Virus.Win16.Tentacle

I'd recommend watching with headphones to get the full "hard drive clicking" sound experience, but that's up to you.

This virus has a few surprises, and I wasn't even going to go through with recording it until I realized that it actually did change the icons successfully, but you have to open them up in the icon viewer to see it.

[aiurxx]

I'm a Tentacles survivor. In the summer of '96/97, 14/15 year old me spent countless hours online with the warez group I was with, O\\'E to dominate the AOL warez space. I usually downloaded and repacked files on my Win 3.11 machine. While browsing for new releases I came across this dogs program. Wanting to have something to share with my dog loving toddler sister, I downloaded it and loaded the crack. It came from one of our trusted partners and was supposed to be cleaned. After a few days (well, nights) my PC was completely borked. Tentacles everywhere. Complete system instability.
I used this an excuse to finally get Windows 95 installed and move on with my life with a lesson learned.

[kantraa]

fun fact: this so called Dogz crack took exactly 1 minute and 39 seconds to freeze the computer

[TankGuy]

"The 90s were a *ruff* time."
God damnit.

[Toxoidb]

It's almost impressive how long this virus manages to bludgeon the disk trying to infect literally anything. Would love to know what it's trying to do that whole time. The payload is pretty neat too, usually malware that changes program icons either completely removes the icon or replaces the icons of everything it infects. Might have to try something like that for my own stuff.

[plushifoxed]

the way i instinctually replied "it's a pipe b‌omb!" when i saw that "what is that mysterious ticking noise?" in the subtitles...

[Lenoh]

5:39 Considering, in a certain Windows version, an acceptable retail key is "1111-1111-1111-1111", I wouldn't doubt 9999-0000 would be acceptable.

[Jobby_James]

The Dogz crack code looks like someone tried to brute force it, and if it was legit, could effectively crack it without any special software or techniques. Also, the fact that the virus references Day of the Tentacle is dope, I wouldn't mind having my PC destroyed with a virus like that! Except for the fact that I would it very irritating having different icons for all my programs and for all them to be the same, regardless of what it depicts.

[JesuszillaS]

That's an oddly specific market to target. It's as if the virus were made by someone who was on the team that worked on Dogz who wrote this to thwart off would-be pirates.

[bobaFête]

I remember this one! I was obsessed with dogs, and my grandpa was prone to trying out all kinds of sketchy software so he must’ve gotten this from somewhere shady. I remember running it over and over trying to get my dog game to work :’)

[wmdtone]

That gentle fan hum and hard disk clicking is just beyond nostalgic

[keifcuadras]

I really like content creators like you that take the extra time to put hidden messages in the captions that you wouldn't normally see if you had them off. I always found that nice for some reason

[BlackMageDark]

Your captions lately are priceless btw! They definitely add to the danooct1 experience 😎

[harishankar_]

I love the closed captions on these videos. Sometimes I wish I had an old PC to be able to run these old operating systems, and perhaps try out a few viruses, like you have been doing for many years. I realise it's possible to make a virtual machine, but that's not nearly as authentic, is it?

This is a cool video, Dan. I hope you have a nice day, too! :-)

[sutorippuwebmaster]

I had Dogz. I can't remember how I got the shareware version but the passive-aggressive whining of the Dogz when you closed out of it eventually got me to buy the full version. Guess I dodged a bullet here.

[UltimatePerfection]

Here's a fun thing to try when you don't have any interesting viruses you have not talked about in the past: try running viruses in environments they don't expect, like running DOS viruses on Windows/DosBox or Win16 viruses on OS/2, then document if they behave any different from when running them under the "perfect" conditions.

[leon_De_Grelle]

I loved "Dogz". It had decent "AI", for what it's worth, for its time, and it functioned like an intelligent Tomagatchi. There was an entire line-up of this software including "Catz" and probably some other animals. Cute and fun, a decent desktop toy.

[ThePhantomSafetyPin]

"I want the file manager to be a tentacle" is not a phrase I thought I would hear today but here we are...

[WannabeMarysue]

I really hope somebody plays Day of the Tentacle for the first time because of this video. Its so good.

[ShyGuyXXL]

Aww, I was hoping the virus would put a bunch of differently colored tentacles from the game on your screen that jump around, which you can't get rid of, and they just keep multiplying until your PC laggs so hard that you can't do anything anymore.
That would've been fun.

[dimitary]

the extended "sitting in the dark infront of the pc, waiting for it to boot" reminded me of weird nightmares I had. It was on a XP computer. A "hacker" somewhere had back door access to my computer through some sort of bios thing. And he'd hack my computer randomly. Things would start acting weird. And then the PC would just freeze for a moment, and then hit me with a screamer. But here's the catch. I can't restart it, reboot it or anything. Pulling the plug would shut it off, and after it turns on, right out of bios, screamer again. I'd reinstall the OS, but screamer would trigger while installing, or after fresh install. There were a lot of small little details that are hard to recall. But the biggest fuckup is that it was a recurring nightmare. With every new time I had the nightmare, I'd recognize the symptoms and rush to shut down the computer.... And then it would just boot on its own and screamer anyway! :( ... And a large portion of the dream was the silently sitting in the dark waiting for the computer to boot.. just to get fucked up by the somehow infected motherboard.