Scary Maze Game

.In Scary Maze Game, players guide their cursor through three mazes of blue rectangles, avoiding the black walls in order to make it to a red box at the end. ==Background and development==

Scary Maze Game was developed in October 2004 by San Francisco–based developer Jeremy Winterrowd using Adobe Flash. , Scary Maze Game is available to play on the Internet Archive's website. ==Popularity==

Scary Maze Game had become widely popular online by 2008, with Catalin Bocanu of Softpedia noting its "high impact over the public" at the time "despite its simplicity". It was spread online through comedic YouTube reaction videos of people, mostly children, getting pranked by the game. The first Scary Maze Game reaction video to appear on YouTube, titled "Scary Maze Prank—The Original" and featuring a boy of about eight years old being jump scared by the game and crying, was uploaded by the channel CantWeAllJusGetAlong in May 2006. It inspired many of the reaction videos that followed and by 2014, had more than 26 million views and 46 thousand likes. He also contrasted commenters who found the videos funny, whom he described as demonstrating "an ironic and distanced relation toward images of suffering", with those who did not find them funny due to exhibiting an ethical response. ==Legacy==

In 2021, Alec Bojalad of Den of Geek retrospectively identified Scary Maze Game as one of the first hits among "Internet screamers", a term used to describe jump scare–based Web content popular in the 2000s and early 2010s. In 2023, for Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, researchers from Aarhus University described Scary Maze Game as "infamous" and one of "the most basic examples of jump scare games" for having players expend mental resources on trying to complete the maze, thereby making them less anticipatory of the jump scare. Dayten Rose of Rock Paper Shotgun wrote in 2025 that, though its impact was "unsung", Scary Maze Game had "pioneered horror in the internet age". He attributed the success of later jump scare–heavy games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), Slender: The Eight Pages (2012), and ''Five Nights at Freddy's (2014) on YouTube to the rise of Scary Maze Game'', adding, "If you had an internet connection circa 2005, there's a good chance you played it." , Scary Maze Game is the 67th lowest-rated game on the social cataloging website Backloggd. ==References==