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## Pokémon Discussion

### Lavender town kills boy? - Page 1

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#### Lavender town kills boy?

Posted by: Glitch Hunter
Date: 2010-11-19 05:00:22
Ok so I was looking for stuff on the psychological effects of pokemon on children and found this on DA (Credit to FurryFan112)
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.
The story of one boys friend dying from listen to the secret tone when rendering the lavender town theme
yes his friend did die due to "epileptic fits" when the boy had never suffered from them in his life?
and if you read the first letter of each paragraph you get to be honest i am pretty freaked out when listening to this recommend you don't use head phones!!!! DEAR GOD DON'T
I
A
M
D
E
A
D
Creepy shit yes lavender town syndrome is very dangerous caused when playing the game pokemon green and red with head phones on this binaural tone has severe effects on children and is extremal dangerous to 7 -12 year olds and? has anyone got to lavender town ever wonder why it so sad the link above provide a secret sound an 9:00 it is a hidden frequency within the lavender town theme tune it get real creepy at 9:00 i will post the info about the "lavender town syndrome"
Overview [$OVR]
The phenomenon of the "Lavender Town Tone" is a legend that involves a bizarre spate of medical cases and deaths from around the country that have been connected to the "Pocket Monsters" (Pokémon) series of games, in particular the first two games of the series, "Red" and "Green". Though the event is largely unheard of due to disclosure laws for companies based in the Kyoto Prefecture, there is a large amount of information that has been brought into the open by a number of dedicated individuals, including (Seki Uchitada) (Ise Mitsutomo) and 佐 治 (Satou Harue), to whom this page is dedicated. Thanks also go out to 忠 (Andou Kagetada) for providing images and animated .gifs of the visual phenomena.
This analysis will discuss the other phenomena that is often confused with the "Lavender Town Tone", known as "White Hand Sprite", "Ghost Animation" and "buried alive model", as well as the semi-related developer-tag that was inserted into the game, and how to safely perform these "easter eggs" in post-first wave cartridges.
History of the Game [$HIG]
The first cases of the "Lavender Town Tone" and associated events were reported a few months after the release of of "Pocket Monsters Red and Green" for the handheld "Game Boy" videogame console. These videogames were wildly popular with children between the ages of seven and twelve (their core demographic), which was no doubt one of the reasons why the "Lavender Town Tone" had the level of severity that it did. In the game, the player takes on the role of a "Trainer", whose task it is to capture, tame and train wild creatures called "Pocket Monsters" for battle. These games, and the two newest additions to the series, "Pocket Monsters Gold and Silver", an anime, manga, figurines, a collectible card-game and home console games have resulted in Pocket Monsters becoming a multi-billion dollar franchise.
In one part of the game, the Trainer comes to a small, out-of-the-way place called "Lavender Town" (). This town is one of the smallest hamlets in the game (aside from the Trainer's own home town), and possesses very few of the services available to the Trainer in every other city in the game - indeed, the location would be unremarkable were it not for the "Pokémon Tower" () located there - a colossal building that holds the graves of hundreds of deceased Pokémon.
It is theorised that, because of this location in the game, at least two hundred children lost their lives, and many more developed sudden illnesses and afflictons - and this does not consider the vast waves of unreported illnesses or deaths whose cause went unnoticed.
History of the Pathology [$HIP]
It was not until Spring/Summer of 1996 that the cases that would eventually become linked to the Lavender Town Tone began to surface. The earliest record of the acknowledgement of the effects of the Lavender Town Town that the author could find came from an internal report made in June 1996 by the company Game Freak Inc. (株式社), which was then leaked by one of its former employees, Ms. Satou Harue. In it, an employee gives a list of names, dates and symptoms - records of children between the ages of 7 and 12 who had suffered various medical problems as a result of playing Pocket Monsters Red and Green versions. Some records are listed below, with the full listing in Appendix A [here]. (It should be noted that entries in the Appendix also include symptoms borne not from the "Lavender Town Tone" [an audio phenomenon] but from the so-called "White Hand Sprite", "Ghost Animation" and "buried alive model", all of which were visual phenomena that provoked similar but distinct symptoms. More details on Part Two [here]).
京 女; April 12 1996 (11). Obstructive sleep apnea, severe migraines, otorrhagia, tinnitus.
幸: May 23 1996 (12). General irritability, insomnia, addiction to videogame, nosebleeds. Developed into violent streaks against others and eventually himself. [殺]
: April 27 1996 (11). Cluster headaches, irritability. Eventually took mixed painkillers. [殺]
: March 4 1996 (7). Migraines, sluggish and slow behaviour, unresponsiveness. Developed into deafness, and went missing. Body discovered beside road April 20 1996. [死]
The document that was circulated internally was the first time that these incidents had been connected with the Pocket Monsters videogames - until then, the cause had not been discovered or diagnosed by medical professionals. Indeed, it is uncertain how the company themselves managed to find the cases related to the event without seeking advice from health services.
Pathology Detail – "Lavender Town Tone" [$PAT]
The predominant symptoms related to what would become known as the "Lavender Town Town" included headaches and migraines, bleeding from eyes and ears, mood swings and irritability, addiction to the games, unprovoked violence, withdrawal and unresponsiveness, and in approximately 67% of cases, suicidal tendencies. However, these symptoms only manifested in children between the ages of 7 and 12 years old who had reached the area in game known as "Lavender Town", most of whom were revealed to have been wearing headphones or earphones while playing the game (see Appendix A [here]).
As it turns out, the developers of the Lavender Town area had sought to make an area that would "leave an impression on the player", according to Seki Uchitada, who was a member of the development team. Seki claimed that at the time of development, a number of the team were interested in making Lavender Town a little different to the rest of the game.
"The Pokémon Tower is a visible result of that," Seki told の次"Game's Dimensions" Magazine) in an interview earlier this year. "That, and the fact that Lavender Town is so different from all the other cities in the game: it is smaller, it has fewer people occupying it, it didn't have a gym… and, of course, the music was very, very eerie. In fact, in the first version of the game, we were told to slightly change the song played in the background of Lavender Town … because our manager told us it would make children upset. The music used in subsequent versions is different."
Either Seki was unaware of the full impact of the Lavender Town Tone, or was vastly underexaggerating how "upset" children would get - no more is said of the music in the article, but there are mentions of Lavender Town's other macabre features (see below).
What Seki failed to disclose to Game's Dimensions Magazine was that the music used in the first-wave release of Pocket Monsters Red and Green was formulated out of an experiment in "binaural beats": using slightly different frequencies of sound, each frequency played in one ear through earphones or headphones, various psychological effects can be induced upon the listener. In most versions of the first wave releases, this resulted in the player feeling uneasy, apprehensive, and mildly disturbed. However, for upwards of two-hundred children, it provoked a variety of disturbances in the brain that went undetected purely because it was undetectable by fully developed human ears - instead, only children fell victim to the tones , resulting in psychological and physiological problems that in some cases led to death - many of which were suicides.
Thoughts?

#### Re: Lavender town kills boy?

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2010-11-19 09:28:33
There are actually various versions of this 'Lavender Town conspiracy'. It was initially popularized by fan-fiction posted to pastebin.com, with its original basis not actually focussing on Lavender Town (though mentioning Lavender Town and binaural/high frequency tones). http://pastebin.com/f71e6728f.
This has been partly discussed on our forums before, http://forums.glitchcity.info/index.php/topic,6148.0.html. The Lavender Town music in the original 1.0 build of Pokémon Red and Green did in fact use 'binaural'/high frequency tones which may be unpleasant for younger players, though it is not likely that they would be the cause of anything serious and at most likely you wouldn't really expect anything worse than mild headaches and nausea. There are multiple baseless claims, for example, the original story suggests that there was a game developer "Chiro Miura" who apparently "did not want to appear in the game credits" and "committed suicide shortly after the game was released". The 'Lavender Town conspiracy' became increasingly popular after the original fan-fiction was replicated, similar stories, such as the one you just posted were submitted and readers began to link the story with the fact that the original Lavender Town theme was different in the original revision of Red and Green.
There are multiple examples of these "urban myths", they are sometimes very popular but tend to be less convincing. "Pokémon: Lost Silver" is a good example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKnCBwsa-bU
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