The Legend of Ghost Ray

Hello, Internet. Gather 'round, because it's storytime. Many of you fine ladies and gents may be familiar with the popular YouTube group known as "Achievement Hunter." If not... well, then, have you been living under a rock, or what? This bunch happens to be quite famous for their many video game Let's Plays. As a matter of fact, they coined the term. Tonight we're going to discuss a particularly disturbing episode of their most popular... well, show, I guess. This is a story about a bunch of lads playing Minecraft.

Now, this strange little episode begins with a rather upset and probably hung-over Geoff. Being the cheeky bunch of lads that they were, the others were all faffing about the way they usually do at the start of every Let's Play. Being the MC of the event, Geoff was doing his damnedest to try to keep things running smoothly, but it was just an off day for him. Usually he was better prepared for recording, but he was right knackered this time. After much faffing was done, Gavin, the most intelligent and might I say handsome of the group, took over for poor Geoff as the MC, and things finally started moving along.

The name of the game was Thunderdome. Two men enter, one man leaves. Then the guy who left comes back with a prize and fights again. Simple, right? First one to construct the coveted Tower of Pimps is the victor. A few broken eggs later, the fights started, and the lads were all having a right good time of it. All was well and good in the realm of Achievement City. At least, it was, up until Gavin's boy Michael noticed something very... weird. He and Ray had had a rousing bout, beating each other to death simultaneously. They both climbed back up onto the spectating platform.

"Ray, I will bow to you now. Good fight, sir."

Ever the gent, Michael bowed to his opponent. Or at least, he thought he did. The episode cut to Ray's camera, and it showed Michael bowing to thin air, in a totally different direction. Ray was confused, to say the least. It took Michael a moment to figure out why. Back to Michael's screen, he looked at Ray. Then he looked at another Ray.

"...huh."

There were two Rays standing right in front of Michael. They both had the same skin and gamertag.

"Hey, Ray? ...look at my screen."

All eyes were on Michael's monitor; no one gave a damn about the fight between Geoff and Jack anymore.

"Imposter! IMPOSTER!" Ray cried.

"What is... what is going on? What is happening here?" said Gavin.

"There's TWO BrownMans! What the hell is happening?!" Michael belted.

"...and they're both MOVING," remarked Ryan.

Everyone was just completely at a loss. The real Ray jumped up and down in place, while the other just kind of... looked around. It wasn't some graphical glitch, there were two Rays! And they both acted all on their own! The episode went on as everyone continued to just observe the second Ray. Gavin thought he must be daft. But it didn't end there. The second Ray floated right up into the air and left the stands, sliding away from the lads.

Well, this seemed quite obvious. It had to be Geoff, right? As the host, he was the only one who could fly, so it was probably some glitch that mimicked him. After a few seconds onscreen, though, the ghost Ray was shown floating next to Geoff, moving differently from him as well. What was going on?

Being such a resourceful fellow, Gavin immediately checked the player list. He was shocked to find that only six names were listed, though--there was no second BrownMan, no seventh player.

"Well, maybe it's just Caleb," he thought. "Cheeky little bastard is probably just having a laugh."

As if to rub it right in Gavin's acceptably-sized nose, though, the second Ray immediately walked over to the stairs... and passed right through them. The lads were baffled. What's more, Geoff stated that he never saw any ghost. Only Gavin, Michael, and Ryan had seen the second Ray on their screens. Gavin was particularly unsettled by these events.

"I don't want to play anymore, that's really disturbing."

...and right it was. But the episode continued. The lads were cheeky, but they were profesh. They knew they had to finish the video, and so on it went with the mysterious Ghost Ray hovering in the background. After that, weird things started happening in the arena. The next person to respawn after the ghost went inside the bedroom was Jack, but we'll get to him later. Before his next turn rolled around, the brave and handsome Gavin went off for a bit of ghost-hunting.

While the battles went on without him, Gavin pursued the mimic into the forest and tried to attack him, but the stupid ghost kept disappearing into the ground.

"Bugger me!" he thought, as he got knocked back by Ghost Ray. Now the bastard was attacking him back. The episode cut out the rest of Gavin's adventure, instead going back to the ring.

From there, things went pretty much normally. Ghost Ray was nowhere in sight and everyone had a right good time beating the living shit out of each other. It wasn't until much later that he decided to make his grand re-entrance. Jack had taken several beatings and revived a few times, and was now in the ring once again. The fight started; it was Ray versus Jack. The two started pummeling each other, as the fights typically went, and it wasn't until Gavin turned around that he spotted it.

There was another fight going on right next to him, in the stands. There was Ray, wearing the same cheeky brown helmet that the Ray in the ring was wearing, beating up on... another Ray? The second Ray bounced and took damage at the same time that the real Ray did in the ring, mimicking his movements. This Ray didn't have the doo-doo armor on, though. As Jack beat Ray in the ring, the beaten ghost disappeared, then the other ghost continued to mimick Jack from afar. Gavin tried to wrap his head around what he'd just seen.

"Okay, on my screen, Ray wasn't in the arena; Jack was punching no one, and there were two Rays punching each other on the stands."

The mystery was afoot once again, and still there was no explanation. Ghost Ray had disappeared again, and so the fights continued... but during the next fight, it seemed like the odds were weighed rather heavily in Jack's favor. It wasn't until the fight after that the lads realized that Jack had become immune to damage. Some kind of possession or something? No one knew what the chaff was going on, and so Jack had to leave the game and re-join. Whatever the problem was, that seemed to fix it.

The game continued normally from there, and the episode ended without any further incident. All that was enough to start people commenting on what could have happened, though. Maybe Achievement City was really haunted by a "Ghost Ray." Maybe Notch himself decided to peek in on a game and mess with everyone... or maybe it was Notch's brother? Still, no one's come up with an explanation for what happened in those stands. But the mysteries don't end there.

The video footage exists, and can still be seen on YouTube to this day. But the episode 43 released to the internet was not the whole of the recording. Gavin witnessed something in the forest, something that had to be cut from the final video. Something that didn't want to be seen by the world, and corrupted the video to protect itself. Something that still haunts him today.

You're probably asking yourself how I know all this. Well... I'm the one who edited that video. Do you know how many times it had to be restored just to get the footage for the final episode? It was at least five. If you're a fan of the lads, then you probably already know who I am at this point... but that's all right. I just want you to know that there's something behind this that goes much deeper than Ghost Ray, and it might be in all of your consoles, as well. Just a bit of a cautionary tale.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in on Friday for next week's episode.