// PC GAMER — GAMING
The PC Gamer Mysteries, Case #1: "A Slice of Death": Why is there a dead golfer hidden in Golden Tee '99?
This murder's gone decades without being solved... until now.
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"Golden Tee '99, hole seven, Aspen Lake: There's a dead body about 180 yards out, a little bit to the right in the woods there," says Keith of Keith's Arcade, a YouTube channel not typically devoted to cold case homicides. But as they say in golf, you've got to play it as it lies, and in November 2012 Keith stumbled upon a body lying motionless just off the green of the otherwise picturesque, forested course in northern Colorado. It was his responsibility to tell the world what he'd found.
"There you go. There you go," Keith repeats, clearly in shock. "Dead body in the woods, about 180 yards from the tee off point. Hole seven, Aspen Lake, Golden Tee '99. Thanks for watching."
Under the pixelated body is a pool of blood, suggesting this unidentified man lying facedown in the grass met a violent end. A golf club stretches out from his hand—but was he really a golfer? Or was it placed there to make it look like a tragic accident, an injury sustained during what is well-known to be a dangerous game? Were there clouds suddenly darkening over the course beside Aspen Lake, or were those just scanlines?
Golfers, famously, take their lives into their own hands every time they get in one of those little carts (no seatbelts!!) and drive it, like, 200 yards. Perhaps that's why this death went uninvestigated for so long—it's even conspicuously absent from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's cold case files, at least according to my comprehensive independent examination (typing the word "golf" into the database, getting zero results and immediately giving up).
To solve a case this cold, I knew there was only one place to go: straight to the source.
Just one problem. Like any other professional true crime investigator (better known as a "podcaster"), I stumbled upon this case with little clue of who to get in touch with first and a keen awareness of the fact that even if I did, jumping right to the solution would ruin all the suspense. So I started by getting the email of a friend-of-a-friend, whose earliest credit on Mobygames happened to be Golden Tee '99.
"I vaguely remember that this was a thing, but unfortunately I don't know how it got in," artist Stephen Alexander—who went on to work on BioShock and BioShock Infinite—told me last year. "If I had to guess it would have been put there by Jim Zielinski (the course designer). He did pretty much all art placements in that version of the game since it was almost all gameplay relevant. Outside of that I really don't know. I was credited on '99, but I think I just did the logo animation (if even that)? I had started pretty recently and was working on some other 3D stuff that was being started up at the time."
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