Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (22 page)

‘If you look closely, you’ll notice that all of the screenshots are typically retouched versions of screenshots we created for magazines before the game was released,’ he said.

Would magazines go so far as to fake such images? And if so, why would they only do so with this game? It’s not like we’re being inundated with stills that claim to show a blurred chupacabra in
Super Mario
, a Loch Ness monster in
Call of Duty
, a yeti in
Tetris
.

Filshie even went so far as to offer his own explanation for what Bigfoot-sighters might be seeing in the game: ‘San Andreas is
an extremely complex game, with millions of lines of code,’ he said at the time. ‘It’s entirely possible for strange things to happen, but none of them are intentional.’

Terry Donovan, the CEO of Rockstar, also speaking at the time, said, ‘There is no Bigfoot, just like in real life.’

This straightforward denial from the game’s makers should have been enough to quash the rumours—as if God himself had confirmed to the world that there were no hirsute monsters roaming America’s tangled forests. But a video game with a scope like
Grand Theft Auto
is a vast and multifaceted construction, built by teams of hundreds of people. It’s entirely possible that one artist or designer could have inserted a so-called Easter egg like Bigfoot without the rest of the team’s knowledge. Indeed, some coders concealed a sex-based mini-game—which became known as ‘hot coffee’—that led to the company being brought in front of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2006. It was a scandal that cost the game’s publisher, Take Two, more than twenty million dollars in lawsuit payments. If a fully developed mini-game, which allowed the game’s lead character to have graphic sex with women, could be surreptitiously included in the game, it’s no great stretch to believe that a single rogue programmer or artist could have quietly inserted a mythical beast.

Virtual Bigfoot sceptics have another advantage over their real-life counterparts: they are able to scour the game’s code in search of evidence. If there were no Bigfoot assets (the graphic renderings necessary to represent any object in a game world) it would prove that virtual Bigfoot was a myth. Some motivated sceptics have spent countless hours scanning the code; they claim that, in the thousands upon thousands of lines of programming, there is nothing referring to Bigfoot. But others are dubious of these claims; after all, how meticulous could an amateur, unpaid hacker sleuth really be?

Despite its early denials, Rockstar has only added to the sense of doubt in recent years. When asked to comment on the rumours, a Rockstar spokesperson told me, ‘We’d prefer to keep an air of mystery surrounding the topic. Let the myth remain a myth.’ Christian Cantamessa, a former Rockstar employee who worked as a level designer on the game, took a similar stance when I approached him.

‘It is a little like asking the U.S. government to discuss Area 51, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The only appropriate comment is “No comment.” ’

For myth-hunters, the search for Bigfoot has provided an ongoing and compelling reason to continue playing the game long after the main storyline has been exhausted. While Chris Ferguson, the Scottish man who retreated into
Skyrim
in the aftermath of personal tragedy, used the game to seek refuge, an introspective kind of quest, these intrepid hunters visit their game to seek a different kind of answer. Their quest is related to discovery (what will we find?) and to glory (the chance to become the first to bag Bigfoot), but it’s centrally about mystery and, in the tradition of all human investigations, the thrill of finding a solution.

Krimmel visits San Andreas twice a week in search of Bigfoot, taking an in-game camera with him on his excursions in the hope of photographing the creature.

‘I’ve beaten the game twice, and maxed out my stats, so myth-hunting is the only thing left to do,’ he says.

For Silver, the allure is in the chance to catch sight of something rare and wonderful: ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred shot at finding him, in my opinion. That possibility is why I return.’

Whether or not people are disposed to believe in or disregard legends, the San Andreas Bigfoot myth appears to be self-perpetuating.
As newer and younger players gain access to the game and read the online rumours, some are inexorably drawn into the story, and become active participants in its extension. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. Rhem Alhatimy, a fourteen-year-old resident of Kufa, Iraq, bought a pirated copy of the game a few months ago, on a DVD containing each of the PC titles in the long-running
Grand Theft Auto
series.

‘I’d read the rumours, and decided to visit Back o Beyond myself,’ he tells me. ‘It was about three o’clock in the morning. That’s when I saw it: a dark, creepy thing standing in the woods. I’m not one-hundred-percent certain, but I think that was him.

‘I will keep looking,’ Alhatimy continues. ‘There is something in those woods.’

Final Fantasy VII
, the Japanese adventure game in which I found refuge during my teenage years, gained notoriety because it kills off one of its main characters midway through the story. This was, at the time, an unprecedented act in a video game. Losing a fictional character whom you care about often stings, but in a video game, the characters you control carry more than mere emotional investment. They are also graphical representations of invested effort—these are the avatars into which you have poured your time and energy, which have grown in power and competence thanks to your service and dedication leading them to victory. When Aeris dies in
Final Fantasy VII
, the wound is doubly deep: the game’s writers are taking away not only a character with whom you identify and about whom you care, but also an asset that you have carefully nurtured in your route to victory.

Even before the game’s release in the West in 1997, importers of the Japanese version reported Aeris’s death and rumours began
to spread that there was a way to bring the character back to life. Complicated sets of instructions for how to resurrect Aeris were disseminated across the emerging Internet. Some of their authors claimed to be members of the development team, or to have tangential links to the game’s writers, in order to add weight to their claims. Players around the world invented theories and tried them out, using ever more convoluted methods.

This kind of scrabbling incredulity as a reaction to loss in fiction has precedent. Charles Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
was published in instalments in the author’s own weekly periodical,
Master Humphrey’s Clock
. Within three days of publishing Chapter 53, in which one lovable character, Little Nell, visits an old church and has a conversation in a graveyard, Dickens had received several letters warning the writer to refrain from what they believed he was planning. These readers took Nell’s visit to the graveyard in conjunction with the line that she looked ‘pale but very happy’ as a foreshadowing of her death.

There’s an anecdotal story that, in subsequent weeks, American readers stormed New York City’s piers, demanding to know from visitors from England whether or not Nell had died.

Nell does indeed perish, and Dickens was swarmed with letters expressing anger and heartbreak. In the realm of fiction, readers have the opportunity to appeal to the character’s creator in a bid to have death’s sentence reversed. So it was with Aeris, who had petitions started in her name. The game’s developer, Squaresoft, reportedly received letters and e-mails either berating them for their decision or demanding to know how it might be undone.

What was most interesting was the way in which thousands of players hunted for the solution: if the game’s authors weren’t going to bring this character back, perhaps they could find a way, some glitch in the programming code from which salvation might be
drawn. This was, after all, a game, which came with a clutch of secrets, including characters that could be recruited to the story only by, for example, exploring the depths of the oceans in a submarine.

This sense of mystery, of a character who can be saved, or of a hidden monster that can be tracked and photographed, can prove a powerful draw back into a game whose charms might otherwise have been exhausted. It’s something that the earliest game designers trained players to search for, either in the tips pages in the backs of magazines (where secrets were often revealed to generate interest in a game) or within the knotted, often impossibly convoluted mysteries within the games’ dungeons. Video games have always been filled with secrets, some of which were discovered only years, even decades, after a game’s initial release. Many games came with secret passcodes that would unlock new characters, items, or other bonuses (one particular string of button inputs featured in so many titles in the 1980s that it became known as the ‘Konami code,’ burned into the muscle memory of every player, who would tap the inputs into a new game in order to see what, if anything, might happen). Most of these codes were, initially, designed to provide the designers with short cuts in order to test the game (extra lives, bonus powers and so on), but they were almost always left in, for players to discover.

Some secrets are ludicrously well hidden. For example, in Capcom’s George A. Romero–inspired zombie game
Resident Evil 2
, a secret photograph of one of the game’s characters can be found by clicking on the same oak desk no fewer than fifty times. Others are more humorous in their payoffs. In the final chapter of
Deus Ex: Invisible War
, if you flush a flag down a toilet, you’re warped to a dance party where all of the main (usually serious) characters
can be seen dancing onstage. Other games, such as
Fez
, are entirely built around grand mysteries; their challenge is in the unpicking of the riddle.

Sometimes these mysteries go undiscovered until their creators reveal their whereabouts. Four years after
Splinter Cell: Double Agent
’s release, two of the game’s developers posted a video on the Internet revealing a hidden side mission, in which the characters must find and rescue four baby seals.

Whether it’s to find a roaming mythical creature or a way to bring a beloved character back from the grave, the hunt for these secrets can become obsessive. Some of the thrill is no doubt in the chance of glory for being the first to snap a Bigfoot on film, or to resurrect a dead girl. But there’s something else too: the comforting reassurance that the truth is out there and that, once unveiled, these mysteries are not random or without logic, but have someone or something behind them.

Video games are so good at presenting satisfying mysteries that one designer decided to use the medium to help solve one of our own world’s most notorious whodunnits.

Forty-one years after the assassination of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, Kirk Ewing was about to stand trial for his murder.

‘I was in Times Square sitting in the green room at
Good Morning America
,’ he recalls. ‘A basketball player appeared on the show before me. He’d recently punched someone in the crowd during a game and had been invited onto the programme to apologise. He made his apology and promptly announced the launch of his new rap CD.’

As the athlete left the stage and the applause died away, Ewing
was ushered onto the TV programme’s set. Ewing sat down and the presenter looked him in the eye. After a moment’s pause, he asked: ‘Why did you kill John F. Kennedy?’

Ewing is familiar with controversy. ‘I’ve had to deal with the consequences of my actions a great deal over my life, so it was no huge surprise,’ he says in a mischievous Scottish brogue. Before joining the video-game industry, he worked in television, producing an episode of the current affairs programme
Dispatches
for Channel 4 and making several appearances on the long-running show
GamesMaster
.

In 2002, he worked as game director on
State of Emergency
, a game published by Rockstar Games that was denounced by Washington state politicians for replicating the 1999 World Trade Organisation riots. But
JFK: Reloaded
, a game that allowed players to assume the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, the twenty-four-year-old sniper who murdered the president on November 22, 1963, hit a different kind of national nerve. The result was controversy on a scale Ewing never anticipated.

‘I was ferried by car around New York City, moving from TV station to radio station and back again,’ Ewing recalls. ‘For an entire week, intelligent people unpicked my personality in front of an audience of millions.’

This trial by media was just the start of the onslaught.

‘I had an unbelievable amount of violence directed towards me,’ he says. ‘There were numerous death threats in the mail. The
Daily Mail
doorstepped my parents to see what they thought about what I’d done—as if they knew what was going on. A reverend in the Midwest called me a “purveyor of electronic wickedness.”

‘I got that one printed on a T-shirt,’ continues Ewing. ‘Perhaps
my favourite e-mail, the one that seems to sum up the whole ignorance around the debate, simply read: “You gay, Swedish asshole.” ’

Ewing’s idea to create a game based on one of the most traumatic moments in recent American history was a response to what he saw as the broadening scope of most video games.

‘Having worked on large video-game projects, I wanted to do something smaller,’ he says. ‘Rather than building an enormous, expansive world I wondered about exploring a single moment in time through a game.’ Ewing, who had recently set up a small studio in Scotland called Traffic Games, wanted to make a game that was based on a real-world event. ‘I loved the idea that we could make games with a current-affairs agenda, rather than just more stuff about orcs and goblins.’

It was also a way definitively to solve a different kind of mystery to those of Bigfoot or Aeris. This was a game that sought to put to rest the curious kind of mystery that’s to be found inside a conspiracy theory.