If you were a curious kid with a family PC in the late 1990s, you remember the loading screen. The chime of the 8-bit audio. The frantic whirl of the CD-ROM drive. You weren’t launching Doom or Myst . You were launching Microsoft Encarta .
It was accidentally horror-adjacent. In fact, a whole subgenre of YouTube videos now exists titled “The Unsettling Atmosphere of Encarta’s Virtual Manor.” Let’s geek out for a second. Encarta’s tours used cylindrical panoramas . Each node was a stitched set of photos (or early CGI) wrapped around a virtual cylinder. The navigation was hypertextual—click a rug, go to the next room. encarta virtual tour
Specifically, I’m talking about the 3D interactive walkthroughs. The two most famous? The Palace of Knossos (Minoan Crete) and The Manor House (Victorian England). If you were a curious kid with a
What made it eerie? The .