optpeace:

It’s fairly well known that Pocket Monsters for the Gameboy was a huge hit when it came out in early 1996 in Japan. It’s also fairly well known that the Lavender Town music was changed before the western release of the game. There are wild stories and mass speculation pertaining to this. In particular, rumors circulated of binaural beats and high-pitched frequencies being used in the original music to induce feelings of discomfort, which went almost entirely unnoticed by adults. There are also claims of children, usually close to 100 in number, committing suicide because of the music.

What isn’t fairly well known is that the children who died were actually part of a pre-release playtest group in late 1995, consisting of around 1,000 children from the Osaka area aged between 6 and 12 years old. These children were all given a beta copy of the game on a legitimate-looking cartridge, and allowed to play at their discretion. Many of the children got as far as Lavender Town, but few continued playing after that. Out of those children, many exhibited odd symptoms, including tremors, insomnia, hallucinations and excessive picking or scratching at the skin. Indeed, many of those purported suicides were actually cases of suffocation or unchecked convulsions in the night…although some children did kill themselves in seemingly deliberate ways. The connection was immediately made between these severe cases and the music in Lavender Town, and the beta copies were recalled immediately and the music changed.

This is the music from that beta version of the game, before it was ever changed.

WARNING: This song contains confirmed instances of binaural beats and high-pitched frequencies which are known for causing (and, in this case, were deliberately used to cause) discomfort, possibly to an extreme extent. It is NOT recommended that you listen to this using headphones, or allow children under the age of 12 to be exposed to this at all. I am not responsible for any adverse side-effects anybody may experience listening to this song — you listen at your OWN RISK. I also refuse to share this beta ROM, simply because there are other things within that should best be forgotten.

The mysteries of the black arts. I don’t know if this is real but this is crazy… I’m going to be the head honcho of a new movement of kids who all get off the extremes of distorted auditory perception.

(Source: commodore-sparklebutt, via optpeace-deactivated20120219)