Taboo The Sixth Sense

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Have you guys ever heard of the game "Taboo: The Sixth Sense?"

If you haven't, that's okay. It's not exactly an NES classic, but it was a game I had as a kid. It was basically Tarot cards put into video game form. You see, when you start off you get the title screen and you press start and you would put in some info about yourself, stuff like your name, birthday, gender, that sort of thing. After that you would type out your question, and it would show you a card shuffling scene followed by your "answer" which usually had absolutely nothing to do with what you asked. In lament's terms, it was a more complex version of a Magic 8 Ball.

No matter how dumb it was though, I wanted it as a kid. It wasn't even a new game, I had just found it at an old used game store, and bought it to play on my brother's NES. Now, I didn't know that it was dumb at first and I virtually had to BEG my parents to buy it for me. I don't come from a very religious family, but I think they thought I was part of some cult when I asked for it, so I'm not really sure if they were angry or relieved when I stopped playing after about 10 minutes.

This is where it just starts to get weird though. I had gone back to school (I was in probably 8th grade at the time) and was talking to my friend about Taboo, he didn't know what it was, so I explained what it was and told him to not buy it because it sucked. That's when this kid named Dwayne come up and start talking to me. Dwayne was the stereotypical nerd. He had bad acne, dorky glasses, and always sat around by himself with some of his other friends. He also, occasionally, wore these purple robes to school. I was surprised when he started talking, he never spoke to anyone at all, but he was talking about Taboo. He told me that the game wasn't stupid, and that it was probably just too complex for me, and that I didn't understand it's powers. You can probably imagine my surprise at how this kid I barely knew came up to me, and started insulting me about a game that I had thought only I really knew about.

My friend and I just kind of stood there for a second, then I asked him what he meant. He told me that it could tell the future, and that he always uses it to train because he is an apprentice wizard. Obviously, this was even more surprising than what he said before. Now, I wasn't exactly the kind of guy to say something insulting to Dwayne, my friend was however and promptly told Dwayne that he was an idiot and walked away. I stood there a second longer until Dwayne told me that Satan doesn't like it when people make fun of him, and invited me to join him. That's when I walked away.

That day was a thing that I ended up forgetting about for a long time. So was Taboo: The Sixth Sense, I had set it down somewhere and just simply forgot about it. Weeks went by, then months, then years, and pretty soon I had graduated, went to college for a while, and moved out, leaving behind the NES and Taboo. I am 25 now, it's been more than a decade since that day when I got Taboo, or talked to Dwayne (well, I guess he talked to me, more than I talked to him).

So why am I thinking about this again?

You see, I was watching the news the other night and I saw that the police just busted a cult for animal abuse. They had been keeping animals like dogs, cats and even rats and raccoons, in small cages and killing them for sacrifices. I wasn't really paying attention, until the mentioned Dwayne. The kid that told me he was a wizard for Satan or whatever. He can't be much older than me, but he looks like he's about in his 40's. He was balding, had big round glasses with thick lenses, and still suffered from that bad acne. At first I thought it was kind of funny "so that's where Dwayne went." I thought. That was until they said the cult was recruiting children using a game. A game called (you guessed it!) "Taboo: The Sixth Sense" that's what caught my attention. They informed parents that if they saw their child with that game, to take it away. They also said the Dwayne, and a few of his buddies, would be spending 120 days in jail, and face a hefty fine for the animal abuse.

This got me interested again. I started thinking back to when I played it. There wasn't really anything too strange about that game, except for the concept. So I decided to do some research about it. Most of what I found were videos, or some other random gaming articles about the game play (if you can even call it that) that I didn't care about. After deeper research however, I found some pretty creepy stuff.

What I found was a Reddit page about it. It was posted by a father who says that he bought the game for his son about 4 years ago, because his son loved really old, and odd, video games. After he had given it to him, the son started acting a lot more irritable, he would get mad at almost every little thing that the dad did, and he would spend almost all his time in his room playing the game, the only time he ever came out would be to eat and, once a week, go out with some of his buddies and do God knows what and come back late at night then go up and start playing again. His grades went down at school, he never had any friends over or did any of the things he used to like to do. Then one day, when he went out with his friends, he never came back. He had disappeared without a trace. The father checked his room and it was a mess. Clothes and old food were thrown all over the floor, there was a Coke stain that had mushrooms growing on it. He also found the game. It was neatly placed in the NES and was just about the only thing that wasn't broken or ruined.

That was the only thing that had to do with Taboo and any kind of strange cult activity. Still, we don't know for sure if the kid joined any kind of strange Satanic cult. Now, obviously, this is just a Reddit article from some random guy on the internet, but I'm finding it hard for myself to disregard it so easily now that I know it's used as a cult recruiting tool.

Do I believe that "Taboo: The Sixth Sense" has any kind of, supernatural connections to anything, or can predict the future? No. At least, I don't think I think so. All I know for sure, is that I have never seen a game with so much power. Not a power like, seeing the future, or having links to Satan, but the power to control. This game has the power to convince kids join a cult that worships Satan and sacrifices dogs, so clearly it has some sort of, I guess you could say, brainwashing ability.

If you find this game anywhere like a game store, or a yard sale, feel free to pick it up. Just remember to keep a clear head. Don't start obsessing over it, don't think it holds any kind of truth, and don't let any kind of child play it at all.

-Rockyraccoon