Stories Like Ben Drowned

Ben Drowned defined what haunted-game horror could be when taken seriously as a format. Published in 2010 as a combination of forum posts, video uploads of a genuinely haunted-looking Majora's Mask cartridge, and text logs, it was the first creepypasta to fully exploit the multimedia possibilities of the internet as a horror delivery system. The game behaved in ways that shouldn't be possible. The save file belonged to someone who had apparently drowned. The game knew the player was there.

What Ben Drowned understood about its source material was that The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was already strange — a game preoccupied with death, time loops, and the faces of the dead. The haunted cartridge version didn't need to invent much; it only needed to escalate what was already there, and to present that escalation in a format that looked like documentation. The YouTube uploads looked real enough to convince people. The text was specific in the way that real accounts are specific. The horror was in the format as much as the content.

If you're looking for stories in that tradition — devices that behave incorrectly, technology that has been accessed by something that wasn't authorised, the specific horror of familiar software becoming unfamiliar — these Night Tales audio stories occupy that territory. Free, narrated, no account required.