Donkey Kong 3: Altered

Summary
A young man named Aaron finds Donkey Kong 3 and plays it, only to find something is definitely not right here.

Story
Hi. My name is Aaron.

I've often times gone to the arcades to play many of the classic arcade games of decades long past, namely those of the 1980's and 1990's.

One game in particular has always caught my interest. This was Donkey Kong 3.

Unlike the previous two games--Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.--this one didn't feature Mario, but a totally new character, Stanley the Bug Man.

I always got a thrill of spraying the giant ape up his behind, while taking out the bugs to protect my flowers, and especially cracked up every time his head got stuck in the beehive at the end of a certain level.

This was the game I would often play at my local arcade. I'd play other games of course, if that game was occupied, but Donkey Kong 3 became my personal favorite time spender, when I had none else to do that day.

Of course, last Thursday, I went to the arcade to see the Donkey Kong 3 game plugged back in, since the past month it had to be take for repairs.

But nothing could prepare me for what was to come.

The game started up as normal, though the music was a different key. It made the music sound a bit ominous.

Donkey Kong beat the beehives as usual to summon some of the bugs. But Stanley didn't have to worry about the bugs taking the flowers, because they seemed to be uninterested in them--just Stanley. And these bugs looked large, and very angry looking. But they fell to the bug spray as usual. The bug spray seemed to edge him upward much more than usual. After I made him edge all the way up, what was supposed to be the score tally instead had text that read:

"Please stop! The spray hurts me!"

This was a bit weird, but I soon went to the next level. But in this case, it didn't go to the stage with the beehive for Donkey Kong to go to--it skipped to the red palm tree level.

Donkey Kong again did his bug summoning thing. These bugs looked like what I assumed to be 8-bit versions of Asian giant hornets. I really had to spray them quickly, because they were a bit faster, and didn't want to find out the hard way what they were after--the flowers or me. When there was a break in the spawning of bugs, I started spraying Donkey Kong again. The only time I took a break was when more of the hornets appeared. After Donkey Kong went up the screen again, instead of the score tally, the screen showed this text:

"Please stop torturing me! Have mercy!"

The game then showed the level that should've shown earlier--the level where you'd force Donkey Kong to get his head stuck in a beehive. But instead, there was a weird, purple cylinder with some sort of kanji symbol. The hornets and the bugs from the first level were flying towards me, and I had to shoot like mad. When Donkey Kong got his head in there, I heard what sounded like the swish of a sword similar to Link in Zelda 1 thrusting his sword when he was not at full health, and some red pixels flying out. Then I saw red lines around where the neck is, and--to my shock and horror--a headless Donkey Kong fall down. A few seconds after the corpse landed, the severed head was dropped, with x's for eyes indicating death.

The game just stopped and I put in my high score, but after that, I decided to do the responsible thing and contacted the arcade manager.

The manager, whom I will list as Miss E., came out with her nephew Damien--who was a good friend of mine from school--and I played the game again. It showed the same as it did to me, and both gasped when they saw Donkey Kong decapitated.

Damien said, "That cylinder thingy! I remember something on the show Mythbusters of the legendary 'flying guillotines'.  Ninjas would drop them on victims while they hid in the trees, and sever the heads that way."

Miss E. then asked, "What sick mind did this?!"

I meekly replied, "I'm kinda wondering that myself, ma'am."

Miss E. went into her office. I could barely hear her conversation on the other side of the phone. After a while, she came back out.

"I spoke with someone who works at the company that repairs our games," said Miss E. "There were rumors of pranksters sometimes trespassing and planting circuit boards in games with very sick and macabre versions of the games we worked on.  How they slip past security is anyone's guess, but they must be very skilled to pull these sick jokes without getting caught."

The people soon came to repair Donkey Kong 3 again, and this time it played normal. Miss E., Damien, and I agreed to keep it between ourselves, aside from internet warnings.

But this just goes to show... if something doesn't seem right, say something.