6 Dark Creepy Easter Eggs Hiding In Video Games

6 Cuphead Will Give You A Case Of The Satanic Panics

Upon release, hackers dug into the code that formed the bullet-hell Cuphead takes place in to find an even deeper hell -- regular hell. They encountered an audio file delicately titled "MUSDontDealWithTheDevilVocal666", which is a creepy-ass alternative to the main title song. 

What happened to the good old days when subliminal messages told you to worship the Devil?

The mention of cutting off heads in the original version is already kind of scary, but the even-more-demonic version does it in a heavily distorted and slowed-down manner, whereas the original did it in a jolly kind of way. Rumors started going around that the developers cursed the game with this new version to mess with pirates who'd obtained the game through the high seas or whatever it is that they use to obtain games illegally, but the song is actually there to mess with players who make a deal with the Devil.

And that's not even the worst part. If you run the music on a spectrogram, it'll get imagified into this:

The Dark Souls series is home to a lot of content most players won't even notice due to non-stop fighting for their digital lives, none of which is more messed up than its beautifully realized parasite ecosystem. The original Dark Souls features bug worm nests that players can open to find well, exactly what their dumb-ass expects.

But they'll also find a nasty secret. There's a chance that these beautiful larvae will somehow bless players with their eggs, and the game will never straight-up tell them that they're mega-pregnant -- until it's too late, that is.

All the players will get are small hints, like the character scratching an itch on their head ...

... and the fact that they'll be getting only half the souls from their enemies. But that's hard to notice because A) players don't know how many souls an enemy in a new area would normally give out, and B) because that's some nerd shit. The nice part is that these souls aren't going to waste, but rather to feed the beautiful bug monster growing inside the players' brains. Once it gets enough souls, it will hatch.

And while you might have to cancel your Fashion Souls competitions, You'll at least have a cool-ass new weapon.

4 The Mannequins In Call Of Duty Are Possessed By The Chickens From Zelda

It's hard not to find mannequins creepy after decades of Hollywood trying to convince audiences that no inanimate object is too dumb to carry out a murder. Whenever looking at mannequins in video games, players can't help but wonder how long until they become alive for the sole purpose of eating the players' faces. Some games, like Skyrim, are seemingly so confident they'll trigger a flight response that its mannequins just sit there following players with their creepy gaze.

But the makers of Call of Duty knew peace was never an option (not after the Call of Ceasefire DLC tanked), so they introduced a neat Easter egg that's sure to make any quickscoper trying to harm its mannequins will end up the quickscopee. In Call Of Duty: Black Ops III, shooting the heads of all the mannequins quietly inhabiting the Nuketown map will make them go on a reenactment of I, Robot.

3 Game Hauntings That'll Get You Even When You're Not Playing

The world should have listened when we first warned that the original Xbox dashboard was haunted. While we can't confirm that the weird-ass noises made by the console came from the ghosts of employees from the various gaming studios Microsoft had destroyed, we do know it's no longer an Xbox-only thing.

Steam forums received various complaints about the platform going all "The Ring" on them and playing ultra-creepy sounds seemingly at random. The "events" usually took place after playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent and happened because a weird "glitch" got Steam's music player (yeah, that's a thing, just like ghosts) playing creepy sound effects from the game.

While this should warrant anyone a piss-in-your-pants pass in any scenario, it's important for gamers who think they're beyond scaring to learn that this also kept happening to players who didn't have any horror game running -- or even installed. 

And if the saying "a video is worth a thousand creepy sound effects, or whatever" has any truth to it, then we're really sorry for the kids who bought the "cursed" issue of Playstation World magazine. This issue secretly contained terrifying body-horror images that a few kids accidentally ended up witnessing.

It became kind of an internet myth for a while, until, just a few months ago, someone finally managed to confirm that yeah, the 43rd issue of PSW magazine included a trailer for Tetsuo, The Iron Man, a terrifying cyberpunk film/nightmare put to celluloid from Japan.

2 Naughty Dog's Darkest Moment Immortalized By Naughty Dog. As A Joke

There's nothing scarier than when fictional horror starts to blend with the real world. Relax, this is not about an actual monster that'll burst out of your head; it's worse. It's about a boss who laughs at his workers' suffering without ever giving them the benefit of the death.

Naughty Dog, makers of The Last Of Us, decided to feature a character card telling the story of "Doctor Uckmnann," a "misunderstood" scientist who conducted "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits." A different company could have pulled off this joke, but when done by Naughty Dog, it's just a tongue-in-cheek belittling of the suffering you've put your employees through.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is full of mysteries, but none as creepy as Blackwater's missing sports team.

While the most important element contributing to its creep factor is how you don't expect anyone dressed up like that in the Wild West, there are other incredibly eerie elements. No bullet holes or stab wounds present, a couple of extra limbs lying around, and two of the corpses are wearing clown masks for unknown reasons.

Players might even solve the mystery, but regardless of how much they search, they'll never learn the entire tale from the game alone. Turns out that this massacre is actually a reference to a real-life case. Worse even, a case that's not from drive-your-horse-to-work-days, but from '09, when the corpses of an entire team of recently murdered soccer players from Colombia were found.

Top Image: Rockstar Games