Microsoft’s 2008 recruitment videos are a dark ‘90s acid trip

We gave Microsoft a gentle ribbing for its corny parody of “Sexy and I Know It,” but little did we know that the company made — or at least commissioned — two masterpieces of short film. In 2008, working with the production team at Digital Kitchen, Microsoft created two psychedelic recruitment videos. In one, a mysterious man in a lab ecoat invites you to work on a project called Mind House, before dissolving into polygons. In another, a pair of gentlemen are washed into a surreal computer world. Both are like Barbarella meets William Gibson meets a 1992 VHS you found somewhere. Brad Abrahams, who directed and created the videos for Digital Kitchen and posted the videos, wrote that the latter “was so weird [Microsoft] didn’t know what to do with it.” The only explanation is that it was ahead of its time.