Notice: archive is dead

The unix box that had been hosting the archives for two decades from Jake's basement finally kicked the bucket, and of course none of us believed in backups. I might try to recover some of it, but it's not a high priority since nothing has really happened with Hypogeum within recent memory. In the off chance that somebody stumbles on this page I've tried to hit the key points in the new, vastly shorter FAQ.

Update Sep. 2020: For some reason there's been renewed interest in Hypogeum, so I've expanded the FAQ to cover some questions I've been getting.

Hypogeum FAQ

What is 'hypogeum'?

Hypogeum is a (probably) fictional computer game that was alleged to have been produced around 1995 to 1999. The actual content of the game varied greatly between different tellings: it was a Myst-style puzzle game, it was a multiplayer MUD, it was set in a seemingly endless underground labyrinth, it had real-time 3d graphics, it was VR (?!), if you died in the game your account was deleted and you could never play again (?!!).

So basically a composite of all the spooky video game motifs, like a Polybius 2.0

Yes, but in its defense it was never claimed to have killed anyone or driven anyone mad.

Did it really exist?

Probably not. There's certainly very little credible evidence to suggest such a game was ever developed.

I want to believe. What about the "page 91 advertisement"?

"Page 91" was a bad photoshop claiming to be a scan of an advertisement for Hypogeum in a gaming magazine. Which magazine? It wasn't specified. Date? Likewise missing. The only piece of information was the page number, and based on that the community went on an unsuccessful years-long quest to track down the magazine.

What about hypogeum.com?

This website is now just a parked page, but at one point it advertised some kind of "e-sports" arena that never came to fruition. At the time (around 2013) there was significant speculation about a possible link to the mythical game Hypogeum, but since the project appears to have gone nowhere, in hindsight it seems likely that it was totally unrelated.

What about Relic Seeker: Hypogeum VR?

It would be rather disappointing to discover that Hypogeum was simply a decades-long covert marketing campaign culminating in a decidedly average mobile VR game.

What about KTF.exe? Please don't crush all mystery out of this world.

Sometime around 2010 'dis', a hacker/dataminer type, posted in the forums that they had 'acquired' a rare and mysterious DOS game: KTF.exe. The 'game' (loosely interpreted) presents itself as a DOS-era fortune-telling/tarot-reading program along the lines of the infamous NES game Taboo: The Sixth Sense. In KTF.exe (which the title screen expands into Know Thy Fate: The Computer Oracle), the player answers a serious of strange and vaguely ominous questions and receives Tarot cards in response.

What's the connection to Hypogeum?

A few of the questions the player may be asked contain direct references to Hypogeum by name, and others contain hints of a narrative in which a player finds, and subsequently becomes trapped within, a game. The game goes out of its way to suggest that it contains a 'game within a game'.

OK, now you can go ahead and crush all mystery out of this world.

KTF.exe is almost certainly a hoax. Conveniently, the original '.exe' is not available, only an 'emulated' version that has been allegedly 'cracked and ported' to run on modern systems. This emulated version is of blatantly modern construction and uses libraries that wouldn't have been available before around 2010. The decision to effectively re-write the entire game, and then refuse to show the original .exe, instead of just using DOSbox, is so flagrantly suspicious that there is little reason to believe there actually is an original .exe.

Can I play it somewhere?

No, the hackers/dataminers in 'Aphotic' who claimed to have found the game say that now they understand the importance of copyright (or at least the threat of DMCA), and that distributing a cracked game ('warez') would be against their newfound code of ethics. Is this sincere or a transparent attempt to build 'mystique' by making the game hard to acquire? You decide.