I was driving to work one day when I noticed a garage sale selling old video games. I had a few extra dollars, so I figured, why not?
I immediately stumbled upon a copy of Call of Duty: World At War. When I went to buy the game the man selling it to me offered to take it back if anything was wrong with it, as this copy had already been returned to him by an angry customer, and he suspected that it must have been defective.
After work, I came home to play the game finally. I put it in, and something bizarre happened. It skipped over the original Treyarch opening. I came upon the screen and there was no opening tune. It just went straight to the main menu. Instead of the usual background, there was a faded picture of executed soldiers. The menu itself had only Singleplayer, Save/Load, and Options. A little weird, due to the fact that there's normally a multiplayer. I must have bought a pre-production or prototype of the game.
I clicked Singleplayer, and started out at the normal Peleliu mission. Everything went fine, and I was having the time of my life until I noticed something odd. The game was much gorier than I remembered; darker, and more realistic. The gore intensified as the level went on, and when you shot somebody, you could hear them mumble and whimper something. Most likely in Japanese. I never found out for sure, but it sounded like it. A little creeped out, I finished the level, and moved on to the Russian side of the story within an hour or two. What struck me as odd this time, was that there was a level after Stalingrad called Auschwitz. I found this to be in bad taste, but continued anyway.
What I had to do was assault the camp with the Red Army. The normal ambient soundtrack was gone. I started to get a little unnerved, but I continued on. I entered the camp to sounds of moaning and screaming. Once I entered, I saw burning bodies and dismembered corpses on the floor. The barracks were lined with bunk beds, each overcrowded with skeletally thin corpses... though some of them were still alive, moaning. I continued my way to Buchenwald, and passed by more and more corpses, and was starting to get kind of scared. I called it quits and went to bed.
I woke up the next morning and when I started it up again to the sound of loud, disturbing screaming on the menu. I quickly went to where I left off, determined to finish it.
Deeper in the camp I found a weird room with a very loud white noise that seemed to intensify when I got closer to it. I found Dr. Mengele's hanging corpse, and a note on a nearby table. It appeared to be some sort of suicide note, but the text was in characters I didn't recognize. The game froze after this, with a loud screeching in the background. I shut it off in terror.
Hours later though, curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to continue on. The levels only got more disturbing from there, including graphic rape and murder scenes in the Battle of Berlin. In the mission select screen, there was a long list of other missions. There must have been hundreds, though I didn't scroll through them all. They were listed in order by date. I didn't play any, but they were all named after notorious war crimes, committed from WWII and after, and some that I didn't know about. Many of these levels took place on dates that haven't happened yet.
I destroyed the disc immediately.