The Scary Maze Game Archive

For a stretch of the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Scary Maze Game was inescapable. A simple Flash game with a steady-hand puzzle, a sudden scream, and an image from a 1973 horror film became the internet's most-shared prank.

This site is the dedicated archive for that game and the culture that grew around it. The original Flash file is gone, the studio that made it is dormant, and most of the sites that hosted it have been parked or repurposed. What remains is the history, and that history is genuinely interesting — how an unpaid side project from a San Francisco developer became an internet-wide phenomenon, the subject of an SNL sketch, an academic study, and one of the earliest examples of viral video pranking.

Start here

If you've never heard of the game and just want the basics: the main page on the Scary Maze Game is the best starting point. It covers what the game is, how it works, and why it spread the way it did.

If you want the full timeline from the original 2004 release through Flash's 2021 death and the game's preservation on the Internet Archive, see the history of the Scary Maze Game.

If you only know the game from the prank videos, the reaction video phenomenon page covers how those videos worked, why they spread, and the ethics debate that followed.

What's covered here

The site is organized into a few main areas:

• The game itself — the original, Scary Maze Game 2, and the later sequels and variants.
• Origins — the developer Jeremy Winterrowd and the Exorcist image at the heart of the jumpscare.
• Cultural impact — the reaction videos, the SNL sketch, and the prank culture the game inspired.
• The bigger picture — the broader genre of internet screamers, related clones and copycats, and the psychology that makes jumpscare games work.
• The aftermath — the death of Flash, the game's life on mobile, and where you can play it today.

This is an archive, not a games host. We don't run the game on this site, but the page on where to play the Scary Maze Game online points to the places that still do.