It’s been nearly a decade. I’ve carried this burden long enough. It is time for the world to know.
As most of my longtime readers know, my first job was at Knowledge Adventure, Glendale CA, makers of smash hit children’s educational software such as Jumpstart 1st Grade, followed by a staggering number of sequels and prequels. If we could have made a Jumpstart Fetus, we would have. Kids and parents loved KA’s stuff.

I was in the far cooler and less profitable edutainment department. We made puzzle games, including the critically acclaimed Dr. Brain Action Reaction, the first first person 3d action puzzle multiplayer internet game for kids. I did the AI and multiplayer stuff, and maybe a trampoline or two.
Well, the multiplayer aspect opened up the possibility of exposing players to the language of other players, which of course may not be the cleanest or most well-meaning, and the last thing we wanted was to debate free speech with our customers. Enter the bad-word filter. Enter the list of bad words to filter. That was a fun project in itself. You get to pick the brains of smart, creative people for everything they consider offensive. To protect the children!
Simple enough to implement, but as packaged consumer software, we needed to ship the product with the list, or to be exact, two files containing slightly different types of words. We didn’t want to put it into the executable, so we just stuck them into two files in the install tree. I suggested encrypting them or at least rot-13′ing them, but my lead programmer said that would be too much work. I should have just done it and saved him the work of thinking about how much work it would have been. The other programmer on the team, a Mac guy (and this was when Macs weren’t cool) suggested obfuscating the filenames as Windows-esque curiosities that nobody would touch for fear of breaking something. His suggestions were the best.
If you install Dr. Brain Action Reaction, you’ll find two files, SysCom and WinTrans in the install tree. You can open them in your favorite text editor and see what the best (worst) minds of KA in 1999 came up with. To protect the children!
It always cracks me up. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing as I typed the two filenames above.