For starters, this is all true. 100%. Maybe you guys won't experience the same things as I did, but you will find this secret. I promise you that.
If you don't know this yet, I am 15 years old. A dumb teenager who always overreacts to reasonable things, right? Wrong. I'm a youth of reason. It takes a lot more than a little nod at something to make me scared. But this... This was beyond a creepy little nod.
If you have experienced anything like this, please tell me.
Now, I'm sure the question comes to mind, what is "it"? Before I can explain the phenomena, I must explain the situation.
As cliché as it may sound, I've been a huge Mario fan for as long as I can remember. Not cosplay huge, but big enough to have played every game all the way through, even piles of steaming crap like Hotel Mario, Mario Typing, and Mario is Missing. However, I never played through Mario Galaxy 2. I loved the original Mario Galaxy, so about three years after the release, I snagged a brand-new copy of Galaxy 2 from my local Gamestop. I got home, popped in the disk, and played the hell out of it. I beat it in a few weeks. It would have been a shorter time, if not for school.
I got 90 power stars, counting the ones I got from the secret world, when I found the Hell Valley Sky Trees. Now, if you're a big fan of creepy gaming legends, this should be a familiar easter egg. I found it by accident. It was when I was playing through the Shiverburn galaxy, trying to nab a secret star. I was in first person on the starting platform, scouting the area out for anything that could lead to a secret area. I was looking up, to see if there were any secret platforms, when I saw these three weird figures on the background, just looking at me. Not moving, just staring.
Inquisitive mind that I am, I simply had to stare, and wonder what the hell these things were. I looked a bit more closely and, much to my delight, saw that they had eyes. Little odd things like this in games already interested me, so this was the icing on the cake. I grabbed my trusty laptop, and after a quick internet search found a few tidbits of info. One hacker had found that the file for the model's name was BeyondHellValleySkyTrees and had a higher-rez image of them. There were also a few theories on the subject, my personal favorite being that Mario is in hell, being forced to rescue Princess Peach infinitely. My personal belief is simply that Nintendo is messing with us. I closed my laptop, gingerly set it on the sofa, and continued inspecting. I moved closer to the edge of the starting platform, towards the Sky Trees. This was when the eyes appeared.
As I went back into first person, I noticed a pair of eyes above the Sky Trees. Not 3D or realistic eyes, just NES-esque, low-resolution eyes. At first I thought this was a graphical glitch, but upon closer inspection, these thoughts were dispelled. They were definitely eyes, and they even blinked! This was a little creepy, but I played through the level normally, though I did not find the secret level. As I was sent back to the hub, Mario's head-ship, I looked up for any more secrets. To my surprise, the eyes were.in the same place, watching me. This really caught me off guard, as I was 110% sure that they weren't there before.
Now, I decided to play through the first level, as a little experiment. Sure enough, the eyes were there. Still watching, still blinking. I played through every level again, quite the effort, and the eyes were there every time. If they were peering from above an inaccessable cliff or window, the Sky Trees were always below them. Once, the eyes appeared directly in front of me, on a far off yet accessible platform. As I approached, though, they faded away. I immediately reopened my laptop and searched for anything about those eyes. I only found a short account of a guy who saw the eyes in the first level of the Freezeburn galaxy, but nowhere else. I restarted the game, and it was perfectly normal.
Until the save select screen, that is. When I saw save file C, the only empty one, the Mario head that you clicked to open it had those low-res eyes. I hovered my cursor above it, and the name was "WATCHING". It was 100% complete. I had no idea where it came from, so I simply tried opening it, but the "error reading disc" message popped up. The screen behind it was a jumble of solid pink blocks and text, so I assumed my disk was scratched or dirty. I looked at it, and it was in perfect condition. I thought that maybe the memory was corrupted, but when I re-ran the game, it was perfectly normal. The WATCHING save file was totally empty, and the eyes were gone from my game. I still play it to this day, and though I haven't seen the eyes again since, I still keep close watch on the sky.