Jeremy Winterrowd

Jeremy Winterrowd built the Scary Maze Game in October 2004 and then, more or less, faded out. He never had a high public profile, and in 2019 the small online presence he did have went dark. This is what is known about him and his work.

The basics

Winterrowd was based in San Francisco. He worked as a developer and built games as side projects. By the time he made the Scary Maze Game in October 2004, he had already produced several other Flash titles, most of which followed a similar pattern: a setup that looks like a casual game, with a jumpscare hidden somewhere inside.

The Scary Maze Game was not designed as a viral object. He built it, emailed it to friends, and then watched the response spread further than he had planned. To handle the influx, he set up a personal website — winterrowd.com — which became the canonical home for the game and his other projects through most of the 2000s and 2010s.

His other games

Winterrowd's other Flash projects shared the Scary Maze Game's basic instinct: a benign-looking surface, a jumpscare underneath. None of them broke through the way the maze game did. The format was the same in each case — a player is asked to focus on something, and at peak focus, an unexpected image and sound interrupt them.

The lack of breakthrough for his other titles is informative. The maze game's success was not just about the formula. It was about specific factors that the others didn't replicate — the level of skill the maze required, the specific image used, the particular timing of the audio, and crucially, the moment in the YouTube reaction video era when it landed. The same designer making the same kind of game produced one viral hit and a dozen near-forgotten side projects. Hits in this category are not engineered, they're won.

winterrowd.com

The site was the official home of the Scary Maze Game and his other work for over a decade. It hosted the playable Flash files, served as a contact point, and gave the game a verifiable creator — the difference between an anonymous internet object and a developer's named work.

The site was taken down in 2019. The reasons have not been made public.

Going quiet in 2019

Around the same time the website came down, Winterrowd stopped posting on social media. He has not made public statements about the maze game, the prank video phenomenon, the SNL sketch, or any of the academic and journalistic coverage of his work.

This is unusual but not unheard of. The Scary Maze Game was, by 2019, a fifteen-year-old project. The peak of its cultural moment had been a decade earlier. There is no obligation on a developer to remain a spokesperson for a viral hit indefinitely, particularly when the legal status of the included content is gray and the cultural conversation around prank videos featuring distressed children had become more complicated.

What he doesn't get credit for

Most discussions of the Scary Maze Game treat it as a found object — a thing that happened to the internet, not a thing someone made. Wikipedia and Know Your Meme name Winterrowd, but the broader culture mostly does not. Compared to the developers of comparable Flash hits — Edmund McMillen for Super Meat Boy, Splapp-Me-Do for The Impossible Quiz — he has remained relatively anonymous.

Part of this is his choice. Going quiet in 2019 ended whatever path there was to broader recognition. Part of it is the nature of the genre — a thirty-second prank doesn't generate the same kind of devoted fanbase as a deeper Flash game. And part of it is that the format itself is more memorable than the author. The Exorcist image is iconic. The scream is iconic. The maze is iconic. The name on the file is not.

The legacy

Whatever he is doing now, Winterrowd's work pioneered a small but real category of game design. The 2023 ACM paper from Aarhus University researchers describes Scary Maze Game as one of the most basic examples of jumpscare games — and "basic" here is not a slight. It means foundational. Five Nights at Freddy's, the Slender franchise, every horror game that uses sustained focus followed by sudden interruption owes something to the formula he popularized.

The 2025 Rock Paper Shotgun retrospective by Dayten Rose framed Scary Maze Game as a quiet pioneer — a game that "pioneered horror in the internet age" without ever claiming the credit. That framing fits the available evidence. Winterrowd built something that became a piece of folklore, and then he stopped building publicly. The work outlasted the public profile.