When I was a kid my uncle gave me a bootleg Pokémon Red cartridge he'd picked up at a market overseas. The label was wrong — slightly off-center, the colors slightly different — but it loaded and played.
It was mostly normal. I say mostly because there was one extra Pokémon in the game that I couldn't find in any guide or strategy manual. It appeared in the first patch of grass I walked through, at level 1, as a black, featureless silhouette — like a placeholder that hadn't been filled in.
When I looked at its stats, it had no type, no name, and one move: Curse.
I caught it.
Curse, when used in the main games, is a Ghost-type move with various effects depending on the user. In this cartridge, Curse worked differently. When I used it on a wild Pokémon, that Pokémon's sprite disappeared and was replaced with a tombstone graphic. When I used it on a trainer's Pokémon, the same thing happened — except afterward the trainer sprite was gone too, replaced with an old man sprite, standing still.
I didn't understand what I was looking at. I kept playing.
I used Curse on every trainer I encountered. After each battle, their sprite became the old man sprite. The dialogue after battles changed: no longer victory text, just the old man saying a phrase I didn't fully understand at my age. A phrase about being alone.
When I reached Lavender Town and the Pokémon Tower, I used Curse on all the ghosts. They became old man sprites. The music changed — already strange in Lavender Town, it became something worse.
At the top of the tower, instead of the event that triggers in the normal game, there was one final trainer: the old man. His team was all old men. When I used Curse on the last one, the old man said: "Now, it is your turn."
The screen went black.
When it came back, my trainer's sprite had become the old man. The overworld was empty. Every building in every city had a tombstone in front of it. No NPCs. No Pokémon in the grass. One hundred and fifty-one tombstones, tallied somewhere in the coding, now at one hundred and fifty-two.
The game crashed.
The cartridge never booted again. I don't know who made it or what the point of it was. I know that I played it until the end and the end was a number going up.