After reviewing “Pale Luna” I was reminded of this story, as it’s another pasta about a video game that doesn’t exist. This is a popular one, so much so that someone actually created a playable version of the game described here, and it’s also one I’m personally fond of.
No warnings; this is more of an odd story than an outright scary one.
“The Theater”
PLOT SUMMARY
Like the previous story, this one is framed as the narrator recounting what they’ve heard about this game. Let’s jump right in.
The Theater was “released around the same time as Doom” (so roughly 1993?) but was considerably less popular, and generally cannot be found for sale today; the narrator indicates that you’ll likely get scammed if you try and purchase a bootleg copy. Most of what they know about the game seems to be secondhand knowledge, or just outright rumors. Allegedly — much of what happens in this story deserves that qualifier — the original release had a cover featuring the game’s only NPC (a bald white man referred to as the “Ticket-Taker” because that’s his job) on a blank background. There’s no accompanying blurb on the back of the box, nor any information on the game’s developer or publisher.
Even if you did manage to get your hands on a copy of the game, good luck trying to play it. When installing The Theater, it will invariably hang on the licensing agreement screen. Fortunately, rebooting the computer with the disc still inside allows you to finish installing the game. Unfortunately… there isn’t really a game here to speak of. Let me explain.
The game’s start screen has three buttons: NEW GAME, LOAD, OPTIONS. OPTIONS triggers a crash to desktop and LOAD doesn’t work at all, so your only choice is to hit NEW GAME. Your character (the game is in first person, in primitive 3D) is standing in a movie theater lobby. The only other character present is the Ticket-Taker, and there’s nothing to interact with in the lobby itself. Your only real option, other than admiring the bad graphics, is to approach the Ticket-Taker (a poor-quality sound clip plays saying “Thank you, please enjoy the movie” when you do) and then head down the dark hallway behind him, presumably to watch the film. The game then fades to black before returning you to the lobby where you started. Your only option is to do the same thing over and over and over again until you get bored. That’s the entire game.
While this may seem like complete crap, even for early ‘90s shovelware, there’s something weirder here, at least according to some of the game’s players. Seemingly randomly, when returning the player to the lobby, the game may load with the Ticket-Taker absent. Nothing else seems different; the sound clip and accompanying text box will still trigger when you walk past the spot where he should be, and again your only option is to continue down the dark hallway. This time, however, there’s no fadeout. You can continue walking forward, in pitch darkness, with only the sound of your character’s footsteps to indicate you’re still moving. Eventually you’ll be unable to go any further, and, after a delay, the Ticket-Taker’s sprite will suddenly appear before the player, although his head has been distorted into a swirl. Nothing happens initially, then the game plays a loud screeching noise and freezes up. After a few minutes of this (the screeching continues while the game freezes) it abruptly returns you to the lobby, with everything appearing normal once more.
Players who have gotten this far describe the experience as unnerving; the long walk down the dark hallway is enough to trigger a feeling of dread in most players before the “Swirly Head Man” (as he’s been nicknamed) even makes an appearance, and obviously the messed-up character sprite and the screeching doesn’t help. Past this point, a few players claim they’d see Swirly Head Man pop up briefly in the corner of their screen while playing, accompanied by a sharp yelping noise. The weirdness continues if you choose to press on here; some time after Swirly Head’s début, the Ticket-Taker will assume a “worried” expression and begin to pace back and forth on the spot (he doesn’t have a walking animation, so he’s more just hopping about). Eventually, players may notice the movie posters in the lobby have been replaced with images of the Swirly Head Man, and when approaching the Ticket-Taker, he has something new to say — the sound is very poor and the accompanying text box is garbled, but it’s generally agreed that he says “Never reach the other levels.” When the lobby next loads, the hallway has been blocked off, replaced with a sprite of a brick wall. Approaching it crashes the game.
The narrator ends by saying that no one has ever made it past this point in the game, hence it’s unclear what the “other levels” are or how one would access them. It’s also not known why players reacted so strongly to the Swirly Head Man, but, according to the narrator, everyone who played the original release now claims to occasionally catch glimpses of Swirly Head out of the corner of their eye.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
When I say I’m fond of this pasta, that comes with some caveats. First, this isn’t a well-written story. The narrator rambles, there’s no real sense of pacing, and we’re told repeatedly how scary all this is although even the narrator admits they don’t really know why the original players found the game so scary. In some ways, I think this actually works in favor of the tale — while I’m unsure if this is stylistic suck or genuine sloppy writing, it’s certainly believable as a forum post made by a fan of some janky old game. Some of the details here I ended up skipping in my summary since they don’t directly add to the tale, like the narrator saying that it’s rumored the image of the Ticket-Taker on the game box will change to an angry expression if the disc is broken, but they do contribute to the impression that this game’s fans are very superstitious about it. The narrator never indicates having played the game themself, and much of the information they have to relay about it seems like rumor rather than objective fact. This could be a haunted or supernatural game, if you take the stance that its original players are right about everything they’ve described happening… or the handful of people who even played this to begin with have just gotten overly paranoid about their weird little video game and are deluding themselves into believing Swirly Head is out to get them. The ambiguity here, again, is something I can imagine this story drawing criticism for, but it’s actually something I like about it.
Second, this isn’t a typical “horror” story — one could argue it’s not scary at all. The game itself is odd, sure, but it has very little content and your mileage may vary on whether a man with a spiral for a head is scary (personally I think it’s a little freaky, but maybe that comes from having read Junji Ito). The warning about unreachable “other levels” in the game is tantalizing, but it’s left completely up to interpretation as to what any of that might be. Many video games, older ones especially, have what’s called “dummied out” content — stuff that was ultimately cut from the final game, but was simply made inaccessible during normal play rather than being entirely removed. The brick wall that appears in the endgame reads like an example of this to me, like it was put there purposefully by some programmer to prevent the rest of the game being accessed. Why this was done, and what extra content the game might be hiding, are both mysteries left open to reader interpretation.
This story and “Pale Luna” have a lot in common in that they’re both stories about old, obscure, virtually unplayable games, but while “Pale Luna” shows its titular game played through to completion, The Theater simply becomes unplayable at a certain point and thus the story is left open-ended. I know a lot of people find this kind of story frustrating, but I’m not one of them. The game’s eventual dead end is, to me, the strongest thing about this story. Making it as far as the brick wall would already take some doing; if you manage to track down a copy and figure out how to get past the installer’s EULA screen, you’re then faced with a game where the only thing to do is walk down a dark hallway over and over, and most people would understandably just give up. The few people who did make it that far all wound up so scared of Swirly Head that presumably they heeded the warning and declined to look into it further. Again, I have to wonder: is the game purposefully dull and repetitive to dissuade people from playing it? Is the Swirly Head Man purposefully designed to invoke this fear in the player to warn them off continuing, or is he a manifestation of something darker hidden in the part of the game that’s inaccessible? What did the mystery programmers intend, and why did they release a game with the majority of the content — multiple “other levels” — blocked off?
This story feels like it’s trying a little too hard to make readers afraid of Swirly Head, especially with how it ends by saying original players of the game have started seeing glimpses of him in real life, but I don’t think that’s what’s worth focusing on here. The possibility that he as an entity exists outside the game isn’t particularly interesting; that trope has been done too many times in creepypasta for me to be intrigued by it. Nonetheless, part of me still wants to know what’s behind that sprite of the brick wall.