Taking part in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge

There was this one book that was super popular back when I was in elementary school.

If you recognize this... please book your health checkup, fellow adults

Why were we so obsessed with scary stuff as kids ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

For a while, I was actively hunting down anything creepy I could read, and game ghost stories were absolutely part of that.

I mean, if it’s a ghost story about a game you actually play, doesn’t it pull you in way harder? ^^

When I think of game ghost stories, the first things that come to mind are the Mabinogi ghost incident and

the old ghost stories from MapleStory.

These days, when you boot up a horror game, you already know it was “made to be scary,” but

online RPG ghost stories hit a little differently, right?

You’re just hunting, questing, doing dailies, wandering around town... and then suddenly, a ghost?

Kinda insanely fun..

So in this post, I’m going to do a light intro to some classic ghost-story lore from old RPGs, mainly Mabinogi and MapleStory.

++

This post includes ghost images, videos, and similar content, so

please be careful if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing or pregnant.

ⅠTable of ContentsⅠ

① Ghost stories from old online RPGs

② The Mabinogi ghost incident

③ MapleStory ghost story

1. Ghost stories from old online RPGs

- Why were there so many ghost stories back then..?



Old online RPGs really did seem to have an unusually large number of ghost stories.

The main reason was probably that the graphics and presentation back then, compared to now,

weren’t as sharp, so silhouettes, dark backgrounds, and repetitive BGM

probably did a lot of the heavy lifting.

Unlike now, when info gets organized and fact-checked super fast,

back then people would hear about weird things that happened in-game and

pass those stories around between players.

“There was an NPC in some dungeon that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

└ Usually... mostly just a bug.. ㅎ..ㅠ

“If you go to a certain place at a certain time, something weird shows up.”

└ Could’ve been an easter egg



(Left) still waiting at the hospital after nn years | (Right) the famous GTA ghost



For one thing, the maps were huge, and there were tons of dungeons and hidden spots,

and on top of that, everyone logged in at different times, so

it was easy for someone to say they’d happened to witness something strange.

Looking back now, most of it was probably bugs, misunderstandings, traces left over from development, plus the occasional easter egg the devs slipped in,

but

back then, even that kind of thing became a story.

Honestly, they’re still fun even now!

Out of all of them, I want to share

a few of the ghost incidents that stuck with me most.

2. The Mabinogi ghost incident

- The unidentified characters at the entrance to Ciar Dungeon

This happened on the beta server during the 2004 open beta.



At the entrance to Ciar Dungeon, which was an instanced dungeon at the time,

rumors started spreading that two unidentified characters were appearing there.

A lot of players went to check the place out, but

apparently only some people could see them, not everyone.

I mean, two characters just staring at players from beyond the wall?

That’s creepy ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Maybe because they looked so unsettling,

‘If you targeted those characters or

went into an attack stance, they would chase the player’

‘The player would get sucked into the wall, and when they came back out,

the items in their inventory would be gone’

‘At the time, characters including NPCs

couldn’t have red hair and red eyes’

Rumors like that went around, but they weren’t true.

You might be thinking, “Wasn’t it just an easter egg?” but

it wasn’t even an easter egg... and DevCAT

officially stated that “the cause is unknown”..?

└ Honestly, this is the scariest part.. a bug with no known cause..;;

Later on, it even got added to Mabinogi Mobile as an official easter egg ㅋㅋㅋ

Next up is a MapleStory ghost story.

Most of you are probably thinking of the mysterious woman in Kerning City Hospital,

but nope, not that one..!

3. MapleStory ghost story

- The unidentified characters at the entrance to Ciar Dungeon

First, let me quickly go over the plot of this ghost story.

GMS and the story of Muriel

Before Nexon launched MapleStory in North America (GMS),

there was a high school girl named Muriel.

After graduating from high school,

she ended up working as a GM for GMS Nexon.

Then one of the employees under her, another GM, made such a huge mistake that it made Muriel furious, but

Muriel couldn’t hold back and set an embarrassing photo of that employee

as the background for Sleepywood.

But the photo was soon taken down, and after an order came down from above,

Muriel received a severe punishment.

After that, she was forced to keep working on Maple nonstop, with barely any breaks and almost no pay,

and then one night, while she was working on the Perion village area,

the employee she had humiliated showed up and killed Muriel.

Then Muriel’s GM character remained inside Maple, and no bug fix could get rid of it, turning into an uncatchable ghost that appeared before players in Perion.





That’s the story, but..

if you look at it now,

(1) There’s really no reason a huge company would force someone into unpaid labor..

└ If that happened at all, it’d already be a contract violation..

(2) Setting an embarrassing photo as the background..?

└ A GM... doing that...? How...?





A lot of it doesn’t really add up, but back then there were tons of different versions going around,

and more than the theory itself, what really freaked people out were the shocking videos and images,

so that was the bigger reason it felt scary.

The bgm cuts out, the screen turns into that, and then there’s even a scream on top of it... yeah, I get why people were scared.

▼ Related videos ▼





Watching these again after so long really brings all the memories back.

After seeing this, I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone at night for a while.. ㅎ

In reality though, it was event content implemented as a boss monster

on a GMS-based private Maple server ㅋㅋㅋ

Those are the two ghost stories I remember most.

What ghost stories do you all remember, and what memories come with them?

Alright, that’s it for this post.

I’ll come back next time with another story (๑>؂•̀๑)