I bought a VR headset for the first time, and after a couple months I got bored with it. The games just weren’t very immersive, it was always blurry or buggy or usually even both. I recently got back into playing the Grand Theft Auto games and thought of how cool it would be to play one of them in VR. Going around, blowing up cars, getting into gunfights, all that stuff would be so cool! I looked, but the only real options for playing GTA on VR were some weird mods that took more knowledge than I had to install, so I did the next best thing and bought a cheap $15 GTA-clone off steam and loaded it up.
Right off the bat it looked like absolute dogpiss, I was never a fan of how blurry and out of focus VR games were, but this put all the others to shame. I figured I had 2 hours to play this thing and I might as well try it out before I refund it. I hit play and was thrown right in to the game. No opening cutscene, no dialogue, I didn’t even get to see my character before I was thrown right into the world with my fists and a knife as starting weapons. Weird, but a nice change of pace, most games make you sit through 10+ minutes of nothing before the good stuff starts. I wasted no time beating and stabbing every civilian I saw and was actually having some fun. Enough fun that the god awful visuals didn’t even really bother me anymore, in fact, now that I could see the game clearly I could really appreciate how much detail they put into really making you feel like you were in LA. I had never been there before, but the feel the game gave off was just right.
By now it’s been a few hours of me killing civilians and police, and I had a pretty hefty arsenal on me by now, shotguns, rifles, pistols. This game really had no lack of weapon choice, but weapon choice aside, I was getting a bit hungry and figured it was time to take a break. I knew I had gone way over the 2 hour limit, but with the fun I was having why not just keep the game at that point, right? Well I suppose it’s time to hit pause and get some food, I’ll come back to it later.
Huh. That’s weird.
I’m trying to hit pause, but I can’t feel my controllers anymore. Hell I can’t even take my headset off. I’m doing the right thing, I know goddamn well where my own eyes are and there’s no way I can fuck up something as simple as taking off a VR headset, so why am I still hiding in a building with police helicopters shooting at me? All of a sudden it hits me, I feel the cold steel of the guns my character is holding. I feel the blood of the countless NPC’s I had spent the last few hours slaughtering dried into the sweater that was equipped. While I’m thinking to try and figure out what the fuck is happening everything goes dark and all of a sudden, here I am. In a police interrogation room with a very real pain in my neck and handcuffs that feel like ice. No matter what I try, my headset won’t come off.
***
This is fucking crazy. This guy kills hundreds of people in a spree that lasted 5 hours, took down a police helicopter, and now he’s saying that it was all a game? Is this some kind of mind game he’s playing with us? I’ve been a detective for 30 years, seen some of the most vile killers you could imagine, and here’s this guy with a body count higher than all of them combined sobbing all over himself like a 9 year old girl who got caught stealing candy. We can’t find any ID, any records, nothing. It’s like this guy really did just appear (the intern says ‘spawned’ is the correct word here) out of thin air. Normally I would have no problem with doing this myself, but something about the way he looks just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s almost as if he really was made in a computer, everything is so plastic about him except the way he speaks, when he speaks all I hear is a scared kid behind one of those old claymation talking heads. It really freaks me out so I’m formally requesting that you send someone federal to help with this investigation, if we can’t get someone else in here then I’m going to have to distance myself from this case. I’ve included a transcript of his official statement in this email so you can have some idea of what I’m talking about.
- Detective J.