I can honestly say this scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid. Like straight up couldn't be in the room with my Sega CD for a couple of months. It just filled me with such terror. I can even remember the day I saw it, my brother had taken me to Blockbuster Video where I bought the Sonic 3/Sonic CD guide. The back had a Cheats section. It was a dark, stormy day, and my parents and sister were out of town. My brother fell asleep in the front room of the house and I went into my bedroom in the back on the other side and opened the book, going through the cheats one by one. I remember it was dim in my room, I had only the lamp on. The moment the screen popped up, I felt an icy terror in my veins. I remember running out of the room and begging my brother to go in and turn off the Sega, then spending the rest of the day closely next to him. It horrified me in such a primal way. My neighbor was into video games and we'd talk about them and hang out all the time. I showed it to him and he thought it was insanely creepy too, but not to the extent I did. He tried to make me feel better, so he figured we should try and figure out what the message said, and maybe it would make me feel better. We were grade school kids at the time and didn't even know it was Japanese. We tried a lot of things, like drawing the characters then looking at them in a mirror (like maybe there was a hidden message?). Eventually his mom saw and said it was chinese (which was wrong) so he took it to a local chinese restaurant and asked someone there to translate it. Of course, the only character they could recognize was the Kanji at the bottom, which didn't help us at all, but we did finally learn it was Japanese. He moved away shortly after that and I didn't get to actually figure out what it said until many, many years later when I took Japanese in college. By then I was already no longer afraid of the pic, but the fear of it remains a huge part of my childhood. Most people point to the horrifying USA boss theme that makes it so scary, and I agree to an extent, but what scared me so much more is that I had reoccurring Sleep Paralysis as a kid. I would have it very frequently. For those who don't have Sleep Paralysis, it's when you wake up but you still have the chemical in your brain present that prevents us from acting our our dreams and hurting ourselves. So you wake and are conscious, but you can't move. This triggers panic in the person, and the dreary state causes hallucinations. There is a common hallucination among people who have this: You tend to see a face, inches away from your own, intensely staring at you. Lots and lots of cultures have myths trying to explain the phenomenon in the past. The current accepted explanation has to do with our innate ability to recognize human faces, as we've evolved to notice that form. It's the same way we see shapes and people in the clouds, our brains are built to pick up and make sense of the pattern. So It's believed that, seeing the world in a hazy state, our brains try to pick out shapes in the area to make sense of them, and we wind up interpreting it as a face. Now, this face most people see is horrifying, it's not like a human face. It's only the most vague outlines and parts of a face. You'll see very dark, black eye sockets, black nostrils, a huge smiling grin. It is believed that people's perceptions of UFO abductions from their room might be someone misinterpreting sleep paralysis, and thus "greys" are the western version of the phenomenon. Throughout other cultures, they have other myths to explain this. In Japan, it's called a witch, and in parts of Europe it's called "the old hag." A common saying among sleep paralysis sufferers is that they "had a visit by the old hag last night." These are 3 pictures I found really quickly of people drawing their visions they see while they have Sleep Paralysis. Note the sunken curved eye sockets, and the big grin. In fact, this is where the word nightmare comes from -- it's a mare (succubus) face that visits you in the night, causing terror. Well, the part that scared me so, so much is that Sonic's face in the screen looked almost exactly like the face I would hallucinate. I was having these night-terror inducing hallucinations, and then suddenly, the nightmare was there on my screen. It's so understandable why it spooked me so much, the face in the drawing is so disfigured and creepy. The Sega CD in general always had a very sinister vibe to it. it felt like a machine aimed at 18+ year old, not a kid's console. I would notice this in games like Mortal Kombat, where it was censored on the Genesis and SNES, but fully uncensored on the Sega CD. I've read that it was sort of by design, the higher price tag meant they assumed only adults would really buy it. So I think the creepy messages in Sonic CD (along with the dark futures) sort of fits perfectly into this image of the Sega CD. I mostly love the console for that, but in this particular case, it scared the shit out of me. So anyone else got a history with this freak-ass pic?
Wild story! Your understanding of these things makes it that much more fascinating. I don’t have such a story myself, but I have experienced sleep paralysis and am fascinated by the odd manifestations of the mind. Thanks for sharing!
I had reoccuring sleep paralysis until I got a dog after college. He slept at my hip for many years. When I'd wake up and start to feel like I couldn't move, I'd feel him pressed up against my hip, and it would calm me down and remind me I wasn't alone -- if something really was there and in front of me, he'd wake up. Eventually I learned to keep my eyes closed to not hallucinate. Then, poof. After like 30 years of having them, they stopped happening. Can't explain it.
Amazing story. I'm very jealous of you having grown up with a Sega CD lol. I did indeed find it creepy, but by the time I found it I came across it in a whole different context. I was already a teenager, and I was playing Sonic CD in an emulator. I found out about it on some Sonic fan site, and the surprise was ruined for me, it was like "if you put in this cheat you'll see a creepy message!" So it was like "oh wow yeah that is creepy, wtf is that about?" I had already been past the childhood 'scary thresholds' -- going to haunted houses, riding roller coasters, things like that. So it was pretty tame in comparison. I also had no idea what the message said, it was years later that I found out the translation.
Yes but this one has always been more memorable to me personally Not sure if I’m the first to figure this out but it seems heavily inspired by this panel from 1991’s Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham
I've never had sleep paralysis but it sounds terrifying. There was a period when I was a teenager and I thought it seemed cool so I would try and force myself to have it because I wanted to see what it was like. Never happened for me and in hindsight maybe that's a good thing lol. I was a bit older when I discovered the secret messages in CD, about 12 or 13 years old. Honestly I just thought they were funny as hell, especially the Batman spoof. That being said, the Infinite Fun screen would 100% make me shit my pants if I was a kid in the 90's and I randomly saw that. Just based on how bizarre it is with that specific track playing, the text in a foreign language and the way you access it really makes it feel like you've stumbled onto something forbidden, like you weren't meant to see it at all. I know it sounds a bit stupid but I kind of had a similar thing with this one glitch in Sonic Adventure 2 where you can glitch out of bounds in the chao garden if you take Sonic far enough he'll literally be floating in a dead black void and I swear to god it looks like his neck snapped. I did this glitch by accident as a kid playing late at night in a dark room, I'm being so serious it scared the living shit out of me I had to run out of the room lmao. To this day I still hate out of bounds glitches in video games. I think we get so immersed in these fictional worlds and we want to believe they're real so when bizarre stuff like this happens it creates a sort of uncanny valley where it messes with that belief, hence why it's so disturbing to us.
Didn’t have a Sega CD. Probably first saw it online in my teens and then on Gems Collection. It’s a creepy pic but I wasn’t afraid of it. I still don’t like it because they put it on Sonic. I have experienced sleep paralysis though. Not as an ongoing problem but a couple of times as an adult. The first was similar to the third pic but the figure was flying around close to the ceiling. Not right in front of me. Nose wasn’t that big but I also interpreted it as a witch. It was freaky but at the same time I wasn’t that scared because I could tell I was half asleep and awake having some kind of nightmare. Once I calmed down I completely woke up. I was a bit creeped out but was able to fall asleep for the rest of the night. The second time I was able to stop it before it fully started. I didn’t see a figure but I felt like something scary was maybe around or about to show up.
Really scared me when I was a kid and used the code in Gems Collection, the US Bad Future Boss Fight music added to how terrifying it was lol. I imagine it likely wouldn’t have hit as hard without it. It didn’t stop me from playing the game or anything, but I never wanted to enter that code again. Oddly enough, the S&K no way screen terrified me much more as a kid, but I discovered that when I was like 4 or 5 or so? I have an early memory of it scaring me so much I ran out of the room, which is hilarious in hindsight. On that topic though, corrupted graphics (stuff like the Missingno glitch in Pokemon) also scared me incredibly as a kid. Much like the out of bounds post, something about the game falling apart like that was scary to me. I never experienced corrupted Hidden Palace in the final version of Sonic 2, but I imagine that would have scared me a lot.
I've always enjoyed the uncanny face of that sonic figure. For those of you who know me from other places, though, you might be surprised to find that while I regularly experienced sleep paralysis as a teenager (likely due to significant chronic sleep deprivation), I have never seen a hag face in the process.
So... It didn't scare me, but I can sort of relate to this in a different way. This is part of a theory I have about why some games have a specific effect on is, it's sort of based on the "Ways of Seeing" essay by John Berger. Here is a simplified version of it which covers the basics. It's worth a watch on its own but the basic idea. How we perceive art changes depending on how we view it, the way the art itself is framed. E.g. the painting is in the art gallery, vs the painting is in your room, surrounded by "your" things, in a building you know. Well... for me... this can apply to videogames, only in more ways. For example, I played a lot of Mega Drive/Genesis games at my Grans house. In a room not my own, it was often cold, on a cheap portable TV. Now what did this effect have on me? I can't say for certain, but I'm sure it's the reason why games like Splatterhouse 2 left an impact of being super scary and tense. Even something like Golden Axe 2 felt scary, but also, games where they was a clear quest felt like it wasn't just a battle against the enemies, but also the elements. I'm sat in a cold room, playing a videogame... when the weather in the game rains or becomes windy, it feels more impactful, because its not just the characters feeling it, I also notice how cold the room is. I'm feeling what they're feeling. Now there are some "fears" which are sort of universal, and one game which seems to trigger a reaction in most people would be this moment... This... has lost some of its shock value now... but at the time it REALLY hit hard. After "the line", when the visuals and audio glitch, tons of people (including me), thought our console had just broken. This was at the time when Xbox 360s and PS3's were always in the news for Red rings of death or the yellow light of death. But until it happens, you don't know what it'll look like. So when this happens, it triggers so many fears in a split second. 1: What just happened!? 2: Did I just lose all my progress!? 3: Did I just lose my console!? I'm not sure if this trick would work as well today since we have a better understanding of what happens when modern systems fail. But it sort of ties into what I said at the start, when we play games, our environment and even understanding of the technology its on can add to the experience and amplify the effect said game has. I'll just finish with another example. Imagine you're playing an old science fiction game at night. It's cold, it's dark and you have a bit of a fear of monsters. Yes this will add to the experience and impact the game has... But now picture the following... you're playing that game on a VERY old original piece of hardware. Suddenly, those old long loading times don't feel annoying. That noise the system makes seems more scary, this system may break at any moment. The system itself might be of an old design that in a way seems "alien" to modern aesthetics, this too adds to the feeling we get from being in this moment playing a game.
I first found out about it while reading up SR when I was 5 (2009); before that I only saw videos of it and my reaction was less fear and moreso confusion. What didn't help was online resources at the time were TERRIBLE. It just said "this exists" or did a common misinterpretation of Mazin at the time. It wasn't until late 2010 when I found out about Tomato's article about the screen did I actually get some closure.
I've only learned about Sonic CD and Majin Sonic in the early 2000s, when I gained access to the internet. By that time, I've already encountered a bunch of creepy gaming-related things, so I was more like, "Oh boy, didn't know Sonic has these too." I think the BGM of Metropolis Zone creeped me out more, for some reason. Weird, I know. Regarding sleep paralysis, I experienced it a handful of times. From waking up lying on my front unable to breathe or move (very unsettling) to seeing a shadowy figure sitting on my couch. The latter was actually kinda amusing because I was like, "Yeah, whatever. I don't have it in me right now to start a fight." And went back to sleep. For me, it's definitely a stress related thing.
I always interpreted it as some kind of off-kilter anime gag and was never that creeped out by it. What helped is my CRT actually made the figure less creepy as in he looked like he had eyes and the black spaces were just his brow's shadow. I just saw him as a goofy Tingle-looking guy dressed as Sonic and not some Sonic.exe creature or whatever the internet's done with him. Helps too that I only discovered it later on Gems Collection when I was 10 or so. I'm sure it would've terrified me as a five year old if it's even possible to trigger in that old Windows version of SCD. I think the Batman one disturbed me more if anything. He looks like Chernabog or some shit.
So I weirdly had a similar experience using Game Genie codes playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors on Genesis back in like 1996. Somehow the graphics for Zeke and Julie on the player select screen got really deformed. I wish I could have recorded it.
As a kid discovering these cheats via a magazine, this image didn't creep me out at all! On a fuzzy aerial input I thought he was like a moustached little uncle to Sonic or something. I guess because I had the JPN/EU soundtrack as well the music wasn't as creepy as what the US got to go with it. I found the batman looking Sonic far more creepy tbh. In fact I ended up drawing a bunch of fanart of him, naming him after the lollipop man from my primary school. Jeffry > Jeffahog. He looks like he is flipping someone off here haha. This was around 1997 I think. I was drawing Sonic comics almost daily around this time and Jeffahog ended up becoming a lawyer/henchman to Robotnik is a suit with a briefcase. He was even gonna be in my Sonic fan game I never finished called Sonic Switch! This was in 2002.
You sir are actually a pioneer. I think this has to be one of the earliest drawings of the masked Sonic lol
