Themightiestofkhrps

(Sound in the video is NSFW.)

In 1998, Panasonic Interactive Media released Secret Writer’s Society, an educational game that teaches kids how to write. But because of a horrible problem, under the right circumstances in the Macintosh version, the game’s text-to-speech feature would read a list of obscenities.

Unbelievably, it took a few months for anyone to notice this. There’s some dispute about what caused this: Panasonic says it was a bug involving the game’s swear filter, while anti-corporate activist group RTMark claims it was an act of deliberate, internal sabotage meant to raise awareness about the dangers of outsourcing education to a computer game.

This version of Secret Writer’s Society was pulled, and it has been missing for the past 20 years… but this week, I got a copy. And now you can play it too!

(…“SHITBIRD”?)

In a statement to The Independent, Panasonic’s Elizabeth Olsen said that the company thought they had tested the swear filter, “but evidently we didn’t test it well enough.”

RTMark co-founder Igor Vamos confirmed to me via email that “The bug had such a deliberate appearance; it would have been a crying shame to not pile on with additional layers of provocative story.”

me: huh?

brain: that was a dude from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, remember?

me: yeah, what about it?

Some lesbians use he/him? Oh cool.

Some people have people inside their head and sometimes it's fictional chars? Sick your brains like a pirate ship they're all working to run.

Some people like being treated like a pet dog? Bark bark bro.

Being fat isn't unhealthy but a perfectly normal type of body to have? Kinda beautiful how different we can all be.