No. The "tortured souls" are the programmers that worked on Excel[1]. Look at this page [2] for videos of the game in action.

[1] http://everything2.com/title/The+Hall+of+Tortured+Souls

[2] http://www.eeggs.com/items/719.html

MS Access is actually a very very useful piece of kit; it's a surprisingly good database considering its limitations, and it's infinitely better than keeping your data with your business logic in an excel spreadsheet.

... Why people hate on it I'll never know.

Revision control aside, MS Access is not that bad for what it does.

However... I've seen management people write a couple of VB functions, think they magically turned into "Developers" (with a Capital D), and start barking random orders to people doing totally unrelated things with totally unrelated tools.

The actual danger is psychological, much like when the new iPhone user on the block magically turns into a "Design Expert" (Caps!) and starts hunting innocent bystanders...

VBA doesn't handle files larger than 2gb, which is one of the reasons people don't recommend using Excel and Access for your business. There are some ways to deal with the 2gb limit[1], but it is better to use other software.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189981