Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally.
It's tough not to have a soft spot for easter eggs in software, especially as someone who loves finding them in video games. Things get even more endearing when developers sneak easter eggs into other, more "serious" applications. It's harmless mischief, but it makes you appreciate these tiny experiments that have become part of the collective internet lore.
As it turns out, Microsoft had some pretty interesting entries in this department. Buried inside an old version of Excel was an honest-to-goodness first-person, 3D-like game that felt like a Doom clone. This was a genuinely fun surprise for those who used it at the time, and pretty interesting to discover as a Gen-Z kid who wrongly thought that old software was nothing but jank and clunky UI.
Turns out, old software had much more personality through its quirks than modern counterparts. Even better, you can still get it running on a modern PC.
Excel had no business running a first-person game
Meet the Hall of Tortured Souls
Even though I wasn't born when Excel 95 came out, I can say for certain that making spreadsheets recalculate in Excel was never anyone's idea of a fun afternoon. Least of all, Excel wasn't the sort of software people associate with 3D gaming. And yet, Microsoft hid a little first-person adventure inside the application, aptly named the Hall of Tortured Souls.
It looked like a Doom clone, sure, but it wasn't really. Hall of Tortured Souls was a navigable 3D environment that let curious users wander around a bizarre virtual hall.
The product team never particularly advertised it, though. The easter egg was just a developer secret that you had to jump through some hoops to play. Users had to scroll down to the 95th row in a blank worksheet, select the entire row, highlight the second column, open the Help menu, and then click on About Microsoft Excel. The final step was to click the Tech Support button while holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift, and that's what got everyone into Hall of Tortured Souls at last.
Getting the game running on a modern PC
No, you don't need to create a virtual machine
I wasn't about to dig out a Windows 95 virtual machine to explore an Excel easter egg, so I looked for an easier way to run it. Thankfully, a GitHub repository recreates the experience using the game's decompiled source code. You can open it in VS Code and run it without resurrecting an entire vintage computing setup.
The process was refreshingly straightforward. All I had to do was grab the repository, open its folder in VS Code, build the project, and launch the game. I never needed a copy of Excel 95 or a time machine, which is nice, considering neither is particularly convenient to come by these days.
There is one rather amusing catch, though. The game is hard-coded to run in a tiny window, and there's no convenient option to scale it up. I ended up using Windows' built-in Magnifier and increasing the display scale to make the experience easier to see. It wasn't elegant, but I got the game running and had fun with it.
It ran much better on my laptop, thanks to the smaller screen and bigger scale. There's even the classic cheat code — EXCELKFA — that you can type in to access hidden hallways in the game. Fair warning, though: the game isn't some huge, sprawling dungeon crawler or arena-based shooter. It's just a nifty little thing to tell people about, play once, and that's it.
Excel wasn't the only productivity app with secrets
Microsoft's Office Easter eggs weren't limited to Excel 95, either. Word 97 had a hidden pinball game, because apparently even writing documents wasn't enough to keep developers entertained. It was a proper little arcade distraction tucked inside a word processor, for when you got tired of typing away on the keyboard.
Excel 97 went another step further and added a whole secret flight simulator inside the spreadsheet program. It felt like a 3D plane to fly around, but the devs actually used software rendering. It had a limit on how much of the world it could render at a time, but that was par for the course for a software-based game in 1996.
These hidden extras eventually attracted scrutiny over security concerns, though, especially around undocumented code buried in productivity software. It may have seemed like harmless mischief, but it could become a headache for administrators responsible for keeping corporate systems secure.
The flight simulator is considerably easier to play today, since you can run a browser-based recreation in seconds without installing vintage Office. Word 97's hidden pinball game is trickier to get running, though, which makes it a little less convenient for a quick nostalgia trip.
It's ridiculous how Microsoft's old productivity suite doubled as an unofficial gaming collection. Somewhere, a spreadsheet enthusiast was just trying to balance their accounts and accidentally discovered an entirely different hobby.
Software today absolutely requires more of this quirky energy
Instead of new productivity features in tools that promise to save us another thirty seconds, I find these little software oddities much more interesting. After all, they exist because someone, somewhere, decided that building something ridiculous was worth doing. I genuinely believe that modern software could use a little more of that energy.
No, I'm not asking Microsoft to hide Unreal Engine inside the new Excel, but I'd certainly appreciate the occasional surprise that isn't a subscription prompt or an AI assistant jammed into my workflow.
