Toy Story: The Beta Video Game

So, almost two years have passed since I lost my memory of that evening, that oh so fateful evening. The start of my journey, the first of many weird encounters with lost videos and games.

After the first run-in, I turned to hard recreational drugs, hoping to fry my brain enough to erase that part of my life, and for a little while, it worked. It was not until last week when it all came flooding back. I am only typing this now because my new cat, Logan Paul, pissed all over the power supply to my $9,000 Alienware gaming PC that I certainly did not, under any circumstances, pay more than what the specs are worth.

I put that little bastard in a diaper and took away his catnip blunts. Needs to learn to use the fucking toilet like everyone else. I had to order a new power supply from Amazon and two days later, holy shit, son of a bitch, it came. I am typing this anecdote right after putting in the new power supply.

Let me break this shit down for you.

My new job consists of the following:

I drive around in a truck, open people's mailboxes, and put envelopes in them.

I am a well-paid, government-employed, mailman. You've heard of Man of Steel? Well, I’m Man of Mail. It's definitely not all it's cracked up to be. I mean 4 months ago I had to have my left nut surgically reattached after a dog chased me down and bit it off. I told the doctor that I couldn't take a donation testicle; I didn't want to impregnate any future girlfriend with a dead man's nut.

I still have that curious side from my time as a trash-man. I’ll sometimes go through other people’s mail. I stopped at someones house to deliver their mail, only to open the package and unveil the contents within. It was a Sega Genesis cartridge, or Mega Drive for those un-American plebs out there. You know who you are.

There was no label, but there was something written in silver marker: “Toy Story Beta - property Traveller's Tales - 1993” I was uber excited to find a beta copy of the video game to my favorite franchise of all time! I slipped it away in my mailbag, then thought of how I was supposed to explain the missing package. I shoved a P.F. Chang's gift card into the envelope along with a copy of Custer's Revenge and stored it in the mailbox. I work for USPS so shitty service is expected.

I invited my friend Marshall to come see this with me since we’re both major Toy Story fanatics. That evening at dusk, as Marshall pulled into my driveway, I spotted a small man dashing down the road into one of my bushes. I thought nothing of it and ushered Marsh in. Before we sit down I show him that I have prepared an extensive meal for us to indulge in while we play this game.

A creamy tomato soup with a special mix of herbs, a basket of buttered sweet rolls, a classic French salad with lemon dijon vinaigrette, a Sole Meuniére with browned butter caper sauce and a side of fried calamari, and a delicious dessert of Crêpes Suzette. This five-course meal prepared all by my hands, the culinary classes I had taken in college and jobs in various three and four-star restaurants paying off massively.

As we sat down with our food, I heard something moving outside. I immediately shrugged it off as I was starving and eager to play this never-before-seen work in progress of an actually decent licensed movie game. I dusted off my old Genesis, sneezing 1,986 times because of my allergies, and plugged it into my retro CRT television, finally getting seated and beginning to dig into our meal.

That was until Tom Hanks, the voice of Woody from Toy Story, kicked down my front door. “DO NOT PLAY THAT GAME! I’M WARNING YOU! IT HAS--” Tom’s assertions were cut short by him tripping up on the power cord to the Genesis and falling to my living room floor, hitting his head on my solid marble coffee table. Needless to say, he was either knocked out cold, or dead. I was pissed. No son of a bitch is cracking my marble. “What are you doing you dumb bastard?!” I shouted to Hanks’ unconscious body, giving him the middle finger. I drug him outside, laying him on the curb with a piece of paper pasted to his abdomen that said “1 Free Tom Hanks” and left him for any random passerby to pick up.

As I turned to go back inside, I could have sworn I smelled Taco Bell burritos. That made me even hungrier and dashed back inside. I hit the power button on the Genesis and began diving into my portion of the meal. This is when things get really strange. I thought this was going to be some normal beta build of a video game. Boy, was I wrong…

It started off with a potato-quality, pixelated video of presumably a couple of the developers jacking off into a Sprite can. What? What the fuck? Hold on… Why did they put this in to begin with? Not to mention I was eating and this made me feel queasy. A bit-crushed audio file played that said, “Fuck you, Disney!” Now, I don't know what their fucking problem with Disney was. All I know is that there is some controversy about Walt Disney being a freemason. I hit pause, hoping that would skip this crude intro movie. It did not.

The clip finally ended and faded to black, and the title screen came up. It was a bit different than what the final title screen is. It looked like an alternative version of the promo pic of Buzz showing off to the toys while Woody scowls in the foreground, but Woody was looking downward to his feet, shoulders slouched. At that point I thought little of it, especially after the opening video. The “Press Start” message flashed on screen and I hit start. Instead of the usual “Yee-haw” soundclip you hear, its instead a new soundclip that says “There’s a snake in my boot!” I was surprised to hear some deleted lines. Sure it was a line from the movie, but it was a new recording of it which is all that counts.

There was no main menu, story, mission briefing, or anything, it just jumps right into the meat of the game with That Old Army Game. The layout was a bit different and the textures were even more different. The whole game was a flat 2-D environment instead of the 2.5-D that is in the final game. Woody's sprite however remains the same. I advanced through the level just fine, nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn't until Ego Check when things turned south.

Buzz instead of leaping away to start off the level, challenged Woody to a tap dancing competition that Woody declined, grabbing Buzz by the arm, throwing him out of an open window. So this was a cutscene. It cuts to Buzz laying on the pavement below, outcold, unmoving and dead with ultra-realistic blood surrounding him in a sizeable pool. Woody looked down in satisfaction with what he had done. He smiled wide and turned towards the camera revealing snake-like eyes. I was unnerved by this and found it to be quite chilling. Woody spoke in a bit-crushed tone, “What's the matter, Geraldo? Afraid of the past?” I wondered what he could have been referring to by “the past,” but I was much more concerned about the fact that this fucking shit knew my name.

“Sit back and enjoy the show,” Woody smiling evilly as he spoke. He went into a bathroom stage that was never before seen, and snuck out some bleach and ammonia. I knew immediately what his intentions were. He went downstairs, sneaking behind Andy and his mom, pouring the ammonia into the bleach jug, creating chlorine gas. Woody was going to snuff out Andy and his family with a World War 1 chemical weapon. Woody dumped the chlorine gas into an open bucket and smirked at the camera, at me, his eyes once again becoming snake-like.

It then cut to a 32x-esque movie that was seemingly animated by Pixar themselves. It shows Andy and his mom on the sofa enjoying some quality television programming, sharing some delicious Orville Redenbacher's popcorn. All of a sudden, their skin turns gray. Andy's mom soon after begins vomiting violently while Andy goes into an asthma attack, the chlorine eating away at his lungs. Andy’s baby sister Molly was dropped to the floor, shitting all over herself and rolling around in it. Andy begins coughing up thick, dark crimson blood that twinkled like rubies in the brightly lit living room as his mom goes into convulsions. Andy's eyeballs fall out and his face melts off in disturbing detail.

Now this was taking things too far. Your face doesn't melt off from chlorine poisoning, but Andy was surely melting away. Bits of his flesh sticking to his clothing and stretching like melted mozzarella cheese on a freshly-baked pizza. His screams and gasps of air becoming muffled gurgles as he chokes on his molten flesh as his appearance becomes less human and looks more and more like Ditto from Pokémon.

Seeing this made me want pizza instead. So, I gave my portion of the dinner to Marshall as I paused the cutscene and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed up Domino's and ordered a large pepperoni pizza and some cinnamon bread twists. 15 minutes later I get a knock on my door. I get up to open the door and the Noid was holding my order, the infamous Domino's mascot of the mid-1980s. “That'll be 12 dollars,” Noid said. I always felt bad for the little guy since after the hostage situation in the late 80s Noid was hardly ever seen again and probably hasn't gotten much work since. Still, it was good Domino's was keeping him around. I gave him the 12 dollars with a 20 dollar tip. A tear formed in his eye and he smiled as he thanked me and headed back for his delivery vehicle.

He looked back at me and said, “By the way, you left your hat on the doorstep.” I looked down at my feet and there sitting in front of me was a tiny cowboy hat. This hat didn't belong to me. I grabbed it and my pizza and walked back inside as the Noid grabbed the still unconscious Tom Hanks and threw him in the back seat of the delivery vehicle and drove off. I threw the hat into the garbage and sat back down with my pizza and took a slice while un-pausing the horrific cutscene.

Andy, or what was left of him, dropped to the floor in a pile of gooey skin and clothing. Once all of his skin had melted into nothing, all that was left was a skeleton. It cuts back to Woody. Him being a toy, he was immune to the chemical mixture that he created as he stared into the camera, into my very soul, those piercing snake eyes burning into my mind. Upon closer inspection, this wasn't the regular Woody design we all know. He looked more like a puppet or a marionette. “Do you not remember,” Woody calmly proclaimed. “The first time you decided to meddle in lost media…” He brought out 3 food items that made things a little clearer to me, and they were Orville Redenbacher's popcorn, a Christmas ham, and Taco Bell burritos. Yes, I remember my time as a trashman, stealing things from other people's garbage. I remember getting those three things for some occasion, but what occasion was it?

“This isn't your first time looking at lost media, Geraldo.” He lifted up a VHS that said “THE NEW TOY, 1992” on it. It finally clicked with me. All of that time getting it out of my head was only a temporary fix. I remember the tape, I remember that damned doll showing up at my house, I remember it all. “You see me in your dreams, but you never remember,” Woody proclaimed. “You see me out of the corner of your eye at any given time of the day, but you never know what it is.” Woody gave a sly smile before the Genesis shut off. I tried turning it back on, but to no avail. That motherfucker owes me a Sega Genesis. I looked over at Marshall, who was asleep and dressed in a Woody cosplay. My face twisted into an expression of disgust and anguish. As I looked back to unplug the Genesis and put it away, he was there. Standing right in front of me.

My nemesis, the ventriloquist dummy Woody.

His eyes beamed at me with a snake-like appearance. His plastic flesh looked as though it had a bumpy, reptilian texture to it. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as he dropped to the floor and his demeanor froze in a normal doll-like facial pose. He had a voice box that kept repeating his famous line… “There’s a snake in my boot! There’s a snake in my boot! There’s a snake in my boot!” A large rattlesnake emerged from his boot, slowly slithering across Woody’s torso and lifting its head up to me at eye-level, sizing me up. The grainy, tinny voice box clip continued barking the same line, “There’s a snake in my boot! There’s a snake in my boot!” I froze as I heard an alteration in the voice clip. I couldn’t place my finger on how it sounded different, but it sounded more pained. It crackled,

“There’s a snake in my boot… I’m… full of snakes!”

Indeed, several snakes burrowed holes through Woody’s body from the inside out, and slithered out, all hissing and raising up to my level. Woody woke up and stood up, eyeing me and his serpent army. “I’m always watching you Geraldo. When you sleep, when you’re awake, all the time.” He motioned over to my friend Marshall, who then began convulsing. His face contorted and stretched to measures I didn’t know were possible for a human’s face to stretch. His body began to shrink and lose some features. It was a painful-sounding process, as the entire time, I heard his bones crunch as they morphed into a new body.

When the mutation was complete, it turned out that my dear friend Marshall, never actually existed. Instead it was Buzz Lightyear who had cloaked himself as someone else! Woody and Buzz came at me, backing me up to the TV. “Give us the game,” they chanted in unison. I started up my own chant in the words of my grandpa Jimbo, “Go fuck yourselves, go fuck yourselves.” Then out of nowhere, my cat Logan Paul swooped in to save the day. He raised his tail and began to piss on the two evil entities. They started screaming wildly, their screams morphing into demonic screeches and gargling. They began to slowly melt away from what I can assume is the high ammonia content in cat urine, which is kind of weird because in the game, Woody was completely immune to the ammonia, so it must be something else in kitten piss that’s killing them. Woody reached his hand out to me in one last desperate attempt for safety, but I didn’t respond. His screeches were snuffed out by his matter becoming liquid, reducing him to nothing more than a puddle of blue liquid on my living room floor. I tasted it. It was Powerade.

I cleaned up the mess and went straight to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the cartridge that I had left on my coffee table was gone, and Logan Paul pissed on my PC.

The moral of the story is, never name your cat Logan Paul.