"DON'T Play This LOST Xbox 360 Game..." | CLANCYPASTA ORIGINAL

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[00:01:00] Do not play the Xbox 360 game Head Cannon. Written by the ClancyPasta team. And you're listening to ClancyPasta. I remember that night like it was yesterday. I remember the glow of the Xbox dashboard. And I would send fuzzy shadows across my wall.

[00:01:30] I remember the little hiss in my headset when nobody was talking. I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet because the controller cable was too short to reach the bed. And yes, I was one of those kids who actually had a wired 360 controller back in the day. But more than anything else, I remember the game. I was up way later than I should have been.

[00:01:58] Playing Xbox Live with a few friends from school. We were doing what we always did back then. Switching between games. Yelling over each other. Talking trash. Laughing at dumb stuff that probably wasn't funny, ultimately, at all. I think we'd been playing Halo earlier. Maybe some World of War after that. I definitely remember playing some Skyrim. Alone, obviously, since it's a single player game.

[00:02:25] But being in a voice chat, which back in the day on Xbox Live was called a party, made it feel like you really were in a party. And we were really having a good time. You know, just goofing off. One of those nights where nobody wanted to be the first one to say they were tired. I think there were about four or five of us in the group party chat. Me and a few of my buddies from school.

[00:02:53] But then somebody else joined the party. I heard that little bloop sound through my headset. And a new name popped up in the party list. Oddly, I didn't recognize it. This was odd because I knew my friends pretty well. And I essentially knew all of their friends as well. It wasn't odd for someone to join a party.

[00:03:21] But it was odd for someone you've never heard of before to join your party. If you were only chatting with a small friend group you knew very well. For a few seconds. Nobody said a thing. I was hoping maybe one of the guys would be like, Oh, hey buddy, how's it hanging? But that never came. Just this kind of awkward silence. That was.

[00:03:49] Until this guy decided to say something. You guys ever play headcanon? His voice was older than ours. I mean, not old, old. But maybe late teens. Maybe an adult. It was hard to tell through the mic though. One of my friends laughed and said, What? Never heard of it. Headcanon man?

[00:04:19] The guy said again like he was excited. I got a strange image in my head of a back alley in the middle of the night. Another one of my friends said, What, like fan theory stuff? No, no. The guy said. Like he was looking over his shoulders. Headcanon man. It's a game. You go to the Xbox Live marketplace. It's an arcade game. It's called Headcanon.

[00:04:49] You guys have got to check it out. It blew my freaking mind. No one had much of a reaction besides, Yeah, sure, pal. So, curious of what this guy was going on about, I asked, What is it supposed to be though? Like, is it an FPS? A role playing game? What are we talking about here?

[00:05:20] Silence filled my headset again. Then, after maybe five seconds, The man just said, All I can say is that if you haven't tried it, You don't understand life. And then he left the party chat. And that's one of the reasons I don't even remember his name. His gamer tag, as they called it.

[00:05:48] He was there for maybe a minute and a half, Something like that. And then, Gone. Just like that. The whole encounter maybe lasted less than 60 seconds. Immediately, my friend started cackling. Everyone in the party muttered some variant of, Who the hell was that? Cat. But no one knew. We all thought it was weird, But almost immediately,

[00:06:17] The rest of my buddies were moving on, Talking about all sorts of things. But nothing related to that guy, Or what he had just informed us of. I backed out to the Skyrim menu, Just staring at it for a while, Thinking about it all. So, uh, You guys have really never heard of that game? Headcanon? I asked,

[00:06:46] Hoping to rope at least one of them back into this with me. But the cackling continued. Come on, man. That guy was just screwing with us. We'd have heard of it if it was real. One of my buddies replied, And I couldn't help but nod, Even though he couldn't see me through the TV. Because, Yeah, he had a point. As arrogant as that might sound, We were really into Xbox Live arcade games.

[00:07:17] Well, at least in the knowing about them sense. We'd often scour the marketplace, Downloading every crappy free game we could find, And give it a shot. We'd discuss how some of the paid games looked, And if we'd ever want to shell out our parents' cash to get them. For me, it was more of a hypothetical thing. My folks weren't made of cash, And to get a new game was a birthday or Christmas kind of a deal. But some of my friends' families?

[00:07:47] Well, they were loaded. So they got just about whatever they wanted, Or whenever they wanted. Anyways, I agreed with my friend, But something about the whole situation just... Well, it stuck with me. And I knew my curiosity wasn't going to just give out anytime soon. Certainly not that night, With how jacked up we all were on caffeine and junk food.

[00:08:15] So I backed out to the dashboard, Navigated over to the marketplace, And I went ahead and searched for it.

[00:08:51] Where is Daredevil? Only on Disney Plus. Within a few seconds, The results came up. And there it was. Headcanon. And I felt a swirl of excitement grow in my stomach. Holy crap, guys. I just looked it up and... Well, I think I found it. I mean, I did find it. I think. I muttered, Scanning the screen before my eyes. I was somewhat hesitant,

[00:09:20] Because the icon was just... Black. And I mean that. It was just a black square. The kind of black that looked like the image failed to load or something. Like it was maybe a glitch. I thought that was weird, But I clicked it anyways to see if it would correct itself. Well, It didn't.

[00:09:46] The store page for this game was definitely one of the weirdest pages I'd ever seen on here. Because it had almost nothing on it. There were no screenshots. No trailer. No publisher that I recognized. And the description area was blank. Aside for the title. My eyes glanced to the price.

[00:10:11] And I instantly grew a smile as I saw it was zero dollars and zero cents. It was free. Oh, God, yes. You're not gonna believe this, guys. I muttered frantically. It's free. Like, 100% free. One of my buddies shouted, Oh, man. Well, download it. Another one of my buddies said,

[00:10:40] Yeah, download it and tell me how awful it is. Probably just some indie trash. But, you know, I didn't really need any convincing. As I hit download before any of them even started to react. Now, I should mention that, uh, internet speeds were a little different back in the day.

[00:11:06] And by that, I mean my internet was slow as all hell back then. Which made it... Very weird. When the download finished almost instantly. That should have been my first clue. Something was at least a little off. Even small arcade games took some time back then. But this one just blinked from zero to done like it had already been sitting on my console. Simply waiting for me to discover it.

[00:11:36] But really, I was just excited. Oh, man. Guys, it's downloaded. I couldn't help babbling into my headset mic. Alright, I'm loading it up. But the second I clicked the game to load it up, their voices cut out. Along with the TV. And along with all light in my room. I was plunged into darkness.

[00:12:03] Oh, crap. Not now. It was a power outage. What horrible timing. But a second later, the lights were back on and my Xbox was already loading back up. That was a little odd on its own. But what was odder was that it wasn't loading me onto the Xbox dashboard.

[00:12:32] It was loading me directly into the game, Headcanon. But I wasn't sure of that at first because my screen was just black. I began to worry that the power outage had fried my Xbox in. So I pressed the Xbox home button and was relieved when the little home menu or whatever it was called popped up overlaying the black screen. And on top of that,

[00:13:02] I saw that I was already signed into my main account. But I was disconnected from Xbox Live. The relief faded into annoyance once again. Because back then, it felt like those Xbox Live parties could fall apart at any minute if you weren't around. And there was nothing more frustrating than leaving to go to the bathroom or something and coming back a few minutes later with everyone else logged off, either sleeping or

[00:13:32] doing something non-Xbox related. Yeah, that happened more than a few times back in the day. I glanced over to my internet modem, which was luckily in my room with me. It showed it was back online. All of the lights were on. Router seemed to be working. I shook my head and stared back at the screen.

[00:14:00] I tried to sign into Xbox Live again, but I just got another can't connect message. What was really odd was that when I tried to troubleshoot the problem, I could see that it was actually connecting to my modem. It's just that Xbox Live refused to load. After struggling with it for a few minutes, I decided to just give it a rest.

[00:14:30] Well, it would give me an opportunity to check out this new game at least, assuming that's what the black screen was. I'd just give it another few minutes and check out the game for a little while, I thought. I exited from the Xbox Live troubleshooter window and was faced yet again with that black screen. But as I stared, the black screen slowly faded into the game.

[00:14:59] And what I saw got me more than a little excited. Because it didn't look like an Xbox Live arcade game to me at all. In fact, that was the first thing I noticed. You see, it looked more like some weird PC sandbox game. Like something made in Gary's mod. Or maybe even a rustic wilderness version of GTA. Or Skyrim if it was about a million times plainer.

[00:15:28] The camera panned over a large wilderness area at night that looked like it had been raining or something. A thick mist overlaying everything. And then, the perspective changed. I was in third person point of view, standing in a valley. The air was fogged around me, making most things hard to see clearly. My character seemed fairly plain.

[00:15:57] Not a soldier. Not a knight. Not anything particularly cool, just a basic human model and a gray shirt and jeans. No face that I could see. But the camera sat behind him. There was no HUD. No health bar. No math. And no objective that I could see anyways. Just the character, the fog, and me.

[00:16:30] I moved the left joystick and my character followed along. As I started moving, the fog seemed to adjust a little. And I could see a little more all around me. I was apparently in some kind of a valley that stretched forward in a long, crooked path. On both sides of me, steep mountains rose up like walls. Though the fog was a little too heavy for me to see very far.

[00:16:59] Almost like the fog feature that was so necessary in early Minecraft. But I could almost feel the giant rock walls to my sides towering above me. It was like I could sense their stature. No music played during any of this, by the way. The only sound was footsteps on dirt. And even those were pretty faint.

[00:17:31] I took my first sip of Mountain Dew in a while, starting to relax again, and got to work testing out the buttons. A jumped, X did nothing, apparently, and B did nothing as well. I don't think Y did anything either. Even the start button did nothing, oddly enough. The guide button still worked though, but the Xbox menu lagged horribly when I opened it now.

[00:18:01] And nope, I still couldn't connect to Xbox Live. I closed the little menu, and kept on trotting through the fog. After maybe 30 seconds, the fog began to clear out a little, getting more and more distant around me the further I got. The color palette in this game was a mix of deep, dark blues, grays, browns, and blacks.

[00:18:31] So far, anyways. Well, I guess there were some oranges and maybe the slightest of red hues every once in a while. And as I kept moving forward, I saw someone standing ahead of me in the valley. An NPC. Okay, cool, finally. Maybe this game was going somewhere after all, I thought. He was facing away from me at first.

[00:19:01] But getting closer to him, I realized it was the same plain model as my character, except for the fact that he wore a red vest over his gray shirt instead of just the plain gray my character wore. And when I was just behind him, he turned around. His face was wrong in a cheap game sort of way. Like it was unfinished, maybe? He looked kind of like a mannequin.

[00:19:32] And then a text box appeared above his head and a little box that reminded me of a comic book text box. You're late, it said. In the next moment, the text box had disappeared and a second or two later, another one popped up in its place. This one read, The shops are this way.

[00:19:58] I pressed a couple buttons randomly, but there were no dialogue options, no prompt. And then the NPC just turned and started walking away. Well, I guess he implied I was supposed to follow him, so that's what I did. Now, this guy walked pretty fast. Not enough that I lost him,

[00:20:28] but enough that I had to keep pushing the stick forward the whole time. Every time I slowed down, he got farther ahead and the fog would start encroaching in. And it got to the point due to my little mistakes that he was barely visible ahead of me because of the thick fog in the distance. After a while of this, he started to make a leftward turn. This went on for a while, and I luckily got a little closer over time, and then

[00:20:58] finally I could see something in the distance through the fog ahead of this guy. It was a light of some kind, an orange light. Well, no, as I kept getting closer I could see it was lots of orange lights. The guy finally slowed down and I was able to catch up with him fully, which revealed what it was I was actually looking at.

[00:21:27] And it was, well, it looked like a carnival of some kind. That's the best word for it that I can come up with, but it was a strange kind of a carnival. It was more like someone's memory of a carnival than an actual one. There were a handful of booths with some odd carnival-style games from the looks of it. A ferris wheel was in

[00:21:57] the distance that, as I watched it, realized wasn't moving at all. To my right was a ticket stand. I walked over to check it out, but I found there to be no one inside and no prompt whatsoever. I turned my character around again and took in the fogged carnival village. It was very low poly, even more lo-fi than the game seemed at

[00:22:26] the beginning. Everything here was colored in faded reds and yellows, like old plastic left outside too long. But hey, at least there was a little more color in this game now, I thought. Looking around, I realized there were signs over the booths. One said food, another said prizes, and another rides.

[00:22:57] But I went up to the booth that said food and nothing. No prompt, no press X to buy food or anything like that at all. And the booth itself, well, it was empty just like the ticket counter. It was like someone had modeled a box, cut a hole in it, and just decided to call it a day. No NPCs or anything, aside from the guy who'd

[00:23:26] led me here. All of this gave me a really uneasy feeling. Like, what was the point of this game exactly? I don't think I'd ever played something before that was so, well, so unclear, clear, entirely ambiguous. I wasn't even sure who I was supposed to be, where I was, or what I was supposed to be doing. And then

[00:23:56] that guy's voice echoed through my mind. The guy who'd joined my Xbox Live party chat earlier for all of a few seconds. Headcanon! I heard him say in my mind, over and over again. I kept walking as I thought, walking up to more and more booths, but all of them looked basically the same, almost like someone had just copied and pasted in the same

[00:24:25] asset over and over again. But then, as I got further down seemingly to one end of this little carnival area, I noticed something that did look a little bit different. At the far end of the carnival was a booth, with a cannon beside it. It was the first thing I'd seen beside the stationary ferris wheel that looked a bit different. It revealed itself more and more as I waded through the fog.

[00:24:57] Now, this cannon was huge. Too huge for the space. I mean, it looked comically ridiculous. It sat on a little wooden wheels pointed up toward the mountains. It was about the size of the booth it sat beside. Its barrel was painted red with yellow stars down the side. And as I turned the corner to look at the back side of the thing, I realized there was a short little NPC guy stood there next to it in a striped

[00:25:27] shirt and a little paper hat. He was so small I couldn't even see him until I walked around the thing. His player model looked like someone had taken the generic model me and my guide have and, you know, just kind of squished it down to half the size. Turning the camera all around, I realized there was a sign above the guy on the top of the booth that read Head Cannon.

[00:25:59] Okay, here we go, I thought. I mean, this has got to be something. I was excited to finally get to the meat of this game. the NPC turned his home body toward me. Not his head, his whole body rotated at once, stiffly, until he was facing my character, almost like he was gliding on a swivel, like a lazy Susan or something. Man, this game was just

[00:26:28] looking cheaper and cheaper, I thought. And then a text box appeared, asking, Want a ride? And I smiled. Not just because of the question, but because for the first time, I actually got a prompt. It was just a yes or no prompt, but hey, it was something. I highlighted the yes option and hit the A button.

[00:26:59] The yes no option box immediately disappeared, replaced by the single word, good. And what happened next? Well, it certainly wasn't what I had in mind, or would have ever expected. His character

[00:27:29] kind of glided over to me again, like when he turned around, and his arms rotated upwards, both little blocky arms raised to each side of my character's head. And then suddenly, my character's head popped off with a wet, rubbery sound. And the body just dropped straight down, knees folding under it like a puppet whose strings were just cut. Or, you can think of the way ragdolls behave

[00:27:58] in GTA 4. It was a very bizarre switch in graphical style, almost like seeing a PS1 game suddenly display an animation that reminds you of a PS3 game. But there was no blood. There was no particular gore, except for the fact that this little guy was now holding my disembodied head, and my body was now headless, flopped on the ground, lifeless.

[00:28:27] The third person perspective camera now seemed freed from its anchor, and just stood static on the scene. I was a little stunned seeing all this. I wasn't terrified or anything, but the confused uneasiness I'd already been feeling definitely stuck around and intensified just a little. Then the camera started moving.

[00:28:57] It started zooming in like a crane shot towards the character holding my now disembodied head, and then swung around, and suddenly the camera was face to face with, well, my face. except it wasn't a face. I'm not exactly sure what my character's face looked like before, or if maybe it had always looked like this since I'd never really gotten a good angle on

[00:29:26] it, but seeing it now, at least, there were no features at all. Just a blank, smooth, skin-colored front of the head, with some kind of brownish color on top and all around in place of hair. My uneasiness was growing. The man holding my head began to move, the camera now in third person behind him just as it had been

[00:29:56] behind me, as he carried my head a few steps over towards the cannon. It was like a cutscene now. I didn't touch a single thing on my controller throughout this part of the game, not at all. First ones go farther. A text box read, In another moment, the camera was angled with the mouth of the cannon in full view, and my head just rolled on in from

[00:30:26] the air as if it was on a dolly. Seeing that actually made me chuckle a little, because it looked so cheap yet again. That made me relax slightly once more, but just slightly. My eyes broke from the screen to my modem again. Light still looked good. I wondered if I should try to connect to Xbox Live again, but as my eyes drifted back to the screen, they found only a

[00:30:56] black screen. And then, in a moment, boom, a burst of sound, and the image came back onto my head, or, you know, head of my character, flying out of the cannon at top speeds. The camera was locked onto the thing in third-person perspective. It shot out and out, and I could see the ground below. After a moment, I realized that I could actually move the camera around a little

[00:31:26] now, and I angled it around till I could see the carnival behind me drifting further and further away. Rotating it back up, I saw the mountains flying below me, past my, well, I guess it wouldn't be my feet, but past my head. It was pretty cool, really, the sense of speed. It reminded me of some of the better moments playing Sonic when I was a little younger.

[00:31:56] But then, instead of starting to angle down or fade into a cutscene of some kind, this head of mine just kept flying, on and on, further and further, getting higher and higher and higher. Gravity seemed to disappear, or at least have very different rules now than it did before. It got to the point where, looking below,

[00:32:26] I couldn't see anything at all, except dense fog. In looking all around, well, same thing, just fog. And eventually the fog started to dim more and more, little by little, until there was nothing, just darkness all around. And the head, which was spinning rapidly, was somehow illuminated

[00:32:55] despite the abyssal darkness. darkness. I sat there on my floor and took another swig of my soda. Tick tock, tick tock. I looked back over to my internet modem and then back to the screen. Darkness, fog, rapidly spinning head. Okay, man, I get it.

[00:33:25] Let's get on with it, I thought. Time passed and I was starting to get seriously annoyed. And then suddenly, the head stopped spinning. It was like the game froze or something, because the background still looked the same, still abyssal fogginess, but the head, which was the only thing that had really been visible moving for a while, was just static,

[00:33:54] frozen, on what was supposed to be my character's face. It hung there for a few seconds, before the screen suddenly cut to black. Ah, nice, I muttered to myself. Did it really just crash again? The thought then entered my mind of what if this thing was actually a virus or something?

[00:34:24] Could Xbox 360s even get viruses? But then I thought about how I'd never heard of a virus that could take your power out, so maybe that wasn't what I was dealing with. But just as I was coming to this conclusion, something appeared on my screen. Something that, for the first time that night, set a shock of butterflies through my gut.

[00:34:53] It was a text box that read, Press A when he arrives. I hesitated and giggled to myself a little. Okay, that's pretty good, I guess. Definitely creepy. But I wasn't sure where this was going. I sat there for a

[00:35:23] few seconds, waiting for something else to appear on the screen, but nothing happened. It just stayed as it was, and I was left staring down those words. In less than a minute, I heard something to my left. Not in my room, but outside my window. It sounded like a car door shutting or something. Maybe opening. Not the

[00:35:53] weirdest thing to hear in a neighborhood, for sure, but at this time of night, it was a little odd. I got up and walked over to my curtains and peeked out into the night, and what I saw made me jump back as soon as I registered what it was I was looking at. Then I got a grip on myself, holding my chest, and peeked out once again. this time much more carefully, so that I

[00:36:23] hopefully couldn't be seen. What I saw out there was my cul-de-sac, of course, but parked on the curb, kind of halfway blocking the entrance of the driveway, was a very large black van. It was pretty dark out, but the streetlights had things illuminated pretty well, and this vehicle looked pristine.

[00:36:52] It's the kind of car that cops drive when they're trying to be stealthy, but that wasn't what freaked me out. On the side of the car, the side facing my window, the door was open, and, well, I could see inside. There were no seats in the back. It was one of those vans that can dual-function kitchen is a storage locker or something, but

[00:37:21] what was there was a large red cannon, the kind you'd shoot a cannonball out of. Except it wasn't as large as the one in the game, of course, but it was as big as it could be while still fitting inside of that van. I pulled my head away from the window and found myself hyperventilating a little.

[00:37:51] What the hell was happening here? And then my eyes went back to the screen, and I read those words again. Press A when he arrives. Well, I guess he had arrived. I crawled over to my controller in front of the screen and, after deliberating for a moment, pressed the button. The text box disappeared, going

[00:38:20] back to that pure black screen, before another one took its place. This one read, It's every boy's dream to join the carnival. Now is your chance. And, just like when I was brought to interact with the cannon booth in the game, I was finally given another prompt with actual options. The first choice was

[00:38:48] join the carnival, and the second choice was reject the carnival. I read those two options in the text that preceded them over and over and over again. I couldn't believe what I was reading, and even more than that, I couldn't believe what was happening. I crawled back over to the window and peeked out again. It was still there.

[00:39:18] The side sliding door still open to reveal that cannon that looked almost identical to the one in the game. The windows were too blacked out, on top of the time of night to see who was inside. Oh god, what the hell was this? You thought this was your run club era. Turns out, it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start.

[00:39:49] Sell your workout gear on Depop. Just snap a few photos, and we'll take care of the rest. They get their race day fit, and you get a payout for trying. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop. Where taste recognizes taste. I closed the curtains and sat with my back against the wall, trying to get my head straight. I'm not sure if I was

[00:40:18] totally successful, but I think I got it straight enough because in just a couple of moments, I knew exactly what I had to do. I crawled back over to the controller and slammed on the second option. Reject the carnival. There was no way I was going out there, not in a million years or for a million dollars. Well, maybe for a million bucks, but that was beside the point. After pressing the button,

[00:40:48] the screen cut to black yet again and lingered there for a while. I peeked back out of the window and saw the van just as it was. But then I heard something that sounded almost like a really low-quality cannon boom sound effect, like the one I'd heard earlier, but with much less fidelity. I swung back around to the screen. There was another question there.

[00:41:18] Are you sure you wish to reject the carnival? You will not have another opportunity in this life. Try again. And again, below the question were those two same options. Join the carnival, or reject the carnival. Seeing all of this and

[00:41:47] reading it over and over again. Well, it made me angry, actually. I knew what I wanted and I knew what I didn't want under any circumstances. I didn't even hesitate this time. I went down to the second option and slammed the A button. The screen flashed back to black, and I sat there, waiting.

[00:42:17] A few moments passed, and then I heard something outside, like a door closing again. I crawled over, and I found myself peeking out just as that van was pulling away, out of the cul-de-sac in the distance, pulling a sharp and hard right. And then the power went out. Again. And it wasn't just my house. The entire neighborhood

[00:42:45] was plunged into sudden darkness. I could see from the window. But it only lasted a few seconds before everything flashed back to life. I felt my heart beating wildly in my chest, and I got out of the window and turned around to lean against the wall again. My eyes couldn't help but go directly to the screen, which was black.

[00:43:13] Oh god, what next, I thought. But then my eyes glanced down to the Xbox console. The power button. It was off. So the black screen wasn't from the game, the Xbox just wasn't powered on. My eyes shot over to the modem, and yep, it was back online already once again. I slowly crawled back over

[00:43:42] to the front of the TV, and I pressed the home button of my little wired controller, bringing the system back to life. Same usual Xbox startup animation, and then it was booting me into the dashboard. Thank god, I immediately thought. And when it was loaded back up, I saw that I was also completely signed in and connected to Xbox Live. Oh yes, absolutely

[00:44:12] perfect. I rushed to see if my friends were still online, and yep, they were. Well, it looked like one of them had jumped offline for the night, but the rest were still on. My fingers tapped and moved with incredible speed to get to the join party screen, and then I loaded in. The moment I saw that I was connected to the voice chat, I just started babbling. Holy cow, guys, you're never gonna believe what just happened. That game, it's...

[00:44:41] Well, I don't know what it is, but it's screwed up, man. I think the marketplace was hacked or something, because... I was cut off by one of my friends, who took me a bit off guard. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. What... What the hell are you talking about? Right. I'd been gone from the chat for a little while. I needed to explain things clearly for them. Oh, okay, okay.

[00:45:09] I started, taking a deep breath. Okay, you guys know that headcanon game that guy told us about earlier? The one I downloaded? As I finished my words, there was this... Awful. Awed. Silent. It was like my words just hung in the air, no one wanting to acknowledge them at all. Uh, guys? Did you hear me? I asked.

[00:45:38] Another one of my friends said, I don't know what you're talking about. Very passively, like he really didn't care or want to care about what I was talking about. Then one said, Yeah, um... Who told us about what game? My jaw hung loose, and I shook my head a little from side to side. Were they screwing with me? I tried again.

[00:46:10] Um, I mean... You know, earlier, before I got kicked offline a bit ago, there was this guy who joined the chat. He mentioned this game called Headcanon that we just had to play it, and... Well, come on, you guys remember that, right? A friend or two cackled like what I was saying was all just a big joke. And someone said, Yeah, I think I'd remember that, pal.

[00:46:37] I was getting kind of pissed now. Come on, guys. It's on the marketplace. I just downloaded it a bit ago. You guys have gotta... As I was talking, I was navigating myself to my games menu. And what I saw was... Well, what I didn't see. The game wasn't there.

[00:47:05] Headcanon wasn't on my list of installed games. I quickly maneuvered through the marketplace and searched the name of that game once again. And though the first time I searched it up, I got the result instantly and easily. Now... Well, now it wasn't there. Nothing came up for Headcanon at all. It was like it didn't exist.

[00:47:34] Not here, anyways. Not now. Uh... Um... I sputtered. I was just... I just played this game. So you guys don't remember? Remember what, dude? The really apathetic friend responded.

[00:48:04] No, man. I think we'd remember if another dude was in this chat earlier. Eh. Hey, who's up for some big team battle? Came my other friend. I just... sat there. Stunned. Controller hung limply in my hand. The rest of the party all jumped onto Halo 3 for some late night matchmaking. But I... did not. After a few minutes,

[00:48:33] I just... quietly excused myself and left the party all together. It was late, anyways. Very late now, and... It suddenly felt like there was an enormous ocean between my friends and myself. It was like we were living on two separate islands. Living in two separate realities. I got onto Minecraft for just a little while

[00:49:03] and... kinda... walked around. I didn't feel like I could sleep yet and... I also wanted to be alone. After a while of doing basically nothing in the game, I... found myself endlessly exploring my achievements list. And then I started looking at my gamer profile again. I looked at my profile pic and considered changing it for a second, but... that train of thought was immediately replaced by... what...

[00:49:32] I read... underneath. You see, those old Xbox Live accounts have this gamer motto thing. It's just a place for you to write something stupid or edgy or cool, maybe. I don't even remember what mine had been or... if I'd had one. But what I read then made me feel absolutely sick. Thanks

[00:50:01] for the ride, it said. I read it a couple times over and then instinctively hit the B button, backing out. What in the hell, I thought. And then I pressed A again, just to verify what I'd seen, but... it was gone. Not that it was back to my old gamer motto, but the entire motto section was now completely empty. There was

[00:50:31] nothing there at all. And nobody saw it. Of course nobody saw it. Just me. just like the game as a whole. Just like this whole night, apparently. I turned off the 360. After all of that,

[00:51:01] I thought about what had happened. A lot. Especially the weeks and months following. I could barely sleep, actually. It became a bit of a problem, but as things sometimes do, it began to fade. The intense fear, anyways. For a while, I was constantly worried that van was going to show up, and God knows what would have happened from there. But after many, many nights of worrying

[00:51:31] and not having anything to show for it at all, my nervous system started to get the picture and started to calm down. I went a good little while in my late teen and early adult years where I didn't really think about any of this at all. I was too focused on other things to care about stupid old gaming memories. But recently, I got my old Xbox 360 out and started playing it

[00:52:01] again. You know, Halo, Skyrim, a lot of the classics I loved. I'd heard that the Xbox 360 marketplace shut down a little while back, but I just had to try it for myself. So, I navigated over to the marketplace area and clicked on the view all games section that, at least in the past when I was growing up, would load you into the entire library of Xbox live arcade games to explore.

[00:52:31] I was expecting an error message to pop up or maybe simply nothing at all. But that's not what I got. It's loaded, actually. But there was only one game, not the seemingly infinite numbers of games I would see back when I was a teen loading up the marketplace. And the one game that came up had a cover that was simply black. Just a

[00:53:01] pure black image. And below the image read, Head Cannon. Immediately, the memory was back, stronger and more vivid than ever. And more than that, was the reality that it really hadn't left me, even though I'd tried to leave it.

[00:53:31] I switched the console off after that, unplugged the ethernet cable, and to be honest, I haven't had the guts to turn it back on since. The very thought scares the hell out of me. It's been about a week now, and I've just been stewing around going over that old memory of that night, over and over again in my head, trying to understand, trying to get a grip on what happened so I can move on,

[00:54:01] or at least try to. But right now, I'm kind of a mess. I'm just frantically overwhelmed and confused, I guess. I don't know where to go from here. I think I'll probably turn that console back on soon and see if it lets me download that game again.

[00:54:30] Or maybe I won't. That'd probably be a terrible idea, actually, but I can't think of anything else to do. The curiosity mixed with the fear is unbearable. Well, we'll see what happens, I guess. things. I guess I guess