Recently a bunch of people stumbled across a mysterious Steam account that's part of nearly 200,000 groups. It's level zero and has only one friend. It's the strangest goddamn thing. It's also a little creepy, if I'm being honest.
The account was originally unearthed by a Reddit user who was looking for an account associated with a Garry's Mod function they needed. When they saw a profile with no image, they found it odd and decided to give it a click. They found this:
Or something like that, anyway. For some people, it apparently shows up as a disabled account. And yes, it really is a part of 196,149 groups.
Some speculated that it's a Valve group functionality test bot, an idea SteamDB (an unofficial database of changes to Steam) programmer Martin Benjamins—aka "marlamin"—lent credence to with these claims:
That idea is the most believable at this point, but there's just one problem. So far as anybody knows, those test bots tend to be in thousands of groups—not hundreds of thousands.
Others wondered if the account is even a bot at all, at which point the conversation moved into "birth of a new Internet ghost story" territory:
At one point the person who started the topic claimed to have had a one-word chat with the account, but they've since deleted the exchange that they posted, sans explanation. Weeeeeeird.
For the purposes of HARD-HITTING STEAM ROBOT JOURNALISM, I've both attempted to friend the account and reached out to Valve. No response from either yet. However, I've yet to begin seeing a child with bottomless, Steam-logo-shaped holes for eyes and tiny pus-spewing valves dotting its skin in every reflective surface I happen to pass by, so I think we're at least alright on the haunting front.
Wait, what was that? You didn't see it? OK, OK, let me get up and go check. Be back in just a second. I'm sure everything is perfectly fine.
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To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.