I'll precede this story with this: I've contacted the proper authorities. More than likely this site is gone now- taken down by the police or whoever handles those kinds of matters.
Now. Let me tell you about the SpongeBob SquarePants video game site.
I know, it sounds incongruous- and to tell the truth, it kind of is. None of this feels... REAL, at all, looking back. Like it was a prank that went too far.
Here goes.
I won't go over the prattle of how I found this, or the page URL, or anything like that. That's a matter for the authorities as of right now, and it's also mostly unimportant. Either way, the site itself is the main concern. I'm mostly sharing this in case any similar sites pop up, or worse, this one returns.
The website itself looked like one of those flash compilation sites like AndKon or Y8- just a bunch of game names with screenshots of the games. Weird, generic nonsense and reskins of more popular games, mostly, although there were a couple of what were essentially real SpongeBob games with the serial numbers filed off- like B.C. Bowling, SpongeBob's Pizza Toss, etc. They all had weird word salad names, like "Spongbob's Pizza Fun Goods" and quite a few had random foreign-language text- most often Arabic. I had a loose grasp of Arabic from a college language class and, later, some Duolingo practice, so I at least recognized one word that seemed to show up very frequently- "جائزة خاصة." "Special prize," or thereabouts. I assumed at the time you could get some award from playing them up to a certain point.
I was right, but I wish I wasn't.
The graphics in the games themselves weren't all that much better. A lot almost felt like cut-and-paste from some knockoff SpongeBob asset pack- not to mention the voices, which used a lot of vaguely SpongeBob-esque knockoff voice lines, including a very pervasive “Yay!” of triumph- although I did note that a lot of official games used that sound, so maybe it wasn’t a bootleg-exclusive thing.
As I said before, the gameplay was very much incredibly barebones on almost all of the unofficial games. Tic-tac-toe, a very poorly-made basketball throwing game, a tower defense with less than 5 towers, and even a reskin of the game Home Sheep Home with improperly aligned GBA SpongeBob spritesheets slapped over the sheep. Evidently, this was the flash game equivalent of a pump-and-dump scam- just making a metric ton of video games to lure in kids.
Or, at least, that’s what I thought.
Alright, that’s enough single-sentence, ominous paragraphs. I figure now it’s time to enter the real meat and potatoes of the article, so to speak- the secrets I found inside of this website.
It began when, after scrolling quite a few of these games for morbid curiosity more than anything, I noticed something odd about one of the games- a password field below it. This field wasn’t embedded in the game- no, it was on the site itself, with Arabic text above it. I obviously don’t remember the exact translation, but it said something like “redeem your 10,000+ point code for a special prize-” again using the phrase “جائزة خاصة.” This seemed very odd- why would the site itself host the reward code, and not the game?
Thus, I began playing the game itself. The game was a very simple and shoddily-made Tetris clone where inputs barely worked and the entire game had a loop of an instrumental of the show’s song Best Day Ever under it, which didn’t even have proper loop points- it would fade out, get to around halfway through the first verse, and THEN loop. It was almost comical how poorly the games on this page were optimized.
It seemed suspiciously easy to get to 10,000 points- you often got a lot of square and line pieces, allowing you to very easily make Tetrises or at least 3-row clears. A particularly challenging take on the Tetris formula this very much wasn’t. It took me around 5 minutes to get to the score needed, at which point the game cut abruptly to a stock image of SpongeBob and his friends in Jellyfish Fields with the glaring Impact text “YOU WON! COPY CODE FOR FUN!”
The code itself was embedded into the game with a short generation screen, and then became a nonsense string of letters, numbers and punctuation- presumably so that you couldn’t get the code from somewhere else, as it was randomly generated. I felt a bit sketched out, but I reasoned that surely whatever was on this site absolutely was not THAT bad- it was a SpongeBob Flash games site, for God’s sake. So I popped my code into the field and immediately, without me even pressing enter, a new page loaded containing only a video file.
It began with a strange SpongeBob style title card reading “Meet SpongeBob!” in the show’s usual font. The music played in the show over police-related scenes (it’s the title card for Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy episodes if you’ve seen the show) as it cut to the opening credits, completely blank with no text, just the sand-covered ocean floor. It seemed they just downloaded a template off YouTube.
A bubble transition- with very poor green screen- cut to the video itself. It was an extremely poor-quality live-action video of the lower end of some kind of harbor, with a beachy area and water stretching out as far as the eye could see. I could hear muffled jostling and unintelligible talking, perhaps in a foreign language, as the person recording set up a camera on a tripod. Then the screaming began.
A woman in the video was absolutely wailing in pain or desperation, loud enough combined with the terrible bitrate to the point that it literally hurt my ears and I had to crank down the volume a few notches. Even through this barrage of volume, it still sounded muffled, though.
The camera spun around to reveal two people. One had a foam mask of that one Patrick “shocked” meme on their face, the other simply was covered in a ski mask, the type robbers wore. The Patrick one spoke up in an affected deep voice that sounded nothing like Patrick, gesturing wildly.
“Our friend is going to meet SpongeBob! How fun!” he said as he gestured to what the person in the ski mask was holding- a large, human-shaped burlap sack with lumps inside that was thrashing around. I realized now that the screaming was coming from the person in the bag.
Silly background music from SpongeBob (I couldn’t name the exact track as I’m not the kind of person who knows that sort of thing) played as the shot cut to the two of them walking towards the beach as the person in the sack thrashed and screamed, things like “YOU’RE MAKING A MISTAKE!” and “I’M SO SORRY!” I was assuming this was some kind of weird horror short, but even so, I was shocked by just how well the person in the sack was acting- she really sounded like her life was in danger.
The man in the Patrick mask continued, “I hope you have fun with SpongeBob and his friends!” and made a hurried gesture to the ski-masked one, at which point the ski-masked man threw the sack into the ocean.
Someone picked up the camera from the tripod and rushed over to the sack in the water. The sack was beginning to violently flail around, still screaming, as the sack- presumably weighed down by something inside it- slowly began to sink. The screams became muffled by water before they petered out, replaced by a stream of bubbles as their lungs presumably filled with water.
The camera turned to the two men, and the one in the ski mask held two thumbs up as the one in the Patrick mask said, “That’s all for today’s episode of Patchy the Pirate’s Sponge Club! Join-” and then the video abruptly cut with a crappy YouTube rip of the SpongeBob end credits.
After a long silence, I finally spoke to myself. “What the HELL was that?” I whispered. I mean, yeah, it was some kind of weird fake SpongeBob-themed snuff film, that wasn’t a huge deal- creepy and gross, but inoffensive to a rational person. Clearly, it was made to shock people. But why was it a prize on this SpongeBob Flash game site?
Even so, I assumed that more crappy films of this calibre were secrets on this page. I've always been a fan of low quality horror and attempts by edgy teens and young adults to get a rise out of people- mostly ironic, but there was a genuine undercurrent of bizarre affection for the sorts of movies and programs like Cannibal Holocaust and the Ensuring Your Place in Hell series. Therefore, I decided to find more of these videos. If nothing else, it'd be an interesting diversion. So, I set out to find more games with these passwords.
For the interest of variety and time in equal measure, I will be telling you about 4 more of these games besides the one that I found, and then the findings that I was able to uncover from there.
The next game I took a look at was one called “Sponges Boy Get Squidward Out.” It was a game in which you clicked on squares patterned after SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward- SpongeBob and Squidward turned into circles and Patrick turned into a long rectangle. The goal was to use physics and the two different states of the characters to remove Squidwards and keep SpongeBobs and Patricks on screen. The reward, as best as I could tell, would be an extra option on the title screen after clearing 40 levels, so I took to it.
I won't bother describing in detail HOW each game played rather than WHAT the gameplay was like, as that's sort of corollary to the story, but I will say that this one was surprisingly fun with a perfect difficulty- I played all 100 levels and completely forgot I was only supposed to get to 40. Either way, when I got back to the title screen, sure enough, another series of random characters. I pasted it in and another video loaded.
Another title card played, this one reading "Clarinet Practice!" This one was somehow even lower quality than the previous video, but the audio was slightly more listenable. From what I could tell, the men in the masks were back and this time they had bound someone to a chair, taping their mouth shut.
"Squidward's REALLY grumpy today!" Patrick said cheerfully, in that same voice from earlier, as he ripped the tape off the captive man's mouth, causing him to wince.
"You gotta stop this," the bound man panted, breathing heavily through his mouth after presumably not having used it for a while. "You gotta stop this, Rick, you-"
"What's that, Squidward?" Patrick asked, causing the bound man's eyes to widen and for him to rapidly shake his head. "You want to practice your clarinet?" He produced a clarinet from behind his back, the reed seemingly sharpened to a point. "Well, here you GO!"
He grunted out the last word forcefully as he jammed the reed into the captive man's neck. Blood burst from the hole in his throat and dripped down his torso, staining his shirt as he screamed and screamed before Ski-Mask forcefully clapped a hand over his mouth. The muffled screams faded and eventually stopped as the man slumped in his chair, falling over from the weight of his prone body and knocking down the chair.
"He sure does make nice music, doesn't he?" Patrick asked, and even through the blocky footage I could make out a smug grin in his voice. "Well, land-dwellers, that'll be all! Sorry for the short video, Patchy and I have really been busy lately! But we'll be giving you more nautical nonsense soon! Patchy the Pirate's Sponge Club, out!"
The credits played again. I had to say, I was impressed by the VFX on display here. Patrick really did look like he stabbed that guy in the throat, but there were definitely tells for me- the low quality video trying to fool the viewer into thinking it's real, mainly. More than likely, they hoped that the pixels would make it look more realistic. That didn't work for Bigfoot sightings and it won't work here.
After that the game I checked out was maybe the weirdest of them all. It was called "Dodge the Spong Ebob." The entirety of this game was simply moving around your mouse, which now had a stock image of SpongeBob pasted over it, and avoiding a stretched-out image of Plankton that randomly bounced around the area. If you lost, a loud stock scream would play and a game over screen would appear of a bloody, peeling SpongeBob that looked like one of those airbrush shirts you'd get from booths at the carnival. The reward here was surviving for 20 seconds, which was surprisingly difficult considering the completely random AI would mean oftentimes Plankton would ram straight into you. But sure enough, I eventually got there, and yet another video awaited me.
The video itself was the least gory- in fact, basically not at all- but was presumably the one you were supposed to watch first in this weird snuff film anthology. The video didn't have a title card but it opened instead on a shot of Patrick, mask still on, in a dark room, lit by a faint light plugged into the wall. His voice was notably far less deep, like he hadn't started doing the Patrick voice yet.
"Hello, naughty nautical neighbors! Welcome to the newest iteration of the Patchy the Pirate Sponge Club! Patchy isn't in here right now, he's tying up some loose ends." He chuckled, and then there was an awkward silence. "I know that the start of this whole thing has been a bit messy, what with the takedowns and the IP bans and all that, but I promise that I'll get these new episodes to you all, even if I have to start lurking on Myspace or something and use codewords." He held up a hand to give a thumbs-up, and it was revealed to be a glove absolutely CAKED in blood- like it'd been used to kill SOMETHING or other multiple times every day. "Remember, when they find out you've been watching these, and they ask you if what you saw was disturbing... tell 'em, 'no, that was Patrick!' Patrick out." He gave a peace sign with his blood-crusted glove and the video ended.
If they were trying to do a narrative here, it was extremely odd to have the killer randomly address the audience at the presumed beginning. That felt like needless worldbuilding if they really were just trying to do horror B-movie schlock. But nonetheless, I pressed on. I was getting some interesting details here.
The next game was a match-3 game with tiles made out of SpongeBob PNGs cropped poorly into squares, and one picture of a weird, thick red substance that seemed to be animated, oozing around. The award was at 30 matches, and once I quickly made that, the next video began.
"Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy's Last Stand" was the name of this one and the video opened on a shot of a very generic-looking fast food restaurant, when suddenly Patrick and Ski-Mask walked in.
"A normal day in the Krusty Krab," Patrick said in a more "dramatic" voice, "until..."
Ski-Mask pulled out a gun and fired several shots into the air. The customers and staff began to scream and panic, running around. One person at the front pulled out a phone and shakily spoke into it, the words inaudible but the message clear- they needed the police to come here.
There was another bubble transition and it cut to shaky-cam of the doors of the restaurant when two police officers burst in. Behind the camera you can hear Patrick speak in the same voice, "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy are here to save the day! But what's this?!" He put the camera back on a tripod and turned it, and you could see one of the police officers tackling Ski-Mask to the ground.
Patrick simply laughed in response to this. "It's Man-Ray!"
Patrick pulled out a gun and began to riddle the officer wrestling Ski-Mask with bullet holes, loud gunshots again ringing through the restaurant as the officer seized up and went limp, causing Ski-Mask to pick him up and throw him at the second officer, who began shooting as well as the rest of the establishment ran out the door.
"...and he's brought the Dirty Bubble!" Patrick continued, before picking up a pillowcase and forcing it over the second officer's head, tightening so he couldn't breathe. Ski-Mask produced a bucket of disgusting, brown mop water from nearby and began pouring it all over the officer's face, and yet another bubble transition cut to an empty restaurant except for the two officers- one riddled with bullet holes and the other purple from lack of oxygen, covered in dirty water.
"And once again the day is saved from the scourge of the law," Patrick shouted, "thanks to Patrick and Patchy!" He and Ski-Mask began to laugh maniacally and the video abruptly cut off.
Around now I was getting suspicions- I was slowly starting to wonder if maybe this wasn't staged. There was no way they could get THAT many people to be crowd actors on a low budget, and those bullet holes didn't seem at all like they were added in post or on the costume itself or anything. I began to feel ill imagining if these were real or not, but I was still erring on the side of fake, so I decided to look at one last one. That would be my determiner for if these even happened in real life or not.
I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the page for this one, and the game I chose was just a long, complex string of Arabic which I can barely even remember- I only saw the "award" thing from earlier and some stuff about God. The game itself wasn't really even a game, honestly- just a loud humming sound over a black screen with a pulsating texture over it that made me even more ill to look at. After around 20 seconds of looking at this and wondering if it was just a loading screen, it gave me a final code. This one was simple and I feel fine with sharing it because more than likely, these people are secretive. They won't use the same passwords twice.
"SANDY."
The video was in much higher quality this time and seemed to be recorded under the table at a fancy restaurant. A man with a very similar build to Patrick but not wearing a mask and an attractive young woman were sitting at the table. The woman seemed quite angry, and it opened with her yelling at who I could only assume was Patrick, mid-sentence.
"...make all of this about your stupid show for babies!" she shouted. "All I ask is that you be mature for one god damn moment when we're on a nice dinner date, and don't pull those stupid references out of your ass! For God's sake, I'm humiliated even being around you!"
There was a long pause, and Patrick- I knew now it was definitely him from the voice- spoke.
"...I hope my horrible ugliness isn't distracting-"
Evidently, this reference was enough for the girl. She screamed incoherently, slammed her hand on the table, and left the restaurant. There was a long pause, punctuated by heavy breathing from whoever was under the table, when just as I thought this was the rest of the video, it cut. Patrick was back in the mask, but he was only wearing a tank top this time and he was sweating heavily.
"Hey... there... Patchy fans... I... geez-" he bent over and retched, not actually vomiting but definitely dry-heaving. "This is... gonna be my last video for a while. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime! ...OK, time's up, haha!" He laughed at his own reference. "Well, you may remember I've been talking about how my ultimate goal for this series is to finally do an episode with Sandy. Well, guess who I found at the bus stop today!"
The video cut to a still image, and the sight of it made me have to go to the bathroom to throw up.
It was a human, for sure- but that was all I could tell from the image. It was a body that was absolutely cut up in every which way, like tiny animals were scratching at them constantly. From the little bits of skin I could still make out that weren't blood-red or scratched to unrecognizability, she was completely purple, just like the "Barnacle Boy" cop had been. Asphyxiated. Scratched to death while choking... Jesus Christ.
I'm not exactly a squeamish person when it comes to gore, but there was something different that I felt about this image, when I KNEW it was real. When my suspicions were confirmed- this was the tapes of a killer. It took me a long time to get all of my sick out, and when I came back, thankfully Patrick had just started talking again and I didn't have to look at it anymore.
"I guess squirrels just don't know how to swim! Ha! Squirrel jokes!"
I felt deep rage run through my body at this maniacal piece of shit and I kept watching, but only for one reason- to see if that rat-bastard ratted himself out. Saying his last name or showing a recognizable landmark. Something like that.
After a while of rambling on about how awesome it was to finally get to kill this woman he hated, he slipped up. Bingo.
"...and in a place like Encino, you just gotta believe! Ahaha!"
Bingo. Encino.
Patrick signed off with a simple hand-gesture this time, and a police siren faintly made itself audible, getting slowly louder, before the video closed.
After typing in a bunch of keywords related to "rick Encino murders SpongeBob" into Google like a lunatic, I finally found paydirt. Something this was definitely linked to.
I found a fairly obscure LA news site that was discussing a rash of murders committed by a man in a Patrick mask, just like Patrick was in the video. After sleuthing around LA population listings, I found what I was fairly certain was the guy, comparing it to my mental image of Patrick from the SANDY video- it matched perfectly. His name was Rick Elworth and he apparently ran a SpongeBob SquarePants fan club back when the show got big. Best as I could gather from the one news article and slivers of information about his pre-murdering internet presence, he became obsessed with SpongeBob and it got in the way of his personal life. I assumed then he just completely snapped- finding some psycho buddy to help him and committing these murders. I still don't know where he was posting these "fan club" videos, and I really hope I never find out. The idea that there's MORE of this guy out there, committing these heinous acts, makes me sick.
So here we are now. The site's down, I'm in contact with the police about the details of the videos, and hopefully Rick Elworth rots in prison for the rest of his life. I'm still awaiting word on a trial- evidently what I submitted filled in a ton of holes in what were known as the "Seastar Murders" in that small part of Encino.
But there is something you should know before I conclude this tale. Something that shook me to my bones.
A couple weeks after submitting the evidence and getting the site taken down, I got an email from an address that was just a bunch of random letters and numbers. When I saw the header, I got panicky and sweaty and immediately deleted the email as fast as I could, and reported the address for pretty much anything I could think of at the time.
The subject itself read just five words.
"Join the Patchy Club," and then my real first name.
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Author's Notes:
We are BACK!
As I said before, life got in the way, long story short. Glad to be back, though.
This was inspired by a video by the awesome workingself on YouTube. I decided to expand upon it.
Also, I'm switching gears. Evidently people have not been using the Disqus. That is fine by me.
I'm replacing it with a Chattable so you can ask me stuff and talk about things directly! Awesome!