Mr. Mix

Does anyone remember an old PC game from the early 1990s called "Mr. Mix"? It's mainly a typing game (similar to Mario Teaches Typing) where you have to type words into a box to make a chef (the titular Mr. Mix) put ingredients into a bowl. Unlike most typing games, however, this game is notorious for having an insane difficulty curve. The game has a "Words per Minute" requirement for each level, being as low as 10 on the first level and as high as 85 on the 3rd. By level 5, the requirement reaches over 500, effectively making it impossible to proceed any further.

One of the main things that people noticed about this game immediately was the background music. The music on the very first level was an unsettling pattern of growls that got progressively louder as the level went on, often causing damage to early computer speakers that weren't designed to handle extremely high volumes of sound. The second level had no music at all, and the third had what sounded like an extremely low-quality recording of a hair dryer playing in the background. The remaining two levels had an extremely loud high pitched ringing throughout the entire level that caused severe ear drum damage to those who managed to get that far.

Another rather disturbing aspect of the game was the design of Mr. Mix himself. He was a large, round-faced, overweight man with large beady eyes and red spots on his cheeks. Most children who played the game reported having vivid nightmares of Mr. Mix speaking to them in a quiet, raspy voice and threatening them to keep quiet about something, although none of them could remember exactly what. One psychologist who saw many of these children reported being disturbed by the sheer amount of terror on the child's face as he or she recounted the details of the nightmare, with many children breaking down into tears in the process, begging for their parents to "save" them. However, no direct relationship to the game itself could be determined by these few cases, as not all children suffered the same adverse effects.

For obvious reasons, this game did not sell very well, and remained in relative obscurity until a few years ago, when PC hackers got ahold of the ROM of the game and started digging through it. Using memory hacking software, they managed to crack the game's code and bypass the impossible fifth level. What they found, however, was extremely disturbing, and caused many of them to quit the expedition altogether.

According to the reports these hackers left behind, the game behaves very strangely if the fifth level is bypassed. The game crashes violently and closes, writing a bunch of files to the user's System32 directory and causing the computer's RAM to be almost completely filled. These files are reportedly pictures of people with horribly deformed faces, screaming in pain and agony, with their eyeballs bleeding from their tear ducts and their outer layer of skin torn clean off in multiple places. If the user attempts to delete these files, the computer will violently crash and blue screen, causing permanent irrepairable damage to the user's hard drive.

The hackers found that this was caused by a lone byte in the game's ROM that triggered when the fifth level was completed. After removing this byte, they were able to proceed to the sixth and final level.

The final level does not have any gameplay to speak of whatsoever. It simply shows a camcorder recording of a man in a chef's hat (assumed to be Mr. Mix), standing in front of a young girl, appearing to be about 8 years old, who is sitting on the ground, naked, bound down by chains on her ankles to keep her legs spread apart and on her wrists to keep her arms tied apart from each other above her head on the wall behind her, and on her stomach to keep her from standing up. She is screaming in terror, crying, while Mr. Mix pulls out a butcher knife and starts to walk menacingly towards her with a look of unspeakable malice and insanity on his face. He leans down to the girl and starts to carve into her vagina, as she writhes and screams in agony and he laughs maniacally with pleasure and fulfillment. Mr. Mix then starts to strip naked and begin to rape the young girl in her wide open, bleeding vagina while slicing the outer layer of skin off of her face while laughing maniacally. The girl's screams become more and more agonized and unbearable until Mr. Mix takes his knife and stabs her clean in the throat. The girl, exhausted and in unfathomable pain and terror, quiets down and manages to whisper out a horrified, "Who are you?".

Mr. Mix leans down to the girl's face, and says, in a low whisper, with his finger at his lips:

"I'm Mr. Mix. Shhh."