So, I don't know if you guys are too young to remember GameSharks, I'm not even sure if they make them anymore. They were this cool little thing that you could plug into a game console and use to hack the game and discover cheats. My buddy still has one for his old Nintendo 64, and we still like to mess around with it sometimes. I found a used copy of Majora's Mask the other day, and I realized we'd never tried to hack it, so I dropped five bucks on the cartridge. Last night I called up my friend, grabbed a case of beer, and went over to his house for some sweet drunken retro gaming.

We were having a great time, making Link fall through floors and walk through walls and all that good stuff. We even found a code that caused a huge number of those annoying little dogs to spawn, swamping the map and generally causing chaos. After the standard cheats got boring, we decided to run the code search on the GameShark again. Oddly enough, the GameShark came up with a brand new code sequence, one we'd never seen before. Being slightly buzzed from the beer and bored with throwing infinite bombs at unsuspecting enemies, we punched the code in and fired up the game.

GameSharks have a tendency to cause minor glitches, so neither of us was very surprised when the game completely skipped over the menu screens and jumped directly into the action. We were outside of the snow temple, and the clock was stuck at a couple minutes to midnight on the third day. The moon was leering at us from the sky, nearly ready to crash into the ground. Other than the frozen time, the game seemed to be functional, so I pushed forward on the control stick and sent Link off in exploration of the world as it teetered directly on the brink of the apocalypse. There was a distinct lack of enemies, and strange patterns of pixels would randomly appear and disappear.

Naturally, we were starting to get pretty bored since we had nothing to kill. I decided to shut the console down and try another code, but I figured I'd look up at the moon one more time. To my surprise, it was much larger than it had been before, and we realized that it was still approaching the earth despite the fact that time was stopped. It was nearly ready to crash down, so we decided to see if anything cool would happen in the end game cut scene.

Oddly enough, the cut scene never triggered. Instead, the moon just kept getting closer and closer. I could barely make out movement on it, and I realized that the spinning Majora's Mask from the menu screen was appearing on the surface in a flurry of oddly shaped pixels. The spinning mask continued to get clearer and clearer until it completely hid the moon's evil grin. Something seemed very wrong with the mask though, it seemed too well animated for an image on a Nintendo 64. The lines and details were very clear, and the colors were far too vivid. As the mask spun around, the eyes seemed to follow me, staring directly at me. I was hypnotized by it, and I sat there, beer in one hand, controller in the other, unable to look away from the screen.

Extremely disturbing images began to flash across the TV screen as the moon continued to approach. Everything appeared to be on fire, and quick glimpses of the poor, innocent animated characters of the town showed them dying extremely gruesome deaths. Majora's Mask completed one final rotation and stopped, staring directly at us.

A gnarled hand came up, slowly pulling the mask away, and underneath was the Skull Kid, a horrible expression of agony and pain burned on his face. He opened his mouth, and with a sickening groan of cartridge era video game sounds, uttered the words that have been haunting me at night. "You lost the game."

The screen went pitch black, and the Nintendo 64 shut off. Me and my friend looked at each other, unsure of what we'd just seen. He claims it was just an alternate ending the producers didn't use in the actual game, but the whole thing seemed way too paranormal to be that easily explained.