Hall of Tormented Souls Inside Windows or New Tales from the Crypt
We have prepared this material in case all the tales from the crypt have already ended, but the burning desire to defeat your opponents with blood-chilling legends remains. Moreover, not all technological legends are tales.
When dinosaurs were dinosaurs and deserts were deserts…..
the gaming monopolist – the Atari company, which at that time owned almost the entire production of home video games and consoles, buried all the cartridges with the game “E.T.”, which caused irreparable damage to the entire video game industry.
They produced a lot of game cartridges for their Atari 2600 console, sometimes those cartridges were not of the best quality. When Steven Spielberg’s film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released and became instantly popular Atari wanted to release a game based on it no matter what. After long negotiations and paying a lot of money (about 20 million dollars) Atari acquired the rights to E.T. The game was made by programmer Howard Scott Warshaw, who was personally selected by Spielberg. The trouble was that Atari wanted to release the game by Christmas and gave Warshaw only five weeks to make it – a very short time span even for the age of Velociraptors.
The game came out on time, but it was so monstrous, incomprehensible and boring that no one bought it – only one and a half million out of the five million copies that Atari produced were sold; the rest remained with the company. What did they do with the extra cartridges? They collected everything together, loaded them into cars, drove them to the desert in New Mexico and buried them.
Editorial opinion
It’s hard to imagine any video giant doing anything like this these days, but this story is true.
When the sun illuminated the ocean with its amber disk, located on the shell of a large tortoise…
One of the greatest musicians and three of his fellow composers Bradley Buxer, Jeff Grace and producer Sirocco received an offer from Sega to write music for a game. They actually did it – but in the end, only Buxer, Grace and Sirocco were included in the credits of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Either because Sega did not want to see the name of the famous musician in the game because of the scandals surrounding him, or (more likely) the musician himself was dissatisfied with the way the Sega Genesis console played his music. One way or another, the participation of the great musician in the creation of the soundtrack remained a secret even for many high-ranking Sega employees, which is why the whole story is still considered half a myth. By the way, according to the legend, that musician was Michael Jackson himself.
Editorial opinion
Hiding the participation of a big star in any project is like hiding the sun – it is almost impossible. Bradley Buxer, however, recently said in an interview that all that was true, but refused to make an official statement. Moreover, one of the game’s developers has demo versions of all the songs Jackson composed for the game, but he is afraid to post them without the required permission.
When the wheat field began to take over the surrounding towns and demand world domination….
Microsoft and all its employees were accused of practicing magic. All because it was necessary to log into the Windows 95 system on page 95 on the 95th day. A strange game will be waiting for you there, at the very end of which there is a “sinister Microsoft secret”.
Editorial opinion
That is not entirely true. There really is a game called Hall of Tortured Souls – but it’s hidden not in Word, but in Excel 95 – a spreadsheet program. You need to open the program, select the 95th cell, execute several commands, and then a new, rather scary window, labeled “Hall of Tormented Souls,” actually opens. There are only two rooms in the game, but if you reach a certain point and type the code “EXCELFKA”, another room will open, in which the developers of Excel 95 are simply depicted. A very cute and self-ironic Easter egg that has nothing to do with otherworldly forces and world domination.
When the full moon decided to have a shindig, a lone wolf strayed from the pack and…
“Trucks with four thousand PlayStation2 consoles went to Iraq – moreover, they were personally ordered by the King of Jordan, Saddam Hussein. The story is being investigated by the FBI and US Customs.” As many video game sites wrote at that time, the Iraqi government planned to assemble a special supercomputer out of all those consoles to use it for military purposes.
That was explained by the fact that the PlayStation 2 is in no way inferior to conventional computers in terms of power, but costs much less.
Editorial opinion
The news, of course, turned out to be a tale – either launched by the cunning marketing department of Sony (on many sites, along with the news, they described in detail how powerful the PlayStation 2 is in terms of technology), or simply spontaneously appeared on the Internet, where not all lone wolves should be trusted.
When the trees were big…
Various people began receiving emails from Microsoft and AOL (and sometimes from Bill Gates personally), saying that the companies wanted to make sure that Internet Explorer was the most popular browser, and for thatthey were doing “email beta testing.”
They asked a person who received the letter to forward it to all their friends, and they would pay money for each recipient.
Editorial opinion
This is one of the first examples of virus spam from the late 90s, but over the years this tale has become a real legend, and some still believe that at some point Microsoft gave away money to users. Microsoft even had to make an official statement and explain that they never sent out any letters, and that was a hoax.
When a signal about the colonization of Mars was received from a parallel Galaxy …..
In several gambling halls in the city of Portland, machines with a strange and rare game Polybius appeared. The machines were completely black – only the name of the game was emblazoned on the sides and the top. The game itself was a combination of both a shooter and a puzzle game, and also drove people crazy. Children who played Polybius became addicted to the game, started suffering from insomnia and amnesia and some even became suicidal. From time to time, agents in black suits came to the Polybius rooms and took some data from the gaming machines.
Editorial opinion
The only proof of the game’s existence is a blurry photo, so you shouldn’t believe in Polybius. Nevertheless, this myth has interesting roots: firstly, in the 80s fans of slot machines loved to talk about how various data (including records) of video games were monitored by CIA agents, and secondly, dreams of exchanging data with other galaxies remain relevant to this day.
