This Microsoft Excel Easter egg led to a wild conspiracy idea that Invoice Gates was the Antichrist

Like anthropomorphic rabbits and Jesus, software program builders love an Easter egg. Microsoft is not any completely different. For many of its historical past, the Home windows developer has inserted hidden jokes and references into many, if not most of its applications. These vary from a Utah teapot that seems in Home windows 95’s Pipes screensaver, to a secret magic 8-ball toy inside Microsoft Entry.

However probably the most well-known, or ought to I say, notorious Microsoft Easter egg is The Corridor of Tortured Souls, a Doom-style 3D maze hidden inside Excel 95 that shows the credit of the designers who labored on it. Not solely is it one of many extra elaborate Easter eggs hid in a Microsoft product, however this innocuous secret would additionally turn out to be the epicentre of a weird Web hearsay that Invoice Gates was the Antichrist.

Hiding designer credit is one thing of a convention for Microsoft, with credit-based Easter eggs stretching all the way in which again to Home windows 1.0. Right here, urgent Alt+Shift+Esc+Enter would convey up a window itemizing “The Home windows Staff”. The listing, which features a younger designer referred to as Gabe Newell, was accompanied by the phrase “Congrats!”

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Related Easter eggs seem in Home windows 3.0, Home windows 3.1, Home windows 95, and Home windows 98. However The Corridor of Tortured Souls was considerably extra concerned than these hidden screens and slideshows. It was accessed by way of Row 95 of Excel 95, urgent TAB to pick out the second cell of the row, earlier than citing the ‘Assist’ window and deciding on “Tech Assist.”

Upon doing this, customers had been transported right into a garish, pixel-y room, with Doom-like inexperienced swimming pools, blue pillars that resemble tentacles, and partitions seemingly adorned with Minesweeper tiles. Forward of the person (now the participant) stretched a staircase main as much as a crimson doorway with black partitions on both aspect.

On these partitions, the names of Excel 95’s builders scrolled endlessly. By the doorway lay one other room, semi-hexagonal in form. On the right-hand wall, a window regarded out into an limitless geometric abyss. Embedded into the wall forward of the participant was a viewport the place Excel’s credit additionally scrolled.

Including to The Corridor of Tortured Souls’ mystique is that it has a second layer. Typing “excelkfa” whereas going through the rear wall of the room the participant spawns in teleports them to a second stage. Right here, a zigzagging pathway harking back to Doom’s E1M1 results in one other room adorned with dithered images of the event workforce, with but extra scrolling credit on the rearmost wall.

Taking a look at The Corridor of Tortured Souls as we speak, it is astonishing to suppose that it brought about something aside from eyestrain. Certainly, the preliminary reactions to the Easter egg are precisely what you’d count on from the web. We are able to see this due to the Usenet archive housed inside Google Teams—which shops all method of forum-like discussions from the final 30+ years.

Trying to find The Corridor of Tortured souls brings up 1000’s of discussions, the primary of which is a thread began by Kristian Poe on September 22, 1995—lower than a month after Home windows 95’s public launch. Kristian’s preliminary submit merely highlights the Corridor’s existence and instructs fellow Excel customers on the best way to entry it.

The preliminary reply, by a person named Horrock, is solely “cool”, earlier than one other respondent cynically ponders “which bugs/flaws in both Excel95 or Win95 did not get fastened whereas the programmers had been placing on this beautiful particular impact”. After this, the thread step by step descends into PC vs Mac bunfight. In different phrases, it is a basic web dialogue.

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On-line chat in regards to the Easter egg continues in an innocuous method till late in 1997, at which level a sequence electronic mail begins to seem that places a sinister new twist on The Corridor of Tortured Souls. The earliest occasion I might discover was from October 1997, in a submit by a person going by Ruach titled “Eerie Info about Microsoft (Check out the Excel 95 Experiment!)”.

The e-mail, which Ruach says was forwarded by “a good friend”, begins out “Since we’re all utilizing MICROSOFT merchandise right here, I assumed I would just let you realize these info…have you learnt that Invoice Gates’ REAL title is William Henry Gates III? His official REAL title NOW is BILL GATES III.”

The e-mail then claims that, for those who take the letters in “Invoice Gates III”, then convert them into ASCIII code and add up the ensuing numbers, the full is 666—the variety of the beast as described in The E book of Revelation. “Coincidence har? Nope. Take WINDOWS 95 and do the SAME process and you’re going to get 666 too!!! And the identical goes for MS-DOS 6.31!!! Sicko ceremony?”

What does this need to do with The Corridor of Tortured Souls? Properly, Excel’s secret maze seems within the second a part of the e-mail. “For these of you fellas who nonetheless have the OLD excel 95 (not workplace 97) then do this out,” the e-mail says, earlier than itemizing directions on the best way to entry The Corridor of Tortured Souls.

Basically, the e-mail wields the Easter egg as proof that Microsoft is concealing secret, Satanic messages inside its software program, which, mixed with its crackpot numerology, supposedly demonstrates that Invoice Gates is the herald of the Endtimes.

Curiously, this earliest model of the e-mail doesn’t explicitly declare that Invoice Gates is the Antichrist, though it’s seemingly a fraction, as by November ’97 a for much longer model of the e-mail appeared. This primary pops up in alt.bible.prophecies in a submit by Andy Ang titled “Invoice Gates is The AntiChrist?”

Within the prolonged model of the e-mail, its authentic, nameless author now brazenly ponders, “Would not be shock[d] if Invoice Gates was ‘The Antichrist’, in spite of everything it was already foretold within the Bible that somebody highly effective would stand up and lead the world to destruction.”

It additionally suggests how the founding father of Microsoft would possibly do that. “Greater than 80% of the world’s computer systems run on Home windows and DOS (together with these on the Pentagon)! If all his merchandise have some type of small program embedded (like this Corridor of Tortured Souls) that may give him management, setting off nuclear arsenals, creating havoc in safety methods, monetary methods everywhere in the world.”

The e-mail additionally folds the World Large Net into the conspiracy by claiming that “WWW” appears to be like like three sixes written with Roman numerals (i.e. VI VI VI), whereas additionally suggesting that Gates might use Web Explorer to “map out what you have got in your pc little by little”. It concludes by urging readers to “take into consideration all this and pray, pray actually laborious, or else…”

The e-mail rattles round in varied kinds for a number of extra years, and had largely petered out by 2003.

Seen in isolation, the entire occasion is so absurd as to appear virtually quaint. However the potential results of such alarmism, borne out of the Satanic Panic of the ’80s and ’90s, may be very actual.

Such assaults haven’t gone away, both. As just lately as 2020, Microsoft got here beneath fireplace from the Christian proper, pulling an advert for HoloLens 2 that featured Marina Abramovic, as a result of 4 years prior she had attended a “spirit cooking” occasion with Hillary Clinton’s marketing campaign chairman John Podesta (“Spirit Cooking” was actually a reference to an aphrodisiac cookbook).

All that stated, I am starting to suppose the e-mail may need had some extent, solely to me, WWW does not seem like three sixes. It appears to be like like six fives. When you add up six fives, you get 30, and for those who divide that by ten, you get 3.

And you realize what meaning…