Sad Satan: The Fortnite of the Dark Web

If you're like most teens and young adults, you've probably spent hours upon hours on Fortnite, striving for your very own victory royale. Fortnite took over the gaming community with its popularity exploding in recent years. Why is it so popular? It's free, creative, and very unique. Many believe Sad Satan possesses these same traits, and today you'll find out why...

What is Sad Satan?

Sad Satan has become the most widely known game that was first discovered on the Dark Web, but where did it start? On July 1st, 2015 Obscure Horror Corner released a video on Youtube titled "Sad Satan - Deep Web Horror Game - Part 1". This twelve-minute video showcased a very strange, never before seen game. The video appeared to be a simple maze game at first... But there was a dark twist.

Playing Sad Satan

After a minute and a half of walking down a straight hallway, you start to hear your first snippet of audio (aside from footsteps). This extremely atmospherical audio sounds like a younger girl speaking backward with loads of distortion thrown on top of her voice. When played backward it's still very hard to figure out exactly what she's saying. Many people claim to hear short emotionless phrases such as "I know them", "six, six, six, six, six" or even the name of the game itself, "Sad Satan."
After a minute of repeated chants, you hear music start to play under her voice. The music sounds like a demented, sped up version of the wheels on the bus. If you'd like to review the first four minutes of audio please let me know what you hear in the comment. click here for the first four minutes of audio played backward. Remember, the clip is reversed, so the first thing you would hear when playing the game is at the very end of the video.

On top of the atmospherical audio, the textures and visuals used in this game are so prominent and forced that they have the ability to make you nauseous if you don't regularly play video games. The walls sway and swell as you walk further down this maze, and there is no roof to the maze, instead, a sky in the distance that appears to have a rip down the middle. Half of the sky is a hazy blue, and the other half reveals stars behind the sky.
Later in the game, you'll start to see pop-ups. These pop-ups may frighten you at first, but there's really no meaning behind these photos. They aren't full of gore, and they are definitely not illegal. This game's original purpose was just to grow Obscure Horror Corners Youtube channel, and boy did it work!

The Original Sad Satan

After Sad Satan was posted to Youtube, forum pages such as 4chan and Reddit immediately took action and attempted to figure out who created this game. It didn't take long for 4chan to figure out that apparently, Obscure Horror Corner made that game himself using the Terror Engine. He, however, claimed that someone sent this game to him from the dark web. The onion link he attached to the game was not a real link, and when clicked, appeared as a blank page.
A few days later someone on 4chan provides a link to Sad Satan. This 4chan user named "ZK" claims to be the person who originally shared the game with Obscure Horror Corner. After seeing the link, thousands of people downloaded it immediately! This link was not the original Sad Satan, but rather a very similar recreation of the game later referred to as the clone of Sad Satan. This clone gave Sad Satan the dark and twisted history we now know it for.
The original Sad Satan had four "scary" pop-ups. None of these files were compiled of gore or anything remotely illegal. The clone of Sad Satan, however, had five new scary pop-ups. Three of these jump scares were of beheadings, the fourth was someone getting run over by a car, and the fifth one... Well, the fifth one involved children.
The five new jump scares - while still terrifying - weren't the worst part of this cloned Sad Satan. The worst part was the botnet virus that came with the installation of Sad Satan. This virus was so powerful and so hidden that even virtual machines and the majority of virus scanners couldn't (and still cant) detect it.

What did the Sad Satan virus do? 

The virus itself acted as a botnet virus, meaning that the computer responsible for the creation of the virus has control over every single computer that happened to download the virus. Hackers use botnet viruses to launch DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and shut down websites. Botnet viruses are also used for spam attacks, and to make money. Cybercriminals can sell off bits and pieces of their botnet armies for some extra cash. This infographic created by Kaspersky does a great job of showing what a botnet virus is truly capable of.