“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?
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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.
Bogey in the rough
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.”
A promising lead! Armed with a suspect, I did what any aspiring podcaster would do in this situation: Sit on the information for a month, then track down what might be Jim Zielinski’s email, fire off a single message at 5:52 pm, and then completely drop the story as soon as no response was forthcoming.
The third caddie
Everyone in the professional investigating-fake-dead-bodies-in-30-year-old-golf-games sphere has something that drives them. A tragedy in their past. An unwavering, ironclad sense of justice. A Turfman 800.
For me, it’s procrastination. Faced with some other task I really didn’t want to do in March 2026, I reopened the case and found another lead. Software engineer Tino Kalafatis has little online presence, but with a bit of searching I uncovered that he has, like Zielinski, worked at Golden Tee creator Incredible Technologies since the 1980s. This time my email found its target.
An ace gumshoe himself, Tino did what had previously proven slightly difficult for this reporter: he asked Jim.
…who, I should be very clear, did not in fact murder a man on a Colorado golf course. But he did cheekily place a little pixelated body on hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee ’99, as a goof.
“Yes this is legit. Back in the day we thought it would be fun to put some interesting things to look at off in the woods in case players made an errant shot. The dead guy was my idea, and it’s actually a digitized photo of me laying in the grass outside our office. We digitized the photo and put it into the game,” said the man himself, as relayed over email by Kalafatis.
Turns out this was never a fake murder investigation at all. It was a fake suicide investigation all along.
Meet Jim, who’s credited as a course designer and co-creator of the Golden Tee Golf series at Incredible Technologies, going all the way back to the first game in 1989.
As he’s described on the Incredible Technologies golf-focused blog LiveWire, Zielinski is “a guy who loves golf, who strives to create golf games for other people who love golf, and he’s damn good at it.” Before co-creating Golden Tee, he was the arcade company’s “first and only QA employee,” before bonding with programmer Larry Hogdson over “their shared love of the gentlemen’s game” and taking on course design for a fledgling golf simulator. That project didn’t pan out, but it eventually led to the creation of Golden Tee. They’ve been making golf games ever since.
You may still be reeling from the twist that Golden Tee’s course mastermind once put a photograph of his own “dead” body in the woods of hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee ’99. But it turns out this wasn’t an isolated incident. Bodies have also been spotted in Golden Tee 2010 and whichever one this is. The sport remains dangerous, no matter how much more sophisticated golf game technology grows with each passing year.
Cover-up!?!?
Last year, after stumbling across Keith of Keith’s Arcade’s video about the dead body in the woods, about 180 yards from the tee off point on hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee ’99, I went looking for it myself in the recently released Golden Tee Arcade Classics collection on Steam.
There I made a chilling discovery: The body, which we now know was the digitized flesh of Jim Zielinski, placed by the physical flesh of Jim Zielinski, was right where it should be… but the blood wasn’t.
Was this a flaw in the emulation used to present these arcade games on PC? Or an attempt to make golf look less cutthroat? Who took the blood, and what did they do with it?
These hard-hitting questions, put to compilation developer Digital Eclipse, have so far gone unanswered. Complicating the situation, if you play Golden Tee ’99 on the Internet Archive—where it runs in arcade emulator MAME—the pool of blood is there. So what’s different about the Arcade Classics version? Even Zielinski isn’t sure, though he offered his own theory.
The dead body in Golden Tee ’99 in MAME. Note the blood.
Image credit: Incredible Technologies
The dead body in Golden Tee ’99 in the Digital Eclipse collection. No blood.
Image credit: Incredible Technologies, Digital Eclipse
“There may have been two versions, the original one with blood, and then one where we got rid of the blood puddle,” he said. “For a lot of the early Golden Tee 3D golf courses, I also placed a digitized version of myself directly behind the first tee, so my friends and family could easily find me in the game. They just had to start a game, turn around 180 degrees, and I’d be standing there.”
I asked if the original photo used to add Jim to the game was still around somewhere, but he said it’s sadly been lost to time. By cross-referencing the Arcade Database, however, I was able to determine that Incredible Technologies did release two revisions of Golden Tee ’99: v1.00 and v1.00S. S for… hole seven? S for sanitized? S for sans blood?
Bound by my duty, I found a ROM of Golden Tee ’99 v1.00S online and loaded it into MAME. I started noticing more stuff on each course that I swear wasn’t there before. There were more spectators, more not-so-hidden bits of eye candy that oozed Zielinskism. A woman in a polka dot bathing suit sunbathing behind a log cabin. A guy on a lawnmower. A cheery group in a bright yellow raft paddling alongside the fairway. I hadn’t seen these versions of the Aspen Lake front nine before. And when I got to hole seven, about 180 yards out, a little bit to the right in the woods, there was Jim, sure enough. And there was Jim’s blood.
Toss that theory into the sand trap, then.
Perhaps that S actually stood for something a little more sinister—something Digital Eclipse was simply trying to distract me from with that missing blood. Keep me focused on the body, not on what else was going on around the course. But it didn’t work, because on my way to hole seven I found something to blow this whole case wide open. Something lurking in the woods, just behind the green. Something that suspiciously disappeared when I tried to get too close.
S… FOR SASQUATCH!?!?
I’ve taken this investigation as far as it can go. Time to bring in the experts.
