Bite-Sized Game History: Diablo’s Satanic Panic, Background Weirdos in The Simpsons, and the World’s First Glimpse at The Sims

Sometimes, a game’s secrets are buried so deep that they take decades to find. But as long as you know where to look, other secrets are sitting out for all the world to see and just waiting for an eager player to discover them.

Let’s examine three games from the latter group in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

For as much as we all wish it would, the Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 80s never really went away. There’s probably always going to be some fringe group of people who believe that devil worshippers walk among us, and that ritual sacrifice is happening in mass numbers (but also in complete secrecy) all across the world. But there’s also no shortage of people willing to treat all of this as the nonsense that it is. Look no further than the fantastic Easter Egg that Blizzard slipped into Diablo in 1997.

The Lord of Terror reigns over the Burning Hells in the dungeon-crawling franchise, but apparently, he is also very concerned with making sure you eat right and practice good dental hygiene. When a player enters the game’s final arena, the towering demon uses an alien tongue to deliver this menacing-sounding greeting:

“Laem yreve retfa hsurb dna selbategev ruoy tae!”

But instead of a demonic curse or incantation, it’s actually some helpful advice hidden behind the magic of backmasking. According to the purveyors of the Satanic Panic, rock bands would use backmasking to insert hidden messages on records to subliminally convert their listers to the dark side. When played in reverse, the true meaning behind these messages would be revealed. In Diablo‘s case, the player is actually being told:

“Eat your vegetables and brush after every meal!”

You can hear it for yourself in this audio clip that was shared by GOG:

The Simpsons Arcade Game has always felt a little out-of-step with the Springfield we all knew and loved from The Simpsons, and that’s probably because Konami released the game so early in the show’s run. Fewer than two dozen episodes had aired when the game was completed, and classic episodes like “Homer at the Bat,” “Mr. Plow,” and “Marge Vs. the Monorail” were still years in the future.

But there were still plenty of great episodes in that initial season and a half, even if the writers and the cast hadn’t yet locked down its distinctive voice (or color palette, for that matter). That work-in-progress foundation is probably what lead to things like Smithers being a jewel thief, as well as the inclusion of the rabbits from Matt Groening’s Life In Hell comic strip, a ninja master, a sentient Krusty the Clown balloon, and other characters created specifically for the game.

But one of the game’s most-memorable bosses actually did appear in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo on the show. As spotted by Talking Simpsons host Bob Mackey, the fire-spewing Drunk Punk that serves as the boss of the Moe’s Tavern level is sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Marvin Monroe’s Family Therapy Center in the fourth episode of the first season (“There’s No Disgrace Like Home”):

Finally, the tireless Chris Scullion recently dug up this extremely early look at The Sims, presented by Maxis’s then-CEO, Jeff Braun. The footage aired during an episode of Equinox, a UK documentary series, all the way back in 1993. That’s roughly seven years before The Sims would launch for the PC, though it wasn’t called that at the time. At the time, developers at Maxis weren’t even sure if it would be a standalone game, instead pitching the Dollhouse project as an expansion to SimCity or the then-new SimCity 2000:

If this clip struck your fancy, some kind soul has uploaded the entire documentary to YouTube and it’s a fascinating time capsule of what game development looked like in 1993.

Thanks to GOG, Bob Mackey, and Chris Scullion for sharing these fun trivia tidbits. If you’d like to see more tweets like this in your feed, be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.