Mike

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11-02-2022

Back from a very early age, maybe since I was six or seven years old, I’ve had a friend named Michael, although we always called him Mike. He was a Canadian kid that moved to my home country, which I won’t share for privacy reasons, although I will say that it’s a country where English is not the national language. My dad is also Canadian, so I was raised bilingual, speaking both my country’s native language and English, so me and Mike really bonded. Because of this, we always spoke to each other in English, despite him learning to speak the other language fluently not too long after we met.

Mike was always a very, let’s say, peculiar type of guy: as a kid he was really into videogames, to a level I know some people are, but he was the only person I personally knew who loved games that much. He mostly liked Nintendo stuff, both retro stuff as well as the latest releases, but also dabbled quite a bit into other consoles and PC gaming, especially the latter. As he grew up he grew to appreciate other forms of art and more intellectual topics, learning to use Photoshop and video editing software, creating music, etc., etc.

One of his most niche passions was ROM hacking/modding retro videogames, which I would say he did quite well and very frequently. I remember going to his house as a kid and he would show me a folder on his computer where he kept all of the ROM files and software he used to make his creations, as well as a folder where he kept the stuff he never put up on his little Blogspot or Tumblr page, can’t remember which service he exactly used, either because they were projects he made just to test some random thing, or because he wasn’t satisfied with them.

I sometimes dabbled in ROM hacking as well, mostly from seeing him doing it and, frankly, being a bit jealous of his ability to craft his own levels and such, but never even got close to his level. We mostly bonded over our love of the specific videogames he most enjoyed hacking, specifically Earthbound, Super Mario World, and various Pokémon titles, and because of his twisted sense of humor which never failed to entertain me. In fact, maybe that was the most central part of him: no matter what topic he was talking about with someone, he never failed to make people laugh. If they liked dark humor, that is.

I remember telling him multiple times, half-seriously, half-jokingly, “someday karma will catch up with you”, to which he’d almost always retort “yeah, go on, start talking and give karma the rope to hang me”. He would start speaking like this, i.e. with strange wording, and very macabre and dark undertones, around when he was 14 years old. Despite all these changes, his love and dedication to ROM hacking was something Mike always kept, along with him eventually learning full-on programming, mostly Python at first if I recall correctly.

As time passed, we grew a bit apart. Not a lot, but still more than what I would have liked to be honest. When we got to university it was really rough on the both of us. We’d been inseparable for so many years, and now we would be going to different universities, with me studying chemistry and Mike pursuing a course specifically tailored towards game development, to the surprise of absolutely no one. We still saw each other sometimes and would send messages to check how the other was doing quite often.

With that said, Mike sadly suffered throughout his life from depression, which affected him quite a bit. He was never really averse to talking about it, but you could tell that he was never saying everything that was going through his mind. Sadly, this all came to the worst possible outcome when, 2 weeks ago, I received a call from his mom telling me, sobbingly, that Mike had been found in the room he was renting dead, hanging from the ceiling fan. She told me that, as per Mike’s request, I was invited to his funeral, adding that he also wrote in his suicide note that his laptop should be handed to me after his family had had a look around it to copy any files they might want to keep, and that I should check its contents whenever I had the chance. Shocked, all I could do was swear and freak out for almost a minute straight, but was pretty much forced to get myself together to not make things even harder for his poor mother. I attended the funeral, crying all the way through, and received the laptop from his family, along with the charger.

After driving home, I took the laptop that was now a memento of my deceased best-friend, and left it charging while I fixed myself some food, both trying to clear my mind a bit and mentally preparing myself for whatever could be contained in that computer. After about half a hour, I decided it was time and opened the laptop.

Next to the trackpad there was a post-it with some handwriting, reading “SMN890”, which I assumed to be the password locking the computer. After waiting for the computer to boot up, I was greeted with the log-in screen, asking me for the password to the account named “Michael”. I typed in what was written on the post, and was in.

The desktop was divided in two sides: of the right side of the screen there was a bunch of shortcuts to stuff like various internet browsers, Photoshop, Steam, and various other pieces of software; the left side of the screen, however, had a single folder named “Hi”. I opened it, and couldn’t believe my eyes: it was absolutely full of ROM hacking related stuff, in fact, it might have been the exact same folder he used to keep all those years ago! I right clicked on the folder and checked its size: 120GB. If it wasn’t the original, it was close to it.

Almost an hour had passed and I was still playing around with the files, mostly by directly running the “final” versions of each hack by using the emulators he had installed. However, sometimes I’d find folders containing a single executable file named simply “whitespace.exe”, which I usually skipped because I didn’t really know their purpose and was afraid of bricking the computer somehow and losing everything kept within. The curiosity, however, was killing me, so I grabbed my own laptop and copied the entire folder to there, watching a movie while waiting for the painstakingly long process to finish. After it was done, I tried opening the file on my own computer, but it wouldn’t run, giving me some error code, so I was forced to run it on his old laptop, which opened it without a hitch.

As soon as the file opened, I was greeted by the intro screen to Earthbound, which seemed to be entirely unchanged. Upon reaching the screen where the profiles are shown, there was only one slot, instead of the usual three. The player’s name was set as “Mike”, the level was 87, and the text speed was set to Fast. Needless to say I was curious, because aside from the fact there was only save slot and that the file was an executable and not a ROM, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I assumed it might be some fancy hack or fan game he was working on and that this file was the one he used for testing, so I simply decided to start the game and see what he had been messing around with this time.

The file started with Ness in The Cave of the Past, right before the final battle with Giygas. However, Ness was normal, not in his robot version as seen in the original game, and there weren’t any enemies in the cave. I started making my way towards the final room, as at this point in the game there is no way to go to any other location, and everything within the cave itself looked normal, aside from the previously mentioned total lack of enemies.

Upon entering the final room where Giygas and Pokey are normally found at, it was immediately obvious what had been changed, being that the room was entirely black, except a thin white stripe running through the middle on which you could walk on and, thus, advance. After following the white stripe, I saw both Giygas and Pokey, in the places they should normally be, and a blank textbox opened.

I waited for text to show up. Nothing. I tried to press every key on the keyboard. Still nothing. Suddenly, the entire screen flashed white and the game crashed. Goes without saying, I was starting to get freaked out.

As I was thinking about what my next course of action should be, that is, should I open the file again and see if I could do anything else or should I call it a day and never touch the file again, the game opened by itself, with Ness being at the entrance of the very last room, once again with only a white stripe on the ground. I decided to try to walk once again to the end of the room.

When I reached the end, Giygas and Pokey were replaced by a lone chair accompanied by the sound of someone weeping. The game froze, the screen went to black, and the following text showed up, which I am copying directly from the very same laptop the original file was in, which is next to me on the table as I type this:

“I knew only you would care enough about this type of shit to search through and open it. Please, don’t be sad. I was sad and look where it got me! Look after my mom, won’t you? She doesn’t deserve this, but then again, neither did I, I think. And, after all, you did give karma the rope, so now you take responsibility! Sure gave you a fright though, uh? Anyways, a wise man once said “a man dies twice, once when he perishes, and again when his name is said for the last time”. Or something like that. So hey, do old Mikey a favor and spread his name. I’m sure he’ll love you even more. – Michael”

I sure will you rascal, I sure will.