GameShark Code

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 a cool little device you could plug into a game console and use to cheat in video games. My buddy still has one for his 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 cheat in 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, it came up with a brand new code sequence, one we'd never seen before. Being slightly buzzed from the beer and bored at 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 and the clock was stuck at a couple minutes to midnight on the third day.

The moon was leering at us from the sky, 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 apocalypse. There was a distinct lack of enemies and strange patterns of pixels would randomly appear and disappear.

Naturally, we were starting to get bored. There was absolutely 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. We realized it was still approaching the earth, despite the fact that time was stopped. It was ready to crash down, so we decided to see if anything cool would happen in the end game cutscene.

Oddly enough, the cutscene never triggered. Instead, the moon just kept getting closer and closer. I could barely make out movement on it and realized that the spinning Majora's Mask from the opening scene 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 it, however. It seemed too well-animated for an image on a Nintendo 64.

The lines and details were very clear and the colors were too vivid. As the mask spun around, the eyes seemed to follow me and stared directly at me. I was hypnotized by it and sat there, beer in one hand and controller in the other, unable to look away from the screen.

Extremely disturbing images began to flash across the TV as the moon continued to approach. Everything appeared to be on fire and quick glimpses of the poor, innocent animated characters of Clock 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. Underneath was 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 all night since. "You lost the game."

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