For years, years, I wondered – ‘why me’ – you know, you know, kiddo – ‘why me’ – but there is no ‘why me’. What? As if there were, you know, ‘chosens’, there’s no ‘chosens’ – there’s no all–seeing, all–knowing powerful nothing. It happened. That’s it. I fell for it. I took its bait – hook, line, sinker. Didn’t I do it to myself? Wasn’t I the sucker? There’s no ‘why me’ – and once I realized that, that there was no, that there was no, no any kind of justice what so ever, until I acted, that gave my existence purpose. And now I’m gonna fulfill that purpose. I don’t want you getting involved. You’re deep enough as it is. Don’t be the sucker!
– Bobby Mortaren; famous last words
I raced from the house to the hotel, at Walsenburg, where I struggled to make sense of everything that transpired. I poured myself over notes and records that I had brought along. Only my laptop’s glow illuminated the room. Every so often lights through I-25 swept across the bed. Every so often breezes stirred trees around the perimeter. Soon midnight passed. The world darkened, relaxing as it were into slumber.
A knock rattled the door - and I could have shrieked if it weren’t for what remained of my nerves. All of a sudden, I felt so icy, so cold, that I stood, frozen, uncertain of how to proceed. Who was it? It couldn’t be good. Not the FBI. Not the Thules. Ache, already?
I balked at chucking my laptop - whoever they were at the door, they’d find it, they’d find it.
It’s the 21st century; evidence doesn’t vanish without a trace.
As my heart pounded my chest, I reached that door and cracked it a notch. I braced for the kick certain to follow. It didn’t come. The hotel’s courtyard / lot spread, deserted except for my rented Wrangler. There wasn’t anyone - anyone who may have been my visitor.
Yet - by my feet - at the edge of the threshold - my visitor had left a box.
I poked at it with my pole and turned it over and over. It wasn’t postmarked. It wasn’t addressed. It had been delivered by hand and, suspecting what it was, I yanked it inside. Leaning onto and drooping against the door, I tore its lid. The box contained two floppies, a CD, and a stack paper. It was Blue Beelzebub - all of it, every part of it. As well as instructions: a How-To-Guide for destroying your future, fetched onto my doorstep, white-glove-style to boot, as promised. It may as well have been a bomb.
###
How did Blue Beelzebub mutate into my obsession?
Worse - did I expect to find its truth remarked into code from 1996? 1996! There wasn’t a lot to the internet way, way back when. But crime was crime no matter its era. Was it crime? And did the game start this way or that way then evolve into crime? Was it crime from its start?
The programmer of Blue Beelzebub, a hacker by the avatar ‘ZuZu’, claimed to be legit. Their MO had been to create games not scams. Or so it appeared until Blue Beelzebub entered the story. If it were a product of malware, why had ZuZu devoted so much of their effort into its creation? Why had they boasted of the game’s nitty gritty details during its gestation? Why all of that trouble, if only a fraction of it would have been appreciated by those who played it? Even LVN, when they weren’t laundering bitcoin, expressed what may be described as passion for that game.
Was it a game?
By 1996 standards, its demos parlayed atrocious graphics and threadbare mechanics. The way it affected the player’s rig ensured nobody would be eager to replay it. The game passed every scan available yet it twisted the OS and hijacked the PC to serve as a node, a link into a yet-unknown and yet-unnamed network for purposes every bit as mysterious as the game itself.
As I contemplated the reality of the situation, I settled onto the notion that that game may have been a gimmick to cover truly malevolent intentions. That had been the crux of LVN’s KickStarter and GoFundMe rackets - they always proposed plausible if lofty projects as if they were real, actual products people buy. However, case after case demonstrated that their pretense unraveled after scrutiny. Could it be, as far back as 1996, the creator(s) of Blue Beelzebub conceived of such a deception? FPS (of the type Blue Beelzebub reported to be) were the rage through the 90s. If so then their MO resembled that of a typical bait-and-switch scheme - bait them with a game, switch them with a virus. Then? What? Profit?
###
In the summer of 2017, Czech authorities in conjunction with the EU, arrested LVN at their apartment south of Plzen. They seized the hacker’s laptop, PC, as well as their twenty thousand CD library. LVN was a hacker-for-fire; evidence presented at their arraignment demonstrated to the court that they had been paid by Russian and other Eastern European actors to pilfer bitcoin wallets. In addition to theft, the court entertained charges connected to a NiceHash heist of 64 million euros earlier that year.
It was the breach of NiceHash’s security that brought my skills to the EU’s attention. For a few weeks, between March and May, I played my part to aid the investigation and the conviction of its mastermind. We discovered that the breach had been directed from inside NiceHash. We split the work: ‘brick and mortar’ detectives ran interviews and stakeouts while my fellow ‘white-hats’ and I toiled at the forensics. To meet our end of the bargain, we created a model of that cyber-attack, in order to construct and deconstruct its operation. As we realized how the crime had been executed, we identified the party responsible for it and built the authorities a solid chain-of-evidence - a chain-of-evidence that identified LVN as the perpetrator.
LVN masterminded not just that NiceHash heist but a dozen scams at sites like KickStarter and GoFundMe. LVN traded exclusively through bitcoin. Their MO was to sow fake projects then to reap real funds submitted by backers - by backers who aimed to launder money via its exchange into bitcoin. Projects were advertised to those who sought the service; they were fraudulent through and through yet they appeared real enough to fool the maintainers of those sites and the public at large who may have been tricked by the scams.
Under the supervision of the investigation at large, I pledged my dollars to a few of LVN’s projects, to see what the response would be. Soon, LVN and I exchanged emails. They wanted to speak face-to-face. In front of the experts, I played to type and gained access to a roster of services from that hacker-for-hire. As a result of the communication, the investigation brought into play anti trafficking & exploiting agencies from around the world and accelerated their goal to convict LVN.
One of the projects LVN advertised didn’t fit into the mold in so far as it felt like a genuine hobby of theirs. LVN sought investors to fund their (re)development of a game, Blue Beelzebub. The project listed at KickStarter - removed but saved to my laptop - included a lightbox of images and demos as well as snippets of code. It discussed such esoterics as: updates to its physics engine and its video & audio renderer; upgrades to its arsenal and its gallery of foes; changing its play - expanding its levels and ditching its linearity.
The details impressed me as they perplexed me. Why? I kept asking. What’s the idea? What’s the racket? Why create a game using twenty year old technology? I understood its esoterics perfectly for I came of age during the 90s. So much of what went into Blue Beelzebub felt familiar as it was familiar. An FPS - first person shooter - propelled by a fork of that fabled, 2.5D DOOM engine. Little wonder that its caps parlayed the look and feel of classic 90s PC games!
Maybe it was yet another scam? Or - maybe - it was a hobby of a gamer / programmer? Could it be that LVN recalled those early DOS games and wanted to re-create the era? But that wasn’t everything. And as I mused & Googled I started to ask myself if there wasn’t more about Blue Beelzebub beyond the haze of my nostalgia. I failed to connect the dots although that did not shake the deja vu - somehow, someway, I recognized that game.
###
Escape published my article about LVN’s conviction. Against the advice of my editor, I stalked its commentary, to see what, if anything, the story drew out of the woodwork. Its aside re: Blue Beelzebub attracted attention. I wasn’t surprised, to be honest, as I had inserted it into the text to draw reaction. And my rouse worked! But I wasn’t the only one who felt deja vu about the game.
A commentator, who asked for anonymity, posted a link to 4CHAN about Blue Beelzebub. LVN had advertized the KickStarter for the game at a group devoted to indie developers. LVN never advertized their work at 4CHAN out of fear of exposure. So that thread where they didn’t ask for money confirmed my sense that it wasn’t, necessarily, a scam.
As I scanned that thread, however, I realized what a rabbit-hole the business would be. After LVN’s post, anonymous replies went to and fro as they typically do. Then the tenor of the thread devolved into a war amongst those who were for vs. those who were against what LVN proposed to do with the game. It was a question about credit. At last - somebody revealed a truth I duly suspected of - that Blue Beelzebub wasn’t the work of LVN - that the game as it existed predated LVN by twenty years or so.
The idea for Blue Beelzebub had floated about USENET c. 1995. The majority of the conversations extracted from the archives suggested that the game was vaporware. Its supporters countered that either a P/C or a DEMO existed and that a play-through had been uploaded to (early) YouTube. Everyone who added their opinion - pro & con - agreed that it was “inspired by Satan”, “took its cues from Crowley’s ‘Thelema’“, and that it included clips “replete with ever more corrupt” gore and snuff. A self-described player, whose rig they claimed had been “totaled” by the game, stated bluntly that it contained a “Chinese Sandwich”.
Undeterred by the confusion, I kept at my search, ramming through the archives, pushing my way further back in time, from 1997 to 1995. USENET had been mirrored prior to its collapse yet its content was not indexed completely; a robust query of its posts required force and patience.... In spite of the odds, my effort worked, my persistence located the roots of Blue Beelzebub.
It was a posted dated June 15, 1995 written by the game’s originator, a hacker by the name of ZuZu. According to their missive, they claimed to have produced “a proof of concept demo” for their “latest and greatest” game, Blue Beelzebub, and that it was “a legit game catering to those who worship and admire Lucifer and everything that stands for”. ZuZu listed, point by point, the substance of their creation. I wasn’t surprised to see, splattered across that post, the verbiage LVN usurped for their own advert.
Except - they weren’t seeking funding. According to their missive, the game had been bankrolled “by entities of a foreign sort, who don’t want to be credited”. Rather, they were seeking “experts” willing to alpha & beta test the product.
Blue Beelzebub and by extension ZuZu went rouge between 1997 and 2005.
Then - October 31, 2005 - ZuZu submitted their last, known public statement. Broadcasted through their usual, over-the-top flamboyance, they wished for their “fans to learn and spread the word” that they “secured an exclusive”. They had convinced a devote of indie horror / FPS games to review Blue Beelzebub. The player they had snagged was famous for their day and their name I recognized as I read it.
Bobby Mortaren - an internet pioneer par excellence. Mixing reviews and play-throughs together, his format had been lauded as visionary and just as imitated. Tweaked a bit by-the-by it continued to find use. His name, though, hadn’t been spoken of for a decade. Games had changed. Tastes had changed. He could have shifted into yet another venture so far as I knew.
Mortaren posted his works to YouTube - to YouTube prior to its merger with Alphabet. As I considered the changes that transpired across the years, I wasn’t surprised to discover that all of my links to his works were dead. Eerily, though, it was impossible to locate his reviews directly via YouTube. So I tried Google and Bing. No result. Ditto with DuckDuckGo. Ditto with Wiki, SlideShare, BoardReader. Out of desperation I surfed into the remnants of Alta Vista - maybe its database saved the information? No. No. Futile - all of it.
YouTube’s size was greater than USENET’s size. My task’s extent was altogether a colossal order of magnitude. If that which I pursued had not been deleted, then, it would be found ad finem omnia. So to dig further I opted for a quick & dirty hack - a bot. A bot scripted to sift and sort all YouTube’s content that matched keywords Mortaren and Blue Beelzebub. I ran it and waited for days then for weeks then for months.
###
My extensive search corroborated the fact that Mortaren left the internet c. 2006. Assuming they may have continued via pseudonym, I enquired into the matter with colleagues who devoted themselves to games and / or to reviews. Only a few recognized their name; nobody was cognizant of their voice.
An editor from ToplessRobot directed my attention to a defunct fansite’s messageboard where somebody asked why Mortaren vanished without a trace. To my shock, the reply was that Mortaren had been arrested by the FBI c. 2006. I could not fathom why. Nevertheless, if the revelation were correct, then, the resolution to the matter was tantalizingly viable. Arrests - and trials - were public.
The LVN / EU case brought my forensic skills to the notice of the DOJ and the Treasury / Secret Service. The FBI, like its European counterparts, wanted to understand everything about bitcoin and how it might (might) be possible to trace transactions to individuals.
As part of my freelance work, I already met and debriefed FBI agents re: the Czech hacker. Eventually ‘large’ talk gave way to ‘small’ talk amongst us. It was at that juncture that I broached the subject of Blue Beelzebub - namely, that LVN hatched a scheme to defraud investors (via bitcoin) ostensibly by promising to develop an update to that game.
“They got exposed by players who recognized the game’s ill-repute,” I stated. “Apparently, the game’s infamy started after its reviewer, a fellow by the name of - er - Robby Mortaren? Bobby Mortaren? Well - they got arrested by the FBI.”
Neither the game nor the reviewer elicited a reply - immediately, anyhow.
A (censored) document, summarizing a DOJ investigation, worked its way into my mailbox. Mortaren had been under FBI surveillance from November 2005 to May 2006. Why wasn’t stated; just that the FBI obtained search warrants for computers & electronics. A federal judge issued an arrest warrant May 30, 2006; however, the DOJ withdrew the charges after Mortaren agreed to an immunity deal. Mortaren turned star witness at a trial that involved organized crime as well as rackets, cults, ritualized human & civil rights abuses and elements that suggested Satanism. The perpetrator(s) that the DOJ wanted to convict fled either to South America OR Eastern Europe / Central Asia. The trial evaporated; neither the charges nor the perpetrator(s) were detailed.
Mortaren’s immunity deal with the DOJ wasn’t negotiable or retractable and included a complete internet ban.
The document listed a PO BOX as Mortaren’s permanent address.
To Mr. B. Mortaren:
Sir, I apologize. Blue Beelzebub. Were it not for the fact that you may be the only person left to recall that game, I would not have stretched my resources so thin to find you. If you are not able to assist my research, is anyone?
I was part of an EU investigation re: bitcoin, theft & fraud, as well as trafficking & exploiting vagrants. Through that investigation I came into contact with a hacker; they claimed to be working on Blue Beelzebub; they sought funds to upgrade it. While disturbing to say the least, that game did not strike me as part of the hacker’s MO. So I pried further into the matter and discovered, to my astonishment, that Blue Beelzebub dated to the mid 90s and that you reviewed & posted the demo at YouTube.
I am curious about that game. I cannot get it out of my head. Who was the programmer? Who was the developer? Where did they get the money? What were their goals? What was the game about, if the game was about anything?
A DOJ document summarizing your immunity from prosecution was brought to my attention. I suspected, as I matched the timeframe of the FBI’s surveillance and arrest, to the demo, that these matters are related. I was not able to find a link, due to the fact that all records, transcripts, etc., were sealed by request of the FBI.
If, for any reason what so ever, we cannot communicate about this matter, would it be possible to contact a surrogate or anybody with the information I seek?
With All Due Respect
JK
###
Due to limits that existed at YouTube’s debut, videos posted from 2005 to 2010 were capped to 10 minutes. Both image and sound playback quality were kept low to spare bandwidth. A lack of (accessible) software and hardware to edit video forced vloggers to improvise. Mortaren had always used a webcam and mic from the 90s to shot their videos ‘live’, i.e., without edits.
YouTube retained the majority of Mortaren’s content; however, after a check of the dates and the poster’s IDs, I determined that Mortaren’s videos had been reposted c. 2006 by another user.
If the titles / numbers were correct then there were seven parts to the demo Mortaren recorded for Blue Beelzebub. Of seven, six remained. Specifically, the 5ifth - which must have been filmed as evidenced by the discontinuity between 4ourth and 6ixth - defied my ability to trace.
The reposter stated that “the 5ifth wasn’t part of the review package”. Yet, as I perused copies of replies they had saved, commentary that referenced material that doesn’t appear anywhere else, I strongly suspected that a 5ifth had been posted for a while and, for whatever reason, Mortaren removed it prior to 2006.
1irst - details facts re: the game: the developer, the programmer, the system requirements, etc.
“If your rig’s able to run DOOM, Blue Beelzebub works,” they state then add: “although, prepare yourselves, kiddos, the game takes a very, very long time to install”.
Passingly, he adds that a fan of his had ditched the game after they experienced “a catastrophic system failure” that they blamed “on either a bug or a virus or both”.
The executable and its auxiliary files pass every virus and malware checker Mortaren throws at it.
2econd & 3hird - demonstrates the game play or what passes for it.
Mortaren prefers to record his reviews live so that his fans experience the game exactly as he does. His videos contain hints / cheats if they are discovered as he plays. He describes Blue Beelzebub as a DOOM-GUY-ESQUE player who moves through an enshadowed monochromatic maze.
“There’s no backwards, I, I, I don’t believe it! Did they forget to give us backwards? There’s forwards and left, right. Kiddos, you gotta do a circle to go backwards.” He continues to berate the game, adding: “Yeah, there’s only forwards. And you know, I gotta say it, the programmer may think they’re the money’s nuts for it.... But it’s so weird that going forwards causes the view to bob up and down or side to side. What’re they trying to do? Are they trying to replicate a player’s gait? Takes me right out of the game. Let me tell y’all why. Like I said, the programmer’s got to be thinking they’re the monkey’s nuts but it’s that bizarro attention to detail that’s so jarring as I consider the lack of detail given to the graphics. Guys. Guys. Guys. You gotta think about what you present.”
Mortaren piles his criticism of the graphics and the sounds, comparing both unfavorably to DOOM. Especially frustrating is the invariance of the black & white textures throughout the maze. He praises the response of the maze to the player as he notes, while attempting to draw the maze, that its passages shift at random. Then more and more criticisms were strewn at the game, including its lack of weaponry, its lack of powerups / extras, its lack of anything.
“A game can’t be about going through the maze, guys, there’s got to be a point - something to do!” Finally, he voices the suspicion that he had been duped by ZuZu.
4ourth - the demo gets interesting.
Mortaren finds an area of the maze where the textures differ. The video’s pixilation - perhaps due to the webcam - perhaps due to the way the reposter preserved it - masks the bulk of the alteration. I detect a change of shade, though, from black & white to blue.
“Well it can’t be for nothing that the wall is blue. Jeez!” As he cracks the joke, to his shock (an explicative slips), the sounds became those of “eerie, drone-like notes fading into reverb” and the monitor displays a still-shot. Mortaren zooms into the image; I recognize it as coming from the shock-site, ROTTEN.
After that alteration, every blue-hued texture Mortaren faces produces other images, increasingly nihilistic and graphic, usually of the dead or the dying, often of celebrities, suicides, accidents, wrecks.
5ifth - ?
6ixth - the segment starts at an awkward jump.
It must have been split from the 5ifth video and while Mortaren does not state why, explicitly, the tone of the voice suggests that something serious transpired.
“Sorry, kiddos, I turned the webcam away - a first - I guess this ZuZu accomplished something.”
When he returns the webcam to the monitor, it is apparent that in addition to tone the substance of the game itself altered.
The player stands at the center of a room Mortaren describes as “a vault with a hole at its floor”. The 2.5D renderer prevents the player from gazing inside the hole. But by directing the player to walk the hole’s circumference it is possible to catch bits of its contents. A sharp, blue light shoots out of the hole; the way it cast light at the ceiling suggests there might have been “water”, as if the hole were a well of sorts.
What shocks Mortaren is that the room fills with children. The renderings of faces make each of the children unique. However: “the ghastliness of the imagery resembles how faces voxilate like with Delta Force games”. Further, he notes, after a pause that echoes my own consternation and trepidation, “I’ve seen these kids. Yeah, I’ve seen these kids from those, those photographs the game stopped everything to show us. Jeez!”
The children stand statue-like as the player walks about them. They serve as obstacles that block movement, otherwise, inert, unresponsive, “not that the player interacts with the kids as there’s no other keys available except A, W, D”.
The video continues, then, Mortaren shrieks.
The playback jostles as if it were about to stop. When everything resettles, he speaks, calmly and evenly, that “there’s a kid that’s different ... animated. You gotta see it, kiddos, I can’t say if it’s awful because it’s awful or if it’s awful because it’s awful....” The webcam zooms into the monitor; the child rendering appears to show it breathing, haphazardly, with their mouth agape. And then, then the child moves and the player like the viewer alike slip an explicative. “I take it back, everything, this is truly and utterly awful.”
7eventh - the coda feels like the set’s longest but is the shortest.
“Right now I’m running. I don’t have a weapon, jeez! I’m running as fast as this keyboard allows but my health is shrinking.” Mortaren stops and rotates the player to face backwards. The animated child is behind and striking the player using a technique that resembles “Hanna-Barbera laziness - or who knows - who knows, kiddos, it could be part of the style”. Just as it is with DOOM, as the player’s health decreases, the view gets redder and the avatar gets bloodier. Mortaren aims into the maze; there is no exit, there is no weapon, no upgrade to assist, all that exists is the floor where the player drops, dead.
The 7eventh adds a post-script recorded after the demo. It shows Mortaren’s PC, open and split to pieces. “The game installed a virus,” he declared then described its symptoms.
“Immediately upon my player’s death, the PC rebooted. After the BIOS, instead of going into DOS, it starts a telnet session and tries to connect via IP. Of course it doesn’t get a reply since my PC uses dial-up. So it freezes, pinging and pinging a server somewhere that it cannot reach.”
Mortaren concludes by theorizing that if Blue Beelzebub were a virus, it must have been designed to target high-end systems with LAN / Ethernet ports.
I jot the IP and attempt to connect to it. Strangely, it will not load yet it will not issue an error of any kind. Chrome, FireFox, Edge, etc., freeze. WHOIS is not able to resolve the owner. Nevertheless, it yields the location of the server, a site approximately 50 miles north east of Trinidad, Colorado.
I reject the result; users of tracers already know that they rely on ISP databases to match IP / location - and how often are those databases updated? - and how often are those updates distributed? The decade that passed between today and the video, and between the video and the creation, assures that there must have been a drift re: the location of the IP.
###
I will not reveal the particulars of when, where, and how I received the call.
“The coordinates.” Into my ear spoke a voice that my investigation made familiar. “Check the coordinates.”
“Coordinates?”
“Blue Beelzebub.”
“Yes,” I replied and Mortaren implied we’d meet.
Mortaren had traced my whereabouts through the blogosphere. He wanted to talk about the game yet feared the government “and or others” eavesdropping. I admitted off-handedly that as I sunk into my work with the DOJ, my paranoia tipped.
“What’s the deal with the game, anyway?”
“What do you want on your Chinese Sandwich?”
My impression settled onto a mixture of intrigue and trepidation. The matter felt so cryptic as to defy credulity. Coordinates? Blue Beelzebub. Chinese Sandwich? Nevertheless, even as we talked (brief as the conversation was) I put together that by coordinates + Blue Beelzebub Mortaren referred to the IP the game telnet’ed.
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