yknow i think the fact that the utdr community tends to skew younger is a little unfortunate for how some of toby fox’s utterly brilliant writing is lost. i dont think younger people quite see the full scope of the meta horror element of video game easter eggs without having been a part of the pre-internet/early-internet world. icepalace_glaceir and egg especially i dont think will hit people quite the same if they never played games in the era before social media.
it’s hard to overemphasize how isolating playing video games was before the internet became an organized, tagged, easily-searchable universal database, or even before it existed at all.
if you were lucky, you knew maybe one other kid who played the same games you did, or had a sibling close enough in age to you to take interest. that was it. other than that, you navigated these worlds completely on your own, having to learn their rules and what their “normal” is without any outside guidance. if you were poor (and you most likely were), you only had a very small number of games that you would play and replay endlessly. you would explore every inch of terrain, examine every polygon, out of pure habit more than anything.
so when something in that familiar lattice is suddenly, unexplainably different, it’s horrifying in a way that’s really hard to put to words. it’s coming home to your solo apartment to find your furniture newly askew. it’s the unknown, the fact that all the rules you thought you understood are being broken. and through all these gnawing feelings, there’s absolutely no one you can tell who will understand, and those rare few that can will most likely not believe you. so whether it’s an easter egg, a glitch, or something else - it’s you, alone, having to newly rationalize this foreign invader to your world. will you shut the game off, hide it away on a shelf to never think about it again? or will you investigate further to try and grasp it? every individual reacts differently - but they all know the overpowering emotion that came with finding it.
it’s why we fell for mew under the truck, for san andreas’ bigfoot. almost every single one of us had some personal event, some elusive experience that sounded so unbelievable to any outsider - and yet it happened. the concept of what could and couldn’t be in a video game became muddy, uncertain. “every copy of ___ is personalized” might be a joking phrase, but that really is an accurate way to describe how it felt. or, with the fact that having a dirty cartridge could cause bizarre, unique occurrences to occur - how it actually was. some people question why one would be afraid of antipiracy screens. well, this all is exactly why.
all this is why i find utdr’s current direction for gaster so transfixing. “he” is not a character to me - to me, “he” represents this concept. of being able to peer through the tiniest crack in the foundation of a digital world, and to see something peering back at you.
i guess i should wrap this up with an example of this phenomenon that i actually personally experienced, so people don’t think i’m dramatizing this.
in the original animal crossing for gcn, there’s an incredibly rare easter egg which can occur when traveling from the main town to your island via kapn’s boat ride. there’s a very, very small chance that your boat will pass over a massive shadow, far larger than any catchable fish you can encounter in the game.
whenever this event was posted about on early internet forums and personal sites, it was met with an inevitable wave of irritation and scorn. posting about this “huge fish” would earn you the title of liar, attention seeker, or - if you managed to take a blurry photo of your CRT - hacker/troll.
but it was real. it was always real - a purposeful, scripted event so rare and specific that it could easily pass as fake. documentation nearly 20 years after the game’s release could finally confirm it as such, beyond a reasonable doubt.
but the thing is, as someone who played a lot of animal crossing, i had a personal experience that colored my view of this event very differently. i’ve come to internally refer to it as the “big fish nightmare”. it’s very much what it sounds like - a nightmare about animal crossing, where you encounter a huge fish. you might only glimpse it, or you might try to catch it, among many other things. but it involves a massive fish, and a sense of fear from the fact that it absolutely did not belong there.
the only problem is that this description isn’t a personal experience. my siblings had this dream. my friends at school had this dream. and in the tags of another post i’ve made about animal crossing fish shadows in the past, i could see complete strangers mentioning having this dream. it’s understandable why, because of how much time you spend in these games assessing fish sizes, that it might show up in your dreams in one way or another. psychologically, it’s very normal, and not something i consider any way in paranormal.
but knowing this experience, it gives me a greater insight to the visceral reaction that posting about this easter egg would garner. i have the lingering sense that, to at least one person, their stirred emotions weren’t exclusively over the thought that someone was clogging discussion with a bunch of screenshots of an edited save.
it was the thought that, somehow, the big fish that you saw in your dreams wasn’t content with staying there.
