Date: Fri, 28 Nov 11 18:09 UTC
From: Leon Müller <LordWire@mail.com>
To: TurboHero <turbohero@excite.com>
Subject: I'm Mr Mix!

Hello mate, found this on the Interwebs, you may like...

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, hoever, 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 level one and as high as 85 on the third. By 
level five, 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 
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 were 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 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. 
However, none of them could remember exactly what that 
was.

One psychologist who saw many of these children reported 
being disturbed by the sheer amount of terror on the 
child's face as they recounted the details of the 
nightmare.

Many of the children broke 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. It 
remained in relative obscurity until a few years ago, 
when PC hackers got hold of a 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 to the 
point that the RAM was almost completely filled.

These files are reportedly pictures of people with 
horribly deformed faces, appearing to scream in pain and 
agony with their eyes appearing to be 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 
irreparable 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.

Unfortunately, all of the original hackers declined to 
discuss what they saw in the final level. All of them 
became extremely paranoid and reclusive, refusing to talk
about anything related to the game and showing 
astonishingly extreme symptoms of post-traumatic stress 
disorder.

Most of them ceased to be able to form coherent sentences 
within a week and, within a month, all of them went 
missing. All remaining copies of the game were destroyed.

To this day, no one knows what was in that game that 
caused them so much psychological damage. Maybe it's 
better that way.

Two years after this incident, a man was arrested after 
trying to kidnap an eight-year old girl from a grocery 
store. Through DNA and fingerprint analysis, the man was 
identified as one of the original hackers who viewed the 
final level of the game.

He was wearing a white chef's hat and had a look of 
unspeakable malice and insanity on his face. When 
interrogated, the man would only say one thing.

"I'm Mr. Mix. Shhh."