I used to play a lot of old Shockwave games as a kid, Burnin’ Rubber 4 had been my favorite game of the bunch. Reminiscing on those days, I can’t help but feel a sting of nostalgia. I remember feeling like a kid in a candy store, unable to decide which game to play. Sometimes I wanted to try 3D games, or arcade-like top down 2D games, sometimes something completely different, like a racing game that incorporated aliens beating up human civilization.
If you don’t know, Burnin’ Rubber 4 was one of those few open world Shockwave games, you were thrown into an open world map and you were able to equip your vehicle with weapons to obliterate your opponents. My favorite map was The City, the map was a huge city made up of off skyscrapers and housing districts, think of GTA. Despite being flat and being made up of a lot of empty space, it was densely populated, sprouting with traffic that made it feel lively.
I never had any friends at school. I had moved from Rotterdam to Amsterdam days before and I was very anxious, I feared that I’d get rejected somehow. That week I was feeling stressed after an embarrassing event where one of the adults misspoke my name on the microphone. While trying to grab my attention he meant to say “Diederik”, but it came out as “Dirk”. My classmates would not cease to call me that, they figured out it irritated me a lot and did it to mess with my feelings.
The next day at school, I ended up lashing out at one of my peers in a humiliating sequence of events that ended up sending him to the ground. Thankfully, he was not badly hurt but my fears of being rejected came true.
I headed home and fired up Burnin’ Rubber 4 on my Packard Bell laptop out of frustration, I stared at the menu screen for half an hour thinking to myself what went wrong that day. Not a few minutes after I started the daily race the car fell out of bounds, infuriating me even more. I stared at the computer screen watching as it caved into the pavement in a looping motion. I then mashed “P” to pause the game, causing the monitor to freeze and then black out. No matter what I did the computer screen stayed blank. I went to sleep feeling terribly upset.
Later that night, I was jolted awake by the sound of my computer booting up. Groggily, I stumbled over to my desk, wondering what could have caused it to turn on by itself. As I looked at the screen, I saw that Burnin’ Rubber 4 was already loaded up and ready to play. I rubbed my bleary eyes, trying to make sense of what was happening. How did the game boot up by itself? Agitatedly, I sat down at my desk and pressed “Start”.
As soon as I spawned onto the map, I felt uneasy. The map was pitch black, and the only light came from the headlights of my car, a reddish tint. As I drove around the map I felt a sense of familiarity with the surroundings – This is The City, isn’t it?
I felt more concerned the longer I played. I was startled as I realized that some reddish figure was moving towards me – was it another car? I knew at this stage that something was wrong, but I couldn’t stop playing. The music was frighteningly subtle, like a deep resonant synthesizer. My eyes opened as I realized this figure was not a car but rather a humanoid-like figure, with a reddish skin tone. The only way I can describe it is as if a jpeg was run through intense saturation and contrast effects, burning it to a crisp.
As the figure sped up, I began driving as fast as I could, looping around the highway but, again, the car got stuck and fell out of bounds screeching to a halt. He caught up to me as I closed my eyes in horror, it let out an ear-piercing scream, “IM DOING IT, IM DOING THE DIRK!” – it shouted. The next thing I saw when I opened my eyes was that the screen once again went completely black. I was left sitting in my dark room, heart pounding, and feeling shaken.
I stayed up for hours laying on my bed. “Why is it calling me dirk?” – I thought. “My name is not dirk.”
I found myself increasingly exhausted during the following weeks, the weeks turned into months, months turned into years, and I couldn’t shake off just the experience, but the embarrassment at being an outcast amongst my peers. The memory of my classmates calling me “Dirk” looped in my head. I became increasingly isolated.
As time passed, I slowly forgot about the whole ordeal, however, I noticed strange things happening around me. My room would get colder, and I could hear whispers in the darkness. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling like something was watching me.
I had been seeing her for years, trying to deal with the anxiety that life and more subtly, that nightmare, had instilled in me. I had been unable to sleep properly, and I jumped at every little sound in the night.
My therapist had helped me develop coping mechanisms and suggested that I distract myself at night by playing eBooks on my phone. She recommended an app that had a text-to-speech feature, so I wouldn’t have to strain my eyes in the dark. I followed her advice and found that it helped me fall asleep.
I didn’t tell her about the nightmare, of course. I had practically forgotten about it.
However, one night, as I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, I noticed something strange. The narrator’s voice was much deeper than I was accustomed to. I shrugged it off, trying to fall asleep. But in that moment, something shook me to check my phone and that moment I realized that the battery to my phone had completely run out, a pit in my stomach grew as I realized that the voice was not coming out of the phone’s speaker.
As I looked up, I saw through my peripheral vision a long figure wrapped around the corner of my room. It had a reddish tint, twisting like a snake. It spoke in the familiar yet twisted voice of the text-to-speech narrator.
I couldn’t move or scream. I was paralyzed with fear as the figure inched closer and closer. I could hear it whispering my name, and the memory of that nightmare came back to me like a neck sprain. As the figure got closer, the narrator’s voice grew deeper and more unrecognizable, and I knew I was trapped.
“I am Dirk.” - it said.
I don’t know how long I lay there, frozen in terror, but when I finally woke up, it was morning, and the figure was gone.
I tried to brush it off, but the fear lingered. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had entered my room that night. I deleted the e-Book app from my phone, hoping that it would put an end to the nightmare, but when I’m lying in bed at night, I can still hear the voice of the narrator. My name is not Dirk, that is his name.
I’ve lost the ability to sleep since then. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.