Corrupt Winamp skin investigation leads to treasure trove of hidden content

Down the rabbit hole: While collecting Winamp skins for an archival project a few years back, programmer Jordan Eldredge could not help but notice that some of them were corrupt. Rather than discard the broken skins, he took a closer look and ended up traversing a series of rabbit holes that led to all sorts of fun discoveries.

Buried within the corrupted Winamp skins was a slew of hidden content that might have otherwise gone undiscovered had it not been for Eldredge’s curiosity.

The first file he looked at contained a PDF for an inflatable balloon costume rental. Another, labeled bobs_car, contained a photo of a vehicle – presumably, Bob’s. One encrypted file was hiding an email address and password, while a separate password-protected file contained several .avs files.

Elsewhere, Eldredge stumbled upon a biography of musician Chet Baker, an assortment of weird MP3s, photos of people, and more. One skin contained a file named Worm.exe that sounded incredibly sketchy. A virus scan did not detect anything out of the ordinary so someone on Discord volunteered to run it on a VM. It ended up being a Snake-like game – neat.

Eldredge then got the idea to try and search for skins hidden within the corrupted skins. Jackpot! A total of 127 skins were discovered – 54 of which were not already in the Winamp Skin Museum (they have since been added).

While there is nothing groundbreaking here, it is a fun reminder of how playful the Internet and its participants were in its earlier days. And who knows what other sort of buried treasures might be lurking in other, non-corrupted Winamp skins. There’s also likely a ton of undiscovered Easter eggs in other vintage software that’ll never get uncovered.

If you are at all into Winamp, I would highly recommend checking out the Winamp Skin Museum. The project features roughly 80,000 skins, each with interactive previews. If there is a particular skin you are searching for, odds are you will find it here.