Excel hid the game with tortured souls -apkrig
When a child looks at a computer, he does not see a text editor, a spreadsheet, graphics software, beautiful interactive encyclopedias, or knowledge of the whole world on the information superhighway. He only sees games. You see games everywhere. Not only in the window with Minesweeper and Solitaire, but also where it turns out that there are none. So it’s no wonder that the story of the video game hidden in Microsoft Excel 95 began to spread in the mid-1990s.
Hell between cells
All you had to do was follow the mysterious combination of instructions and a Dooma-style game popped up. The title with the haunting name Hall of Tortured Souls was activated by opening a new table, descending to line 95, and selecting it. He then had to click in column B to open the Help menu in the menu and select About Microsoft Excel. When you do so, a classic dialog box with information about the program will pop up. However, just hold down the Ctrl, Alt, Shift keys, click on the Tech Support button and it will become a “spell”.
Voilà. Instead of tables, a party awaits you, as it was said in the 1990s, if you allow me this linguistic flashback. You can move through a miniature world that you watch from a first person perspective. In the Hall of Tortured Souls, you wander through a strange labyrinth (well, in fact, it’s just a few rooms), in which foreign names sinisterly sinister on the walls.
IDKFA? No, EXCELKFA!
In the middle of the initial hall, you can turn on your heel and if you know another secret combination, go one step further. If you write the code EXCELKFA, another part of the level will open for you, at the end of which even portraits of strangers will “haunt” you.
You have probably heard the story and quite possibly tried this procedure yourself years ago. Alternatively, he was stunned by classmates who didn’t subscribe to Chip and PC World like you. It is based on the truth and is an authentic easter egg from the developers. You can see their names and faces in this “game”. Of course, this is not a game in the true sense of the word, but rather a little fun.
It is not difficult to conclude that the authors were clearly inspired by the famous Doom. After all, it also contained similar easter eggy. For example, John Romero’s pricked head in the MAP30: Icon of Sin level in Doom II. After all, this is not the only similar example from the software giant’s workshop. Similar minigames and games appeared in Microsoft Office 97, which even hid a simple simulator or pinball. And in the following years, such easter eggies were repeated.
Or maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s actually a sophisticated call for help. An attempt to draw attention to the inhumane working conditions in Microsoft’s offices, where the tortured souls of the developers subscribed to Bill Gates. You won’t find out the truth at the end of the show, as Jonathan Frakes says. We will leave the interpretation of the whole story to you.
