that moment where you go "I bet the creepiness associated with this video-game related thing from my childhood was just a product of me being young and it's actually not that creepy"
and then you look it up and it's actually creepier than you remembered
after a cutscene, you're given a code to "test out the TV-303" (the TV-202 is the ship you fly in the game, IIRC)
entering said code takes you to level 0-0 ... and, before I even make an attempt to piece together this, just *watch*:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQ0-BBnRIg