Game News “You are having a heart attack”, these video game error messages are scaring players!

Game news “You are having a heart attack”, these video game error messages scare players!

Fear and video games often rhyme with horrific titles. However, fear is not limited to gloomy atmospheres and liters of hemoglobins, but can occur in a much more vicious way.. It has notably made a solid and unintentional place for itself in the unexpected of consoles and games. It is in this category that error messages arise, suddenly cutting off the player’s experience. A fear that is certainly precise, but striking, especially for those who have already experienced this type of interruption. Now, it is no longer uncommon to see Internet users reproducing these unintentionally frightening situations, tapping into the horror and general gullibility of the Internet. However, to understand this phenomenon, it is important to be aware of the impact of error messages on players.

Error messages in video games, a repressed fear

In your gaming life, you have surely already seen error messages. Although not extremely rare, they can occur for various reasons, such as a CD that cannot be read by the console or a bad connection. Imagine yourself alone in the family living room and in the dark, trying to launch a Game Boy Advance game on your GameCube using your Game Boy Player. Just when you were expecting to hear the gentle melody of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, you hear a dull piano sound. On the screen, you see a red error message that you’ve never seen before, telling you that your Game Boy Player is not plugged in. The message in itself is not scary, but the way it is delivered is enough to startle the most daring. It only took ten seconds to have my heart racing, lit by this scarlet screen, completely unexpected.

If you own a PlayStation 2, you may have ever felt uncomfortable or even frightened by a sharp screen that occurs when a CD doesn’t play. It must be said that this Sony console had a unique atmosphere that placed users in front of a black void with floating cubic shapes and ethereal music. The error message makes this already disturbing atmosphere, chilling with a blood-red glow drowned in smoke. It’s all a question of atmosphere in this case, which creates an increased feeling of unease depending on the age of the player.

On the video game side, if you unfortunately have a pirated version of a game, you may have already encountered a surprising anti-piracy message. This is the case of Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 which detect unofficial copies and display a message in the middle of a game, even though the player has spent a few hours there. The image of the characters in prison and the relatively menacing music left an impression on more than one player.

Inspired by these surprising messages, content creators have created false situations of this type. This type of video regularly appears all over the Internet and perfectly illustrates the impact of this fear on players.

The creativity of Internet users sends shivers down your spine

For several years, videos of error messages have been appearing on the Internet. We can notably mention the one on Mario Party DS which aroused the curiosity of Internet users surpassing one million views. Imagine yourself in the shoes of that poor gamer who saw his pleasant and colorful game freeze with an excruciating noise, only to face an anti-piracy screen. We see the characters from the Mario universe locked in prison, with the words “pirating is not a party” in red. After watching the 40 seconds of videos, many Internet users shared their fear of this sudden interruption and imagined themselves experiencing it when they were children. Only, there is a catch: this error message does not exist. As
this video of an anti-cheat message from Nintendo on Super Mario 64 which saw the light of day on another channel, shortly after the video on Mario Party.

Inspired by real error messages that they may have encountered in the past, players with keen graphic design skills have fun reproducing this type of sudden appearance on the screen. The result is completely stunning and deceives a large number of innocent Internet users.. So, in just a few years, more or less successful videos of this genre appeared on the Internet. While the less realistic ones make you smile (beware of sensitive souls)the most careful are chilling, like this video where the Nintendo Switch game Ring Fit Adventure detects a heart anomaly. In short, when creativity mixes with the verisimilitude of certain games, it results in particularly striking videos.

Generally, those who post fake error message videos rarely clarify that it is not the real thing. Thus, the border between reality and fiction is blurred to ensure better immersion in the illustrated situation. In all cases, these amateur productions paved the way for a new horror genrebrilliantly conveying the feeling of fear that an impressionable child might feel in front of their console.