My name is Jason Constantine. I lived in the city of Toronto, and I am seventeen years old. My parents passed away when I was only a child; my girlfriend, Angela, is the only thing I had left in the world to live for. She left me a few months ago, and I have not been able to find her since. If you know who we are, please try and find a way to contact her. Tell her that I love her with all my heart, and not to take my death too hard.
What you are reading right now was recovered in my last will and testament and given to one of my dearest friends, who has taken the liberty to publish it on this site. For what purpose? As a warning. A warning to those of you not to trifle with things that were best left unseen.
The gruesome events that I have experienced were beyond explanation. All I can tell you is that they had stemmed from the popular game known as Minecraft.
You could call me a fan of the beta; all these new, complicated mobs and blocks they've added took away from what I felt was the backbone of the game; its simplicity. Minecraft's appeal to me came from the fact that it was easy to understand, and yet grew increasingly interesting and difficult as the game progressed. The updates from and including Beta 1.8 were what I felt had ruined the game, for me, at least.
As the updates progressed, I felt the increasingly urgent need to find an older version of Minecraft to play on. I consulted a friend, who claimed to be able to revert my game back to the original version. For the sake of privacy, I will allow you to know my friend as Alex. I let him mess around with my computer for a little, before he finally told me that he was finished.
After Alex left, I started up Minecraft to find an odd title screen waiting for me. The former dirt-textured backdrop that I have been longing for so much was not there, but replaced with a series of scrambled letters and numbers on a black background. Some of the letters moved around, like the opening scene from The Matrix, except their motion was horizontal. The Minecraft logo was replaced by a large, blank white box. The buttons didn't retain their original either; they were too replaced with empty boxes.
My first reaction was to call my friend back to fix whatever he had done. My cellphone ran out of battery just as I moved to call him, and I decided it wasn't that important anyways. I would call him tomorrow. In the meantime, I would see just exactly what he had done to my game.
My memory guided me through which buttons were which, and I successfully navigated through the menu to the world selection. The "Create New World" option was grayed out. I attempted to click on it, but nothing happened. I then realized there were already two existing worlds; one titled "Pangea" and the other "Jack's Island Resort". "Pangea" was the name of my first world I had created a few years ago when I first discovered the game. I had no idea what "Jack's Island Resort" was. Perhaps a test world that was hidden from the game? Or had my friend plugged in one of his own worlds, to try and show off his creations to me?
I wasn't a big fan of adventure at the time; I always preferred stability over chance. I clicked on "Pangea", to see where it would take me. The loading textures returned, and I smiled to myself at the sight of that old textured background.
The world deposited me in the midst of several mountain ranges. It was just as I remembered it, when I had first created the world. A large wall of dirt right behind me, and a few smaller, albeit still gigantic hills ahead. A small lava waterfall poured off a nearby cliff, spilling onto the ground in a mass of orange and red. The house that I had built would be just over the mountain range.
There were, however, a few things that stood out to me right away. The desolate landscape was completely void of mobs, as if they had all migrated away on hearing word of my arrival. There was no sun in the sky, only a deep, maddeningly endless expanse of blue. The grass seemed to have a strange sickly yellow tint to it, almost as if it had been afflicted by some sort of disease. I attributed these anomalies to the fact that my friend must've set the game in an earlier stage then I had believed, and continued on.
Slowly, I made my way up the mountain step by step. My movement was somewhat sluggish, and I would occasionally fail a one-block jump. Again, I supposed that this was just a glitch, and would fix itself in a future update.
After what seemed like an hour, I managed to reach the summit of the mountain. I looked over, preparing myself for the rush of nostalgia that would surely consume me once I was in a familiar environment once again.
My heart skipped a beat as I saw what awaited me. The landscape that was once so colorful had been converted all into a single type of purple block. The trees, the grass, the stone, all had been changed and dyed purple. My old, modest castle now sat in ruins, the last remaining tower crumbling down into a purple dust. Only the sky and the occasional waterfall would retain its color.
On closer inspection, the strange purple block that had seemingly corrupted the former majesty of my home had its own unique texture, too. It had several lines running across it both vertically and horizontally, forming a sort of checkerboard pattern. I tried to hit the block, and nothing happened. It was like no block was there at all.
Frustrated, I decided I might as well explore my old home, perhaps salvage any loot that might still be rusting away in the purple-dyed chests. The door, thankfully, was still usable. I felt an odd sense of premonition as I walked through the violet hallways, almost as if something would leap at me from the shadows and devour me whole.
Turns out that feeling was not entirely wrong. I had only made it into the second room when something hit me from behind. My health went down by an entire three hearts, and I turned around just quickly enough to catch a glance of a seemingly pure white figure before the last of my health left me. The respawn screen didn't give me a very good view of the figure; all I could see were two ivory legs, with practically no texture whatsoever. My head was immediately filled with questions. What was that thing that had killed me, within the short span of a second and a half? A failed test enemy, that my friend's tampering had accidentally resurrected? An easter egg inserted by Notch? Or perhaps, a ghost of someone, haunting the game that I had loved so much?
I realized how ridiculous I sounded on that last one. Sighing, I closed the application. I needed some sleep before I tried out my world again.