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Operation seems to be a game that Hasbro produces solely to traumatize children and give them lifelong anxiety disorders. The game is almost 60 years old now, which means there are now generations of adults suffering the effects of the “fun” that Operation subjected them to. But childhood trauma wasn’t enough for YouTuber Slee, so he hacked an Operation game to make it shock him whenever he messes u

If you are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with Operation, allow me to fill you in on the deets. The special board contains a graphic overlay of a patient with several cavities to hold physical manifestations of ailments like a broken heart or a brain freeze. There are official gameplay rules that work for multiple players, but the way everyone actually played the game was by simply trying to remove all of the ailments before giving up in frustration. Players have to remove those maladies using a small set of tweezers connected by a wire. If they make contact with the edges of a cavity, the tweezers complete a circuit and a loud buzzer goes off while a vibration motor shakes the entire board and the patient’s nose lights up.

Slee upped the stakes of the game with two additions: voice sound effects and hefty shocks. Slee loaded the sound effects (clips of himself shouting) as MP3 files onto a microSD card. That plugs into a full-size SD card adapter with wires soldered to its pins. Those wires connect to the SPI port pins on an ESP32 development board. The ESP32, in turn, plays the sound clips through a small amplifier board with a speaker attached. The ESP32 can also rotate a servo that pushes a button on the remote for a dog’s shock collar, which Slee wears on his wrist.

Slee disabled the Operation board’s vibration motor and buzzer, but left the light-up nose intact. A photoresistor connected to the ESP32 sits right next to the nose, so the ESP32 can detect when the player fumbles an operation. When they do, the ESP32 triggers both a sound effect and the shock collar. If you want to up your game from heart rate-increasing jump scares to genuine pain, this is the hack for you.