(Creepypasta) ZackToons (by LuckieStar)

The formidable robot cartoon websites. If they ring a bell, there's a chance you've heard of them before. They are frequently seen as a double-edged sword. They promise free cartoons, but what they provide is not always what you expect, such as malware masked as a video file. I have my fair share of knowledge of these kind of websites due to my unsupervised access to the internet and endless curiosity in grade school. Not only was I able to watch cartoons that I grew up loving, but it ended up destroying my family computer, and I couldn't go on the internet for at least a month before getting a new one for Christmas. One of these websites that I remember going on had been glued to the back of my mind since the last time I went on it, and it still is to this day. In fact, it had gotten to the point that I tried looking it up on the internet archive only to find all but not. It only took me this long to realize why there were little to no archives in the first place. The website you see above is zacunes.tv, one of, if not the first of its kind, opening up around November 2005. For a cartoon website this old, its aesthetics were unique and had its own charm compared to the others. However, its primary gimmicks were nothing new. download and watch free cartoons, a report system for any bugs, a facts and questions page, yada yada. However, there was a catch. There were comics that you could download and read, much like the cartoons that were presented on the website alongside its own forum page where visitors of the site could discuss about their favorite cartoons and the like. One of the main things that made Zack Tunes stick out like a sore thumb was the mascot used to represent the website, a small dinosaur dog hybrid named Zack, mainly to tie in with the website's name. Remember him for later. During the mid to late 2000s, the website would get frequent visitors every day with over 1,000 downloads per week due to how malware free the video files were at the time. Back then, it was considered to be one of the most popular of its kind. There was even a fan art thread in the forums page where visitors of the site could send in their artwork of Zach and show their appreciation for the website and character. Speaking of which, I was lucky enough to scrge up one of the only existing fan arts of Zach from a former user of the site who wished to stay anonymous. It's a miracle how these people still thrive on the internet in some way. As the site continued to flourish, its theme started to change every holiday and pumped out cartoons revolving around said holiday. Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, you get the picture. Things would sail smoothly during the peak of the website until the start of 2009, a full year before the site's eventual closure. When the site was given a makeover for April Fool's Day, a small portion of the cartoons pushed out were distributed in an odd manner. The file names for said portion of cartoons were nothing but gibberish in a language nobody could understand. Alongside the video quality being watered down to a measly VHS recording of said cartoon with the screen and sound warping intensely every now and then. The visitors of the site assumed that it was just some harmless tom foolery albeit a little unsettling. So they brushed it off. By the time October rolled around that year it happened again. The cartoons that were pushed out were progressively becoming harder to watch with the videos abruptly cutting to a black screen for a few seconds every now and then, and the audio constantly slowing down, speeding up, and being put in reverse. Even the comics that released every weekend were starting to alter, the art and words abstracting into nothing but incoherent nonsense. The users on the forum would start to notice how off the cartoons and comics looked, eventually voicing out their concerns to the point that the owner of the site would apologize on the announcement thread. Hello, Zach comes to apologize on behalf of what happened. We never thought that you all would be so upset with our new spooky tunes. Don't worry though, we will fix them up shortly. Thank you for the ongoing support. 10 minutes later, the site went down for the rest of the day to fix the videos and comics. When the site went back up the next day, things went back to normal for the rest of the year. That was until the tail end of October in 2010. As the days before Halloween passed by, the cartoons that resembled said holiday were pumped out. This time, it was way worse than what had happened previously. The characters started to mutate and deform in various ways. From their eyes sinking into their sockets and revealing nothing but bottomless pits smothered with spiderw webs to bile and flem leaking from their nose, ears, and mouth to their veins darkening and pulsating, a dark unidentified liquid oozing from them. This set the forums off. Questions and complaints frantically being sent left and right an hour after the odd tunes were posted. This led to yet another announcement from the owners of the site being posted. This time it took a shorter amount of time for them to respond. Zack here, he comes to apologize and will fix the tunes up soon for Happy Camper. Stay tuned until Halloween at midnight. Until then, usually it would take around a few minutes or so to fix the holes that were created, but in this case scenario, not even close. It took a good 3 hours before the files for the videos and comics to be fixed, eventually calming the forums down and stabilizing everything once more. But not for long. Then Halloween day came. The cartoons and comics that were once fixed came and done, returning to their once abnormal state. This mildly upset the forums, but since it was Halloween and all the stuff that had happened beforehand fit the theme, they eventually brushed it off. When nighttime rolled around, the sight's logo would start to act strangely. Zach's eyes slowly started moving to the center, presumably at the camera. After Zach's eyes finished moving, a sound bite of a voice, low and monotone, started to call out a name repeatedly, a name that didn't sound human. >> Sound coral. >> Then Zach's body started to shiver, the background of the site starting to flicker to black behind him. His ears and tail slowly go down as his smile fades. As his smile fully faded, the screen flashed for a split second before going to black. The sound bites calling for Zgaro being replaced with the yelp of a dog, followed by a loud web thud. 10 seconds after the black screen followed what was considered to be the worst day for those who were still online. The website now appeared to be melting and deteriorating as an array of loud guitar riffs that didn't even sound like a guitar played in the background. Zack, who was the front and center of it all, was now visibly shaking, only slightly tilted to the left. Out of everything that had changed, he was affected in the worst way possible. His limbs had grown long and slender, paws now taking on the form of an eagle's claws. Crimson red thorns, veins that used black bile, body parts that were almost unrecognizable as human or animal, and letters of an unknown language covered a good portion of his body, from the base of his spine to the tip of the tail. His face was nothing but sunken bloodshot eyes, a gaping mouth consisting of nothing but flesh and teeth, and a singular crimson horn that warped and extended in an unnatural manner. At this point, Zach was barely recognizable as a dog. He didn't even look like himself anymore. The sound bite of a man calling out for Zara would then transition into pain screams that were drowned out by the obnoxious, inhumane rifts that played at maximum volume. As the site continued to rot, the background behind Zach would start to flash a collage of pictures in quick succession, snippets of the cartoons and comics that were deformed from hours prior, photographs of an endless forest in the middle of the night, and corpses, not the kinds you would see in those cheap horror movies or edgy adult cartoons. They were actual photographs of corpses. As the many corpse photos flashed alongside the other pictures, bold white words started to scroll to the top of the screen in yet another unknown language which translated to the following. Zgaro is what unites us as one. He makes us feel whole and a part of a new society. Your body is rotting. Without Zgaro, you cease to exist. If Zgaro is no more, we all cease to exist. Give up your gods, your mind, and your desire to exist as a human being to him. Zgaro loves you. After the speech, consisting of an unrecognizable language finishes scrolling to the top, the screen flickers to black for a short second before playing a small jingle and showing Zach, who had been reverted to normal, with his face replaced with the symbol seen on his color and the smiley face mark on his legs being replaced with said symbol as well. After 5 seconds of silence, some words in red appeared above Zack, reading out the following. Happy Halloween. Thank you for being lovely followers since 2005. Zack loves you. The site was then frozen in this state until a day after the incident where the site had officially shut down judging by the lack of Zach's presence and the text that was now a bold black color and in the center of the screen which now read the following. The page has ceased indefinitely. Despite the frantic panicking and questions that spread within various social media sites like YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, or whatever else was similar at the time, the scare itself never had any terrible side effects like destroying the computer or executing payloads. The only thing that was close to that was whilst the speech scrolled, the site had secretly downloaded a transparent image of the symbol from Zach's color as a JPEG file simply titled Zgaro, which would allegedly crash the PC completely if you tried modifying it. That's the end of the website's history. But that wasn't the end of it all. I interviewed the same anonymous person that had one of the only existing fan arts of Zach about the website, but they only had a handful of evidence ranging from screenshots of the website, three video files of the cartoons from the website, one of them being from the Halloween incident, and a screenshot of the official Zacunes Twitter page. Said anonymous person added that the Zacunes Twitter had an alleged burner account if you scrolled all the way down to the very first post. They never told me about what said burner account was about. So I just assumed that it was just a business inquiries only account just in case bignamed corporations had something to say about the website and it's an authorized distribution of cartoons. The curiosity got to the best of me minutes after a minute or two. So I went ahead and traced back to the internet archive using the screenshots anonymous had sent me as a guideline to type the Twitter account into the search bar. Luckily, going through the December 2008 snapshots helped tremendously with my search, seeing the many tweets of the Zack Tunes account before its deletion two years later. Upon scrolling all the way down was the alleged burner account that Anonymous told me named Kendall K. Clicking the username redirected me to a May 2009 snapshot of the account due to there being no screenshots of it in 2008. The account itself was pretty bare bones, judging by the blank banner, profile picture, and all, but the one thing that stood out from it was the description and the link the account was tied to. Founder of Zacttunes.tv. For more of my work, go to badcode.fi. At first, I hesitated clicking said link because I had no clue what the website domain meant and feared that it could be malware. But after a bit of digging into the domain itself, I realized that it was just the domain of a somewhat familiar language. So I ended up clicking the link with my anxiety dissipating. Upon entering said website, I was immediately fooled by my own curiosity. What was now in front of my eyes was the symbol of Zgaro on the top of the screen and text of said language reading out the following. Welcome to the official Zgaroism page. We hope the path you take in your life is benefited by our God. It was at this point that I realized I had found a cult made up of some religion out of whatever that thing is. Clicking on one of the buttons located below the symbol that was simply titled offerings was filled to the brim with grotesque images such as actual live recordings of corpses being festered on by maggots. Some of the corpses being identical to the ones seen in the Zacunes.tv to the Halloween tragedy and a blond-haired man carving into the neck of another who appeared to be blindfolded and riddled with sweat, tears, and acne. At this point, I was on the verge of vomiting on the spot. I immediately clicked on another button to get whatever I saw out of my face. There, I was met with a list of members that were followers of the Zelgarism cult, which consisted of middle-aged men that were also into whatever kind of beliefs and intentions the creator of this site was in. I scrolled a little more to the bottom of the members page due to the curiosity killing me off and the face and words I saw before clicking off of the website right then and there made my heart drop. Kendall Corv, founder of the Zgaralism religion and community. We thank him for helping us unite as one and redirect the world to a better path of life.