Yo,
I’m at work as I write this, nothing to do and it’s a little overdue.
So about a year ago you might’ve remembered I announced an event that would be coming to the tower named ‘The Streamer’. I was super excited to get into it and I know a lot of you were too so I’d just like to apologize how that whole thing turned out.
I announced The Streamer after finishing my first year of college during the Summer, which was a point where I had a lot of free time on my hands, which meant in between doing my own personal things I’d go ahead and do Summer of Events because that always fun. I had this big idea for event which involved spooky happenings, player participations and actual voice-acted set pieces throughout. A lot of things cropped up during that summer which affected the progress of the event, I had a lot of stuff recorded, that vast majority of it voice acted, but I just didn’t have the drive to go ahead and put it all together, I pushed it back to ‘Halloween’
Halloween rolled around and I was beginning to find the strains of second year at college and trying to keep up a personal life became a tad too stressful to do anything in my down time, I’d ocassionally still tease it now and then and I dropped the first ‘Trailer’ which actually had scenes from the event that were already prepared, I pushed it back again.
Lobby 2 release rolls around earlier this year and with the boom in playercount I figured it’d be a good time to get the thing out, it was about 50% done, I’d just done a bunch of new material and I started leaving hints and started a crazy goose chase on the old forums which probably infuriated a lot of people. Even moreso probably when it went silent, I’d just been hit with a massive deadline for a bunch of end of the year projects which had to be done, I absolutely couldn’t find the time to put into getting this out and finalized (unless I wanted to squander my qualification and grades). That’s about the last time I touched on it and ever since I’ve lost the drive to get it done and out.
I had a full script written out, the story was perfect but I just straight up didn’t have the time to finish what I’d started and that lead to a lot of people getting upset and disappointed and I’m really sorry about that! It became somewhat of a joke over time.
ANYWAYS
To go back to it now would be silly, the story itself is pretty heavy, to get it out and do it with a lower player count and with the weird stigma attached to it would be dumber than the concept of making a horror story through GMod is. To give you an example here was the basic synopsis of the story.
THIS IS ALL FROM THE INITIAL CREATION OF THE STORY
We meet a ‘live streamer’ named Max (or Maxplaytime), he is shown as a happy and bright individual at the start of the video broadcasts. He is currently working his way through doing some GMTower streams, (this is taking place in lobby 1). The players in the audience are presented with a Twitch-like menu of past broadcasts, there are 3 initially, the first two are seemingly normal videos of himself playing Tower. However, the third video starts with him trying to find the Tower servers, he cannot, he browses the server list to find a map running ‘gm_tower’, the server name is the normal “[GMT] Lobby 1”, he loads up the server, oblivious to him, but apparent to the players is that several scripts and foreign files are downloaded upon loading the map. The server loads, he spawns in the station as normal, bewilderingly enough there are no players on the scoreboard, but there are nameless “players” roaming around the lobby as usual. Max becomes audibly confused, we can hear him get sluggish and sound more and more uncomfortable as the broadcast goes on. The Lobby is also a lot dimmer and ‘greyish’ as if a colormod had been applied and the screen flashes a fair number of times in an almost hypnotizing patter. We get to a point in the video where Max questions if the server is a pirate server as the IP address is different and the server will no longer load in the browser. He does not disconnect. The broadcast ends with him in the chair in the Secret Elevator Room, he does not say goodbye, the video just ends after 5 minutes of nothing.
Back to the players, they are presented with the ‘Twitch’ screen again, there is now a fourth video simply titled ‘Update’. The video is Max speaking over the GMod menu screen, he is not his usual cheery self and is audibly distressed, he tells us “I don’t feel like playing this game anymore” and that he will be taking a long break due to personal issues. The Video ends
A fifth video is now selectable and nameless, in this there is no video and just a blank screen. Max is very audibly upset in this video and incredibly disheartened sounding, he announces the disdain he has for streaming, becomes seemingly paranoid about the feelings of his girlfriend, his job and his home, he feels as though he is doing nothing and expresses the extreme disappointment he has brought on himself. The video ends.
Almost instantly the audience is presented with a very distorted video clip of the gameplay we have seen so far only fast forwarded. In an flash, a jump cut is made to very disturbing and horrifying clips made in Sandbox mode, depictions of death and murders created with ragdolls in realistic ways, like a fantasy snuff film. All of which with very distinguishable methods of killing (Drowning, Fire, Dismemberment…), after the clip is over the audience is presented with questions on each and riddles, which they will solve together.
After each puzzle is solved a new horrifyingly brutal video is presented on the twitch selection screen, each with a puzzle at the end. This continues til the audience is greeted with ‘messages’ on screen, they flash by too quickly for anyone to notice. A final video is shown, it’s a video of the lobby 1 suites, only dark and distorted, there is a radio playing a news broadcast decribing the events of a murder that took place in the local area, whilst the grizzly details are explained, there is no voice over and unlike the last few videos, this is a gameplay video but it does not appear to be from ‘Max’. The video cuts to a blurred image of a ragdoll hanging from a tree. There is a garbled low-tone voice playing over the end of this video.
Now on the selection screen, we see a new past broadcast. It’s a 5 minute video of the elevator room in the lobby, a player enters, it’s almost surveilance like and is very clearly not a video from max. The audience at this point realizes it is Max sitting in the chair, garbled messages play again.
After answering another question, another video is presented where the audience wil recieve a new video afterwards. The video this time is of Max’s 3rd and final gameplay video, the original audio is distorted however and much lower. The bellowing voice sharply reads out “CARCOSA IS A STATE OF MIND, A BARREN WASTELAND” “IT IS WITHIN YOU”. The flashing images in the original video now spell out ‘SIN’ repeatedly over and over, the video ends.
After a few more riddles and questions there is one final video, the thumbnail is an image of the lobby with a white ghostlike face in front of it. There is no video. The audience can hear the sound of a man groaning in a room in the distance and coughing, almost drugged sounding we can hear him ask “Did I do good?”. Sharp sounds of something attacking him are heard. The audience now realize they are listening to Max’s last pleas of mercy before he is murdered by several blows/stabs from an object, the audio cuts out after the metallic object is dropped and all breathing grinds to a halt.
Player questions begin again, at the end of which a final video is shown.
The image of this video is the thumbnail of the aforementioned video. We can hear Max talking to someone. “WHY DO YOU MAKE THE VIDEOS?” asks the low-toned and eery voice. “Personal gain, fantasies” we hear Max reply in a very demonic sounding state.
“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO NOW?”
“I’ll take care of her”
“I WILL BE BACK HERE”
A newsreport is then played in the next video, much like the last time it describes a very brutal death. It is explained that a young man was found, tied to a chair and stabbed repeatedly in his own apartment room, there are various papers lying around his room, with notes stating “If you’re reading this, he has found me”. “I don’t want to do it, I really don’t want to do it, please help me” followed by repeated scribbles of the word “SIN, SIN, SIN, SIN” “HE IS REAL”
After one final question a final video log is played, Max is heard sobbing. "I don’t know what I’ve done, someone needs to help me, I really really fucked up, my girlfriend is dead and she is in a suitcase in the woods, if you find it along with me tell her family I am sorry and that there was nothing I could do. Something happened, I don’t know what, but I feel like it was that stupid fucking game, ever since I’ve felt like I’ve been in a constant struggle with myself and my own urges, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, he will be here soon, I need to be ready, I must be ready, he is with me now, I believe in him and soon I will be washed free from what I have done, we all deserve to die sometime, farewell.
THIS IS MAX…
SIGNING OFF"
whilst the audio plays, various images of threads posted on the GMTower forums are shown to the viewers, describing accounts of meeting ‘strange’ players on Tower and weird occurances taking place. These are mixed in with real news stories of actual recent murders, as well as ending with Max’s. The end of the newstory ends with “the victims eyes appeared very dark and incredibly bloodshot almost as if he was in a state of mind not of his own when he had died. Authorities also report that a large Cross was drawn on the wall with the victims blood”
The event ends with a shot of Lobby 2 everything is seemingly normal, the camera pans in closer and we can see that none of the players have names yet again. All playermodels are charple models and none of them speak, leaving the viewers to believe there is another pirate server out there and that the killer ‘codenamed CROSS’ is still at large
Tl:dr of the story Player Cross exists as an actual horrible human being who set up a private server and brainwashed a subjectable player named Max within this server. Max becomes crazed and begins creating videos of ideal ways to kill other human beings in GMod. Afterwards we hear during a news report he has killed his real life girlfriend and hidden her body in the woods. Max explains in one final log he did not mean it and that cross is now coming for him, Max is killed, police finds out, announces the murderer is still at large and at the end we see a seemingly normal shot of Lobby 2 only to find that it is another private server set up by Cross, waiting for a player to join.
