History of the Scary Maze Game

The Scary Maze Game has a longer story than most people realize. It started as a side project, became a pillar of the early YouTube reaction era, ran out of steam during the Flash decline, and then was preserved by archivists after Flash itself was killed off. Here is the full timeline.

2004: The original

Jeremy Winterrowd, a developer based in San Francisco, built the original Scary Maze Game in October 2004 using Adobe Flash. The project was small — a steady-hand maze puzzle hiding a jumpscare from The Exorcist on the third level. He emailed it to a few friends.

The game spread through forwarded emails, instant messenger links, and early forum posts. There was no marketing campaign and no platform launch. The viral mechanism was social: people who had been jumpscared themselves wanted to see others jumpscared too.

In response to the early traction, Winterrowd put up a personal site, winterrowd.com, to host the game alongside his other work. Several of his other projects were also jumpscare games, but none of them caught on the way Scary Maze Game did.

2006: The first reaction video

In May 2006, a YouTube channel called CantWeAllJusGetAlong uploaded a video titled "Scary Maze Prank — The Original." It showed a boy of around eight years old playing the game without warning, hitting the third-level jumpscare, and visibly breaking down.

The video was the prototype for what became a defining genre of early YouTube content. It collected millions of views over the following years — by 2014, more than 26 million, with over 46,000 likes. Imitators followed almost immediately. People filmed siblings, parents, friends, and especially children playing the game, then uploaded the reactions.

2007 to 2010: Mainstream attention

By 2008, the Scary Maze Game was a recognized internet phenomenon. Reaction videos featuring the game appeared on America's Funniest Home Videos, The Soup, and Web Junk 20. Casual gaming press picked it up — Softpedia's Catalin Bocanu wrote about its "high impact over the public" despite its simplicity.

Sequels and clones proliferated. Scary Maze Game 2, 3, 4, and beyond appeared on Flash game portals, often without clear authorship. The brand decoupled from the original game; "Scary Maze Game" became a category of jumpscare games rather than a single title.

In 2010, Saturday Night Live ran a sketch in the recurring "I Didn't Ask For This" segment featuring Bobby Moynihan as Roger Simms, a man whose reaction video shows him punching through his monitor and breaking down emotionally after the jumpscare. The sketch was a parody, but it cemented the game's place in mainstream cultural awareness. Full coverage on the SNL sketch page.

2011 to 2018: The slow decline

The reaction-video gold rush cooled. New jumpscare formats — Five Nights at Freddy's, Slender, screamer-heavy creepypastas — pulled attention toward longer-form horror gaming content. The Scary Maze Game stayed in circulation, especially as a "trick your little sibling" prank, but it was no longer the cutting edge of internet horror.

It still got referenced. The 2014 book Documentary's Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship by Jason Middleton discussed the reaction videos in the context of cringe comedy and the ethics of filming children's distress. In 2014, scaryforkids.com became another notable host of the game.

Behind the scenes, the Flash ecosystem was decaying. Browsers were progressively restricting Flash by default. Mobile devices never supported it. The original delivery mechanism for the game — click a link, play in-browser — was getting harder and harder to use.

2018: The academic study

In 2018, researchers used the Scary Maze Game reaction videos as data for a naturalistic study of facial expressions. Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), they analyzed children's reactions and found that less than half showed the prototypic facial expressions for either fear or astonishment. The study was a small but legitimate use of the videos as primary source material.

2019: Winterrowd goes quiet

In 2019, winterrowd.com was taken down. In the same year, Jeremy Winterrowd stopped posting on social media. There was no announced reason. He has not returned publicly since. The page on Winterrowd covers what's known and unknown about his disappearance from public-facing work.

January 12, 2021: Flash dies

Adobe officially ended Flash Player support on January 12, 2021. Browsers had already been blocking it; the official end-of-life made it final. The Scary Maze Game, in its original form, stopped working in standard browsers everywhere.

This affected every Flash game on the web simultaneously. Major Flash portals shut down or pivoted to HTML5. The Scary Maze Game franchise, which had always been distributed as Flash files, lost its primary delivery mechanism overnight. The Flash discontinuation page covers the impact.

2021 onward: Preservation

The death of Flash triggered a preservation push. Two efforts became the standard ways to play old Flash games:

• Ruffle. An open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly. Ruffle runs Flash files directly in the browser without any plugin. The Internet Archive integrated Ruffle into its software library and now hosts the original Scary Maze Game playable via Ruffle.
• BlueMaxima's Flashpoint. A community Flash preservation project that has archived tens of thousands of Flash games as a downloadable client. Scary Maze Game is included in its catalog.

HTML5 ports of the game appeared on CrazyGames, Poki, and other modern game portals. A mobile app was created. The franchise stopped expanding but didn't disappear — it just moved into archive mode.

2023 onward: Academic and historical recognition

In 2023, researchers from Aarhus University writing for the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction described the Scary Maze Game as one of the most basic and influential examples of jumpscare games, foundational to a genre that includes Five Nights at Freddy's and dozens of imitators.

In 2025, Dayten Rose of Rock Paper Shotgun wrote that the game's impact had been "unsung" but that it had "pioneered horror in the internet age." That framing — the Scary Maze Game as a foundational text of internet-era horror gaming — has become the standard retrospective view.

Where it stands now

The Scary Maze Game today is a piece of internet history. The original is preserved and playable. Sequels exist as archived files. The reaction videos still circulate. The SNL sketch is still on YouTube. The Wikipedia entry is comprehensive. Know Your Meme has it documented. Multiple academic papers cite it.

What it doesn't have anymore is mass cultural relevance. It's a thing people remember from when they were younger, not a thing kids are getting pranked by today. That's normal — viral phenomena have shelf lives, and twenty years is a long shelf. The job of an archive site is to make sure that when someone wants to remember, the information is there.