Though the generator could unintentionally turn on some machines, he had taken safeguards to make sure that didn’t happen to anything in the garage. He wanted to work on other things all day, as his life didn’t revolve around the game and he had already showed me pretty much everything it had to offer.

If that wasn’t menacing enough, Bunn had still been haunting me two hours after the game had been turned off. This whole game was designed to torture its poor main character, and the player as well for failing him. Pretty much from the ground up, though someone did find half of a system manual—that gave us the start we needed to get anywhere at all. The tech put the cost of the machine at about ten thousand dollars, and just over the limit of what a 120-volt outlet could power. Bunn reunite with his family (his wife rabbit and three kids), and then all take naps together in the Times Square glen, I actually felt my heart get lighter for a moment.

But it was still playable and understandable enough, and I think any American child would be able to get through the story on their own. But just a few minutes later, everything was on again and there was a very low rumbling that traveled through the walls. As I drifted off under clean blankets, I thought about Bunn’s journey, and wondered if Boris purposely only showed me a perfect game that first night.

So there was a feeling of nostalgia, mixed in with the excitement of doing this to a piece of software very few had played.Oh, and then Bunn commits seppuku, the screen flashes, and the ruins of Times Square and the glen are suddenly engulfed by a blazing hellfire, endlessly looping. There was a bundle of wires and convertors, some caked in dust, all mashed together like an industrial accident waiting to happen. The media itself was missing, but the address on the label was worth far more than another copy of the game.

But that didn’t explain how it could send information through a plain old 240-volt plug, or how that data could mess with the mind. I say that knowing now that it wasn’t just my barrage of fever dreams that made me feel like he was stalking me. That was a brief phase, but one of my memories that stuck out was the time I suddenly woke up, standing in the kitchen of the first home I knew, late at night. Secondly, whenever the backup power kicked in, it would sometimes power up random hardware and appliances.After I post this and add to my house guest’s growing collection of similar stories, I’m heading out. The generator ran out of fuel last night, right around two in the morning, when I would’ve actually been asleep.