BEN Drowned

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time and one of the gems of the Nintendo 64 library. The Legend of Zelda series had two hugely successful titles on the Nintendo 64 with the other being Ocarina of Time. Finding this game should have been a great moment for Alex Hall, unfortunately for him this game will become his worst nightmare.

Moving into a dorm as a college sophmore a friend gave Alex his old N64 and a battered copy of Super Smash Bros but after some time grew bored of the same game and decided to search garage sales for more to add to his collection. After a weekend of going to garage sales one final house drew his attention. He got out of his car and was greeted by an old man who flashed him a crooked smile as Alex looked at the assortment of junk on the table, there were no games on the table and the old man seemed to not know what a video game was at all. The old man told Alex he had some things an old box, the box contained a few video games, specifically for the N64.

The man handed Alex a grey N64 cartridge with the word "Majora" written on it in permanent marker (which is in itself unusual due to the standard gold colour of the Majora's Mask cartridge). Alex believed he had a beta version or pirated copy and bought it from the man. The old man told him that it belonged to a boy about his age who didn't need the game anymore. Alex ignored the comment at the time and bought the game off of the man and took it back to his dorm. As he left though the old man said "Goodbye Ben" to Alex, which he also ignored at the time

He put the game into his N64 and saw an existing save file called BEN, out of curiosity Alex decided to play the file just to see where "BEN" had got in the game. He made it to Day 3 at the Stone Tower Temple with only an hour until the moon crashed into Termina Fields (which if you didn't know is the aim of the game, to stop the moon destroying the land). BEN had defeated 3/4 of the bosses and had almost all of the masks in the game. Alex left the game and created his own file called simply "Link". But this is where Alex's nightmare began. It began quite simply with only what seemed a error in the programming.

The NPCs in the town swapped BEN and Link's names often. At times the NPCs would call Alex Link after his file names and at other times he would be called BEN. Thinking this was a programming error he then deleted BEN's profile to fix the error. When he reloaded his profile, the NPCs left a blank space where the file name should be. Frustrated he turned off the console for the night. When he turned it back on and put the game back in is when his nightmare truly began. Tune in for the next installment where Alex begins to explore a world of pure terror which drove him near to insanity!

#majorasmask #BENDrowned