This Microsoft Excel Easter egg led to a wild conspiracy theory that Bill Gates was the Antichrist

Like anthropomorphic rabbits and Jesus, software developers love an Easter egg. Microsoft is no different. For most of its history, the Windows developer has inserted hidden jokes and references into many, if not most of its programs. These range from a Utah teapot that appears in Windows 95's Pipes screensaver, to a secret magic 8-ball toy inside Microsoft Access.

But the most famous, or should I say, infamous Microsoft Easter egg is The Hall of Tortured Souls, a Doom-style 3D maze hidden inside Excel 95 that displays the credits of the designers who worked on it. Not only is it one of the more elaborate Easter eggs concealed in a Microsoft product, but this innocuous secret would also become the epicentre of a bizarre Internet rumour that Bill Gates was the Antichrist.

Hiding designer credits is something of a tradition for Microsoft, with credit-based Easter eggs stretching all the way back to Windows 1.0. Here, pressing Alt+Shift+Esc+Enter would bring up a window listing "The Windows Team". The list, which includes a young designer called Gabe Newell, was accompanied by the word "Congrats!"

Similar Easter eggs appear in Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows 98. But The Hall of Tortured Souls was substantially more involved than these hidden screens and slideshows. It was accessed through Row 95 of Excel 95, pressing TAB to select the second cell of the row, before bringing up the 'Help' window and selecting "Tech Support."

Upon doing this, users were transported into a garish, pixel-y room, with Doom-like green pools, blue pillars that resemble tentacles, and walls seemingly decorated with Minesweeper tiles. Ahead of the user (now the player) stretched a staircase leading up to a crimson doorway with black walls on either side.

On these walls, the names of Excel 95's developers scrolled endlessly. Through the doorway lay another room, semi-hexagonal in shape. On the right-hand wall, a window looked out into an endless geometric abyss. Embedded into the wall ahead of the player was a viewport where Excel's credits also scrolled.

Adding to The Hall of Tortured Souls' mystique is that it has a second layer. Typing "excelkfa" while facing the rear wall of the room the player spawns in teleports them to a second level. Here, a zigzagging pathway reminiscent of Doom's E1M1 leads to another room decorated with dithered photographs of the development team, with yet more scrolling credits on the rearmost wall.

Looking at The Hall of Tortured Souls today, it's astonishing to think that it caused anything other than eyestrain. Indeed, the initial reactions to the Easter egg are exactly what you'd expect from the internet. We can see this thanks to the Usenet archive housed within Google Groups—which stores all manner of forum-like discussions from the last 30+ years.

Searching for The Hall of Tortured souls brings up thousands of discussions, the first of which is a thread started by Kristian Poe on September 22, 1995—less than a month after Windows 95's public launch. Kristian's initial post simply highlights the Hall's existence and instructs fellow Excel users on how to access it.

The initial reply, by a user named Horrock, is simply "cool", before another respondent cynically ponders "which bugs/flaws in either Excel95 or Win95 didn't get fixed while the programmers were putting in this lovely special effect". After this, the thread gradually descends into PC vs Mac bunfight. In other words, it's a classic internet discussion.

Online chat about the Easter egg continues in an innocuous manner until late in 1997, at which point a chain email begins to appear that puts a sinister new twist on The Hall of Tortured Souls. The earliest instance I could find was from October 1997, in a post by a user going by Ruach titled "Eerie Facts about Microsoft (Try out the Excel 95 Experiment!)".

The email, which Ruach says was forwarded by "a friend", starts out "Since we're all using MICROSOFT products here, I thought I'd just let you know these facts…do you know that Bill Gates' REAL name is William Henry Gates III? His official REAL name NOW is BILL GATES III."

The email then claims that, if you take the letters in "Bill Gates III", then convert them into ASCIII code and add up the resulting numbers, the total is 666—the number of the beast as described in The Book of Revelation. "Coincidence har? Nope. Take WINDOWS 95 and do the SAME procedure and you will get 666 too!!! And the same goes for MS-DOS 6.31!!! Sicko rite?"

What does this have to do with The Hall of Tortured Souls? Well, Excel's secret maze appears in the second part of the email. "For those of you fellas who still have the OLD excel 95 (not office 97) then try this out," the email says, before listing instructions on how to access The Hall of Tortured Souls.

Essentially, the email wields the Easter egg as evidence that Microsoft is concealing secret, Satanic messages inside its software, which, combined with its crackpot numerology, supposedly demonstrates that Bill Gates is the herald of the Endtimes.

Curiously, this earliest version of the email does not explicitly claim that Bill Gates is the Antichrist, although it is likely a fragment, as by November '97 a much longer version of the email appeared. This first pops up in alt.bible.prophecies in a post by Andy Ang titled "Bill Gates is The AntiChrist?"

In the extended version of the email, its original, anonymous writer now openly ponders, "Wouldn't be surprise[d] if Bill Gates was 'The Antichrist', after all it was already foretold in the Bible that someone powerful would rise up and lead the world to destruction."

It also suggests how the founder of Microsoft might do this. "More than 80% of the world's computers run on Windows and DOS (including those at the Pentagon)! If all his products have some kind of small program embedded (like this Hall of Tortured Souls) that can give him control, setting off nuclear arsenals, creating havoc in security systems, financial systems all over the world."

The email also folds the World Wide Web into the conspiracy by claiming that "WWW" looks like three sixes written with Roman numerals (i.e. VI VI VI), while also suggesting that Gates could use Internet Explorer to "map out what you have on your computer bit by bit". It concludes by urging readers to "think about all this and pray, pray really hard, or else…"

The email rattles around in various forms for a few more years, and had largely petered out by 2003.

Viewed in isolation, the whole event is so absurd as to seem almost quaint. But the potential effects of such alarmism, borne out of the Satanic Panic of the '80s and '90s, is very real.

Such attacks have not gone away, either. As recently as 2020, Microsoft came under fire from the Christian right, pulling an advert for HoloLens 2 that featured Marina Abramovic, because four years prior she had attended a "spirit cooking" event with Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta ("Spirit Cooking" was in fact a reference to an aphrodisiac cookbook).

All that said, I'm beginning to think the email might have had a point, only to me, WWW doesn't look like three sixes. It looks like six fives. If you add up six fives, you get 30, and if you divide that by ten, you get 3.

And you know what that means…