Buryman

Remember the Buried Alive story? The story about an undead corpse that supposedly was originally going to be the boss of Pokemon Tower in Lavender Town? I never believed a single bit of it. Just to prove it was fiction, I copied the files of my Pokemon Red game onto my computer and took a look at as much of the games code as I possibly could.

While looking into the unused code and sprites looking for whatever supposed sprites and code like White Hand or Buried Alive. I found nothing on the white hand at all, no spite, no code, no nothing.

However, Buried Alive is a, for the most part, a different story. I found something, a sprite called “buryman” I don't remember what file it was, but it wasn't .gif as far as I know, since the original Game Boy can't read .gif images. The sprite looks very different then the one I see circulating the web all the time.

The sprite was still basically a zombie coming out of the ground, but part of the left arm seems to still be underground, while the right arm was bent on the ground as if it where crawling, about a fourth of the chest is concealed by the sprite's arm, bit what is visible shows a bare chest with it's ribcage clearly visible under the skin, some parts of the skin seem to have rotted away exposing rotting muscle and bone, including a few ribs. I can only describe it's face as to be as grotesque as the 8 bit system would allow. It's mouth was wide open with half of its lower jaw bone is clearly visible with what seems to be some teeth missing, possibly rotten away, how obvious. Its eyes seem to have an eternal, blank white stare, I also note the dark gray around it's right eye, but this is likely discoloration.

I was perplexed by this sprite, so I went to see if there was any code attached to it,well to my surprise, yes and no. there seemed to be code related to buryman, but nothing is really attached to it, in fact much of this script is a scrambled mess, much of it missing or change drastically so it would not work; it seems to be intentionally altered by quite possibly the team at Game Freak. They did a damn good job ripping the code apart, rendering it useless data, but they didn't get rid of it for whatever reason. Could Game Freak have forgotten about it or where too lazy to remove it? I don't know.

From what remained of the intact code, I could find only three things that really mattered at all.

- This code is likely from some time in Pre-Alpha stage, but I'm not certain. - It was to have 4 Pokemon, a Gengar, a Muk, a Haunter and a fourth lost in the scrambled code. - Buryman didn't just give you money and go like most trainers, instead he had a script all to itself upon its defeat, which maybe why some people say the game froze upon beating him.

I had to take this to a friend I knew, he's a far better than I am, maybe he knew something.

He told me he could make major alterations to the code to fix the buriedalive scripts and make it possible to fight it. However it would have to be played on an emulator, which I had, a VisualBoyAdvance, as he could not alter the game cartridge itself. I accepted his deal, loaded the files onto a flash drive and handed it to him. He then asked me how far I am into the game. Last time I remember I had just beaten Erika, healed up and ready to return to Lavender Town, so I told him this, he remarked at how convenient it was, and left taking the flash drive with him.

The next day my friend came back to my house and handed me the flash drive, he told me he made all the needed alterations and managed to keep my progress. Wasting no time I popped in the flash drive, loaded my VBA, loaded the altered game and went on from there.

make it back to Lavender Town and went into Pokemon tower, seemingly everything is the same as an unaltered game, that is until the 3rd floor, from there after beating the first channeler on that floor I began to hear strange noises, like the sounds of digging and tiles being broken, as I ascended I began to hear moaning, as if someone was in pain, however it sounded so distorted it couldn't be a moan in pain. From there everything was as normal until I got fairly close to where I would normally fight the dead Marowak, from here I can hear growling and snarling, which is funny because I don't see a sprite of anything. So I take a couple steps to where I would normally fight the Marowak and suddenly I hear an aggressive screech and enter what seemed to be a trainer battle, only the encounter tone was distorted, as was the music that played during a trainer battle.

“buryman wants to fight” the text box says, there I see the zombie sprite I saw just days before, I first bring out my Raichu, it brings out a Haunter, a quick thunderbolt caused the Haunter to faint. Now keep in mind my Pokemon are all about level 40+ already just a heads up. For whatever reason, as this thing brought out it's next Pokemon, a Marowak of all things, the music began to distort further, almost in a demonic manner. I brought out my Gyarados and took care of the Marowak with ease. Next was Gengar, I expect things to become even creepier from here, I brought out Mew and sure enough a dose of Psychic does the trick. Psychic's sound was different this time, rather than the usual sound, a remixed version of the sound including high pitched binaural beats played instead. I wasn’t affected by the sound despite being able to hear the high frequency sounds quite clearly but I bet that would really give someone a headache given certain circumstances.

Finally, buryman was down to it's last Pokemon, a Muk. Same deal as Gengar, Psychic. I won! Oh wait, have I won? I clearly beat him but it's not showing the usual victory sequence, for a few moments the music was gone, everything was silent. The screen went black for a fraction of a second and immediately after came a horrid scream, not like a scream for help, but like the scream from before when this battle began. The music played again, only this time it was about 3 times faster than usual and buryman came out into view, not to admit defeat, but, from the looks of it, to fight me and my team, the was level was blank, only showing it's name above the health bar.

So I guess this is what happens, am I surprised? Slightly. I wasn't given the choice to switch Pokemon, Raichu automatically switched out Mew. Why? Why is that? Anywho, unto the battle.

I had yet to test out thunder and this odd occasion seemed like the opportune time to test out Raichu's Thunder, which he had just learned. So I select thunder,by now I'm expecting something creepy to happen. The thunder animation plays as normal, and buryman's health dropped, little by little, all the way down to one hit point. The screen goes black for a frame and I am instantly back in the overworld. I take 2 steps back automatically as an overworld sprite of buryman slowly crawled toward me. The sprite was bald and had dark patches all over it's body, and from the looks of it, it's legs were torn off.

Raichu suddenly appeared in front of me, in between me and buryman, a text box appears, reading

“Raichu: Get over here you rotting son of a”

I pressed what was mapped as the A button and the screen goes black again. The sound clip of thunder played and the screen rapidly flashed as if it was trying to give you a seizure. With each flash showed a picture of an undead man with no legs being ripped and blown apart.

After this little sequence, I'm back in the overworld. Only where the buryman sprite was is not a pool of blood, as is the area surrounding it. Raichu was back in his ball, I went and checked his summary and immediately I see the spite is not at all the same. Raichu was standing up straight, had his arms crossed, was covered in patches of blood and had a smirk on his face. Is my Raichu suddenly Max Payne now? Also he now seems to be level 50 strange, he was 44 before, and I didn't exactly get any notice of XP gain.

Going back to the overworld, the tower is silent. I go to the top floor expecting the rest of the game to play like normal, but no, only Mr. Fuji happens to be there, no rockets, nobody.

As normal I escort him to his house, he give me the Pokeflute and I continue in my way, only Lavender Town's music is not playing, in fact nothing was playing at all, the entire town was completely silent....

As I go onward to route 12 I face myself with the questions I had asked before. Why was the script scrambled for these things and not simply deleted entirely? Was Game freak too lazy or busy to get rid of it? Or did they know someone would hack the game one day and scrambled the script to make it harder to re-implement?

I may never know such things, nor do I wish to know, somethings should remain a mystery, Ignorance is bliss at this point.