The Maze

I made this game in October of '04 for Halloween and sent it to a few of my friends in an email. About 5 months later, someone had sent the same email back to my mother! It had turned into a viral email joke. I was very flattered and figured I should make a website for all the stupid prank games I've made.

-Jeremy Winterrowd

The infamous third level of The Maze.
	Jeremy Winterrowd
	Flash game
	October 2004

The Maze , more commonly known as the Scary Maze Game, is a Flash game created in 2004. It was made by game developer Jeremy Winterrowd.

This Flash prank disguises itself as a simple maze game in which the player has to utilize their mouse cursor in order to move a blue little dot through the maze. At the start screen, there is a note informing the player that the objective of the game is to pass through all 4 levels, and the player cannot touch the walls. The game also says that it's recommended to turn on the volume. However, there are actually only three levels in the game, and there is no point in turning on the volume because no sound is heard during the entire game... or is it? 

The first two levels are easy to complete. The walls are wide, and it's very easy to move the blue little dot until the end of these levels. But as the third level is reached, the walls begin to shrink and have sharp turns, making it difficult to avoid touching them. This usually makes the player concentrate on the screen. Then, near the first curve to the left of the maze's sharp part, a picture of Regan MacNeil from the 1973's classic horror movie The Exorcist pops up along with two loud screams, scaring the user. Right after that, Winterrowd's site URL scrolls down on the screen, and two yellow buttons appear in the bottom corners. The left one tells the player to e-mail Jeremy, and the other one leads the player to his site. 

The game was uploaded in 2005 on Jeremy's website, Winterrowd.com. The original version of the game had some slight differences in color, where orange/yellow with alternative text was used instead of turquoise. There was also an alternative version of the game used in America's Funniest Home Videos, where the face that pops up is replaced with the one from What's Wrong?, due to copyright laws. It includes a scream from What's Wrong?^{[citation needed]}

Reactions

Justice playing The Maze.

A lot of people have posted videos of other people reacting to the game. The first reaction video on YouTube was uploaded by user CantWeAllJusGetAlong, on May 20th, 2006. In the video, a young kid, Justice, is playing the maze. Then, he gets surprised by the screamer. Shocked, he starts screaming and repeatedly hitting the computer screen. He then runs to his stepdad, Chad, and starts crying. As of October 2017, the video has over 27 million views.

The most viewed Maze Game video was uploaded by YouTube user nalts and has accumulated over 43 million views as of October 2017. On March 27, YouTube's Ethan Channel released a video in which YouTube ethanb0206 tricked his friend into playing the maze game (shown below, right). On March 27, the video obtained more than 0 million visits and 0 comments.

Parodies

The Maze has been parodied on Saturday Night Live. There is also a game called Save Justin Bieber, created by Jeremy Winterrowd himself, which replaces some parts of the game with a picture of Justin Bieber and the maze color is light purple instead of cyan blue.

In The Simpsons episode "Flanders' Ladder", the opening segment has Bart Simpson prank his sister Lisa by having her play a game called "Genius Maze", which is a direct spoof of The Maze, however in this spoof, the jumpscare happened very early on in the 2nd level, and has a popup of a zombie, instead of Regan.

4th level

Even though the game informs the player that there are 4 levels in the game, only 3 levels are playable, and the player can't really go to the last level because he's always interrupted by Regan Macneil when getting to the part with sharp turns in the 3rd level, scaring him. However, some people tried to find out if there's actually a way to get to the 4th level and how it looks like. There are some videos on YouTube of people successfully going through the 3rd level and finally entering the 4th level, but, unfortunately, all of these videos are fake. The earliest "tutorial" on how to get to the 4th level was uploaded by the YouTube user SoccerMomDebbie on October 19th, 2008.

File:The 4th level in the Scary Maze Game

In the video, Debbie normally moves around the maze until getting to the half part of level 3. After that, he clicks with the right mouse button in order to open the Adobe Flash settings window. He clicks the "close" button and, according to him, the game will put the blue dot at the start of level 3 again. Then, he normally wanders through the level and successfully passes through the shrunk walls, touching the red rectangle. Debbie informs the viewer of the video that doing this will lag the computer a little bit (possibly because the jumpscare doesn't appear). Finally, the so awaited level 4 shows up. As shown in the video, level 4 is almost entirely composed of shrunk walls, and the exit is located at the lower left corner of the screen. Scrolling down the comment section, we can see that the biggest part of the comments claim that the video is fake and that the trick doesn't work, while some people say that the trick actually works and explains alternative ways to reach level 4, if the one present in the video doesn't work.

The video itself is fake. Upon closer observation, the exit of the last level is painted bright red, while the exits of the previous levels are painted vermilion. Also, the text font used in the word "Level 4" is different from the font used in the other levels. Additionally, the walls in Level 4 are just a little bit wider when compared to the ones found at the end of Level 3. Last but not least, we can highlight the fact that the creator of the video fails Level 4 and goes back to the beginning, claiming that it is impossible to solve.

What also proves that Level 4 is fake is that its layout is different when a comparison is made between this video and any other video that proves that there is a way to get to level 4. The Scary Maze Game's last level is not official, so, unfortunately, we will never be able to see how it actually looks like.

Gallery

• 

  The main menu.

• 

  The first level.

• 

  The second level.

• 

  The third level.

References

Links

NOTE: The following games contain screamers!

• Original version: winterrowd.com/maze
• winterrowd.com/maze/scary-maze-game.swf
• Orange version: web.archive.org/web/20051223121743/winterrowd.com/maze1.swf
• Yellow version: fugly.com/flash/709/Scary_Maze_Game.html
• Justin Bieber version: winterrowd.com/savebieber/
• Unofficial Portuguese Version: fugly.com/flash/1013/7_Level_Scary_Maze_Game.html
• America's Funniest Home Videos version: winterrowd.com/afvmaze
• winterrowd.com/afvmaze/the-maze-afv.swf
• Unofficial HTML5 version: playscarymazegame.net/play-scary-maze-game/ 
• Mirror Link: scary-maze.com

Unofficial Links

• DeviantArt version: deviantart.com/doodie119/art/The-Maze-710178696
• DeviantArt version with AFV: deviantart.com/ntvm2005/art/The-Maze-What-s-Wrong-AFV-version-796727707

Showcase video

• youtube.com/watch?v=0WjDrQ0IhBw