In case you missed it yesterday, click “Continue Reading Metro Article” below to read the article I did for the Metro. It had to do with strange Atari games. Here’s some more video game weirdness:
-There was Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em, another Atari porno game you need to read about to believe.
-Pac Man, where the ghosts are controlled by crickets.
-Ok, this is downright amazing. An entire website devoted to the dumping of the ET cartridges in the landfill in 1983.
–Custer’s Revenge was one of Seanbaby’s 20 worst video games of all time.
E.T. was the beginning of the end for the Atari 2600. Finally, your opportunity to control the movements of the alien creature you had fallen in love with in the theatre, and all it did was fall into wells. But falling into the well was sometimes a good thing, because there were valuable phone parts in these wells. I felt like this was a great message to send to kids. “Sometimes jumping into wells is ok, because at the bottom you may find phone pieces or possibly even E.T.” The game was such an epic commercial failure that Atari was left with millions of leftover cartridges. Apparently inspired by the Mafia, they dumped the leftover cartridges at a nearby landfill and covered them with concrete.
There was one game that was sold for the Atari 2600 that I certainly wasn’t aware of as a child. Called Custer’s Revenge, the object of this game* was as follows: a visibly aroused Custer (as “visibly aroused” as one can be on 128 bytes of RAM) dodged arrows in an effort to get to a naked Native American woman tied to a cactus. If he dodged the onslaught of arrows, he would have sex with the woman, who was still tied to the cactus.** I have always been a little disappointed that this never led to more porn video games based on historical figures and revenge. Like “Stonewall Jackson’s Revenge”, in which he tries to avoid being shot by his own men to make love to Mary Todd Lincoln.
Custer’s Revenge wasn’t the only strange game on the 2600. There was Pepsi Invaders, a video game that was just like Space Invaders except that the aliens were replaced with the letters P-E-P-S-I.*** There was also Chase the Chuck Wagon, a game cartridge you could win by sending in proofs of purchase of Purina dog food. So the next time some flashy young buck tries to tell you how awesome his new video game is, you can just say, “Oh yeah, well back in my day, when you got shot by a Pepsi Invader and your alien fell into a well, you got to make love to a woman tied to a cactus.” That should shut them up.
*which actually existed
**I’d like to reiterate that I am not making this up
***Again, do you think I could make this up even if I tried? Pepsi Invaders?