Trigger Warning: The 50
post anniversary cake is a lie
A Belgian indie games
developer who cursed all gamers to die in agony has admitted that
their malediction had little if any impact on gamer mortality rates.
The curse which rippled
unnoticed across the nethersphere and was later reproduced in a
two-part tweet on Twitter reads: “Goodbye, gamers! May you die in
the same agony that you caused to thousands of defenceless virtual
creatures. FUCK GAMERS! FUCK THE GAME INDUSTRY! DIE! DIE!DIE! And rot
in hell!”
It is believed to be a
reaction by the developer - Tale of Tales - to disappointing sales of
their game Sunset, in which the player took on the role of a
housemaid to a south American dictator during the 1970s.
“I have to admit when I
read the incantation my blood ran cold...” said avid gamer and
occasional shitposter, Niles.
“...I've lost count of
the hours I've spent mocking Tale of Tales' ludicrous 1970s housework
simulator. You just never expect retaliation from small developers.
Tale of Tales went full-Neeson on gamers sentencing us all to die in
horrifying but unspecified ways.”
Gamer, Colin Loppin, said
“I bought Stars Wars
Battlefront II because it afforded me an opportunity to shoot
Ewoks in the face after a stressful day of serving customers at
Yoghurt Cottage. It also helped to dull the humiliation of being
given a name reminiscent of a waistcoat-wearing bunny rabbit from a
Beatrix Potter story.
“Now I've been told that
I am to die in the same agony that I inflicted on the cannibalistic,
C3P0-worshipping, teddy bear sadists from the forest moon of Endor.
That wasn't in the licensing agreement I signed when I installed the
game.”
Other gamers summoned the
motivation to briefly leave their basements and seek protection:
“I went to the new age
store on Dimer Avenue and made myself a protective suit from dream
catchers...” said Kenneth Bell.
“...At dinner that
evening, my Wicca-loving Tumblrette of a younger sister told me that curses
were much smaller than dreams and would easily fit through the holes
in the netting of the catchers. At this point my father silently got
up from the table and a few minutes later we heard his car reversing
out of the driveway. He has yet to return home.”
Despite the sense of
foreboding and dread that followed the announcement of the curse on
social media, the actual impact was barely felt. Journalist, Jeremy
Fisher, from the popular gaming review website 'Frogger Went A
Courting' equated the indie developer's feeble stab at black
magic with the release of Duke Nukem Forever as “a lot of
build up to nothing. It was certainly nowhere near the
kind of curse you get from AAA developers. They employ whole teams of
people whose job is to rain magical beat downs on anyone who stands in
the way of a project."
"And once you're cursed you stay cursed,” Fisher
added, before jumping off his lilly-pad and disappearing beneath the murky green waters of his pond.
The mood among gamers who
awoke on the 23rd June was celebratory with the hashtag
#ImAlive quickly rising into the trending topics on Twitter, while
the Pearl Jam song - Alive briefly
re-entered the Top 10 international downloads on iTunes.
“Did ToT cancel the
curse or something?” queried Twitter fuckwit, @backwards7, who
subsequently admitted that he had sold all of his possessions on Ebay
to pay for a lavish Viking funeral.
“I guess something went
wrong with the curse,” said @Cabbage-Kin12.
Gamers reported that they
had experienced very little of the agony foretold by Tale of Tales:
“I awoke with the
headache that I usually get after drinking 24 cans of store-brand
cola before passing out on the couch in front of the Halo menu
screen.” said console jockey and insufferable Microsoft fanboy,
Roger Puddick.
A statement allegedly from
Tales of Tales read:
“Our desire to curse a
wider audience was not motivated by feelings of rejection but by a
sense of moral obligation to scorch the earth clean of gamers and
then salt the ground where there had once stood a thriving industry.
We felt we had to try and curse as many people as possible: To rid
the world of gamers not in a targeted, methodical point-and-click
fashion, but as part of an unfettered rampage of dark magic and
battle sorcery - A bit like that guy in Hatred, only with a
wand, a top hat and a beautiful assistant replacing the guns and the
chainsaws.
“The drying up of
funding in Belgium for retaliatory witchcraft meant that we were left
with no option other than to source inferior newts from disreputable
internet dealers and we feel this may have weakened the potency of
our spell.
“We also spent a lot of
money renting Leigh Alexander's megaphone so that our curse was heard
by the widest possible audience but it didn't help one bit.
“We hate the idea of
viewing gamers as numbers and prefer to regard them as an amorphous
mass whose collective indifference to our carpet-unrolling and
box-opening physics algorithms has doomed them to fates worse than
death.
“So far only four gamers
have died, all from natural causes, and in mild discomfort rather than
the agony we envisaged. It's hard not to feel disappointment in the
context of the encouragement we received from those three witches who
we met huddled around a cauldron on desolate Scottish moorland, who
promised us that we would be Thane of Cawdor and King thereafter.
"We are proud that we tried
to curse all gamers. We did out best and we failed, so that's one
thing we need never do again. A thirst for vengeance still burns
wildly in our hearts like magical violet wildfire, but I do not think
we will be resorting to using curses again. And if we do it will be
on a small boutique scale.”
Gamer Darren Blackwell
told MODE 5:
“I will never forget the
day Tale of Tales cursed me and my fellow gamers and I survived.
Every day from now on is a gift to be cherished.”
Blackwell then removed a
half-eaten slice of cold pizza from a box balanced atop a stack of
similar boxes cluttering the surface of a coffee table, and sank into
the bowed centre of a sagging settee in front of an episode of
Will and Grace.
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