HAHAHA, wow, I bet that was a fun surprise. 8 instances! I've never seen that many outside of a cluster (and of course all of the instances weren't on the same node unless there had been a complete disaster).

I loooove this idea. Now I gotta figure out how to detect it from inside T-SQL. I can't use sys.dm_server_services because that only returns the current instance's related services. I did some quick Googling and there's an interesting solution involving xp_cmdshell, but that's not usually enabled:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/714413/how-to-detect-all-sql-server-instances-from-studio

I've heard from a lot of people who've worked on their own PowerShell equivalent of sp_Blitz™, and it'd be easier to detect there. Dang!