The Strange Story Of Excel 95’s Secret Doom Style Level
PC gaming and PC software have always shared one big thing in common: developers love hiding Easter eggs. From secret levels in shooters to weird bonuses in productivity apps, there is a long tradition of tucking little jokes and tributes into code.
One of the most legendary examples comes not from a game, but from Microsoft Excel 95. Buried inside the spreadsheet software was a full 3D maze called The Hall of Tortured Souls. It looked like a low resolution Doom level and was packed with credits to the developers who built Excel.
At first it was just a neat discovery for curious users. But a couple of years later, this obscure Easter egg became the center of a wild internet conspiracy theory claiming that Bill Gates was the Antichrist.
This is the strange journey of a hidden level, some imaginative numerology, and the early internet’s taste for tech paranoia.
Inside The Hall Of Tortured Souls
Microsoft has a long history of hiding staff credits inside Windows and its apps. Early versions like Windows 1.0 let you bring up secret team lists with specific key combos. Later versions such as Windows 3.x, 95, and 98 also included little hidden credit screens.
Excel 95 took this tradition to a new level. Instead of a simple text popup, it contained a rudimentary 3D experience:
- You accessed it through a specific sequence involving row 95 in Excel 95 and the Tech Support option in the Help menu.
- Once triggered, Excel would drop you into a chunky, pixel filled 3D room.
- The environment was very mid 90s PC: green pools reminiscent of Doom slime, blue pillar like structures, and walls that looked like they were tiled with Minesweeper graphics.
- A staircase led up to a crimson doorway, flanked by walls covered in endlessly scrolling names of the Excel 95 developers.
Beyond the doorway was another chamber, shaped like a semi hexagon, with a window looking out over an abstract, endless void. A viewport in front of the player displayed more credits rolling by.
There was also a second secret layer. If you stood in the starting room, faced the rear wall and typed a specific phrase, Excel teleported you to another level. This new area featured a zigzag walkway clearly inspired by early Doom maps. At the end was a room decorated with dithered photos of the Excel team and yet more scrolling credits.
For most users, this was simply a cool discovery. A productivity app suddenly turning into a low budget first person maze felt like a playful acknowledgment of the PC gaming world that so many Windows users lived in.
From Fun Easter Egg To Internet Conspiracy Fuel
When people first uncovered The Hall of Tortured Souls in 1995, the reaction on Usenet, an early internet discussion system, was exactly what you would expect from PC users of the era.
- One user posted instructions on how to access the secret level.
- Others responded with simple reactions like “cool”.
- The thread quickly devolved into a classic PC versus Mac argument, with some people joking that developers were wasting time on Easter eggs instead of fixing bugs.
For a couple of years, that was the end of it. The Hall of Tortured Souls was just one more oddity for enthusiasts to show off to friends.
Then, in late 1997, a chain email started circulating that turned this hidden maze into something supposedly sinister. The message stitched together a bunch of ideas to argue that Microsoft and Bill Gates were tied to biblical end times prophecy.
The email started with a numerology stunt. It claimed:
- If you take the letters in “Bill Gates III”, convert them to ASCII codes, and add them up, you get 666, the “number of the beast” from the Book of Revelation.
- Doing a similar trick with “Windows 95” and “MS DOS 6.31” supposedly also produced 666.
From there, the email went on to describe the exact steps needed to access The Hall of Tortured Souls in Excel 95. It framed the eerie name and spooky looking maze as proof that Microsoft had buried Satanic messages and dark symbolism inside its products.
Later, longer versions of the email went even further. They directly asked whether Bill Gates might be the Antichrist and spun a story about how Microsoft could theoretically control the world.
- The email pointed out that the majority of the world’s computers ran Windows and DOS, including critical systems like those used by the US military.
- It suggested that hidden code similar to the Hall of Tortured Souls could allow Gates to trigger chaos in financial systems, security networks, and even nuclear arsenals.
- It added the World Wide Web and Internet Explorer into the mix, claiming that “WWW” resembled three Roman numeral sixes and that Microsoft’s browser could quietly map your entire PC.
The email ended with a dramatic warning to readers to think and pray hard about these “facts,” leaning heavily into the Satanic Panic atmosphere that had lingered since the 1980s.
Why This Weird Rumor Still Matters
Viewed from today, the whole idea that a crude 3D credits room in Excel proves Bill Gates is the Antichrist sounds absurd. The Hall of Tortured Souls looks more like a programmer’s joke, influenced by the popularity of Doom and other early PC shooters, than a demonic ritual.
But the story is an interesting snapshot of how people reacted to the growing power of personal computers and the internet. In the mid and late 90s, Microsoft felt overwhelmingly dominant in the tech world. When one company’s software runs on almost every office and home PC, it is easy for anxious imaginations to turn that into a global control narrative.
The pattern also never really went away. Decades later, Microsoft has faced other waves of moral panic from different groups, whether that is over mixed reality ads or broader fears around surveillance, AI, and big tech influence.
In the end, The Hall of Tortured Souls is best remembered not as evidence of some hidden evil, but as one of the strangest crossovers between PC software, early 3D game aesthetics, and online conspiracy culture. It shows how a simple Easter egg meant to celebrate a dev team can take on a life of its own once it hits the wider internet.
For PC fans, it is also a reminder of a more experimental era, when even a serious application like Excel might secretly double as a tiny Doom like level, waiting to be discovered by anyone willing to poke around under the hood.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/this-microsoft-excel-easter-egg-led-to-a-wild-conspiracy-theory-that-bill-gates-was-the-antichrist/
