The source of 99% of my guilt

Many moons ago, I wrote a little joke article on Push the Third Button Twice entitled "Unlock Dark Castle on your iPhone/iPod Touch". It was a parody of other how-to's I'd seen, where people gave you stupidly complex instructions about how to do strange things with gadgets, most of which probably didn't work. So I went out of my way to write the most absurd article I could, promising the classic Mac game on their slick new phones.

I honestly didn't think anyone would take it seriously.

Today I was reminded to check my Google Analytics report, and I saw that while 1889.ca has had fairly steady growth for the last little while, PTTBT had a MASSIVE spike a few days ago. So I followed the link back, and found this:

According to this report, a teenager in the UK managed to discover this egg, the classic Mac game “Dark Castle”, in its entirety, available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Activating this game is a bit complicated but, here are the directions.

TechCrunch fell for it. And they're not the first. This article gets so much traffic for PTTBT, it's completely nutty. The next closest is how Radiohead bought Facebook. The mind, it boggles.

All of this is to say: if you ever see my Dark Castle article featured somewhere on the web some day, please tell people it's not real. It was never meant to be real. And I feel sorry that so many people worked so hard to verify it.

That said, I'm not takin' it down :)