EDIT 3/27/2017: As the original author of this pasta, I have taken it upon myself to re-write this piece. Mainly because when I originally wrote this, it was rather poorly organized and written.
-SUPERMARIOFAN123311
This is a true story that happened in the ZDoom forums in the year 2013. At that time, there was a forum user called Zygo, who was apparently a big fan of horror games that address psychological issues, like Silent Hill for example. This is not something very unusual to find in the community of fans, as many people ask for mods with these themes. (And considering this is Doom we are talking about, some people may prefer the horror atmosphere of Doom 3 or the original Playstation port of Doom.) Several users attempted to create mods inspired by Silent Hill and similar themes. If there's anything in psychological horror that seems to captivate people, it's causing them to feel a genuine fear that is born within you, much stronger than simple images of monsters can create. But nobody could have expected something like the more macabre and unsettling WAD created by Zygo, called Root Pain.
The post was literally just an attachment image of his project's logo, with text reading "NO INFORMATION PROVIDED", and a link to download was all the topic recently created on the ZDoom Forums. Zygo didn't say anything more, letting the players find out that it was. Soon, users started to comment that the mod was disturbing, including people who said they wouldn't sleep well at night after playing this mod. Before I begin, Zygo originally was an avid forum member, more so a pretty normal guy. He was originally working on a mod themed after the video game Blood, called "POSSEST", which was sadly canned due to him reportedly losing all of his progress. In April of 2013, just before releasing this mod, he released a short-lived WAD called "Classic Rivalry". Essentially, this WAD was meant to "compete" with Terminusest13's Samsara project, in being a similar mod starring FPS heroes and material from an assortment of different games from Doom to Duke Nukem 3D, all the way to Killing Time. It was heavily criticized for being unbalanced and he ended up having an egotistical response towards his criticism. I's also worth noting that Zygo, since 2014, had been banned from the forum for unknown reasons. All this created a mystical aura around the mod, as if it were something that would be hidden forever unless one checked it out for themselves. Root Pain had awakened my curiosity, by causing a certain feeling of revulsion in the other users that is not uncommon to see if this was a "screamer" (those typical videos in which a frightening picture emerges of anything on the screen, with an exaggeratedly high scream), or something completely different. There was something uniquely grotesque in that mod, and I soon would find out what it was.
I decided not to read anything past the first page of the thread, so I wouldn't spoil my “experience”. After downloading the WAD and starting the game, I opened up the menu to find only three options: Start, Epilogues, and Xcape (a pun on the word Escape, how original – I know). I decided to explore each of these bottom-up option. Xcape would be the equivalent to Quit Game, except that the only confirmation message that seemed to be configured to appear was "It will live...". That made me assume that the mod's intention was to kill something specific. But what would it be? Was this something like CutmanMike's Ghoul's Forest trilogy or something? The Epilogues option was only the configurations options in disguise, and with a limited number of options to choose from. There remained only the start option. I quickly selected it, and for a moment is displayed an image with a symbol that represents the female gender, depicted in a bloody fashion, before the map loaded up.
When the game begins, it's noticeable that the scenario represents the inside of a living creature of sorts. Both the walls and floor are made of pulsing flesh. There is no sky. Instead, it's this pink, misshapen texture representing the guts of whatever animal that the player is in. Red blood cells can be seen hovering in front of the player, for the entire length of the map. Moving into contact with any of these cells causes them to drop onto the ground. Moving on, a fork with identical paths to the left and right who drove to the locations, but that were inhabited by a strange sphere which also appears to be a cell, or an internal organ. The player is disarmed, there is no information on the screen indicating your amount of health, not even the traditional Doom HUD bar with “Mr. Doomguy” looking left or right. Instead, there's nothing to do there but to roam in that limited space, listening to the sound of a sinister BGM of the environment made of synthesized notes blended with a sound that resembles the beating of a heart. There are no switches to be pushed, there is nothing equivalent to a door, no secret passages or enemies. Then, when you open the map, you'll realize that I was right about the theory of the game being inside the bowels of someone. The map’s name is simply “Womb”, and the drawing of the map formed on the screen is nothing more than a female’s uterus.
That would explain the female symbol at the beginning of the game, as well as in the spheres of the map that represented ovaries. But this still didn't give me any directions about what to do. Confused, I resolved to resort to only measure that was appropriate at that time to try to keep playing: use the classic IDKFA cheat code for access to some weapons and, curiously even after having them on hand, there was no counter on screen to show ammunition, items, or really anything. It's no use shooting the red blood cells, as they just wander around there. I only have the ovaries. I took the path on the right and, after firing a rocket into the egg, what sounded like a woman screaming in pain could be heard. Suddenly, the whole map started shaking violently, with the ovary exploding into a pool of blood. I repeated the process on the left ovum, which also disposed into a bloody heap, while the whole map shakes and the moan of terrifying agony is played again. When I decided to return to the beginning of the map, I came across something even more bizarre. Something that nearly made me jump out of my fucking chair: a giant fetus monster of sorts, graduating in the same place where the player starts the game amid distorted sound, as it floated toward my direction. The sound was just... disgusting honestly. My reaction was to fire several rockets against this towering unborn baby. It kept moving forward, and once it finally touched my player - another scream, even more horrible than the first, is heard. Soon, the game crashed, with the distorted sound of the fetus continuing to play infinitely.
Through the administrator of tasks, I was able to close my frozen game. I felt sick. The pain in my stomach was big and I thought I was going to vomit right there in front of the computer. I had just finished playing a mod where your goal was to perform an abortion, and I began to understand why Zygo probably would've been banned. Upon returning to the thread on the ZDoom Forums, I came across more information which were discovered by other users about this grotesque mod.
There were secret messages within the file that should appear on the screen when running the usual Doom cheat codes (things like "You are insterile!" for IDDQD or "Mifepristone added" for IDFA, being the name of Mifepristone abortion pill). Also, when you tried to get out of the game, there was a chance the confirmation message "long lives the UNBORN" would be displayed on the screen. The names of the Actors are bizarre to say the least. The playerclass is no longer DoomPlayer and becomes a "Parasite", while the fetus is called Zygo. Yes, Zygo, the name of the creator of this mod. This made things worse in hindsight by being about aborting a fetus. The fetus of the fucking author who made this sick mod. That to me was the sickest thing I had seen in a gaming community. As if that wasn't enough, looking at the properties of the fetus, it's possible to see that their values are absurdly exaggerated, perhaps to make it impossible for the player to kill it by normal means (the fetus is still vulnerable to console commands, such as the "mdk" who kills any monster that the player is looking, which triggers the secret message: "You have successfully aborted the child.") However, one thing called a lot of attention from some forum users. The overall health of Zygo is expressed by the number 1215182091514. It could just be a random number, but people were thinking that the number was too specific to be a mere coincidence.
Theories continued rolling by the thread of Root Pain, until the user Pyroscourge discovered the meaning of the 1215182091514 number. Basically, it wasn't meant to be a single giant number, but an encrypted message. Each of these represents a letter of the alphabet. One could separate the number as follows: 1 2 15 18 20 9 15 14. Now, if we replace each of these numbers by your respective letter of the alphabet, appears:
1 2 15 18 20 9 15 14
A B O R T I O N
All this raised several questions in the thread. Some speculated that Zygo had suicidal tendencies, or that he might have suffered an attempted abortion (coincidence or not, the name he gave himself was the resulting cell after fertilization, called Zygote, or in English, Zygothe, which led some people to question whether there was any relationship between the word Zygote and the choice of the name "Zygo" for that user). Others were quite skeptical about the mod in General, some making jokes and others just saying that Zygo wanted attention – Especially after the "Classic Rivalry" fiasco. As for Zygo, he never gave a response. He never even reposted in his own thread. From the moment of his creation, until his community banishment (for other reasons that don't relate to the mod itself), there hasn't been a single answer from the creator. To this day, Zygo hasn’t been seen again on the face of the internet.
I still stick around in the Doom modding community to this day but even so – I’ve never been disturbed this much from an actual Video Game.
You can read the original thread here: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=36738
Gameplay of the mod...