SONIC HAS PASSED

I'm a Sonic fan. I once read this really bad story about a haunted Sonic PC game. It was meant to be creepy, but it was just lame. Apparently, it's part of a whole genre of weird Internet stories, but I forgot the name. I think it's called something like "Spooky Lasagna". I didn't believe any of these weird stories about "evil haunted games", until it happened to me.

I have a friend who used to work at Sega, in the early Genesis days, before Sonic 1 was released. One day, he emailed me a .rom file, with the note:

"I think I found a prototype version of Sonic 1 in my old files. I can't beat the first boss, however. I know you're better at Sonic than I am, so I think you can do it."

I opened the ROM in my emulator. It was a quite early prototype. The title screen showed for a few seconds, then it went straight to Green Hill Zone. What's odd is that all the graphics looked like prototypes or placeholders, making it look like a NES or Master System game. Other than that, it was normal until the first boss.

You know how Robotnik has this wrecking ball he tries to hit Sonic with? In this ROM, instead of moving in its usual pattern, it spazzed out and moved all across the screen, completely detached from the chain. I tried to avoid it, but it inevitably hit Sonic, killing him in one hit. After that, it displayed this weird Game Over screen.

It was a plain black screen, except for a message flashing in dark red text: "SONIC HAS PASSED". The music was this really slow and sad version of the Green Hill Zone music. I tried to close the emulator, but it wouldn't close. After about a minute, the "SONIC HAS PASSED" message stopped flashing and started shaking. At that point, the music was replaced with a corrupted cacophony, quite similar to the "music" from CrazyBus. This went on for a few seconds, then it showed a corrupted version of the title screen.

At that point, the emulator crashed, and the ROM file, and the email containing it, disappeared from my computer, never to be seen again.