Ghost in the machine? Legend of the 'haunted' N64 video game cartridge

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250501-the-haunted-video-game-that-traumatised-the-web

49•fallinditch•1d ago

Comments

pxndxx•5h ago

Inscryption captured the "videogame creepypasta" genre in an actual, pretty good roguelike video game, if you want more of this!

randomtoast•3h ago

Short Summary:

Ben Drowned is a viral internet horror story (a “creepypasta”) created in 2010 by Alex Hall, who posted under the pseudonym “Jadusable.” The tale revolves around a supposedly haunted Nintendo 64 cartridge of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The cartridge was unlabeled, and when played, exhibited disturbing behavior: reversed music, distorted graphics, and the recurring presence of a statue of Link with a petrified, menacing expression. The in-game ghost was said to be “Ben,” the spirit of a boy who drowned.

Related Wiki Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Drowned

neuroelectron•3h ago

Pretty creepy. Here's a direct link to the scenes in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOJmdxdjeA&t=230s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6D2XCJUJHY&t=65s

The effects are made with N64 ROM hacking in Project64 emulator and video editing.

2OEH8eoCRo0•1h ago

Are haunted/cursed games a common fear in children? I recall a recurring nightmare where my Sim Town game was corrupted or cursed. Having all of the game rules become inverted was terrifying for some reason.

dafelst•1h ago

For what it's worth, I experienced the same sort of nightmares, though it typically wasn't a specific game or program, more like the computer being hacked/compromised/haunted.

gs17•37m ago

I've always had nightmares about technology misbehaving, but I blame it on my childhood Mac being one that would sometimes start up with with the screen inverted, the "happy Mac" icon replaced with a dead sad Mac, and the sound of a car crash. The machine that usually follows specific rules randomly deciding to scare you definitely builds some anxiety.

nekoashide•11m ago

Ghostbusters on the NES was fear inducing as an 80's kid, then came Resident Evil on the PSX.

Show HN: VectorVFS, your filesystem as a vector database

The Death of Daydreaming: What we lose when phones take away boredom

No Instagram, No Privacy

Geometrically understanding calculus of inverse functions (2023)

A Tektronix TDS 684B Oscilloscope Uses CCD Analog Memory

AWS Built a Security Tool. It Introduced a Security Risk

The vocal effects of Daft Punk

History of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600

Show HN: Klavis AI – Open-source MCP integration for AI applications

Show HN: Bracket – selfhosted tournament system

I'd rather read the prompt

V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory

Jiga (YC W21) Is Hiring Engineers

AI Meets WinDBG

The Beauty of Having a Pi-Hole

Circuitpainter: Create PCBs using a simplfiied graphics language

Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

Design for 3D-Printing

Digitization Complete for World-Renowned Franco Novacco Map Collection

Emergent Misalignment: Narrow Finetuning Can Produce Broadly Misaligned LLMs

Show HN: My AI Native Resume

On Not Carrying a Camera – Cultivating memories instead of snapshots

Matrix-vector multiplication implemented in off-the-shelf DRAM for Low-Bit LLMs

Towards the Cutest Neural Network

Show HN: CodeCafé – A real-time collaborative code editor in the browser

Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

The Design of Compact Elastic Binary Trees (Cebtree)

Unparalleled Misalignments

A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

Driving Compilers (2023)