There are a surprising number of programs designed to randomly kill processes on your computer until it crashes—or you wimp out

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Process roulette is the name of the game.

The splash screen for a game called Process Roulette.
(Image credit: Codebox)

For reasons unbeknownst to mankind, there are a surprising number of applications designed to arbitrarily select and destroy processes on a PC until it crashes.

This morning, I was made aware of an application made by user IceSolst on X with AI coding platform Cursor AI that randomly selects a process on your computer via its process ID (PID) and terminates it. If you're wondering why, you're probably overthinking it. From subsequent tweets, it appears a storefront has been added that allows you to buy malware via $hitcoins earned from every spin of the roulette wheel.

As stupid as it sounds, one can assume that's the whole point. Needless to say, don't install malware on your machine, but this specific application isn't available to download, anyways.

I did, however, discover a few Github repositories for applications that do something similar (minus the malware, as far as I can tell, anyways). Nothing is original on the internet, as the saying goes, but an application that will eventually crash your PC on purpose is a surprisingly popular concept.

There's process roulette on Github that was published around five years ago by Codebox. You can choose how many rounds you want to play and presumably hope you make through before a crash occurs.

The game is described as: "A silly little game that could mess up your machine pretty badly (please use a VM!)."

You can only stop process roulette early by typing the phrase: "i am a coward'.

I also found another application created 10 years ago, born from a tweet posted by user Jamis. Further to the mental damage I just received upon realising 2016 was ten years ago, the application, also called process roulette, encourages a group of players to hop onto a virtual machine to play. This is a slightly more well-defined game than the others, with a "croupier" acting as the game's referee, and a 'controller' that actually runs the game. And you're not killing your own PC to play, though you could.

A cursory Github search reveals more masochistic programs, too.

It's worth noting, unless you install some form of malware on your PC, just restarting it after a crash will generally fix it.

In light of these applications, I was speaking to someone (who shall not be named) that informed me that, at an old workplace, their colleague created a similar application and would use it on unsuspecting users; in an act tantamount to a small-scale localised cyber attack. So, if you're the type of person to eat stinky fish in the office, best secure your PC with a password.

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Jacob Ridley
Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.

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