The creepypasta story known as Ben Drowned, also known as “Haunted Majora’s Mask Cartridge,” first appeared online in 2010. The story revolves around a cursed Nintendo 64 “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” game cartridge. The story goes that a college student named Alex buys the game from an elderly man only to find it is cursed by the ghost of a drowned youngster named Ben.
The lines between fact and fiction get more hazy as the plot develops and unsettling incidents and otherworldly happenings take place within the game. Ben Drowned has become a well-known figure in internet history, enthralling both gamers and horror fans.
Who is Ben Drowned?
Ben Drowned is a three-part multimedia alternate reality game (ARG) web serial and web series written by Alexander D. Hall under the pen name Jadusable. It was first published as Haunted Majora’s Mask Cartridge.
The series is known for inventing many of the typical tropes and themes of creepypasta that are used today as well as for subverting themes from The Legend of Zelda series. It was originally published by Hall from 2010 to 2020 with a break in between and was based on the 2000 action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. On October 31, 2020, the series came to an end.
The first episode of the Haunted Cartridge series, which was Hall’s debut endeavor, was made available in 2010. It centers on Jadusable, a college student, who becomes the target of a seemingly omniscient artificial intelligence named BEN over the course of a single week after purchasing a haunted Majora’s Mask Nintendo 64 video game cartridge.
The second storyline, dubbed Moon Children, spans from late 2010 to early 2011. It centers on the ascension of a strange cult known as The Moon Children, who worshiped the moon through human sacrifice.
The third storyline, dubbed Awakening, started in March 2020 and followed both new and old characters who had gotten involved in several events that year. With the aim of connecting the previous arcs, this one presented fresh situations that showed what happened after an event that occurred in the universe in 2018 and led to the dissolution of civilized society.
With millions of viewers, the series is one of the most well-known web serials on the internet. It is also widely regarded as an example of a contemporary urban legend and as having had a significant impact on the development and acceptance of the literary subgenre known as creepypasta, which has given rise to many of the familiar tropes used in contemporary internet horror stories.
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Background
Ben Drowned takes place in a fictitious, parallel world that shares many similarities with Earth before the Moon Children, a group of worshippers of the moon known as Luna, emerged. Sometime after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the Moon Children selected a 12-year-old kid named “Ben” to serve as the test subject for a brand-new project.
Ben was soon unwillingly drowned in an attempted Moon Children ritual called ascension where the sacrifice becomes a prisoner of their own making, a catalyst for the cult to continue their plans after being coerced by them to join their group under the promise of having friends and becoming like his childhood hero, Link.
The resulting product, called “BEN,” is trapped inside a copy of Majora’s Mask and combined with the programs inside before being later under the supervision of an elderly man because the original “Ben” no longer has any physical control as the dominant thinking.
As some of the cult’s members start to carry out their plan online, including a mysterious being known as “Kelbris, The Father,” who online assumes the form of the Happy Mask Salesman, the old man eventually gives the cartridge to a random college sophomore who bought it unaware that it was a cursed item.
Finally, after making their way onto the Internet, “BEN” starts to wreak havoc on the websites and movies that the sophomore student Jadusable interacts with for the benefit of “The Father.”
