My brother buys used game lots off online auction sites — boxes of twenty, thirty carts at a time, old Nintendo 64 and SNES and Game Boy stuff, mostly common titles in poor condition that he cleans up and resells. It's a hobby that occasionally turns up something interesting. He thought this one was interesting. He gave it to me because he doesn't own an N64 anymore.
It was a Super Mario 64 cartridge, standard gray housing, label in good condition. Nothing unusual about it externally. I cleaned the contacts, plugged it into my N64, turned it on.
The Nintendo 64 startup screen was normal. The Super Mario 64 title screen was normal — Mario, the stars, Lakitu's camera pulling back, the music. Normal. I pressed start to enter the game.
The file select screen had a file already present. This happens sometimes with used games; people forget to erase their saves. But instead of a star count and a name, the existing file was labeled with my name.
My name. Not my brother's name — he'd never touched this cart — and not a common name that might appear by coincidence. My full first name, which is unusual enough that I've never met anyone with the same one, rendered in the game's font as clearly as anything on the screen.
I sat with this for a moment.
I selected the file.
It loaded into the main hub area, Peach's Castle, with 120 stars collected — a complete game, everything done. Mario stood in the center of the room. The music was the standard hub music. But when I moved the joystick, Mario turned to look at the camera, which he does in the game normally — the camera mechanic is standard. Except this time he turned to look at the camera and he stopped. He faced the camera directly, which is not a standard Mario 64 animation. His face was at the correct angle for normal gameplay but his eyes — the texture of his eyes had been altered. They tracked with the camera. As I moved the joystick to reposition the camera, his eyes moved to continue looking at the lens.
I stood still. Mario stood still. We looked at each other.
Then a text box appeared on screen — a mechanic that Super Mario 64 does not have. Characters in the game don't speak through text boxes. But one appeared anyway, in the plain white text box style of the game's file naming screen:
"I knew you'd come back."
The box closed. Mario's eye tracking returned to normal. The game was, from that point forward, completely standard — it played exactly like any other completed Super Mario 64. All stars available to replay, all areas accessible, everything working.
But every time I opened the pause menu, the file name was still my name. And twice more while playing, in rooms I shouldn't have been able to trigger it, the text box appeared:
"I waited a long time."
And, once, in the final Bowser stage, which I revisited out of curiosity:
"I'm glad you remembered."
I don't know how to explain the text box system — it genuinely does not exist in Super Mario 64's code. I don't know how my name is on the file. My brother has the complete lot manifest and I've matched every other cartridge in the lot to a known title. Nobody named anything like me appears in any manifest he has.
I kept the cartridge.
I play it sometimes. The text boxes don't appear as often anymore. But sometimes, starting up the game, before the file select screen, there's a single frame between the N64 logo and the title — a single frame of plain black screen with white text:
"Hello again."
It has always been waiting. It was waiting before I owned it. It was waiting before I was born, probably. Some things in games are more patient than the hardware they run on.
They just need the right name on the file.