Pokémon Incident

I met my best friend in elementary school. We had both brought our Gameboys to school one day and sat together at lunch once we realized what we had in common. I had Blue version and a Venausaur, he had Red version and a Charizard. He and I battled whenever we could and became great pals. As the years went on, we continued playing Pokemon, even through high school. Throughout all of the Pokemon generations and versions we went though, the battles never became dull.

As we approached college, we had to go separate ways. We didn’t speak much after that; we had such busy lives to follow in college. I didn’t think we would ever regain the friendship we once had. Then, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were released in 2007 and we once again enjoyed our common interest in the series. We battled and talked over Wi-Fi nearly every day for a few weeks after its release.

My friend told me that he planned to play through his old Red version again. Since it had been about three months after the release of Diamond and Pearl, we didn’t play them as much as before. I asked him why he wanted to play that dusty old cartridge, and he responded, “I don’t know, maybe I’ll find something that no one has found before.”

Despite my unwillingness to run through my Blue version with him, he played his Red version anyway. After he started his journey, I never talked to him again. About three weeks later, I received a call from my friend’s parents.

Even though he never had any similar problems before, he died from what was speculated to be an intense seizure. He was alone in his dorm room until a roommate, who was unfortunately too late, found him lying on the ground, lifeless, and strangely wearing his favorite headphones. I flew out as soon as I could to attend his funeral. His roommate, who was going to attend as well, informed me that just days before the incident my friend was becoming obsessed with Lavender Town and its music. My friend had aspired to become a sound engineer after graduating and had a wide range of audio skills at his disposal. He could always hear quiet sounds vividly while I failed to even recognize them at all.

As soon as he rediscovered Lavender Town, he ripped its audio to his computer and began experimenting with it. Interestingly, he bragged about finding a rare rip of the music from the first distributed batch of the Japanese-exclusive Green version. Not specifically referring to the special Japanese version, he had told the roommate that, “The frequencies in this song are different; they blend together in a special way. But there’s something missing. I think something was meant to be mixed in, but it never could have worked on the Gameboy. It was so limited in terms of sound bandwidth.” I had the chance to go through his laptop one last time, so I visited his Recent Items list. At the very top read “lavender.wav”. Along with a few photos of us together, I copied this to my flash drive. Caught in my sadness over my best friend’s death, I ignored the audio file until a few weeks before writing this. I somehow recently decided that I needed to retrace what had happened.

Driven by my desire to know what caused his untimely death, I opened the properties dialog box for the audio file, without opening the file to listen to it. Within the comments section of the metadata, he had written, “binaural tones, i added the necessary frequencies, i know why lavender town sounds so sad, and i know the part that was missing”. Even eerier, I looked in his default audio program (still without listening to the file) and found the playcount for this file. One. I chatted with a sound enthusiast online in hope to decipher these cryptic comments. He gave me some special software which would analyze the audio in real time and said that was the most that could be done. This video is a screen recording of me running the aforementioned software with the original audio file. To this day I have not listened to the actual audio, as I am too emotionally disturbed by my best friend, Anthony’s, death.