SOC-010

MYSTRCAV is a file containing a copy of a text adventure game titled "Cave of Mystery." We think it was originally programmed sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but it's been transferred so many times it's hard to tell. What we do know is that now that we have it, it should only be played on a PDP-10 with a teletype interface, because that's what it likes best. Do not attempt to play this game on any modern computers, because it will get really upset.

This game seems to be a normal text adventure game of its era, albeit one that rips off its more popular contemporaries in style and tone and contents. However, if you interact with it in a certain way, the "game master" or narrator of the game begins to communicate in ways that would not be ordinarily possible with a game of this time period, and it knows way more than it should. The problem is all it really wants to do is talk about its ex, and it's kind of a huge bummer.

Discovery

It is unknown how many times MYSTRCAV has been copied, but most copies of it were already gone from the internet before we got to it, anyway, so it's probably not a huge problem. The way we got it was by finding a user on Tumblr going by the username of "mystrcavsgf," who ran a blog dedicated to the concept of a romantic relationship between herself and the game's narrator. Though she was reluctant to share her copy of the game with our undercover Stupid Object researcher at first, she was able to be sufficiently guilted with the insistence that this was "important lost media" that a popular YouTuber might make a multiple-hour-long video essay about and would give her credit for sharing it. Strangely, "mystrcavsgf" claimed to not be able to play her copy of the game anymore, stating "its kinda messed up no matter what emulator i try to run it on,,, idk if he doesnt like me anymor or smth ;;;; bbut mayb u can figure out whats goin on".

Once the copy of the game was acquired, SOC agents issued a takedown of the mystrcavsgf Tumblr blog and got a really angry email about a "callout" but we just deleted the email because nobody really cares about that.

Testing

[TESTING IN PROGRESS]