Bee Movie Game: The Beta Copy

So, almost one year have passed since I lost my memory of that evening, that oh so fateful evening. The start of my journey, the first of many weird encounters with lost videos and games.

After the first run-in, I turned to hard recreational drugs, hoping to fry my brain enough to erase that part of my life, and for a little while, it worked. It was not until last week when it all came flooding back. I am only typing this now because my new dog, Fred Figglehorn, pissed all over the power supply to my $10,000 Razer gaming PC that I certainly did not, under any circumstances, pay more than what the specs are worth.

I put that little bastard in a diaper and took away his dognip blunts. Needs to learn to use the fucking toilet like everyone else. I had to order a new power supply from Amazon and two days later, holy shit, son of a bitch, it came. I am typing this anecdote right after putting in the new power supply.

Let me break this shit down for you.

My new job consists of the following:

I drive around in a truck, open people's mailboxes, and put envelopes in them.

I am a well-paid, government-employed, mailman. You've heard of Man of Steel? Well, I’m Man of Mail. It's definitely not all it's cracked up to be. I mean 4 months ago I had to have my left nut surgically reattached after a dog chased me down and bit it off. I told the doctor that I couldn't take a donation testicle; I didn't want to impregnate any future girlfriend with a dead man's nut.

I still have that curious side from my time as a trash-man. I’ll sometimes go through other people’s mail. I stopped at someones house to deliver their mail, only to open the package and unveil the contents within. It was a Xbox360 game, or Xbox for those un-American plebs out there. You know who you are.

There was no label, but there was something written in silver marker: “Bee Movie Game Beta - property Beenox - 2005” I was uber excited to find a beta copy of the video game to my favorite franchise of all time! I slipped it away in my mailbag, then thought of how I was supposed to explain the missing package. I shoved a Red Robin gift card into the envelope along with a bootleg copy of Super Maruo and stored it in the mailbox. I work for USPS so shitty service is expected.

I invited my friend Scotty to come see this with me since we’re both major Bee movie fanatics. That evening at dusk, as Scotty pulled into my driveway, I spotted a small man dashing down the road into one of my bushes. I thought nothing of it and ushered Scott in. Before we sit down I show him that I have prepared an extensive meal for us to indulge in while we play this game.

A creamy tomato soup with a special mix of herbs, a basket of buttered sweet rolls, a classic French salad with lemon dijon vinaigrette, a Sole Meuniére with browned butter caper sauce and a side of fried calamari, and a delicious dessert of Cheesecake. This five-course meal prepared all by my hands, the culinary classes I had taken in college and jobs in various three and four-star restaurants paying off massively.

As we sat down with our food, I heard something moving outside. I immediately shrugged it off as I was starving and eager to play this never-before-seen work in progress of an actually decent licensed movie game. I dusted off my old Xbox360, sneezing 1,996 times because of my allergies, and plugged it into my vintage CRT television, finally getting seated and beginning to dig into our meal.

That was until John Goodman, the voice of Montgomery from Bee movie, kicked down my front door. “DO NOT PLAY THAT GAME! I’M WARNING YOU! IT HAS--” John’s assertions were cut short by him tripping up on the power cord to the Xbox 360 and falling to my living room floor, hitting his head on my solid marble coffee table. Needless to say, he was either knocked out cold, or dead. I was pissed. No son of a bitch is cracking my marble. “What are you doing you dumass?!” I shouted to Goodman’ unconscious body, giving him the middle finger. I drag him outside, laying him on the curb with a piece of paper pasted to his abdomen that said “1 Free John Goodman” and left him for any random passerby to pick up.

As I turned to go back inside, I could have sworn I smelled McDonald’s burgers. That made me even hungrier and dashed back inside. I hit the power button on the Xbox 360 and began diving into my portion of the meal. This is when things got really strange. I thought this was going to be some normal beta build of a video game. Man, was I wrong…

It started off with a poor-quality video of presumably a couple of the developers jacking off into a Diet Pepsi can. What? What the hell? Wait a minute… Why did they put this in to begin with? Not to mention I was eating and this made me feel sick to the bone. A poor quality audio file played that said, “Fuck you, Dreamworks!” Now, I don't know what their fucking problem with Dreamworks was. All I know is that there is some controversy about Dreamworks being a freemason. I hit the a button, hoping that would skip this crude intro movie. It did not.

The clip finally ended and faded to black, and the title screen came up. It was a bit different than what the final title screen is. It looked like it has picture instead of a video. At that point I thought little of it, especially after the opening video. The “Press Start” message appears on screen and I hit start. Instead of the usual “Select” soundclip you hear, its instead a new soundclip that says “Ya like jazz!” As I got jumpscared by Barry B Benson scowls in the foreground, but Barry was looking downward to his feet, shoulders slouched. I was surprised to hear some deleted lines. Sure it was a line from the movie, but it was a new recording of it which is all that counts.

There was no main menu, interview, cutscenes, or anything, it just jumps right into the game with New Hive City. The layout was a bit different and the textures were even more different. The whole game was a 3-D environment instead of the 3.5-D that is in the final game. Barry's model however remains the same. I advanced through the jobs just fine, nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn't until First Flight when things turned south.

Instead of Pollen Jocks General telling them the rules before they began to fly to start off the level, Adam challenged Barry to a tap dancing competition that Barry declined, grabbing Adam by the arm, throwing him out of an open hive. So this was a cutscene. It cuts to Adam laying on the pavement below, outcold, unmoving and dead with ultra-realistic blood surrounding him in a sizeable pool. Barry looked down in satisfaction with what he had done. He smiled wide and turned towards the camera revealing bee-like eyes. I was unnerved by this and found it to be quite chilling. Barry spoke in a low tone, “What's the matter, Samson? Afraid of the past?” I wondered what he could have been referring to by “the past,” but I was much more concerned about the fact that this fucking shit knew my name.

“Sit back and enjoy the show,” Barry smiling evilly as he spoke. He went into a bathroom mission from Trapped, and snuck out some bleach and ammonia. I knew immediately what his intentions were. He went downstairs, sneaking behind Ken and Vanessa, pouring the ammonia into the bleach jug, creating chlorine gas. Barry was going to snuff out Ken and Van with a World War 2 chemical weapon. Barry dumped the chlorine gas into an open bucket and smirked at the camera, at me, his eyes once again becoming bee-like.

It then cut to a 1080p movie that was seemingly animated by Dreamworks themselves. It shows Ken and Vanessa on the sofa enjoying some quality television programming, sharing some delicious Wonderful Pistachios. All of a sudden, their skin turns gray. Vanessa soon after begins vomiting violently while Ken goes into an asthma attack, the chlorine eating away at his lungs. Hector was drunk and he was falling downstairs, shitting all over himself and rolling around in it. Ken begins coughing up thick, dark crimson blood that twinkled like rubies in the brightly lit living room as Vanessa goes into convulsions. Ken's eyeballs fall out and his face melts off in disturbing detail.

Now this was taking things too far. Your face doesn't melt off from chlorine poisoning, but Ken was surely melting away. Bits of his flesh sticking to his clothing and stretching like melted mozzarella cheese on a freshly-baked pizza. His screams and gasps of air becoming muffled gurgles as he chokes on his molten flesh as his appearance becomes less human and looks more and more like Ditto from Pokémon.

Seeing this made me want pizza instead. So, I gave my portion of the dinner to Scotty as I paused the cutscene and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed up Little Caesars and ordered a large pepperoni pizza and some crazy bread. 20 minutes later I get a knock on my door. I get up to open the door and the man who was warring a ВИD mask was holding my order, the infamous Russian logo of the early-1990s. “That'll be 14 dollars,” ВИD said. I always felt bad for that guy since after the police beatings, riots, gunfights and massacre situation in the 1990s ВИD was hardly ever seen again and probably hasn't gotten much work since. Still, it was good the private company's was keeping him around. I gave him the 14 dollars with a 30 dollar tip. A tear formed in his eye and he smiled as he thanked me and headed back for his delivery vehicle.

He looked back at me and said, “By the way, you left your shirt on the doorstep.” I looked down at my feet and there sitting in front of me was a tiny yellow turtleneck shirt. This shirt didn't belong to me. I grabbed it and my pizza and walked back inside as the man with the ВИD mask grabbed the still unconscious John Goodman and threw him in the back seat of the delivery vehicle and drove off. I threw the shirt into the garbage and sat back down with my pizza and took a slice while un-pausing the horrific cutscene.

Ken, or what was left of him, dropped to the floor in a pile of gooey skin and clothing. Once all of his skin had melted into nothing, all that was left was a skeleton. It cuts back to Barry. Him being a bee, he was immune to the chemical mixture that he created as he stared into the camera, into my very soul, those piercing bee eyes burning into my mind. Upon closer inspection. “Do you not remember,” Barry calmly proclaimed. “The first time you decided to meddle in lost media…” He brought out 3 food items that made things a little clearer to me, and they were Wonderful Pistachios, a Christmas ham, and McDonald’s burgers. Yes, I remember my time as a trashman, stealing things from other people's garbage. I remember getting those three things for some occasion, but what occasion was it?

“This isn't your first time looking at lost media, Samson.” He lifted up a VHS that said “THE NEW SECRET, 1991” on it. It finally clicked with me. All of that time getting it out of my head was only a temporary fix. I remember the tape, I remember that monkey who named George showing up at my house, I remember it all. “You see me in your dreams, but you never remember,” Barry proclaimed. “You see me out of the corner of your eye at any given time of the day, but you never know what it is.” Barry gave a sly smile before the Xbox360 shut off. I tried turning it back on, but to no avail. That motherfucker owes me a Xbox360. I looked over at Scotty, who was asleep and dressed in a Barry B benson cosplay. My face twisted into an expression of disgust and anguish. As I looked back to unplug the Xbox360 and put it away, he was there. Standing right in front of me.

My nemesis, the Benson.

His eyes beamed at me with a bee-like appearance. His own flesh looked as though it had a bumpy, reptilian texture to it. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as he dropped to the floor and his demeanor froze in a normal dead bug facial pose. He had a audio tape that kept repeating his famous line but different… “Ya like worms! Ya like worms! Ya like worms!” A large worm emerged from his shoe, slowly slithering across Barry’s body and lifting its head up to me at eye-level, sizing me up. The grainy, tinny audio tape clip continued barking the same line, “Ya like worms! Ya like worms!” I froze as I heard an alteration in the tape clip. I couldn’t place my finger on how it sounded different, but it sounded more pained. It crackled,

“Ya like worms… I’m… full of worms!”

Indeed, several worms burrowed holes through Barry’s body from the inside out, and slithered out, all hissing and raising up to my level. Barry woke up and stood up, eyeing me and his serpent army. “I’m always watching you Samson. When you sleep, when you’re awake, all the time.” He motioned over to my friend Scotty, who then began convulsing. His face contorted and stretched to measures I didn’t know were possible for a human’s face to stretch. His body began to shrink and lose some features. It was a painful-sounding process, as the entire time, his skin is turning yellow and the wings is growing behind him I heard his bones crunch as they morphed into a new body.

When the shrinking was complete, it turned out that my dear friend Scotty, never actually existed. Instead it was Adam who had cloaked himself as someone else! Barry and Adam came at me, backing me up to the TV. “Give us the game,” they chanted in unison. I started up my own chant in the words of my grandpa Jimbo, “Go fuck yourselves, go fuck yourselves.” Then out of nowhere, my cat Fred Figglehorn swooped in to save the day. He raised his legs and began to piss on the two evil entities. They started screaming wildly, their screams morphing into demonic screeches and gargling. They began to slowly melt away from what I can assume is the high ammonia content in dog urine, which is kind of weird because in the game, Barry was completely immune to the ammonia, so it must be something else in puppy piss that’s killing them. Barry reached his hand out to me in one last desperate attempt for safety, but I didn’t respond. His screeches were snuffed out by his matter becoming liquid, reducing him to nothing more than a puddle of orange liquid on my living room floor. I tasted it. It was Orange juice.

I cleaned up the mess and went straight to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the game that I had left on my coffee table was gone, and Fred Figglehorn pissed on my PC.

The moral of the story is, never name your dog Fred Figglehorn.