Video games drop the F-bomb a lot these days. Not so long ago one game used it 5688 times. It wasn’t always that way though.
YouTuber DanDan went on a quest to find out exactly which video game was the first ever to take the medium into cursing’s big leagues, to the place where parents collapse into puddles of sheet-white horror and mouths are washed out of existence. F**k spoken out loud, sans censorship, was the goal. Here’s what he found by way of his own research:
In short, a few games have jockeyed for the honour over the years, including adventure games The Orion Conspiracy (1995) and Discworld (1995), and a glitch in 1991 shooter Llamatron that caused an uncensored sample of the phrase “oh f**k” to be cued up when the player died.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the mystery is solved. A commenter on the video pointed out that at least one game, Paranoia for the PCEngine, did it in 1990. And sure enough:
So it’s kinda hard to be certain. Do any of you know of games that boldly, brazenly opened a gate to the f**kdimension (spoken and uncensored) before 1990? This is no longer just about video games. This is about history.
Also the word f**kdimension makes me giggle.
Comments
10 responses to “The Search For The First Video Game To Say ‘F**k’”
I really love these anecdotal exposes. Nice!
I wrote a boxing game, that dropped the F-Bomb if you got a KO, back in 1984 on the Atari 800.
My brother used to make SAM (software automatic mouth) say F***-SH** over and over, but I don’t think that counts. It used to sound like the noise the old space invaders made when shooting… fuckshit – fuckshit….
The Discworld one is interesting, because I definitely remember hearing that line in the first game.
I remember it because it was one of the first talkie games I’d ever played, and my mum happened to be in the room when that particular line was said. It took a lot of convincing not to lose the game forever.
Hm, a Discworld game, with Eric Idle voice acting it? Well, time to visit GoG…
You can’t currently buy it anywhere, except second hand. I remember the ScummVM wiki mentioning that permission had been given to release it freeware, but I don’t think anything came of it.
They’re fun enough games, though the first has some pretty ridiculous puzzles. The first 2 are stylistically a lot closer to Monty Python than Discworld, though.
Discworld Noir (the third one) is pretty great, but it suffers from 4 actors voicing about 50 characters throughout, and some pretty terrible 3D modelling and animation.
If I remember correctly if you have the discs for the two discworld games, they work quite easily in ScummVM.
Noir is also a dastardly fiend to try and get running succesfully
Frak! On the BBC micro didn’t quite use the spelling we all love and enjoy. 1984. Used the battlestar galactic model of swearing.
I always thought it was San Andreas…
I can’t believe Kingpin: Life of Crime wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the linked article. 🙁
1988 Famicom Disk system game ‘communication battle’ had the word F**KING at its side swap screen
GTA 1 had “fuck” scrolling along the pager at least once. That’s my first encounter with it. I didn’t see it again until The Getaway on PS2, and every second work was a profanity. I remember thinking, “right, so sweating in games is fine now. OK.”
I then went on with my life.
We played Wheel of Fortune on the 80’s Amiga. I called myself ‘Cunt Face’ and the computer would announce it, in a Stephen Hawkins kind of sound 🙂