Ghost in the machine? How a ‘haunted’ N64 video game cartridge terrified children around the world

Years earlier, in September 2010, a real-life college student called Alex Hall hit “publish” on a forum post that would change his life forever. Hall had just started his second year at Saint Louis University in Missouri, US. He wasn’t a fan of college. Here was his first taste of freedom as a so-called adult, and yet there were still all these classes to attend. He dreamt of becoming a famous author.

At the time, content called “copypastas” had become popular on forums such as 4chan and Something Awful. The term refers to the practice of copying and pasting blocks of text online, an early means of going viral – if such text proved popular enough to be shared widely. Ben Drowned is a canonical entry in an influential subgenre of copypasta called “creepypasta” – horror stories whose origins often become obscured as they spread across the web, thus adding to the mystery. Slender Man, a legend that was eventually turned into a big budget movie, is probably the most famous example.

By 2010, creepypastas had become extremely popular. But few of these stories concerned video games – despite the significance of games as cultural artefacts by that point. There were some examples, though, such as Polybius – a story that spread online in the early 2000s about mythical arcade game said to be part of a US government conspiracy.

Hall decided that the internet was missing something: an in-depth, video game-themed creepypasta. Gradually, his idea began to form: a haunted cartridge, a series of hoax-like forum posts, a narrator targeted by the evil entity within the game, and videos to back up these claims.

Hall knew how to make such videos using software to mod (modify) a game. He chose to use that software on Majora’s Mask, Hall’s favourite at the time. “That game, to me, felt like the most alive video game that I had ever played, really,” he says. Characters talk at length about their grief, or express denial about their impending doom, even while the moon, which is on a collision course with the world, edges closer and closer overhead. “They have hopes and dreams,” adds Hall.