A college student finds a Nintendo 64 cartridge at a garage sale. There’s no sticker, no box. There’s only one word, MAJORA, marked in black ink on the plastic. The old man selling it looks happy to get rid of it.
There’s already a save file on the cartridge called BEN. The student deletes it and saves his own. The characters of the game continue calling him BEN.
This is the introduction to what is arguably the best horror story ever published on the internet, and it remains controversial sixteen years after its publication. This is the source of that story, how it came to exist, and one major point on which nearly everyone is misinformed.
The short answer
BEN Drowned is a horror story serial by Alex Hall, an American college student using the pseudonym Jadusable. The serial was published on a daily basis on the /x/ board of 4chan during 7-15 September 2010. The protagonist of the story is a college student who experiences a number of supernatural occurrences related to the second-hand version of Majora’s Mask he owns. The story came together with real video footage, thus becoming widely known and eventually spawning an entire reader-based alternate reality game lasting almost ten years.
Where the story came from
At the time Hall wrote his first horror story, he was a sophomore in college, and he had never written any horror stories before. He had been watching the early creepypasta websites since 2009, before the form even got its name, and he decided to write one himself. He chose Majora’s Mask to serve as a foundation for a story because he had always loved its melancholic atmosphere.
Hall wrote the story really quickly, publishing a new chapter practically every day for a week while receiving feedback from the website members. This led to small mistakes in the text. There were a few spelling errors in the story, but they proved to be the greatest feature of the whole piece, as it gave a character that types with increasingly more difficulties the feeling of a person in a state of mind breakdown. This could not have been planned, and Hall did not attempt to fix those mistakes.
The original title of the story was Haunted Majora’s Mask Cartridge.
| BEN Drowned file | The details |
|---|---|
| What it is | A creepypasta that became an alternate reality game |
| Written by | Alex D. Hall, posting as Jadusable |
| First posted | 4chan’s /x/ board, 7 September 2010 |
| Original title | Haunted Majora’s Mask Cartridge |
| Built on | The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo 64, 2000 |
| Length | Three arcs, the last one ending in October 2020 |
| The entity | BEN, understood to be a dead boy inside the cartridge |
| The line | You shouldn’t have done that |
What actually happens
Jadusable takes an N64 from his roommate and gets the cartridge cheap from an old man who inexplicably wants to give it away. The save file belongs to a guy named Ben, who has gotten far and finished the majority of the game before stopping towards the end. He creates his own save file named Link and the townspeople start calling him BEN. He erases Ben’s file and stops receiving any other names.
That’s when things go wrong in a very strange way. Areas he can’t get into. Music plays backwards. The Happy Mask Salesman shows up in places where he’s not supposed to be. A Link statue that follows him at the same speed he walks and never stops following. Hall built a lot of this off of the fourth day glitch, which is a legitimate trick in the Majora’s Mask community of gamers that allows you to circumvent the three-day cycle of the entire game. At this point in the story, that’s what causes somebody to notice him.
Through the week it evolves past the game itself. The posts become shorter and more bizarre, the narrator stops sleeping, and BEN leaves the cartridge and enters the life of the player. This arc ends with Jadusable leaving and somebody else taking control of his account.
Why the videos worked when everything else looked fake
This is the part that most retellings gloss over, but it is why this creepypasta really worked.
Hall didn’t superimpose spooky effects on top of gameplay footage. He used Project 64, an emulator for the N64 console and employed some obscure GameShark debugging codes to directly alter the game itself, changing audio, the geometry of levels, animations, behavior of characters. In his interviews Hall has described how it took a lot of time and trial-and-error to achieve it. And what he managed to achieve was just how much control he had with these codes.
And it made a huge difference. Effects added over video never feel authentic since the lighting, frame rate, compression and the footage itself don’t match. What Hall created was a game engine actually performing those actions, rendered by the very same machine, with the very same textures and the physics engine, everything a little bit off. Anyone who has ever played Majora’s Mask could tell that footage is real. And this is the part that is uncanny. No writing alone could ever achieve it.
Why it had to be Majora’s Mask
Change the game – the story falls apart.
Majora’s Mask was already the weirdest thing that Nintendo ever published. A kid has three days to prevent a moon with a face from destroying a town and the only way he can do it is by living these three days again and again until he sees how everybody fails in the same way. It’s a game about death and grief pretending to be a children’s adventure game. There are enough people who played it as kids and found it creepy long before anyone wrote creepypasta about it.
And it has an Elegy of Emptiness statue – a hollow-eyed version of the player character left behind to operate switches. Nintendo put that statue in the game on purpose in 2000. Hall didn’t need to add anything spooky himself – he just needed to move what was already there.
That is closer to psychological horror than to anything supernatural. The fear is that something familiar is behaving slightly incorrectly, and the story never needs to show you a monster.
The three arcs
| Arc | When | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| The Haunted Cartridge | September 2010 | The original posts and videos, nine days |
| Moon Children | Late 2010 to July 2011 | A reader-driven ARG about a cult |
| Awakening | March to October 2020 | The return, almost a decade later |
The second arc was the point at which it ceased to be a story and became a game. Shortly after the first arc had concluded, Hall’s YouTube channel underwent a transformation directing readers to a website run by a cult calling themselves the Moon Children, named after a group from Majora’s Mask. Readers solved puzzles, interacted with characters via email, and voted on how those characters would act. The website operated on a cyclical system similar to that of the game itself, and it kept crashing under the sheer load of traffic.
Hall even went backward. Two videos uploaded to the channel in 2009 and entirely separate from this project became canonical within the second arc as though they always belonged there. This was years before the site existed, when almost nobody was watching, and that is precisely the sort of trick you can only do once.
Nobody actually drowns in the original story.
This is where most people miss the point, including the vast majority of the sites covering it.
The title is BEN Drowned, so people naturally assume that this story will tell you that the titular character drowned in the game. It does not. The original arc has nothing about anybody drowning. It has a save file with a name on it and some implications, but readers filled in the blanks on their own, debating whether Ben drowned by accident, drowned himself, or was drowned by his father.
The answer comes later, in the ARG, where the cult is responsible for Ben’s death. This was a retrofitting job. The original week of postings left this detail wide open and is better for having done so. The name is carrying all of the weight, and that sort of thing is a total fluke.
The lines that got away from the story
There are two phrases which escaped this creepypasta to become the stuff of internet meme culture.
One of these is from BEN. He will say a version of it whenever the narrator does something which he shouldn’t: you shouldn’t have done that. This phrase is now attached to thousands of images of cats and other things and has been used by most of the people who have never heard of the creepypasta before.
The second of these quotes isn’t even Hall’s work. The Happy Mask Salesman asks the player whether they have encountered a terrible fate, and it is true dialogue in the game itself, written in 2000 for an adventure game intended for kids. Hall took whatever was in front of him, and the result is that a generation reads that quote as one of horror.
What BEN Drowned changed
Before 2010, creepypasta was a block of text. After 2010, creepypasta was a text plus evidence, and the evidence was the point.
Everything that came after uses this format. The genre of the haunted video game cartridge alone spawned hundreds of imitations, mostly dealing with a Pokemon or a Sonic game being somehow corrupted, and all of those imitators totally missed the point. They produced glitchy videos. Hall produced a narrator whose everyday life is deteriorating in front of an audience capable of responding to them.
The reader interaction is the other legacy. People weren’t reading this; they were participating in it through emails and voting on the outcome of actions. A good portion of the modern horror web is built upon the framework Hall put together in a fortnight as a sophomore without any writing experience.
Is any of it real
No. BEN Drowned is fiction and its author has never claimed otherwise. Alex Hall admitted early on that he made the whole thing while at college, he has given interviews about how the footage was produced, and he still answers questions about it publicly.
There is no haunted cartridge. There was never a boy called Ben. There is no evidence anybody connected to Majora’s Mask died, and Nintendo has nothing to do with any of this.
What is real is the effect it has on people who find it at the right age. A story about an object that is quietly wrong is unusually good at attaching itself to real objects, which is the same mechanism that keeps people writing apology letters to Robert the Doll. If you have an old console in a cupboard, you will think about this the next time you switch it on. That is the whole trick, and knowing it is a trick does not undo it.
Where to read it now
The original nine day-long series of posts has since been preserved on every single creepypasta website out there, while Jadusable’s videos are still available on YouTube and look precisely like something that could have been recorded from an emulator in 2010. Read the posts in sequence with the videos where they appear. Reading everything together destroys the sequence that made the whole thing work.
The ARG arcs are more difficult. Most of the original websites no longer exist, and what remains is mostly preserved on some other website or reconstructed by the fans, which means that you will be reading the history of a game rather than playing it. Take the first arc seriously and consider the rest to be history.
Verdict
Horror fiction on the internet generates huge amounts of writing and virtually none of it stands the test of time for more than ten years. This one survived, but not because it was well-written, as it is not. It has survived because a teenager figured out that horror can be a lot scarier when presented as evidence than when told as a story, and then went through all the technical trouble of making his evidence believable.
Go through the first arc. It is just a few hours long. If you have played Majora’s Mask in your childhood, clear your schedule for the day, as it is about to go in an unexpected direction.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote BEN Drowned?
Alex D. Hall, an American writer who posted under the username Jadusable. He was a second year college student in 2010 and had never written a horror story before. He has never hidden his identity and still talks about the project openly.
Is the BEN Drowned cartridge real?
No. There is no haunted copy of Majora’s Mask. The footage was produced on a PC using the Project 64 emulator and debugging codes, not recorded from an N64 console.
Can you play the fourth day glitch yourself?
Yes, it is a real glitch and people were performing it long before this story existed. It lets you slip past the game’s three day limit. Nothing unusual happens when you do it, beyond the strangeness the developers put there.
What does the Elegy of Emptiness statue have to do with it?
It is a real item in Majora’s Mask, a blank-faced duplicate of the player character that you leave behind to weigh down switches. The story uses it heavily, and the images that circulate online are usually of the genuine in-game model rather than anything made up.
How long does BEN Drowned take to read?
The first arc runs to roughly two hours including the videos. The full three arcs run to millions of words across archives, forums and video, so most people read the original and stop there.
Is BEN Drowned connected to Sonic.exe or Lost Silver?
Not directly, but both came afterwards and both borrow the format. BEN Drowned effectively invented the haunted game cartridge story, and the wave of imitations that followed is the clearest evidence of how well it worked.