I found my old NES Godzilla cartridge while moving and decided to play through it for nostalgia. I'd beaten it many times as a kid. I knew every level.
The game started normally. First few stages — familiar, standard. Then things started being wrong.
New stages appeared that I had no memory of. Not just new to me — genuinely new, different in visual style from the official game, rendered with a competence that shouldn't have been achievable on the NES hardware. They were dark and complex and detailed in ways the official game wasn't.
New monsters appeared alongside familiar ones. One was called "Red" in whatever internal naming the game used — a massive, vaguely Godzilla-shaped entity that appeared in specific stages with no warning. Red was different from the other monsters in a specific way: it was clearly designed, with intention and detail, in a way that suggested a specific creator rather than a game company.
Red learned. Across sessions, Red's behavior changed, adapted to how I played. Red did things the AI in a 1988 NES game could not do.
Then the game started addressing me directly.
Not in the crude way of early games — not just displaying a name. The game referenced things about me. Things specific to me. Things no game could know. It referenced my dead girlfriend — by name, the right name, a name I had never entered in any game. It used her death as a game mechanic. It turned the stages into representations of specific moments in my life.
I played it because I couldn't stop playing it.
The game ended eventually. It ended with Red, and with a message, and with something that resolved or didn't resolve in a way I'm still not able to characterize as good or bad.
I've thought about what the cartridge was and where it came from and why my copy was different. I have no answer that satisfies.
I know it wasn't a normal game. I know something was in it that shouldn't have been in it. I know it knew things.
I know I still think about Red.
The NES Godzilla Creepypasta is a landmark long-form illustrated horror narrative by Cosbydaf, originally published on Bogleech.com. This is an excerpt and summary; the full illustrated story is available online and is strongly recommended.