As if it wasn't enough for Majora's Mask to have its creepiness factor heightened, an even more modern internet urban legend is all about the original Pokemon games - specifically, a bootleg edition that shirks the traditional Red and Blue colour scheme and is billed as "Pokemon Black". Building on the existing spooky stuff in the Pokemon games (seriously, it exists! Ghost Pokemon! The Lavender Town music!), this unofficially licensed GameBoy cartridge was apparently procured using less-than-legal means and played by games journalist Eric Caoili, who described his experience of playing it in detail. The game starts much the same as Pokemon Red and Blue, only after selecting your starter monster you find yourself in possession of another - GHOST. You could play through the game normally but if you ever used Ghost in battle, the enemy Pokemon would be too scared to fight it, and using Ghost's only attack "Curse" would cause the screen to black out, the enemy to disappear, and the battle to be over. The implication was that Ghost was killing people's Pokemon. If that wasn't dark enough, the game apparently culminates in all of the trainers you have fought also dying, so wandering around the world saw you not speaking to NPCs but walking around their tombstones, which littered the landscape. At this point all the game's music is playing at half-speed, like a dirge or a funeral march. After "completing" the game it cuts to your character, as an old man, alone in the world. You have no Pokemon. You have no friends. And then Ghost finds you...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
