The Game - Chapter 1 – The Cartridge with No Name

I found the cartridge in a cardboard box that smelled like mildew and cold metal. It sat beneath a folding table at a church rummage sale on the outskirts of town, buried under cracked VHS tapes and tangled controller cords. No label. No manufacturer stamp. Just dull grey plastic, heavier than it should have been, with a shallow notch carved into the back as if someone had tried to scratch something out.

The man running the table didn’t remember where it came from. He squinted at it, shrugged, and said, “Five bucks, if it works.” I didn’t even ask what system it was for. I already knew.

At home, I slid it into my old console—the one I kept purely for nostalgia, hooked to a CRT TV I couldn’t bring myself to throw away. The cartridge resisted, just slightly, like it didn’t want to seat properly. When it finally clicked into place, the television flickered before I even hit the power button.

The game booted instantly.

No splash screen. No logo. Just a black field that slowly filled with static, resolving into a title made of jagged white letters: PLAY ME AGAIN.

The menu offered only one option: START.

The game itself looked like a crude top-down adventure, all muddy colours and flickering sprites. The player character—a small, hunched figure—stood in a forest clearing. Trees pulsed at the edges of the screen, as if breathing. There was no tutorial, no HUD, no instructions. When I pressed a button, the character turned and stared directly at the “camera.”

A text box appeared.

YOU’RE LATE.

I laughed it off. Creepy aesthetics weren’t new, especially in homebrew horror games. Still, I felt an uncomfortable tightness in my chest. When I tried to quit, the console ignored me. The power button did nothing. Only when the screen abruptly cut to black did the system shut itself off.

I sat there in silence, listening to the soft hum of the TV cooling down.

That night, I dreamed of static-filled forests and a figure that stood just out of view, waiting for me to move first.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model