Recently, I received an email from what appears to be a dead- or fake- address. The message itself was blank except for an attached file: "Super.jar." Now, at the time I had about nothing to lose, so I went ahead and opened it.
What follows is a description of what I experienced.
The .jar started fairly quickly as I was greeted with a title screen similar to that of Super Mario Brothers for the NES. Except-- it was all empty. No other sprites aside from the bushes, even the coin counter appeared to be missing. The title was replaced with "Super!," and the only option was "Game." I chose that option, obviously.
The title screen.
The game began in a castle level, with a long, seemingly endless bridge. I ran across for a good forty-something seconds before Mario reached a random, sudden death. The level restarts, and I manage to squeeze in fifty seconds of running time before another instant death; now having one life left. Ten - Twenty - Thirty seconds across the bridge and then - it crashed. Everything came to a screeching halt as the window froze up, ending the game. Honestly, I was as disappointed as I was creeped out by the whole situation- but I was also curious.
I fired up the file a second time, making my way back onto the bridge and actually making it to the edge- clocking in at around sixty seconds. I wasn't able to stop at the edge but instead fell off into the darkness below. A new level begins, this time with some actual platforming.
This new level consisted of mushroom platforms that appeared to be chained up straight on a floor made entirely of lava. It seemed pretty normal at first, until I realized that Mario could barely move; his jump height only half of what it should be. That was irritating. On the final platform was a brick-box holding a beanstalk. It was a challenge in itself to actually reach the stalk - with Mario's decreased mobility, of course. Climbing up the vine only restarted the level.
So, long story short, I repeated this process as controlling Mario became tougher and tougher with each restarting, until I physically couldn't jump up to hit the box.
"Fuck it," I thought, and jumped down into the lava. The game closed soon after, with a newly created blank text file on my desktop, simply titled "Thank you.txt"
Note: This 'story' isn't incredibly creepy as it's something that actually happened recently that I felt a needed to share. I still don't know who sent the file to me, or what the "Thank you" really meant, but I'm hoping to figure those out eventually.