On September 10, I was sitting down to dinner with my family when we heard a knock at the door.

That was strange.

We weren’t expecting anyone.

I went to answer it and found a food-delivery driver standing there with a McDonald’s bag. Nothing particularly unusual about that, except nobody in the house had ordered McDonald’s.

Inside the bag was something even stranger.

A small flash drive.

No note. No explanation. Just a flash drive sitting inside a McDonald’s bag like the opening scene of an extremely low-budget horror movie.

Being the responsible and highly intelligent adult that I am, I left it sitting on the table for a while and wondered what the hell was going on.

I considered the possibilities.

Maybe it belonged to somebody else.

Maybe somebody was playing a joke.

Maybe it contained some God-forsaken virus designed to encrypt my computer and demand $75,000 in Bitcoin from me because, as everyone knows, hackers are bad dudes with bad ’tudes.

Naturally, after carefully considering all of those possibilities, I plugged it into my computer anyway.

Because apparently I have learned absolutely nothing from horror movies.

There was only one file on the drive.

“The Unwritten Dead.”

That was it.

Now I was curious.

What exactly was on this thing? More importantly, how did whoever sent it know that I operated an incredibly prestigious underground blog with approximately one subscriber?

Beats me.

But by this point, the whole situation had taken hold of my imagination.

After staring at the file for far longer than any reasonable person should, I clicked it.

Inside were two things: what appeared to be the game’s source code in a plain text file and an executable file, for those unfamiliar with computer terminology.

That was when things became a little unsettling.

I suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling that somebody was watching me.

Of course, that could also have been because I had recently visited the Dark Web after watching Drop Dead Gorgeous, but that is an entirely different story and probably best left for another day.

The important part is the game.

And the game is unlike anything I have played in a long time.

The objective is relatively simple: explore the woods and collect scattered pages from an ancient text while fighting, or avoiding demons, monsters and other creatures that apparently consider you part of a balanced breakfast.

There is something strangely hypnotic about it.

I keep returning to it.

Again and again.

At this point, I have played the thing so much that I feel like I have somehow become part of it.

And I am completely hooked.

The graphics are especially interesting. They have that strange, slightly rough look of an old forgotten computer or console game, the kind of thing you might have discovered on a dusty cartridge at a garage sale in 1997.

Which is particularly impressive considering that I absolutely, definitely, unquestionably had nothing whatsoever to do with making it.

Obviously.

All of this got me thinking about something I used to love: creepypastas about haunted video games.

Back in the day, you could stumble across some story about a cursed cartridge, haunted computer game or mysterious ROM and lose an entire evening reading about it.

Was any of it believable?

Of course not.

That was part of the fun.

One of the most famous examples was BEN Drowned, the story about a supposedly haunted copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

And really, think about the basic premise for a moment.

Why would the ghost of some drowned kid named Ben decide that, of all the possible places in the universe to spend eternity, he wanted to live inside a Nintendo 64 cartridge?

It makes absolutely no sense.

And that is precisely why I love it.

Then there was the NES Godzilla Creepypasta, another wonderfully ridiculous story about an apparently cursed game gradually becoming more disturbing.

Those stories understood something surprisingly effective about horror: ordinary things become much more frightening when they stop behaving the way they are supposed to.

A video game is harmless.

A toy is harmless.

A television is harmless.

A computer is harmless.

Until suddenly it isn’t.

There is something wonderfully stupid and strangely unsettling about taking an object associated with childhood, comfort or entertainment and turning it into something threatening.

Those old creepypastas were mindless fun.

But by God, they were my kind of mindless fun.

I tried listening to some of them again recently, and I will admit that a lot of them do not hit quite the same way anymore. Some have aged better than others.

But I still love what they represented.

They were weird.

Creative.

Unpolished.

Sometimes completely ridiculous.

And people made them simply because they thought the idea was cool.

Maybe that is part of why this mysterious little game has gotten its hooks into me.

It reminds me of that era.

It feels like something that should not exist, some forgotten third-rate horror game somebody discovered buried on an old computer twenty years after the developer disappeared.

And apparently that is exactly my kind of thing.

I also realize that I have been relatively quiet around here lately.

Do not worry.

I have not abandoned the site.

I have simply been doing what I always do: working on far too many projects at the same time.

I am absolutely terrible for this.

I will start building a game or program and immediately convince myself:

Yes. This is the one.

This is the project I am going to focus on.

This is the project I am going to finish.

I start making lists of improvements. I begin planning features. I imagine the completed game.

And then – blammo – another idea crashes into my brain and suddenly I want to build something completely different.

Does anybody else get like that?

Because apparently my greatest enemy as a developer is my own imagination.

Still, something has changed recently.

Over the past few weeks, I have been replaying some of my favourite games, the games that originally inspired me to start creating my own projects, build this website and spend an unreasonable portion of my life staring at source code.

It reminded me why I started doing this in the first place.

Because it is fun.

Not because I expect to become some world-famous developer.

Not because every project needs to become a masterpiece.

Not because somebody on the internet needs to declare me a genius.

I just genuinely love making things.

Maybe someday one of my games will bring a little joy to somebody somewhere in the world.

Jesus Christ, that sounds fucking lame.

But you know what?

It is true.

The world can be a miserable place sometimes. There is always something going wrong, somebody arguing about something, or another reason to convince yourself that everything is falling apart.

So if sitting at my computer and creating weird games about haunted forests, demons, mysterious flash drives and questionable life decisions gives me something to look forward to, then I think that counts for something.

Maybe that is enough.

And as for the mysterious game?

I am still playing it.

Probably more than I should.

But if the screen suddenly starts displaying my name or some dead kid named Ben begins sending me messages, I promise I will write another article.

Assuming, of course, the haunted flash drive does not get me first.