In Real Life

Newsflash: Most Profitable Games Movies Were, Actually, Terrible

Let’s remember, in a year when folks are talking optimistically about a Gears of War movie, the history such franchises are up against. Game adaptations might make money. But as films, they suck without exception.


August 17, 2008
Uncategorized

Atari Games Too Bad to be True

Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State’s Technician in the early 1990s.

But play along, because it’s funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favourite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams’ Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: “You can’t blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted]can clean up [expletive deleted] “.

The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games]