters in an August Underground movie or something.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the cult was organized as some black ops recruitment farm by some bigger organization.

Not sure if they were being used by deep state or some other larger cult unrelated to any of it, but I always thought it was unusual for such a fringe cult to have so many sets in multiple states and even one in Canada, but they were all small in number.

The Iowa set I was in ran at about 20 or so deep at most. The Kentucky set was about 10 or 12 people at its peak, and there were groups in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia whose sets were in the single digits

The biggest group was the "Mother" chapter in the Chicago area at around 50 people or so, and the Michigan guys were anywhere from 15 to 25 people.

Maybe some of the more promising cultists were let into a bigger organization or something?

We watched a LOT of zombie movies and used the "zombie apocalypse" as code for training for a SHTF scenario. This was in the 90's and very early 2000's, before The Walking Dead or even 28 Days Later.

When zombies went full mainstream fad, all of a sudden the CDC and FEMA were using zombie apocalypse imagery to raise awareness for the emergency preparedness and disaster prep?

Could've been a test run for predictive programming?

Or maybe it was just coincidence?

I don't know...