When Yahoo! shuts down Yahoo! Answers on May 4th, a truly irreplaceable collection of human knowledge—and comedy—will be lost forever. Yahoo! Answers gave us deep reflections of the human experience by providing the platform for questions like "How is babby formed?" and "I saw a man so beautiful I started crying?" and "does spider have pusspuss?"
Thousands of messages as confusing and brilliant and hilarious as these will disappear next month, but at least 500 of them will be enshrined somewhere they will last forever: in a mod for 2013's The Typing of the Dead: Overkill.
Typing of the Dead is a spin-off of Sega's 1996 light gun shooter The House of the Dead. Instead of pointing a gun at an arcade screen, you type in words and phrases like "Unicorns" and "To thine own self" to blast the undead running at your screen. It's maybe the best idea anyone has ever had for a videogame. For years, Twitter account YahooAnswers.txt has been tweeting random quotes from the bowels of Yahoo! Answers, and now they've assembled the best of the best as a new dictionary for The Typing of the Dead on Steam. Using the RIP Yahoo Answers mod is as simple as clicking the Subscribe button.
It's clear just from these four screenshots there are some real winners in the collection.
ok so i collected a 500 question highlight reel of our tweets and made a custom dictionary for Typing of the Dead, get it because yahoo answers is dead hahahahahhttps://t.co/tjAlUEl0Dm pic.twitter.com/kDnyfrnv5nApril 8, 2021
The mod may also end up serving as a hard mode for Typing of the Dead pros, since there are some curveballs in there—emojis like ;) and parentheses and prompts like "Is yamble a word?" (It is not). I imagine there are a whole lot of typos lurking in this archive waiting to throw off your WPM.
Bless you, YahooAnswers.txt, for this vital and hilarious work of preservation.
