Lavender Town Cursed Music

[Ecco]

Hey so in the Gameboy game, Pokemon Red and Blue / Green...

The original music of Lavender Town was said to be cursed. Or at least, very gloomy music that would affect certain people, to feel sad, depressed, etc.

There was even the urban legend which is probably not true, of 100 Japanese kids killing themselves, after playing Lavender Town... Assuming it's not true, then it's funny that people were spreading that urban legend, lol.

Anyway, I've never played the games, and I was wondering if anyone could point out the LEGIT original, JP version of that song?

There are several versions on YouTube but they all sound slightly different, so I'm not sure what to think...

[Lync]

First off - Go play Pokemon Blue/Red/Yellow.
It's delightful. I'm not a Pokefreak, I still have the cards, but I never played anything after the three flavors of the first game and it was great.

Second - Forget the Lavender Town music legend. That's for busters.
If you want to be a legit Japanese grade school boy from the 1997 you need to go watch episode 38 "Dennō Senshi Porygon" from Season 1 to get the full effect.

It's like listening to Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" backwards for the first time. But with seizures.

[Ecco]

Haha well I was too old to get into Pokemon in the 1st place, I was in like junior highschool, when the show became popular lol.

And the Lavender music really IS very sad and gloomy.

Though it seems certain videos are altered, without really acknowledging it.

For example, this video seems altered, but claims to be the original... which is stupid, lol.

[Sik]

I recall reading that early revisions of the track used pitches that were unplayable by the Game Boy's speaker (which is a rather shitty speaker :​v) and hence could sound really off-tune (which yeah, definitely would make it sound creepy). I haven't really bothered to check the ROMs to see if it's true, albeit I could see it being a legitimate problem.

But yeah, the whole thing is mostly rumors.

[Ecco]

I recall reading that early revisions of the track used pitches that were unplayable by the Game Boy's speaker (which is a rather shitty speaker :​v) and hence could sound really off-tune (which yeah, definitely would make it sound creepy). I haven't really bothered to check the ROMs to see if it's true, albeit I could see it being a legitimate problem.

But yeah, the whole thing is mostly rumors.

^Haha no way, the song really is hauntingly gloomy and sad. (Although the story about the kids is probably not true.)

This vid would seem to be the original music. He makes a note around :30 seconds when it starts to get creepier sounding. You have to listen for a few minutes to hear all the weird changes that the song goes through:

[Ecco]

And here is another version which claims to be original, but which seems altered, without being acknowledged. (There's a deep humming sound added to the whole song.) So again, this is stupid:

[Ecco]

Then we have some YT videos of Lavender Town song with an echoing effect (which you can hear from the very first sounds).

IDK if this is from the second, international version of the game?

[The Jackal]

Sorry to be the grinch but:

Music and the Lavender Town Syndrome

The background music of Lavender Town has garnered much interest due to some listeners finding it unsettling. Listing it as the second-most scary video game track in 2012, Brittany Vincent of Bloody Disgusting stated that Lavender Town's "deceptively calm ... tune ranks highly on most gamers' lists of terrifying childhood memories." Lavender Town's music, composed by Junichi Masuda, combines sharp chiptune sounds with "a cavalcade of jarring chords" to create an eerie atmosphere.^[2] Jay Hathaway of Gawker stated that leaving the music on loop may cause a "vague sense of dread".^[3]
According to a creepypasta story that was uploaded anonymously on Pastebin in 2010, the music of Lavender Town compelled the suicide of over 100 Japanese children in the spring of 1996. Others allegedly suffered nosebleeds, headaches, or became irrationally angry. According to this urban legend, high pitch binaural beats harmed the brains of children in a way adults were immune to. This fabricated illness was dubbed "Lavender Town Syndrome" and the original story went viral after being spread on general interest websites such as 4chan. Various people have added details to make the story more convincing over time, such as Photoshopping images of ghosts into spectrogram outputs of the Lavender Town music.^[3] Mark Hill of Kill Screen stated that the appeal of the Lavender Town Syndrome legend "comes from corrupting such an innocent symbol of childhood," and drew comparisons with "Dennō Senshi Porygon", an episode of the Pokémon anime series that gave hundreds of Japanese children seizures.<sup>[4][5]

[6]</sup>

^{It's a stupid internet meme popular with the tweens, nothing more.}

[Leynos]

Yeah, but this music makes me want to commit suicide but kill everyone else in the process.




I've never played a Pokemon game. The music posted in this topic reassures me I'm missing nothing.

[Ecco]

I've never played a Pokemon game. The music posted in this topic reassures me I'm missing nothing.

^Haha I never played one either, I just heard about this one thing.

I assume that the rest of the soundtrack is probably happy and cheerful.

Lavender Town apparently represents... sadness, dead pets, and ghosts...

[sidewinderl]

Haha well I was too old to get into Pokemon in the 1st place

Poppycock! I was part of a group that played it (and the card game) even though Red/Blue came out when we were in high school.

Also, Viridian Forest is totally:

[Ecco]

OK here is fact-checking the urban legend, because there's a lot of false information about it.

And we should actually make sense of it, lol. Some parts are true, and some are false:

[BubsyFan1]

Back in the day, I liked how Lavender Town was completely different from a lot of what Pokemon seemed to have been portraying. Or at least that's how I remember feeling. Somewhere in my pile of music stuff, I have the beginnings of an upbeat swing arrangement of this song for an 18+ piece big band.