About

Mandrill Maze is the name of a short animated clip demonstrating an animation made on an Amiga computer in which the viewer is navigated through a short, looping maze with mandrill faces covering the walls and looping music (High Performance by John Van Eps and Douglas Wood) in the background. Online, it has been the subject of edits where characters get lost in the maze as well as a creepypasta.

Origin

The mandrill picture plastered on the maze walls was widely used to test compression algorithms back in the 80's.

The clip was originally part of a compilation of animations made by Amiga users and was created by Allen Hastings in 1988. The compilation was uploaded on September 12th, 2007 by user deltaray3 (shown below, left). A ten minute loop of the clip was then uploaded on December 22nd, 2009, by user potatoooooooooooooo, gathering over 40k views (shown below, right).

Spread

On the same day as the loop was uploaded, user UltraBibendum uploaded an edit titled "[SHOCKING] ROMANIAN DRIVER ATTEMPTS TO NAVIGATE THE MANDRILL MAZE," gaining over 16,000 views (shown below). This was the first of several edits which placed various characters in the maze, sometimes changing the face on the walls from a mandrill to something else.

On September 6th, 2012, an anonymous user under the name of Adam uploaded a creepypasta about the video on Pastebin^[1] that claims that those who watch the original tape would die soon after. He then describes an experiment where he watches loops of the Mandrill Maze, slowly descending into madness.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References