About scarymazegames.net
scarymazegames.net is an archive site for the history of the Scary Maze Game and the cultural phenomenon that grew around it.
What this site is
This is a reference resource. It collects, organizes, and presents information about the 2004 Scary Maze Game by Jeremy Winterrowd, its sequels, the reaction video phenomenon it generated, and the wider genre of internet screamer games. Each page on the site is focused on a specific aspect of that history — the original game, the creator, the Exorcist image used in the jumpscare, the SNL sketch that parodied it, the academic studies that examined it, and so on.
The goal is to be the kind of resource that didn't exist when the Scary Maze Game was at its cultural peak: a single dedicated archive that takes the subject seriously enough to document it carefully.
What this site is not
This site does not host the game itself. It is not a Flash game portal. It does not run, embed, or distribute Scary Maze Game files of any kind. Visitors looking to play the game can find working versions on the Internet Archive, on HTML5 game portals, and through Flash preservation projects — the page on where to play the Scary Maze Game online today covers the options.
The site is also not affiliated with Jeremy Winterrowd, with the original Scary Maze Game's developer, with any of the sequel or clone developers, with Warner Bros. (which holds rights to the underlying Exorcist imagery), or with any commercial entity associated with the franchise.
How information here is sourced
The content on this site is drawn from publicly available reference material: Wikipedia entries, Know Your Meme entries, journalistic coverage in outlets like Rock Paper Shotgun and Softpedia, academic papers (the 2018 facial expression study, the 2023 Aarhus University ACM paper), and the broader documented history of the game and its surrounding culture.
Where information is uncertain or contested — particularly around authorship of the various sequels and clones, or specific claims about the audio used in the jumpscare — the site flags the uncertainty rather than picking a side. The Flash game era was loose with documentation; not everything has a verifiable answer twenty years later.
About corrections
If you have specific knowledge that contradicts something on the site — particularly if you were involved with one of the sequel or clone games and can correct attribution or details — the site is open to corrections. Information added has to be verifiable; we are an archive, not a gossip board. Reach out via the standard contact mechanisms available through the domain registrar.
The point of an archive
Internet phenomena have shorter shelf lives than their cultural impact suggests. The Scary Maze Game was a defining piece of late-2000s online culture; today, fewer than half the people who would have known it then could describe it correctly without prompting. That decay is normal. It's also reversible — archives are how the decay reverses.
The point of this site is to keep the record clear: who made the game, when it spread, why it worked, what it influenced, and where it stands now. Reasonable people will care about that record at varying intensities. The goal is just to make sure the record exists for whoever wants it.