With how terrifyingly nightmare inducing that Link Elegy statue is I'm not surprised someone came up with a spooky story surrounding it. I'm just grateful it's so well written and thought out.
@dtxspeaks268 I think its just the uncanny valley, the face is oddly realistic for the time where everything else is suuuuuper cartoony in the game, it just felt super weird and gave me goosebumps.
Yeah most creepypastas from back in the day are laughable, but this one is genuinely well made That nightmare in particular is so grotesque, especially cause it actually goes into detail
@@argentum8417 Yup its a shame that all the bad stories that don't know how to implement Ben Drown's cliche's ended up dragging the story down with it but its such a well thought out story
awakening wasn't as scary as ben drowned but I really liked how much control we had in how the story progressed, what places we explored, and what decisions were made. people who weren't there don't realize that after every episode we'd get choices on where to do next and literally that next week the next episode would reflect that. we debated SO MUCH about certain decisions and it really made the story feel so much more personal, it was super unique and I really wish games/stories did more of that
Ben Drowned is probably one of the best gaming creepypastas ever, if not just creepypastas overall. Much more interesting and enjoyable than the "hyper realistic bloody eyes" style pastas, the rom hack footage being insanely convincing (and worthy of praise for that effort alone), and the attachment to a larger ARG but still standing great on its own. As a kid, I loved Ben Drowned for the creepy Zelda gameplay and music, and as an adult I discovered the Moon Children and loved the more complex mystery and scraping through old forum posts for information. Great how the pasta grows with you like that.
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY it set a standard that most gaming creepy pastas never reached, but it's cool because of the large amount of effort and love put into the project.
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY Eh, not really. Godzilla NES creepy pasta got praised by it’s gorgeous art work and the mysterious worlds that were shown in the game however the story and the ending didn’t convince me to be a better storyline than Ben Drowned.
I am a grown man. I discovered the creepypasta around 2011/2012 I think (I was around 10 at the time) and it still scares the hell out of me for some reason lmao to the point I had to lower the volume or just not look at the screen at some point. When Majora's mask 3DS came out, I was SCARED because of the creepypasta and still kinda is, I played the game but honestly probably wouldn't touch it again for a long time. Yeah, an old creepypasta about a child's game can terrify a big boy and I feel so weak but also it's part of my childhood
Almost exactly the same as me! Even after all these years, the story and statue still make my skin crawl unlike much else, and the only explanation I have as to how its impact on me never left is because it was the first internet horror story I ever read. Even now as a massive horror fan I can hardly bring myself to even look at the statue for long, haha.
As someone who was a teenager back then: exactly that! I just was like 'Wait, people are still talking about this creepypasta?' when I saw the title of this video. To be frank with you, the elegy statues were all kind of in the uncanny vallley, and the remake frankly did them no favors on that one either. But it's really just the graphics at the time of the original making them look a little extra uncanny, and it truly was the worst on the human Link statue.
I'll be honest, at first the ARG angle felt like it was waning somewhat and going off focus, but the end was what tied it all together and arguably made the story better/creepier than the original, considering instead of it being a ghost, it turns out to be peoples' consciousnesses who were converted to AI to live in a virtual reality paradise that went horribly wrong.
the creepiest thing was how well it aged, like a year later the metaverse shit started getting announced and now a civil war in the US unfortunately doesn't seem so crazy
My favorite Ben Drowned style story online has to be NES Godzilla. I haven't read it in a couple years, but it went from genuinely disturbing and creepy to an epic fantasy in an organic way. Loved it
I had a blast watching this, Ben Drowned has always been one of my favorite Creepypastas and this is also my first time seeing the non-video side of things in full detail. Getting some explanation for the events of the 2020 continuation was really nice, since I was honestly completely lost with nothing but the videos to go off of.
It’s funny thinking how all of these creepypastas used to scare me as a kid but now most of the ones that kept me up are laughably bad. I will say though, that Link statue is still really creepy
@@Kingkaiju05I was terrified of Slenderman when I was around 12 😂 I thought it was real, every time I got on the bus and we went through the woods I was looking around making sure Slenderman wasn't around. Marble hornets and Slender were terrifying too
While I'm personally not a very big fan of the last few videos and the ending, this is still one of my favorite ARGs. There was just something about witnessing the whole Awakening arc in real time that was really amazing and I'm glad to have been there for most of it. Really hoping Alex Hall's next project manages to be as good.
same, I know he works in washington DC now with senators and regulators about digital assets (this dudes career path is bipolar af lol) but I hope he goes back to writing again. every time he makes a story it always incorporates something super unique to the genre (Ben Drowned was the trend setter for so many creepypastas and then Awakening incorporated a heavy amount of audience choice to tell the story)
I remember being 8 when first finding this series and thinking this was the scariest creepy pasta story. It was so bad I could never think about playing either of the n64 Zelda games due to me thinking the story was real. It’s almost comforting in a way that I was able to see closure to this horror mystery a decade later.
That Creepypasta was so scary to me back in the day where those types of stories were terrifying. I remember a few years ago finally getting into the Zelda games and playing Majora's Mask on my 3ds, I was easily creeped out when I saw the creepy Link statue in the game.
Tbh, that one was not that bad as it was obviously a wooden puppet(like skull kid I guess, but without a soul). The really creepy one was N64 MM, as it looked like a literal corpse standing in front of you, and it lead to many theories on it.
Hi there, I was an active player for the ARG during the third arc, and wanted to pop in to shed some light on it. So, the haunted hotel was marred by so many issues, mostly in regards to conveyance, we had no clue what was required and what wasn't, we didn't know how to handle things, and especially after we lost the original 3 items we brought, it just wasn't worth it. Once the choice came up to either work with MM or stay with hotel things, it was obvious. At least with MM we had some clue about how to do things. Then there was the controversy near the end. Unsure if it's touched on in the video but there was a major creep that was on the mod team for the discord server, and despite BEGGING Alex to at least address the situation after the creep got removed, he didn't, and once he closed the server he revealed he barely even managed the discord, and that it was someone else. While Alex is great at storytelling, he's not nearly as good at being direct or truthful. And of course a year later he tried to push a bunch if crypto crap too.
Ben Drowned is simply what a creepypasta is supposed to be. Creepy, original, gives a dark twist to something that was already nostalgic and known, and withstands the test of time while still being scary.
I liked it because it was tonally different, there was a real sense of "righting the past wrongs" of the 2010 story. But I get why as an artist Alex didn't want to just remake Ben Drowned again and opted for a different tone. IMO it wasn't as scary but it did do something super unique - the way the episodes would come out every week and how much agency we had over the story (we debated for HOURS about whether or not to let the moon fall... like something out of phoenix wright) made the story really unique & I would say that was its biggest strength. People looking on this retroactively don't realize that after every episode in the cartridge we could actually vote on where to explore next and it would happen IMMEDIATELY in the next episode. It made the story feel so personal that nothing else has really quite managed to capture since
I remember playing Majoras Mask at 8 years old when I got it for a gift. I thought I was cool but I had a little odd feeling about it. Once I finished the game, I started to watch a lot of videos about it. Then, I found out about Ben Drowned. I was CREEPED out as a kid and never played it again. I still love Zelda and I recently started playing Majoras Mask again, but the fear i had back as a kid was insane.😭
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the "oh it's an ai thingy where we trapped the mind of people in there and Ben is actually an acronym" I was like: eeeeeeeeh? :/
I was just a little kid during the first arc of the story. I stumbled upon the old creepypasta image and videos on youtube and it scared me half to death. But when 2020 rolled around and it started up again, I followed along with it, live. I was in the discord meetings during the big events. I saw the website change, saw people uncover things, voted in the polls. It was an insane thing to be a part of, and it was AWESOME. Thanks for this video, it helped explain everything that I didn't understand about it, even while I watched it all unfold.
I was OBSESSED with Ben drowned as kid even though it scared me a ton, I found the “haunted video game” creepy pastas so terrifying and yet so addicting to watch. I remember watching this one Ben drowned video that had someone telling the story with the gameplay like they were the person in the story and when the game finally chilled out at the end, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and skipped away from the laptop to play on my Wii or Wii U
I never thought after the first half of the creepypasta that they managed to involve a whole cult based on the moon children, that's nuts, ben drowned including sonic.exe is the main reason why i got into internet creepypastas, and at the time i was still young when i was into them, coming back to each one fills me with nostalgia.
Someone HAS to create a real video game about this story , there can be multiple endings depending on whether you escape, you follow the story as it turned out or do other actions that lead to different outcomes. This story seems ripe for a game
Wow I had no idea about the later ARG portion of the story.. And it's not good. I mean the creepy corrupted gameplay is still on point, and that was always Ben Drowned's strongest (and arguably only truly good) aspect, but the story is complete clownshoes. Death cults, dimensional merges, societal collapse, time travel, AIs, soul digitization, evil corporations with scifi tech.. Those are a lot of really out there concepts, but they don't actually pay off in an interesting way. The lore is very convoluted, but it doesn't actually go anywhere interesting. There are no interesting twists to the story because all the elements play out exactly as you've already seen them play out in other stories with similar elements, and ultimately all that anyone ever really wanted was to go back to the creepy haunted game.
omgg wait i just realized this was uploaded only 6 hours ago, and i was specifically looking for a video about ben drowned exactly like this, thank you for making this 🙌
I didn’t know about the Awakening arc, I kept up with Ben drowned when it was originally being posted and thought the story was over. Thanks for giving me some new content that I wasn’t aware of! Great video
The original copy of Majoras mask was a simulation and "Ben" was a kid who was forced into it along with tons of other poor souls. And the halfway house saga was also a VR world. Sarah aka the second protagonist reset the virtual world so everyone can remain in blissful ignorance. I still don't understand what role the moon children and lunar cult had to play, if any Ben Drown lore scholars would be willing to explain that would be epic.
i could be misremembering, but i believe the moon children cult was a front made up by the tech company responsible for the simulations. basically they made it up so they could "recruit" young people for testing.
Moon children and lunar cult are the same i thing, and they were one of the first iteration of internity project (I think that when someone dies,they say that he is ascendant because he can now live in the fake paradise
I ALMOST wish I'd been born a little later just to have experienced some of these silly stories as a kid and been spooked, instead of coming across them as a teen and laughing my ass off
I was a kid at the time of this and genuinely talked to cleverbot asking it questions about ben drowned and when I asked “where are you ben?” It responded “your room” and my little 10 year old ass felt like crying haha I’m so happy I can look back at these as an adult and laugh at that little kid I was. I’m still incredibly fond of these stories because of it!
Might be controversial, but I think the ARG is kinda bad. I 100% respect the work that was put into making it and the modded ROM gameplay is awesome, but it just doesn't really add anything to the original story and kinda just takes all the mystery out of it.
Maybe it was a "you had to be there" sort of thing, but this was my first time hearing about the ARG portion past the first arc, and yeah, it sounds like a real mess that overcomplicates what was originally a great, short, sweet and unnerving story. As soon as the story began taking a turn towards apocalyptic cults, my eyes glazed over.
Yeah, the whole thing was kinda lame to me, wish it'd had stopped with the father being the true antagonist, these are tropes that have been seen and seen again.
Thank you for this - i am older than most but played MM on N64. Ive seen references to this but didnt know the story. I had my first child in 2007 so that explains why i missed things from 2009.
Ben Drowned was my first truly terrifying creepypasta that I read. I have read others, both gaming and original, and while I-as a, like... 14-15 year old teen-enjoyed them and thought they were pretty creepy, I was able to not get too freaked out knowing that it was fiction. When I read Ben Drowned, though? I was pretty convinced due to the videos. Seeing an actual playing of this 'cursed game' so to say made me actually scared, and I stayed up all night reading it. When I got Majora's Mask [even on a N64! Meant to have been for the Gamecube but hey, nice and classic], I got a weird glitch causing the end game screen to freeze on Link before he gets blown away. I was certain I was on the first day, and had just done the reverse song of time to slow down the clock. Scared the shit out of me at that age, that was the final pin to convince me that the story was real, and I was cursed too! It worked fine after turning the system off and on again but goodness did I have a few nightmares. I had later learned about the 'continuation' but never got into it because it sounded incomplete and didn't want to get into it just to have to wait. I now feel bad I didn't get to participate in such an amazing ARG!
Growing up, i was really scared of the creepy pastas. All I knew of this one was the statue, the reversed song of healing, and the happy mask salesman laughing. This is an interesting story coming back to.
I love Ben Drowned as a concept and what it meant for the Internet horror genre, but it was never that scary to me. The first time I ever heard it was around a campfire, and the guy telling it messed it up quite a few times, so it never really stuck 😅
Honestly I found the text parts of BEN DROWNED pretty weak. It leans a little too heavily into 'so spooked you guys', like guy you went to a yard sale and bought a beaten-up cartridge, it's not that spooky. But the footage is honestly great. It leans into an eerie wrongness that really does a great job of building tension, even if Link bursting into flames at random is more silly than scary. It's not really something that translates well into verbal recitation, though. Imagining somebody trying to turn it into a campfire story is hilarious.
What made this great is that nostalgia is a double edged sword... In everybody's childhoods, there were good times... AND there were bad times, and often those with good times forgot or romanticize what really happened. Teenagers and young adults kind of grew up with up with the internet... MySpace, Facebook, UA-cam, Instant Messaging. We projected ourselves onto these platforms, and the internet started right back at us. And it scared us shitless. And it was awesome.
I knew all of Part 1, a good chunk of Part 2, but I had never gotten much of any information about Part 3! I'm glad to finally be able to see the conclusion of this story after all these years.
I think this is the only full length coverage of the full arg in one video. Professor Doc Greever has a 10 part series on the arg and the behind the scenes of the arg
My friend in college showed me this and I remember it freaking me out SO BAD. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this at the time either which I think made it so much more intense.
The statue isn’t all that creepy. UNSETTLING as all hell, definitely. But the creepiest thing of the whole ARG is definitely the design of The Father. Almost gave me nightmares the first time I saw it.
and i remembered it far different than was shown in the video, as the way i remember was the Father being far away and then suddenly filling the whole screen, removing Link, and opening his eyes and they were completely black, no color variation like in the video, and i almost threw the remote at the tv and now i have a noticeable fear of black screens causing me to legit wish i had a knife by me for self defense AT ALL TIMES.
I like the original creepypasta and everything that related to the video game The footage creeped me out I never knew about anything that came after and I can't help but cringe at it The guy's voice on the 'recording' reminded me of the first FNAF game and the tapes you listen to there idk, maybe I've grown out of creepypasta, but it sounds like they're very desperately trying to be edgy Also it's not acted great Might just be me, maybe there's an audience for it
I remember being scared of this creepypasta when I was like 14 and had nightmares about him and now I just think the story is good. I only played the demo for the 3ds version but I didn't buy it because I hate being timed on stuff. i also i had a nightmare that I was over at my grandma's house and heard the song of unhealing playing without the pc even being on and i was panicking trying to figure out what was making it play.
Wanted to come back and leave a comment here. I listened to this video on a long walk home one day, and it was such a good video that I started taking longer walks home while listening to more horror stories I missed over the years.
always heard of it but never heard the whole story. Definitely didn’t think it went to deep! All an outsider heard was a creepy pasta about a haunted cartridge, but definitely a good way to build up fans to participate
OMG i recommend doing a deep dive into Ben drowned like months ago I believe, can’t believe it got made into a vid and my algorithm shows it to me 3 days late
I may not be a huge ben drowned kinda guy but I love this story I discoverd it in 2016 when I was young it was the music that got to me mostly but now that I listen to it again it still holds up.
Time to post this again! Back in the day I screwed around with clever bot; especially when I found out about this. One day I asked Clever Bot (unprovoked) if it knew who had drowned a kid named Ben. It told me the HMS did. and it used the HMS abbreviation too. I just closed the tab and never used it again. That was...almost 10 years ago now?
I legitimately got scared to be in my basement alone when I was like 13 bc for some reason I was certain that Ben would appear behind me and I’d be all alone in the dark. This stuff was so effectively terrifying at that age lol
While it is a big shame how Jadusable basically turned on his own fans and went huge into NFTs and Crypto, along with citing people like Tim and Joe as major influences in Act 3, it was still a magical time and loved the moments the fans could come together and experience the end of the saga.
I don't find the story itself very scary, but those gameplay videos are a different kind of unnerving. That Link statue, too... god damn. What the hell was Aonuma thinking with that one? Lmfao it still creeps me the hell out
Wait a second. When Sarah was introduced (or Player 3 at the time), you specified that both the Majora's Mask cartridge and the Hotel needed time, and both had their own worthwhile ending. The community really only ever decided to play Majora? Or after the second time, it was set in stone that the rest of the ARG would be played within the cartridge? That doesn't leave much room to "manage time in both stories". I was very invested all the way through the end, this didn't necessarily break my immersion, but I also lost a bit the plot at that moment. Also, how did Sarah know about the Eternity Project? Sure, WE could see the website, and it was explained that we replaced Sarah's free will (even though she's just a regular human being digitized? It's a bit messy, I guess), but Sarah or whatever player would've been alive at that point shouldn't know about it, or should they? I thought they got amnesia when placed in the hotel. That's why they wanted to scape. Also, what did Player 2 bring with him that was so important that Player 3 shouldn't have? Was it possible to escape from the hotel at all? Or was that just a red herring? I'm sorry if I'm picking too many nits, I'm just WAY too invested right now not to look into the details. You can't hook me that way (which, knowing Ben Drowned so many years, it's amazing I never knew about this), and then leave me hanging like that. Still, amazing content, and thank you for the high quality video! It was really such a joy to watch. You definitely earned a sub
i remember bringing up my dad's N64 and not being able to sleep with it in my room because of the creeypasta lol i was like 8 at the time and now it's evolved into this. it's crazy
i have an unpopular opnion that i just like the majoras mask part, all of this stuff of moon children and luna cult, it just fells off trying to explain something that didnt need explanation, maybe some people like this whole arc but for me the good part is just the first one about ben and the haunted cartridge
I was a gullible little teenage kid and just played through the game and of course took too long... so as if the moon propping down wasn't bad enough. No little me of course swallowed the "Ben drowns" story whole after searching for tips on UA-cam. Weeks without sleep.. still feel strange watching it after so many years 😂
Thank you for the analysis! It's kinda hard to understand what was going on because when I left the creepypasta free.wmv was the last piece and it was insane to realize that the story wasn't over yet. That Ben is not actually a virus and he is not the one killing people out of revenge. The only thing I don't understand is... BEN. Are there two of them? One is a child Ben that we help and the other is BEN, the face we saw on one of the videos that looks like Saira. Or did I get it wrong?
IMO Alex Hall is not good at ARGs. He started doing one piggybacking out of the nostalgia that majora brought, and was editing creepy stuff back when no one was doing that with emulators Instead of keeping it simply haunted , he inserted what I can imagine are bits and pieces of his cancelled movie that are very black mirror/matrix esque in nature.(not interesting with this execution) He tried to do too much and kinda lost track of what made the original good and deviated so far from it that is just mid. There's way better ARGs out there at this point hence why I immediately lost interest when I gave it a chance and saw how much of a convulated mess it was.
pls make a video about the princess AKA if you see her turn off the game, its literally the best game creepypasta no one talks about, and that what scares me the most
@@Sacrow what scares me the most is how little people talk about this story, just like how in the story you not supposed tô talk about her, thats like the most unintentional imersion i ever seen from a creepypasta
Those images of the uncanny girl -- the "Get out" image and the "Don't be hasty now" image -- are by far the most unsettling parts to me. It's those eyes.
I just watched a meme of spiderman jump farting and didn't realize I had auto play on and THE MUSIC IN THE BEGINNING OF THIS VIDEO STARTED PLAYING. Lemme tell you I'm happy I was already taking a dump when it did jfc
I'm here because nostalgia. I spent 24 hrs straight completely engrossed in this with my best friend in 2010. I miss him. He's not dead, we both got married.
I never thought I'd find out the ARG ended. I remember seeing the first part seen as a creepypasta when I was younger & later on found out it was an ARG. It's an interesting ending though I'm curious what happened to Sarah & that guy that went to see someone named Baker. I sometimes lose focus or forget things as a make comments so for all I know you mentioned it & I forgot. Never expected Ben to turn out to be good given the creepypasta section but it makes sense when putting things together. At least they won't suffer any longer.
This creepypasta was creepy af back in the day, and it still is. I saw the original gameplay video as a kid and it creeped me tf out.
it was creepy but was it pasta?
I was a late teen, and it scared the crap out of me too lol
The veridian city music in the background to this creepy pasta was good af I swear
Tftftftf
@@chickennugget481arpa is creepy
Edit: pasta
With how terrifyingly nightmare inducing that Link Elegy statue is I'm not surprised someone came up with a spooky story surrounding it. I'm just grateful it's so well written and thought out.
Hmm, I never thought it was terrifying tbh
Why t u grateful. 👎
I really hope Alex is doing alright. Last I heard from him, he was really feeling down.
@dtxspeaks268 I think its just the uncanny valley, the face is oddly realistic for the time where everything else is suuuuuper cartoony in the game, it just felt super weird and gave me goosebumps.
Yeah most creepypastas from back in the day are laughable, but this one is genuinely well made
That nightmare in particular is so grotesque, especially cause it actually goes into detail
Ben Drowned really did change the internet horror scene
Sure some things might be cliche by today's standards but it was such an amazing ride
the only reason they feel cliche today is because ben drowned created those cliches and i love that
@@argentum8417 Yup its a shame that all the bad stories that don't know how to implement Ben Drown's cliche's ended up dragging the story down with it but its such a well thought out story
awakening wasn't as scary as ben drowned but I really liked how much control we had in how the story progressed, what places we explored, and what decisions were made. people who weren't there don't realize that after every episode we'd get choices on where to do next and literally that next week the next episode would reflect that. we debated SO MUCH about certain decisions and it really made the story feel so much more personal, it was super unique and I really wish games/stories did more of that
Ben Drowned is probably one of the best gaming creepypastas ever, if not just creepypastas overall. Much more interesting and enjoyable than the "hyper realistic bloody eyes" style pastas, the rom hack footage being insanely convincing (and worthy of praise for that effort alone), and the attachment to a larger ARG but still standing great on its own.
As a kid, I loved Ben Drowned for the creepy Zelda gameplay and music, and as an adult I discovered the Moon Children and loved the more complex mystery and scraping through old forum posts for information. Great how the pasta grows with you like that.
Ben Drowned wasn't subtle, it's just that most of it's competition was so subpar that it seems subtle in comparison.
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY it set a standard that most gaming creepy pastas never reached, but it's cool because of the large amount of effort and love put into the project.
@@fartface192 I think that as a piece of writing, Godzilla NES is like 10 times the story Ben Drowned is
I agree. Part 1 of the larger Ben narrative fucked me up as a kid, but good thing it has finally come to a close after more than ten years of waiting.
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY Eh, not really. Godzilla NES creepy pasta got praised by it’s gorgeous art work and the mysterious worlds that were shown in the game however the story and the ending didn’t convince me to be a better storyline than Ben Drowned.
I am a grown man. I discovered the creepypasta around 2011/2012 I think (I was around 10 at the time) and it still scares the hell out of me for some reason lmao to the point I had to lower the volume or just not look at the screen at some point. When Majora's mask 3DS came out, I was SCARED because of the creepypasta and still kinda is, I played the game but honestly probably wouldn't touch it again for a long time.
Yeah, an old creepypasta about a child's game can terrify a big boy and I feel so weak but also it's part of my childhood
I was 19 at that time and trust me as a grown adult I can appreciate a good story and this was definitely one that hit right in the nostalgia
Almost exactly the same as me! Even after all these years, the story and statue still make my skin crawl unlike much else, and the only explanation I have as to how its impact on me never left is because it was the first internet horror story I ever read. Even now as a massive horror fan I can hardly bring myself to even look at the statue for long, haha.
I'm almost your age and I'm scared that you called yourself a grown man😭😭😭
>grown man
*Laughs in mid 30s*
It's a good creepypasta. Remember being in the /v/ and /x/ threads for it.
"I am a grown man" was 10 in 2011-12. ... wait fuck we getting old
Normal people: It's just a Link statue.
2010's kids: Oh no.
As someone who was a teenager back then: exactly that! I just was like 'Wait, people are still talking about this creepypasta?' when I saw the title of this video. To be frank with you, the elegy statues were all kind of in the uncanny vallley, and the remake frankly did them no favors on that one either. But it's really just the graphics at the time of the original making them look a little extra uncanny, and it truly was the worst on the human Link statue.
I love majora’s mask :)
2010s kids hearing the song of unhealing is exactly like war veterans getting vietnam war flashbacks
We get so much ptsd from it 😭😭
Speedrunners: How fast can we summon elegy statue under water?
@@mythman700I kinda find it comforting I think it’s the dark undertone but I enjoy it
I'll be honest, at first the ARG angle felt like it was waning somewhat and going off focus, but the end was what tied it all together and arguably made the story better/creepier than the original, considering instead of it being a ghost, it turns out to be peoples' consciousnesses who were converted to AI to live in a virtual reality paradise that went horribly wrong.
the creepiest thing was how well it aged, like a year later the metaverse shit started getting announced and now a civil war in the US unfortunately doesn't seem so crazy
The whole “the truth” part was never solved is SO ANNOYING like bruv and the fact we can’t even do it anymore is just 😭
You mean the "truth.txt" or something else?
My favorite Ben Drowned style story online has to be NES Godzilla. I haven't read it in a couple years, but it went from genuinely disturbing and creepy to an epic fantasy in an organic way. Loved it
I had a blast watching this, Ben Drowned has always been one of my favorite Creepypastas and this is also my first time seeing the non-video side of things in full detail. Getting some explanation for the events of the 2020 continuation was really nice, since I was honestly completely lost with nothing but the videos to go off of.
It’s funny thinking how all of these creepypastas used to scare me as a kid but now most of the ones that kept me up are laughably bad. I will say though, that Link statue is still really creepy
Have you watched the video?
I was born in the hay wire age of creepypasta and I remember vividly being genuinely afraid of slenderman
@@Kingkaiju05I was terrified of Slenderman when I was around
12 😂 I thought it was real, every time I got on the bus and we went through the woods I was looking around making sure Slenderman wasn't around. Marble hornets and Slender were terrifying too
While I'm personally not a very big fan of the last few videos and the ending, this is still one of my favorite ARGs. There was just something about witnessing the whole Awakening arc in real time that was really amazing and I'm glad to have been there for most of it. Really hoping Alex Hall's next project manages to be as good.
same, I know he works in washington DC now with senators and regulators about digital assets (this dudes career path is bipolar af lol) but I hope he goes back to writing again. every time he makes a story it always incorporates something super unique to the genre (Ben Drowned was the trend setter for so many creepypastas and then Awakening incorporated a heavy amount of audience choice to tell the story)
The lore behind this creepypasta is just fascinating
I remember being 8 when first finding this series and thinking this was the scariest creepy pasta story. It was so bad I could never think about playing either of the n64 Zelda games due to me thinking the story was real. It’s almost comforting in a way that I was able to see closure to this horror mystery a decade later.
That Creepypasta was so scary to me back in the day where those types of stories were terrifying. I remember a few years ago finally getting into the Zelda games and playing Majora's Mask on my 3ds, I was easily creeped out when I saw the creepy Link statue in the game.
Tbh, that one was not that bad as it was obviously a wooden puppet(like skull kid I guess, but without a soul). The really creepy one was N64 MM, as it looked like a literal corpse standing in front of you, and it lead to many theories on it.
@@Y_u_dum @Y_u_dum
Hi there, I was an active player for the ARG during the third arc, and wanted to pop in to shed some light on it.
So, the haunted hotel was marred by so many issues, mostly in regards to conveyance, we had no clue what was required and what wasn't, we didn't know how to handle things, and especially after we lost the original 3 items we brought, it just wasn't worth it. Once the choice came up to either work with MM or stay with hotel things, it was obvious. At least with MM we had some clue about how to do things.
Then there was the controversy near the end. Unsure if it's touched on in the video but there was a major creep that was on the mod team for the discord server, and despite BEGGING Alex to at least address the situation after the creep got removed, he didn't, and once he closed the server he revealed he barely even managed the discord, and that it was someone else. While Alex is great at storytelling, he's not nearly as good at being direct or truthful. And of course a year later he tried to push a bunch if crypto crap too.
I actually remember that creep.
Ben Drowned is simply what a creepypasta is supposed to be. Creepy, original, gives a dark twist to something that was already nostalgic and known, and withstands the test of time while still being scary.
It forgot the spaghetti though :(
@@Quaxo21Which is why we have Scary Spaghetti
The Awakening arc was so good, managed to be creepy like the old chapters too
Was glad to be there when it happened.
I liked it because it was tonally different, there was a real sense of "righting the past wrongs" of the 2010 story. But I get why as an artist Alex didn't want to just remake Ben Drowned again and opted for a different tone. IMO it wasn't as scary but it did do something super unique - the way the episodes would come out every week and how much agency we had over the story (we debated for HOURS about whether or not to let the moon fall... like something out of phoenix wright) made the story really unique & I would say that was its biggest strength. People looking on this retroactively don't realize that after every episode in the cartridge we could actually vote on where to explore next and it would happen IMMEDIATELY in the next episode. It made the story feel so personal that nothing else has really quite managed to capture since
@@defaultname7685 theres just something about Rosa saying “forget what I say” in the intros that gives me the creeps
I remember playing Majoras Mask at 8 years old when I got it for a gift. I thought I was cool but I had a little odd feeling about it. Once I finished the game, I started to watch a lot of videos about it. Then, I found out about Ben Drowned. I was CREEPED out as a kid and never played it again. I still love Zelda and I recently started playing Majoras Mask again, but the fear i had back as a kid was insane.😭
The first part is iconic, spooky, and enjoyable, but the rest is… kind of a hot mess.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the "oh it's an ai thingy where we trapped the mind of people in there and Ben is actually an acronym" I was like: eeeeeeeeh? :/
Yeah people dont remember the moon children stuff for a very good reason lol
The dark legacy of one of the coolest things ever done with the medium of creepypastas. Seriously those videos are just impressive.
I was just a little kid during the first arc of the story. I stumbled upon the old creepypasta image and videos on youtube and it scared me half to death. But when 2020 rolled around and it started up again, I followed along with it, live. I was in the discord meetings during the big events. I saw the website change, saw people uncover things, voted in the polls. It was an insane thing to be a part of, and it was AWESOME. Thanks for this video, it helped explain everything that I didn't understand about it, even while I watched it all unfold.
I was OBSESSED with Ben drowned as kid even though it scared me a ton, I found the “haunted video game” creepy pastas so terrifying and yet so addicting to watch. I remember watching this one Ben drowned video that had someone telling the story with the gameplay like they were the person in the story and when the game finally chilled out at the end, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and skipped away from the laptop to play on my Wii or Wii U
I never thought after the first half of the creepypasta that they managed to involve a whole cult based on the moon children, that's nuts, ben drowned including sonic.exe is the main reason why i got into internet creepypastas, and at the time i was still young when i was into them, coming back to each one fills me with nostalgia.
Someone HAS to create a real video game about this story , there can be multiple endings depending on whether you escape, you follow the story as it turned out or do other actions that lead to different outcomes. This story seems ripe for a game
I would love to see a real movie about that so bad
Nintendo licensing would kill it
Wow I had no idea about the later ARG portion of the story.. And it's not good. I mean the creepy corrupted gameplay is still on point, and that was always Ben Drowned's strongest (and arguably only truly good) aspect, but the story is complete clownshoes. Death cults, dimensional merges, societal collapse, time travel, AIs, soul digitization, evil corporations with scifi tech.. Those are a lot of really out there concepts, but they don't actually pay off in an interesting way. The lore is very convoluted, but it doesn't actually go anywhere interesting. There are no interesting twists to the story because all the elements play out exactly as you've already seen them play out in other stories with similar elements, and ultimately all that anyone ever really wanted was to go back to the creepy haunted game.
Fun fact: I am probably one of the first people to discover song of healing in reverse. I did this way back in like 2004 using audacity.
omgg wait i just realized this was uploaded only 6 hours ago, and i was specifically looking for a video about ben drowned exactly like this, thank you for making this 🙌
I didn’t know about the Awakening arc, I kept up with Ben drowned when it was originally being posted and thought the story was over. Thanks for giving me some new content that I wasn’t aware of! Great video
YASSS saving my day once again! Back when I was a teen I was sooo obsessed with BEN Drowned. Good old nostalgia
The original copy of Majoras mask was a simulation and "Ben" was a kid who was forced into it along with tons of other poor souls. And the halfway house saga was also a VR world. Sarah aka the second protagonist reset the virtual world so everyone can remain in blissful ignorance. I still don't understand what role the moon children and lunar cult had to play, if any Ben Drown lore scholars would be willing to explain that would be epic.
i could be misremembering, but i believe the moon children cult was a front made up by the tech company responsible for the simulations. basically they made it up so they could "recruit" young people for testing.
Moon children and lunar cult are the same i thing, and they were one of the first iteration of internity project
(I think that when someone dies,they say that he is ascendant because he can now live in the fake paradise
I ALMOST wish I'd been born a little later just to have experienced some of these silly stories as a kid and been spooked, instead of coming across them as a teen and laughing my ass off
I was a kid at the time of this and genuinely talked to cleverbot asking it questions about ben drowned and when I asked “where are you ben?” It responded “your room” and my little 10 year old ass felt like crying haha
I’m so happy I can look back at these as an adult and laugh at that little kid I was. I’m still incredibly fond of these stories because of it!
Might be controversial, but I think the ARG is kinda bad. I 100% respect the work that was put into making it and the modded ROM gameplay is awesome, but it just doesn't really add anything to the original story and kinda just takes all the mystery out of it.
Maybe it was a "you had to be there" sort of thing, but this was my first time hearing about the ARG portion past the first arc, and yeah, it sounds like a real mess that overcomplicates what was originally a great, short, sweet and unnerving story. As soon as the story began taking a turn towards apocalyptic cults, my eyes glazed over.
Yeah, the whole thing was kinda lame to me, wish it'd had stopped with the father being the true antagonist, these are tropes that have been seen and seen again.
Ben Drowned is probably the creepypasta that fills me the most with a weird sense of dark nostalgia, it means so much to me.
Great video! This had tons of content and you did a great job summarizing it.
Thank you for this - i am older than most but played MM on N64. Ive seen references to this but didnt know the story.
I had my first child in 2007 so that explains why i missed things from 2009.
Ben Drowned was my first truly terrifying creepypasta that I read. I have read others, both gaming and original, and while I-as a, like... 14-15 year old teen-enjoyed them and thought they were pretty creepy, I was able to not get too freaked out knowing that it was fiction. When I read Ben Drowned, though? I was pretty convinced due to the videos. Seeing an actual playing of this 'cursed game' so to say made me actually scared, and I stayed up all night reading it. When I got Majora's Mask [even on a N64! Meant to have been for the Gamecube but hey, nice and classic], I got a weird glitch causing the end game screen to freeze on Link before he gets blown away. I was certain I was on the first day, and had just done the reverse song of time to slow down the clock. Scared the shit out of me at that age, that was the final pin to convince me that the story was real, and I was cursed too! It worked fine after turning the system off and on again but goodness did I have a few nightmares.
I had later learned about the 'continuation' but never got into it because it sounded incomplete and didn't want to get into it just to have to wait. I now feel bad I didn't get to participate in such an amazing ARG!
Growing up, i was really scared of the creepy pastas. All I knew of this one was the statue, the reversed song of healing, and the happy mask salesman laughing. This is an interesting story coming back to.
I love Ben Drowned as a concept and what it meant for the Internet horror genre, but it was never that scary to me. The first time I ever heard it was around a campfire, and the guy telling it messed it up quite a few times, so it never really stuck 😅
Honestly I found the text parts of BEN DROWNED pretty weak. It leans a little too heavily into 'so spooked you guys', like guy you went to a yard sale and bought a beaten-up cartridge, it's not that spooky.
But the footage is honestly great. It leans into an eerie wrongness that really does a great job of building tension, even if Link bursting into flames at random is more silly than scary.
It's not really something that translates well into verbal recitation, though. Imagining somebody trying to turn it into a campfire story is hilarious.
@sacrow your recent releases are some of the best new content in this genre. Keep up the good work !
What made this great is that nostalgia is a double edged sword... In everybody's childhoods, there were good times... AND there were bad times, and often those with good times forgot or romanticize what really happened.
Teenagers and young adults kind of grew up with up with the internet... MySpace, Facebook, UA-cam, Instant Messaging. We projected ourselves onto these platforms, and the internet started right back at us.
And it scared us shitless.
And it was awesome.
I knew all of Part 1, a good chunk of Part 2, but I had never gotten much of any information about Part 3! I'm glad to finally be able to see the conclusion of this story after all these years.
How in the bloody heck did it went from a Creepypasta about a Haunted Cartridge to about a Cult and 2012??
I think this is the only full length coverage of the full arg in one video. Professor Doc Greever has a 10 part series on the arg and the behind the scenes of the arg
I watched his series and really like how deep he dives into the story.
Nice!
Been waiting for this one since the Majora's Mask video.
It is oddly the perfect N64 game to get a creepypasta yet it was given way more than that
This actually got me into playing Majora’s Mask, and later the Zelda series in general. I first played MM on an emulator lol
woah this third arc is bananas I had no idea this was so recent !!! so sick
My friend in college showed me this and I remember it freaking me out SO BAD. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this at the time either which I think made it so much more intense.
Finally
I knew there was more to the Ben drowned story but no one ever put it into a video before. Thanks man. That was beautiful.
The stars aligned, I'm terribly bored and was basically wasting my hour of lunch break trying to find something to watch. THANK YOU
I've watched quite a few Ben Drowned explained videos, but this. Brava! *Chef's kiss*
I didn't even know a third arc existed!
Thanks, I've wanted to cover this story for a while. Hope you liked it.
@@Sacrow I did thanks for your hard work!
The statue isn’t all that creepy. UNSETTLING as all hell, definitely. But the creepiest thing of the whole ARG is definitely the design of The Father. Almost gave me nightmares the first time I saw it.
agreed bro i stopped watching youtube for a bit after seeing a glimpse of that FREAK
like i saw that when i was 8
@@lokisylskar9005 I remember being scared of the Happy Mask Salesman and Ben when I was around 8
and i remembered it far different than was shown in the video, as the way i remember was the Father being far away and then suddenly filling the whole screen, removing Link, and opening his eyes and they were completely black, no color variation like in the video, and i almost threw the remote at the tv and now i have a noticeable fear of black screens causing me to legit wish i had a knife by me for self defense AT ALL TIMES.
i regret trying to find where i got that memory from, since i think my mind was trying to repress it
I had no idea the Ben drowned lore went so deep
Let's go! Thanks man I've been checking everyday for this video! My favorite creepy pasta! Brings me back to 8th grade :)
This is one i unfortunately skipped back in the day. I guess it was just too complex for me
I remember watching the final videos as they premiered. Really interesting how the story all turned out in the end
I like the original creepypasta and everything that related to the video game
The footage creeped me out
I never knew about anything that came after and I can't help but cringe at it
The guy's voice on the 'recording' reminded me of the first FNAF game and the tapes you listen to there
idk, maybe I've grown out of creepypasta, but it sounds like they're very desperately trying to be edgy
Also it's not acted great
Might just be me, maybe there's an audience for it
from Majora's Mask to AI digitization, what a wonderful world
I remember being scared of this creepypasta when I was like 14 and had nightmares about him and now I just think the story is good. I only played the demo for the 3ds version but I didn't buy it because I hate being timed on stuff. i also i had a nightmare that I was over at my grandma's house and heard the song of unhealing playing without the pc even being on and i was panicking trying to figure out what was making it play.
Wanted to come back and leave a comment here. I listened to this video on a long walk home one day, and it was such a good video that I started taking longer walks home while listening to more horror stories I missed over the years.
I love the story it scared me back than but everything from the moon children on was just over dumb and convoluted
always heard of it but never heard the whole story. Definitely didn’t think it went to deep! All an outsider heard was a creepy pasta about a haunted cartridge, but definitely a good way to build up fans to participate
Was just telling my girl about this crazy now you have this whole documentary. Bravo.
i have rewatched this video so many times and i always get lost at around the 20 minute mark
OMG i recommend doing a deep dive into Ben drowned like months ago I believe, can’t believe it got made into a vid and my algorithm shows it to me 3 days late
I may not be a huge ben drowned kinda guy but I love this story I discoverd it in 2016 when I was young it was the music that got to me mostly but now that I listen to it again it still holds up.
I wasn't that young keep in mind I am still young now just entering a more mature mind.
I just looked it up and yes I was young sorry for the mistake. pls no hate
Lores pretty good but dude the long pauses between every sentence is really makin me pull my hair out
I only figured out about the ARG section so many years later. It makes the story so much more compelling.
I was obsessed with this story as a kid, Majoras Mask and VTMB being my two favorite games of all time helped that a lot lol
20:16 skullkid be shakin it fr
Time to post this again!
Back in the day I screwed around with clever bot; especially when I found out about this. One day I asked Clever Bot (unprovoked) if it knew who had drowned a kid named Ben. It told me the HMS did. and it used the HMS abbreviation too. I just closed the tab and never used it again. That was...almost 10 years ago now?
Interesting bio!
Interesting bio!
I legitimately got scared to be in my basement alone when I was like 13 bc for some reason I was certain that Ben would appear behind me and I’d be all alone in the dark. This stuff was so effectively terrifying at that age lol
While it is a big shame how Jadusable basically turned on his own fans and went huge into NFTs and Crypto, along with citing people like Tim and Joe as major influences in Act 3, it was still a magical time and loved the moments the fans could come together and experience the end of the saga.
I don't find the story itself very scary, but those gameplay videos are a different kind of unnerving. That Link statue, too... god damn. What the hell was Aonuma thinking with that one? Lmfao it still creeps me the hell out
Wait a second. When Sarah was introduced (or Player 3 at the time), you specified that both the Majora's Mask cartridge and the Hotel needed time, and both had their own worthwhile ending. The community really only ever decided to play Majora? Or after the second time, it was set in stone that the rest of the ARG would be played within the cartridge? That doesn't leave much room to "manage time in both stories".
I was very invested all the way through the end, this didn't necessarily break my immersion, but I also lost a bit the plot at that moment. Also, how did Sarah know about the Eternity Project? Sure, WE could see the website, and it was explained that we replaced Sarah's free will (even though she's just a regular human being digitized? It's a bit messy, I guess), but Sarah or whatever player would've been alive at that point shouldn't know about it, or should they? I thought they got amnesia when placed in the hotel. That's why they wanted to scape.
Also, what did Player 2 bring with him that was so important that Player 3 shouldn't have? Was it possible to escape from the hotel at all? Or was that just a red herring?
I'm sorry if I'm picking too many nits, I'm just WAY too invested right now not to look into the details. You can't hook me that way (which, knowing Ben Drowned so many years, it's amazing I never knew about this), and then leave me hanging like that.
Still, amazing content, and thank you for the high quality video! It was really such a joy to watch. You definitely earned a sub
i remember bringing up my dad's N64 and not being able to sleep with it in my room because of the creeypasta lol
i was like 8 at the time and now it's evolved into this. it's crazy
I definitely prefer when it was just cursed game. While I admire all the work that went into it, it quickly become just too much for me.
I remembered being both terrified and fascinated by this creepypasta that it made me dug up my old N64 just to finish the game completely.
I remember seeing ben drowned in a angry German kid video when I was 8 and I was terrified as heck.
i have an unpopular opnion that i just like the majoras mask part, all of this stuff of moon children and luna cult, it just fells off trying to explain something that didnt need explanation, maybe some people like this whole arc but for me the good part is just the first one about ben and the haunted cartridge
My cousin showed me the game play video when it was new and it scared the ever loving shit outta me. I couldn't even watch the whole video for years.
Should I be watching this at 1 am? No. Am I going to? Yes.
I was a gullible little teenage kid and just played through the game and of course took too long... so as if the moon propping down wasn't bad enough. No little me of course swallowed the "Ben drowns" story whole after searching for tips on UA-cam. Weeks without sleep.. still feel strange watching it after so many years 😂
Can we agree that Able's VA sounds hot? Very high production quality on this one!
i miss those long nights of reading creepypastas in a dark room only lit up by my monitor
Thank you for the analysis! It's kinda hard to understand what was going on because when I left the creepypasta free.wmv was the last piece and it was insane to realize that the story wasn't over yet. That Ben is not actually a virus and he is not the one killing people out of revenge.
The only thing I don't understand is... BEN. Are there two of them? One is a child Ben that we help and the other is BEN, the face we saw on one of the videos that looks like Saira. Or did I get it wrong?
ending was so hopeful yet bittersweet i wanted to shed tears but i didn't for some reason lmao
This is why I like the Sonic.Exe creepypasta not because it’s good but because this one scares the crap out of me!
Thanks to this damn story i still cant play MM without quitting 20 mins in/being insanely nervour/unnerved
Majoras Mask game itself is creepier than the Ben Drowned creepypasta
IMO Alex Hall is not good at ARGs.
He started doing one piggybacking out of the nostalgia that majora brought, and was editing creepy stuff back when no one was doing that with emulators
Instead of keeping it simply haunted , he inserted what I can imagine are bits and pieces of his cancelled movie that are very black mirror/matrix esque in nature.(not interesting with this execution)
He tried to do too much and kinda lost track of what made the original good and deviated so far from it that is just mid.
There's way better ARGs out there at this point hence why I immediately lost interest when I gave it a chance and saw how much of a convulated mess it was.
pls make a video about the princess AKA if you see her turn off the game, its literally the best game creepypasta no one talks about, and that what scares me the most
The Princess is my favorite gaming creepypasta. I definitely need to cover it.
@@Sacrow what scares me the most is how little people talk about this story, just like how in the story you not supposed tô talk about her, thats like the most unintentional imersion i ever seen from a creepypasta
First one here! Keep up the hard work Sacrow I enjoy your content.
Man this is still one of my favorite gaming related copypastas
Ben do be drowning tho
WHAT?!?!?!
@@Megumi-v1o!
Those images of the uncanny girl -- the "Get out" image and the "Don't be hasty now" image -- are by far the most unsettling parts to me. It's those eyes.
I just watched a meme of spiderman jump farting and didn't realize I had auto play on and THE MUSIC IN THE BEGINNING OF THIS VIDEO STARTED PLAYING. Lemme tell you I'm happy I was already taking a dump when it did jfc
I'm here because nostalgia. I spent 24 hrs straight completely engrossed in this with my best friend in 2010. I miss him. He's not dead, we both got married.
I never thought I'd find out the ARG ended. I remember seeing the first part seen as a creepypasta when I was younger & later on found out it was an ARG.
It's an interesting ending though I'm curious what happened to Sarah & that guy that went to see someone named Baker. I sometimes lose focus or forget things as a make comments so for all I know you mentioned it & I forgot.
Never expected Ben to turn out to be good given the creepypasta section but it makes sense when putting things together. At least they won't suffer any longer.