That's how far back Windows needs to go to try to elicit some non-negative attention
Tallain•Aug 20, 2026
I mean, Raymond Chen has been writing The Old New Thing consistently for over 20 years. Nearly every single entry is interesting, informative, and illuminating, aimed at every facet of software engineering, old and new, over the decades. He may be part of the final bastion of quality and care for detail at MS, dwindling and faint as it is.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
navigate8310•Aug 20, 2026
I don't think OP meant any non-negative reaction towards Raymond but MSFT.
abigdog•Aug 20, 2026
Win 95, 98, Me were buggy and crashed alot.
OuterVale•Aug 20, 2026
Users scare me.
mrosenbjerg•Aug 20, 2026
Raymond Chen is my favorite MS blog writer
teekert•Aug 20, 2026
Another example: [0]
Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".
I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).
Hmm. I gotta say I do see these though. Especially Claude...
rsynnott•Aug 20, 2026
I refuse to believe that at this point the AI companies are not doing that deliberately.
lopis•Aug 20, 2026
You can just as well say the logos look like flowers, suns, plasma balls, retinas. If you choose to only see anuses on all of them, that's really on you.
> Sound familiar? It should, because it's also an apt description of... well, you know. A butthole.
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
latexr•Aug 20, 2026
> There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
ricudis•Aug 20, 2026
Though now it's long buried in internet folklore graveyard, there once was a popular shock image (and an associated website) called "goatse". (If you never heard of it, you better NOT google it).
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
jb1991•Aug 20, 2026
So what was the government that complained?
wartywhoa23•Aug 20, 2026
A certain remote tropic island's!
earth-tattoo•Aug 20, 2026
Pakistan.
yreg•Aug 20, 2026
This article includes the photo of the (clothed) hologram (it's the third image).
(Although a little dressing does improve the taste.)
wartywhoa23•Aug 20, 2026
> Until we got a complaint from a government (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that was upset with Windows 95 because it depicted naked children.
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
ttyyzz•Aug 20, 2026
I must say that "But it makes me wonder about the mental state of our beta testers [...]"
cought me off guard while drinking coffee
wolfi1•Aug 20, 2026
is the screen still usable?
rackp•Aug 20, 2026
It's pretty funny picturing them with deadpan expressions, coming up with stuff like butts and obscene images.
stefs•Aug 20, 2026
years ago my father got a decomissioned, wiped clean notebook from work and asked me to set it up for him. i didn't want to shell out a hundred bucks for windows, so i suggested trying linux (ubuntu) and he agreed. "intrepid ibex" was installed without issues. a few weeks later i asked him if everything was ok and how he liked it, and he had no complaints, except one: he didn't like the edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...
SV_BubbleTime•Aug 20, 2026
The most shocking thing for me on this was that Ivex was such a shit version of Linux and gave me such trouble I put Linux off for 10 more years after that crap. It was not at all ready for normal people. Night and day different to Linux today.
st_goliath•Aug 20, 2026
> "intrepid ibex" ... edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper
Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P
Windows has been free since at least VXKC4. Microsoft wouldn’t exist as anything but an Excel vendor today if it were any other way; it’s intentional.
(Ubuntu was the right choice.)
notpushkin•Aug 20, 2026
Yep. Same thing with Adobe.
teekert•Aug 20, 2026
Hmm, I also only see a skull
boomlinde•Aug 20, 2026
It's impossible for me to determine whether it looks like a skull now because my mind was contaminated with the notion that it's a skull before I had a chance to look.
bluedino•Aug 20, 2026
One of the earlier releases (when they would send you free CD's) got flack for people in their underwear
Well, the Ubuntu logo has suddenly clicked. How did I not see it before?!
lukan•Aug 20, 2026
Thanks for your comment, otherwise it still would not have clicked for me ..
DonHopkins•Aug 20, 2026
I'll see your CD cover with three people in their underwear, plus a hologram of the top half of a possibly naked baby on the Microsoft Windows box, and raise you the top half of several naked SGI "Skinny Hackers" in a projected texture map illustration of an ACM publication:
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
And it continues…
artisinal•Aug 20, 2026
How do I view the collectors edition Windows XP without Googling “naked baby” ?
They should have told them to gtfo and use Slackware then.
sneak•Aug 20, 2026
What is an “obscene body part”?
If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?
trencedamp•Aug 20, 2026
Appendix
khazhoux•Aug 20, 2026
This is why large companies should employ a few pedophiles to run things like this by them first. Long term, much savings.
walrus01•Aug 20, 2026
Or they could outsource it via some kind of API: EaaS (Epstein As A Service)
SG-•Aug 20, 2026
The US government did just that.
CursedSilicon•Aug 20, 2026
Given the state of the US, I'm not so sure that pedophiles are truly fit to run anything
sachahjkl•Aug 20, 2026
satanic
globular-toast•Aug 20, 2026
I was watching YouTube the other day and it was talking about Nirvana's Nevermind album, showed the album cover but with a square censoring part of it. In these cases it really is the censor themselves who is debauched. Reminds me of the classic story where Samuel Johnson left out some rude words from his dictionary. He was congratulated for having left them out, to which he is said to have quipped "I congratulate you on being able to look them up!"
latexr•Aug 20, 2026
It might sound silly to censor an album cover, but on the other hand why risk Google locking your whole account due to some automated check from which you have no recourse?
YouTubers need to unionise. People need to maintain control of their own computing.
srvmshr•Aug 20, 2026
Raymond Chen's articles are true wealth of contemporary tech-lore. My favorite is the one where a user reported error on Flight Simulator map [0] and it escalated all the way up to Bill Gates & the then chief of FS division.
the ubuntu logo is a skull and the windows logo is four little windows and somehow both are accurate descriptions of the people who use them
blkhawk•Aug 20, 2026
I find it worrying because being super sensitive to stuff like that is usually red flag that the person is kinda into it - Senators in Bathroom stalls and all that (bonus if you get the reference).
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
aiandaguy•Aug 20, 2026
niceee
harshreality•Aug 20, 2026
[edited to more align with the essay's thesis, thanks to the reply for pointing out misalignment]
I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery.
(Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.)
People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.
ksbd-pls-finish•Aug 20, 2026
This does not seem to be related to the article. OP is about red moon and naked baby and clouds. It does not claim that anyone hated windows because of that.
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.
professor_v•Aug 20, 2026
I'm kind of offended they changed them all. At some point you just have to say 'okay this is just complete bullshit' and stand for the things you create. Otherwise everything ends up in this corporate bland soup of nothingness. Of course we know where Microsoft ended up, but I doesn't have to be that way.
By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.
anal_reactor•Aug 20, 2026
Unfortunately the wider cultural movement "we must avoid offending anyone at all costs" got us here. It's not only corporations, many people also behave like this in private. It's sad, but it is what it is, the only thing you can do is searching for small pockets of people who aren't insane.
bpavuk•Aug 20, 2026
> Windows XP had its own share of complaints. The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks.
According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen on his blog The Old New Thing, Red moon desert was originally intended to be Windows XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. While this wallpaper was temporarily set as the default wallpaper during Whistler, this story does not appear to be true; Bliss had already been selected based on extensive research by design manager Rob Girling and his team, and the Luna visual style shares the same color scheme as the wallpaper. It is more likely the wallpaper was set to default as a decoy; the unleaked Lab06 build 2415 predates build 2423, and shows Bliss set as the wallpaper.
lazide•Aug 20, 2026
The only people who might plausibly think that were probably also jerking it to late night scrambled skin-e-max in the 90’s when it was basically just hard R.
I’ve seen that background hundreds of times, and it never even occurred to me.
josephg•Aug 20, 2026
I can see it now that it’s been pointed out. The desert looks like a naked person lying face down, head toward the right of the image.
Now I can’t unsee it. The butt is real.
DonHopkins•Aug 20, 2026
The original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k.
The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.
Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.
In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:
> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.
All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:
The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.
The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:
28 Comments
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".
I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).
[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...
[1] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-di...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/02/nirvana-neverm...
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-design...
I also think it would be very impolite to make fun of your clients on the internet for a stupid request while naming them explicitly while doing so.
Looking at it from a distance indeed may raise some brows.
By the same logic:
If God didn't mean for people to cannibalize each other, we wouldn't be made of meat.
Flanders and Swan: The Reluctant Cannibal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEvh8qY-QRo
Seriously though, I love babies!
...I just can't eat a whole one...
(Although a little dressing does improve the taste.)
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
cought me off guard while drinking coffee
Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png
Windows has been free since at least VXKC4. Microsoft wouldn’t exist as anything but an Excel vendor today if it were any other way; it’s intentional.
(Ubuntu was the right choice.)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-turns-20-shaping-the...
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071
https://halfblog.net/2011/12/04/daemon-worship/
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
>–Brett Glass
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
And it continues…
Did this comment already put me on a list?
If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95...
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery.
(Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.)
People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.
By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.
oh thanks, now I cannot unsee it. :)
I suppose it looks like buttocks?
According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen on his blog The Old New Thing, Red moon desert was originally intended to be Windows XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. While this wallpaper was temporarily set as the default wallpaper during Whistler, this story does not appear to be true; Bliss had already been selected based on extensive research by design manager Rob Girling and his team, and the Luna visual style shares the same color scheme as the wallpaper. It is more likely the wallpaper was set to default as a decoy; the unleaked Lab06 build 2415 predates build 2423, and shows Bliss set as the wallpaper.
I’ve seen that background hundreds of times, and it never even occurred to me.
Now I can’t unsee it. The butt is real.
The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.
Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.
Original monster cover:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:
> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.
All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
Full email thread:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.
The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
That's not what 'this looks like ass' means.