Back in the early 2000's, when internet commerce was still in its infancy, vintage game cartridges were a popular collector's item on these sites. Rumors and urban legends about a cult supposedly tampering with and distributing pirated copies of popular games at the time such as the Sonic the Hedgehog series would every now and then experience a surge in popularity. While these tales were heavily exaggerated and lacking of much actual substantial basis, they made for great marketing material, with many sellers claiming to be in possession of one of these modified games. While most instances were in reality just bored teens trying to trick someone gullible enough into buying a "haunted Sonic 2 ROM" in hopes of making a quick buck, some believe that there were a handful of sellers who had managed to come across the real deal.

In my spare time, I volunteer online to work in a web archival project, finding abandoned sites that still remain online and preserving them for future generations. On one of my "shifts", I found one of these aforementioned sellers. On it, I found one of the tampered cartridges for sale. After a bit of haggling with the owner, I was able to purchase a digitized version of the cartridge at a heavy discount. I posted the file on the archival forum, and let the other volunteers open it because I'd rather not get a virus. The other users posted their experiences in the subsequent thread. I've sifted through the responses and made a general list of occurrences.

• 17 players reported seeing unusual flashing lights on the monitors
  • These instances would only occur when the monitor was more than 3/4ths off screen
• 23 players reported hearing erratic and grating noises whenever they were a certain distance from the monitors
  • Noises would only play under similar conditions to the aforementioned visual anomalies
• 6 players supposedly saw incredibly compressed and low quality videos on the monitors despite the hardware of the original console being unable to process images on the scale reported
  • From what the players could make out of the shown videos, most featured graphic violence and esoteric imagery
• 2 players claimed to have experienced sleep paralysis featuring Sonic the Hedgehog preaching in some garbled language
  • When questioned, the players believed that these bizarre dreams were in some way caused by the monitors

Upon further research, I read other stories of other hacked games exhibiting anomalies similar to the ones recounted by playtesters. No proof was provided, but many shared themes in common.

• Super Mario World
  • Signs would sometimes be written in a language that doesn't exist
  • Question mark blocks would rarely produce bugged items with nonsensical or cryptic sprites. Collecting these items had no effect on Mario
  • Pipes would take longer than usual. Glitched sounds would play if the lag was long enough
• Super Metroid
  • Opening cutscene had errors so severe that flashed occult imagery before crashing and rendering the cartridge unplayable
• Street Fighter 2
  • World map sequences showed random points of interest in random areas. Any attempts to reach these points would cause the game to crash
  • Background character sprites would sometimes appear as completely empty or black

Almost every decently popular game around that time period would have tampered copies. No leads have been found on any other altered cartridges as of recently. I'll update soon enough.