Lavender Town Suicides.. Pokemon R/G

[tc]

So, it's late night and I stumbled upon some creepy stories that deal with the original Pokemon Red and Green. Take a read, I can guarantee you'll be creeped out and won't be able to sleep. (Although I found it an interesting read..)

Lavender Town Tunes:
"When “Pokemon” was first released in Japan, there was an odd phenomenon between children ages 7-12, particularly in those using headphones to listen to the sound effects. Increase of nosebleeds, irritability, insomnia, and addiction to the game, playing for hours and hours on end and crying to the point of vomiting when the opportunity was taken away.

Roughly 70% of these cases ended in suicide.

In almost every case of the aforementioned symptoms, despite gameplay time recorded to the limit of the internal clock, the game had not progressed further than “Lavender Town”.

A closer analysis of the game revealed a tone in the audio of the music for “Lavender Town” at a pitch undetectable by fully developed human ear drums. Within weeks every unsold copy of the “first edition” the game were recalled silently and the game was re-released with re-mastered audio for “Lavender Town”.

The widely known version is said to be missing three extra tones, as well as the unique, binaural tone of the first edition, although this is unconfirmed due to the rarity of working first edition copies; in the known few that remain, the internal clock and ‘battery save’ have all timed out and ceased function, and in many cases the game will freeze upon entering any battle."

Some more disturbing information on Lavender Town Tunes:
Lavender Town Tone(Pokemon Red/Green) -THIS IS VERY,VERY LONG.-

Considered a story, but interesting nonetheless (This is quite long):
During the first few days of t - DannoW - f71e6728f - Pastebin.com

I know this is all fake because it is hard finding evidence to back all of this up, but it is still sending chills through my spine. I never had problems when playing the original Pokemon red nor did I have a problem listening to the Lavender Town bgm but after reading this, my childhood..

To add more discussion, have you encountered/read any other creepy/disturbing backgrounds surrounding other games?

[McChicken]

HOLY CRAP, i played that game for days, and i remember EVERYONE having a copy of the game back in the day... what were they trying to do to us!

[bootsie]

That is messed uppppp!!!

[Daniel Jackson]

Psychological warfare!

[Hagen]

I looked into it and I'm 90% sure its completely fake. The story claims that the game included .swf, .wav, and .gif files which weren't used on game-boy games.

[KRosen]

I looked into it and I'm 90% sure its completely fake. The story claims that the game included .swf, .wav, and .gif files which weren't used on game-boy games.

lol gameboy didnt support flash!? aww....

but i wanted to use it to watch gameboy porn.....

lol.... no offense i thought the story was kind of funny.....

185.It was a few days before the body was discovered. It lay on the floor, blood everywhere. In one hand held an empty gun, and in the other was a classic Gameboy with Pokemon Red on the back. The battery had long died, and only an empty, black screen was left.

lolwtf? i was 10 and played both these games excesively.... >.>

[EverBlue]

Most likely fake, but you gotta keep in mind the Pokemon games were released in Japan first. They were released in 96 for Japan, where North America didn't get them for almost 2 more years. So even if this IS true, you wouldn't have gotten any of the "first gen" games.

[Jakoff the Jakoffasaur]

Fake, because it was pokemon Red/Blue not Red/Green

[EverBlue]

Fake, because it was pokemon Red/Blue not Red/Green

Again.. The Japanese version, was "Pocket Monsters Red & Green". Blue didn't come out until later that year.

From Wikipedia

During the North American localization of Pokémon, a small team led by Hiro Nakamura went through the individual characters, renaming them for western audiences based on their appearance and characteristics after approval from Nintendo of Japan. In addition, during this process Nintendo trademarked the 150 Pokémon names, in order to ensure they would be unique to the franchise.[37] During the translation process, it became apparent that simply altering the games' text from Japanese to English was impossible; the games had to be entirely reprogrammed from scratch due to the fragile state of their source code, a side effect of the unusually lengthy development time.[31] Therefore the games were based on the more-modern Japanese version of Blue; modeling its programming and artwork, but keeping the same distribution of Pokémon found in the Japanese Red and Green cartridges, respectively.[35]

As the finished Red and Blue versions were being prepared for release, Nintendo spent over fifty million dollars to promote the games, fearing the series would not be appealing to American children.[38] The western localization team warned that the "cute monsters" may not be accepted by American audiences, and instead recommended they be redesigned and "beefed-up". Then-president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi refused and instead viewed the games' possible reception in America as a challenge to face.[39] Despite these setbacks, the reprogrammed Red and Blue versions with their original creature designs were eventually released in North America over two and a half years after Red and Green debuted in Japan.[40] The games were received extremely well by the foreign audiences and Pokémon went on to become a lucrative franchise in America.[39]

[zellthemedic]

I looked into it and I'm 90% sure its completely fake. The story claims that the game included .swf, .wav, and .gif files which weren't used on game-boy games.

I agree with Hagen. I don't buy any of this at all. This would've been HUGE news if this actually happened.

[knightsvalor]

I looked into it and I'm 90% sure its completely fake. The story claims that the game included .swf, .wav, and .gif files which weren't used on game-boy games.

Yup, that slip-up about seals it as a hoax. It's also not very credible given that the only availible sources are forum posts (you can't find it on any news site, or even any sort of semi-credible websites). Like any urban myth like this, most of the other "facts" contained within are unverifiable:

1. Only found in an incredibly rare, first edition of the game, of which, conveniently, no copy still works to replicate it. (I don't buy the save battery thing either; I have an NES game from the late 80s where the save game battery STILL works. Surely there would be ONE working copy somewhere).

2. The deaths weren't linked to pokemon until much later (thus, avoiding any appearance on the news for being able to search though records)

3. More unverifiable data in the form of an internal report that was supposedly "leaked" (yet is nowhere to be found on the Internet, conveniently).

4. Apparently some guy wrote his doctoral dissertation on it. No copy of the thesis, no university affiliation (or even discipline!), no year of when the thesis was published, no attached file.

This is the tip of the iceberg here. So yeah. Hoax.

[tc]

Hoax or not, it was an interesting read that I wanted to share.

[KRosen]

Hoax or not, it was an interesting read that I wanted to share.

indeed! its agreat talking peice. even though the talking is about how silly the concept is when you look at it stepped back. besides lavendar town wasnt scarry >.>

[EverBlue]

Are you being sarcastic, KRosen? 'Cause that music was creepy as hell. And a tower filled with dead pokemon? kthx.

[MC Cubes]

also, isn't this sort of disaster the kind of thing that keeps potentially great franchises from getting off the ground? i.e. pokemon would never have gotten popular if this was true. the PR hit would have been ginormous.