One of the most fervent lost media hunts on the internet came to a disappointing conclusion earlier this month when the person who launched an internet-wide search for "That Evil Farming Game" realized he'd dreamed the whole thing.

In 2016, Redditor sparta213 posted about a game he vaguely remembered to /r/tipofmyjoystick. In the post, he describes a game that's similar to farming simulators like Harvest Moon but with a twist: early in the game, the player kills their wife during an argument, and buries her in the farm. The game then revolves around maintaining the farm while hiding the murder from the police. In the ensuing thread, a commenter suggested it may have been a dream of the OP, but nothing much came of it.

In 2018, user DavidSpaceAMA made another post in /r/tipofmyjoystick looking for a similar game, which added credence to the sparta213 post. Over the following years, interest in the supposedly lost title ramped up, ultimately leading to the creation of a subreddit dedicated to identifying the evil farming game. YouTube internet sleuths Nexpo and Whang hopped on the case, bringing it to an even wider audience.

The hunt came to the most disappointing conclusion imaginable when, on June 13th, Redditor PM_MeYourEars found an animation made from a Vinesauce clip in which Vinesauce essentially explained the plot to the game sparta213 posted about way back in 2016.

After bringing the theory to sparta's attention, he confirmed that he believes he fell asleep while watching the Vinesauce stream, which is something he used to regularly do, and that the game he was imagining was essentially implanted into his head while watching Vinesauce. After the discovery, Vinesauce responded in a video explaining his side of things.

Lost media hunts are a tricky business: someone on the internet will describe something they vaguely remember, others will chime in that they vaguely remember something similar, and it's off to the races. Of course, memory can be a tricky thing, and there's always the possibility that the thing in question never even existed. Or, more disappointingly, it could just be the product of a dream had while watching mindless Twitch streams.