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2025 Update: The aforementioned image comes from the trailer for a horror movie called Exte. You can find it at the 57-second-mark here. Low-budget horror games from this time are interesting to me for the way they rip outside media and somehow work it into their story. Earlier in the same game, there’s a computer where you can find a short video of that talking bacteria mobile game. Anything is possible

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Since 2020, multiple YouTubers (notably Nexpo and Goose Boose) have made videos about a certain event in an obscure (not so much in Japan, but obscure in the US) RPG Maker horror game named Utahonotatari 2 or Haunting 2. RPG Maker horror games are one of my favorite subgenres of horror (one of my favorite genres of anything already) so it was a pleasant surprise seeing two YouTubers I’ve already watched for ages talking about them.

In the game, there is a supposed glitch which is triggered after walking through a pair of structures in a certain area, where your game would create a fake error before cutting to black with some occasional glitchy noises and flashes of white, before cutting again to what appears (to most people) to be a low-quality photo of a supposed corpse.

Here’s a video of the glitch in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uFSsLNoy3k

For the last few years, people have slowly been finding out about this game & the supposed glitch inside of it and treating it as if it really is a glitch with a real photo of a corpse. Obviously, it’s not.

I found a way to extract all the data and files used in a Wolf RPG Editor game (because usually they're compressed into giant files called Data.wolf that contain everything) and in the games files, there's an entire folder named "ばぐ" in the games files (translated to computer bug in English, thanks Tea 4 helping), and it’s dedicated to all the images and textboxes used during the glitch.

As well, this practice is used a few times throughout the duration of the game instead of video files, and the supposed “corpse image” is even reused in different areas of the game! 

It’s very obvious this is a planned glitch not only because of the creepy nature but two things:

1) The textbox quality before it starts to go all over the screen is very compressed (looks like it was made in an older version of MS Paint, but that’s just based off the way it’s compressed, I have no way of proving that) and low quality because the majority of the images made by the creator of the game that were used in the game were made in 320x240, and get stretched to at least 640x480

2) Most of the footage of this glitch was recorded by people who speak English (after the glitch became well known over here) and the textboxes that are triggered by Wolf RPG Editor and go all over the screen seem to be random symbols because they do not have their computers set to a Japanese locale

Here’s a screenshot of what it would look like without an English locale:

One thing I’ve seen that really confuses me is the point that “if this were a real event, why would it only happen once throughout the game?”

My first thought upon hearing that was “no shit it only happens once”

The whole point of it is to catch the user off guard, appearing as if it were a true glitch; in a very quiet section of the game I might add. If it happened more than once, it would totally ruin the immersion that the error brings when it does happen that one time.

While there’s already a large community of people bonding together to try and find old ROBLOX clients that are currently lost from March 2007 and before, there are a lot of people who are taking a step back and are instead recovering old photos, videos, now-deleted-forum-posts, and other miscellaneous media from ROBLOX’s infancy. In 2006, Shedletsky (formerly known as Telamon) made a slew of now-deleted posts on sites like Gamedev.net asking for feedback and promoting the self-proclaimed “virtual world building game”. Many of these included screenshots of the game, many of which aren’t fully archived. One of these posts was from October of 2006, and included some screenshots of the special Halloween brickbattle map, known as “Haunted Mansion”. In 2010, a random user uploaded one of these screenshots as a ROBLOX shirt, for some reason. The image doesn’t use the provided shirt template and therefore doesn’t fit on the avatar at all, but hey - at least Gordonrox24 successfully archived and preserved some old ROBLOX media without knowing it. The second and final image is the original image, although some of the quality has been lost as ROBLOX compresses shirt image uploads into 1:1 images - before I stretched it to 768 x 472 pixels, which is the dimensions of many of the other full-size screenshots Shedletsky took around August to November of 2006. Hopefully you learned something new, and hopefully this wasn’t too long, convoluted, and completely nonsensical if you don’t have a basic understanding of what I’m talking about already