Streamer delves into 1995 MMORPG, finds one person still haunting the servers

Games like Amnesia and Silent Hill are supposed to be the creepiest things around, right? Sometimes the creepiest things, though, weren’t intended to be. One of those is, apparently, Active Worlds.

Youtuber vinesauce hopped into this 20-year-old MMO to see what’s up and found it almost entirely deserted, with the exception of a person named Hitomi Fujiko.

The game’s art, which was heavily limited by the tech available at the time, is pretty creepy on its own. I find the recent Devil Daggers creepy for the same reason. The infinite blackness of that game makes me feel like I’m in some kind of endless purgatory. Active Worlds inspires some of the same sensations for me.

This Hitomi Fujiko character looks to be an NPC at first, but the player, Vinny, starts to realize they’re actually a real person, which is weird for both the fact that they, too, are hanging out in this empty world, as well as some of the stuff they’re saying: “But this land… it is empty. I am the only one left.” and “Please tell me I exist.”

When vinesauce was doing the live stream, thousands of people were watching and trying to sign up, which forced the game’s login servers to shut down. It’s possible the server admin noticed all the new traffic and decided to login to see what was up, messing with this new player. That seems more likely than someone hanging out in an empty MMO, waiting for someone to show up.

But it’s still spooky as hell.