In 2021, a Reddit user named "Sparta123" posted to r/tipofmyjoystick trying to recall a farming game like Harvest Moon, "with the premise involving a man who kills his wife and tries to hide the body while working as a farmer." Nobody could name it. The hunt for the "Evil Farming Game" spread across Reddit, Discord, and the lost-media forums, with users combing decades of game catalogs for a title that matched.
It matched nothing, because it never existed. In a video essay, YouTuber Justin Whang "revealed that the premise of the game originated from a 2015 clip" of a stream by Joel Johansson — the Swedish streamer known as Vargskelethor Joel, of the streaming collective Vinesauce — who had riffed the murder-farming premise as a joke while playing the game Global Defense Force. Sparta123 confirmed Joel's video was "likely the source of the game," according to Wikipedia. Joel apologized on Twitch "for the time that users had wasted in searching for a non-existent game."
"The urban legend would be developed into a real game, titled The Evil Farming Game: Replanted."
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