User blog:GammaRaul/The Jolly Roger Bay Slide Box (64pasta Contest Submission)

In Super Mario 64, there exists a strange, anomalous object in the third stage, Jolly Roger Bay. The stage already has a reputation for being odd, given the fog that appears in first playthroughs of the stage, but disappears after the ‘Plunder in the Sunken Ship’ star is collected, or the characteristically unnerving Unagi that resides in its tunnels, but what I will be talking about today is something much, much stranger.

The object I refer to, called the ‘Slide Box’ in the DS version’s code, is a box that sits aboard the Ship in the stage, sliding from side to side as the ship tilts, damaging Mario if it hits him. Odder still is the fact that the box does not appear anywhere else in the game and that its texture contains the symbol of a Jolly Roger –in other words, a skull with crossed bones below it– implying whatever is inside could be dangerous.

Even still, you might not think it’s that odd, not any odder than Unagi or the fog, perhaps. However, that is because you have not heard about what happens when the box breaks. Under normal circumstances, you are not supposed to be able to break it, and that’s where discussion ended for over 26 years, but on the 23rd of September 2022, in r/mario, Reddit User u/█████ discovered something that would later change everything.

He discovered that should one re-enter Peach’s Castle after obtaining all stars and maximum lives on all 4 saves, they would find the door to Jolly Roger Bay locked, and interacting with it would make the message ‘Locked, never to be opened again’ show up; Upon testing various things, he would discover that, in the corridor where one would access Bowser in the dark world, the painting would not change into Bowser, and the trapdoor was not there. Jumping into it would lead the player to a quite odd level.

The level did not contain much, being merely a small room with a checkerboard floor and the sky bricks from the first floor of the Castle. In the center, there was a blue and red hammer, similar to the one Jumpman wielded in Donkey Kong, on a pedestal of the same texture as the Castle’s outer walls. Collecting the hammer would boot the player to the beginning of the hallway, which had now returned to normal.

After collecting the hammer, whenever Mario punched, it would instead show an animation of him hitting whatever was in front of him with a hammer. Doing so in front of the Jolly Roger Bay door would cause the lock to disappear, allowing the player to enter the room. In the room, the painting had turned darker and desaturated, all of the fishes once in the aquarium were now gone, and the Secret Aquarium was inaccessible.

Entering the level would reveal it to be just like the painting had shown, the waters darker and everything else less saturated. There were no enemies, no boxes, no coins, and, generally, nothing except the level geometry, the ship, and the Slide Box. Out of curiosity, in an act he would later come to regret, █████ had decided to try to destroy the Slide Box with the hammer; According to him, upon doing so, he immediately passed out.

When he woke up, he was back at the title screen; All was desaturated, the save slots were wiped, and he had a massive headache. He was sad that all of his progress was gone but decided to shut off the game, take a headache pill, and focus on other things. The next day, he decided to continue his investigation and began a new save file. Everything was, once again, desaturated, stranger still, however, was the fact that there were now crows in the game, a lot of crows, ‘an unnecessary number of crows’ as he put it.

The butterflies were replaced by crows, some enemies were replaced by crows, stars looked less like stars and more like a crow taking the shape of a star, and if you looked up at the sky in floating island levels (such as Whomp’s Fortress), you will find many, many crows circling far above the stage. The strangest part was that, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, the crows were apparently hyperrealistic; Like, they looked more real than reality.

Every time he saw one of those crows, he could feel another headache slowly bubbling inside him; Unnerved, with a small headache, and a little dizzy, he decided to turn off the game and stop the investigation. The Reddit post ends here; Naturally, many assumed this was a creepypasta, but then reports began cropping up that would make many people doubt that maybe this was actually real.

Across all copies of Super Mario 64, even emulated ROMs, the painting of Jolly Roger Bay had changed to be exactly as was described in the Reddit post, and the level itself, while still being mostly normal, was desaturated and had darker water, though there was one major thing missing. The Slide Box was gone.

While this is all very strange and unnerving, that is not where our story ends, as on the 6th of October 2022 (1 week ago as of the time of writing this), the friends of █████ have spoken out about his disappearance, the details around it being quite disturbing; According to his friends, prior to his disappearance, he had been acting a lot more erratic, ceasing to go outside, ranting about seeing the crows from the game everywhere.

According to his friends, he at first said that he would see the crows in the corner of his vision and in his dreams, then whenever he saw a bird, it would seem to have been “replaced” by the crow, and soon enough, in his perspective, other animals would be replaced by the crow, and all eyes were replaced by the crow’s eyes.

This went on until █████ went missing inside of his house on the 30th of September 2022, his Discord account being deleted at the same time, we have no clues where he could’ve gone. As a final creepy cherry on this unnerving cake, according to his friends, though it’s attributed to a trick of the mind, they swear that, sometimes, his Discord username turns into Garbled Unicode for a spit second. The above was a post made on a now-deleted ‘Creepy Gaming Stories’ blog on the 13th of October 2022, one day before the incident with Nathaniel Burnett. If only we had known.