Secret of Mana

In 1997, when he was a teenager, LazyCouchGamer picked up a used copy of the fantasy role-playing game  Secret of Mana  at a video rental store. He was playing through the game’s fire palace alongside a princess when enemy blobs of lava appeared. They began multiplying. Suddenly, an enemy blob seemed to grab the princess and disappeared, he recalled. Her HP gauge disappeared, too. It was like she had never existed. He freaked out, but reconsidered, thinking it was just a sudden and unexpected plot twist in the game. But later on, he couldn’t progress further: The game would wait and wait for a text box from the princess, who had vanished into nothing. He reset the game, and for years, joked that it was haunted.