Taking part in the NEXON PEAK Post Challenge

There was this book everyone was reading when I was in elementary school.

If you're old enough to recognize this.. time to book that health checkup

Why do we love scary stuff so much as kids? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

For a while, I was hunting down anything spooky I could read, and gaming urban legends were part of the fun.

I mean, doesn't an urban legend pull you in even more when it's about a game you actually play? ^^

When I think of gaming urban legends, the Mabinogi ghost incident and

the old ghost stories from MapleStory come to mind.

With horror games these days, you go in knowing they're meant to scare you,

but urban legends in online RPGs hit a little differently, right?

You're just hunting, questing, doing dailies, wandering around town like usual, and suddenly... a ghost?

So damn fun..

So let's take a quick look at some old gaming urban legends, mostly from the classic RPGs Mabinogi and MapleStory.

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Heads-up: this post includes ghost images and videos,

so please be careful if you're sensitive to scary content, in poor health, or pregnant.

ⅠContentsⅠ

① Urban legends in old online RPGs

② The Mabinogi ghost incident

③ The MapleStory ghost

1. Urban legends in old online RPGs

- Why were there so many urban legends back then..?



Old online RPGs really seemed to have more than their fair share of urban legends.

My guess is that a lot of it came down to the graphics and effects back then

not being as clear as they are now, with silhouettes, dark backgrounds,

and looping BGM probably doing a lot of the work.

Information wasn't gathered up and fact-checked

as quickly as it is now. Instead, players would often

swap stories about weird things that happened in-game, and word would spread.

"There was an NPC in this dungeon that wasn't supposed to be there."

└ Most of the time.. just a bug.. ㅎ..ㅠ

"Go to a certain place at a certain time, and something weird shows up."

└ Could be an Easter egg



(Left) Still waiting at the hospital after nn years | (Right) The faaamous GTA ghost



For starters, the maps were huge, with plenty of dungeons

and hidden places, and everyone played at different times,

so it would've been easy for someone to say they'd stumbled across something weird.

Looking back, most of it was probably bugs, people seeing things, or leftovers from development + the occasional Easter egg from the devs,

but still,

back then, even those things became stories of their own.

And honestly, they're still fun to hear about!

So let me share a few of the ghost incidents

that really stuck with me.

2. The Mabinogi ghost incident

- The mysterious characters at the entrance to Ciar Dungeon

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



Rumor had it that at the entrance to Ciar Dungeon,

an instanced dungeon at the time, 2 mysterious characters would appear.

Lots of players went to check it out,

but apparently only some of them could see the characters.

I mean, those two characters just staring at players

from the other side of the wall? Creepy ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Maybe it was because they looked so creepy,

but people started saying things like, 'If you target those characters

or take an attack stance, they'll chase you.'

'Players got sucked into the wall, and when they came back out,

the items in their inventories were gone.'

'The game didn't let characters,

including NPCs, have red hair and red eyes back then.'

Those rumors did the rounds, but none of them are true.

You might be thinking, "Wasn't it an Easter egg?"

But it wasn't even an Easter egg.. and devCAT actually

put out an official statement saying 'the cause is unknown'..?

└ Honestly, that's the scariest part.. a bug with no known cause..;;

It did later make it into Mabinogi Mobile as an official Easter egg. ㅋㅋㅋ

Next up, a MapleStory urban legend.

You're probably all thinking of that mysterious woman

at the Kerning City hospital, but nope..!

3. The MapleStory urban legend

- The mysterious characters at the entrance to Ciar Dungeon

First, here's how this urban legend goes.

The story of GMS and 뮤리엘

Before NEXON released MapleStory (GMS) in North America,

there was a high school girl named 뮤리엘.

After graduating from high school,

she went to work for NEXON as a GM on GMS.

Then one of the GMs working under her messed up badly enough to make 뮤리엘 furious.

뮤리엘 lost her temper and used an embarrassing photo of that employee

as the background for Sleepywood.

But the photo was soon taken down, and orders came

from the higher-ups to punish 뮤리엘 severely.

뮤리엘 was forced to work on MapleStory nonstop, with barely any breaks or pay.

Then one night, while she was working on the town of Perion,

the employee she'd humiliated showed up and murdered her.

뮤리엘's GM character stayed behind in MapleStory as a ghost that no bug fix could remove and no one could catch, appearing to players in Perion.





That's the story, anyway..

Looking back at it now, though,

(1) A major corporation has.. no reason to force someone into unpaid labor

└ That'd be a breach of contract for starters..

(2) Making an embarrassing photo the background..?

└ A GM.. doing that..? How..?





A lot doesn't add up, but there were all sorts of versions floating around back then,

and nobody really cared about the backstory. The videos and images were so shocking

that they were what really scared people.

All the BGM cuts out, that happens, and you get screams on top of it... yeah, I can see why people were scared..

▼ Related videos ▼





Seeing these again after so long really brings back memories.

After watching this video, I couldn't go to the bathroom alone at night for a while.. ㅎ

In reality, though, it was just a boss monster made

for an event on a GMS-based MapleStory private server ㅋㅋㅋ

Those are the two urban legends that stuck with me the most.

What gaming urban legends do you remember, and what memories go with them?

That's it for this post!

I'll be back with another story next time (๑>؂•̀๑)