Nintendo quietly programmed creepy hidden faces into the original Game Boy Camera accessory that would randomly appear and traumatize children in 1998.

A closer look

Nintendo quietly programmed creepy hidden faces into the original Game Boy Camera accessory that would randomly appear and traumatize children in 1998. If a player pressed the run button on the camera's menu screens, there was a small mathematical chance the screen would freeze and display heavily edited, distorted photographs of the development team's faces. These terrifying pixelated images were accompanied by jarring electronic noises and cryptic text asking you who you were running from. The Japanese development team added this nightmare fuel simply because they thought it was a funny prank to play on unsuspecting kids looking for easter eggs. Imagine a modern tech giant intentionally shipping hardware that routinely jump-scares its primary demographic of pre-teens with analog horror visuals. It was a bizarre era of software development where programmers had total creative freedom to just openly terrorize the consumer base without fear of online backlash