In other words, this is the eleventh article wherein I will examine and interpret the bizarre illustrations used to sell video games in the 80s and 90s. Both Metallica and Harry Nilsson have screamed for you to jump in the fire, and now I’m screaming too.

Blaze Out

Data East/Konami, 1989

(early shovelware)

This is just egregious.

“You guys see that?” Rambo muttered bemusedly, staring into the distance. “Someone’s really about to buy this for their C64.”

Sgt. Elias was able to make eye contact for only a moment, clearly occupied with death throes that would never be explained beyond the narrative they’d been torn from in order to deposit his corpse here. The life faded from his eyes.

“THIS COURSE OF ACTION IS INADVISABLE,” said RoboCop, his voice’s metallic tone cutting clearly through the din of approaching horses. “THEY MUST BE UNDER THE MISTAKEN IMPRESSION THAT THIS IS SOMETHING OTHER THAN FRAGMENTED BULLSHIT THAT WILL TOTALLY DISAPPOINT THEM.”

Rambo sneered in numb disgust. “Get used to disappointment, RoboCop. Look where we are. Relegated to the bargain bin. Uncle Sam’s toy soldiers, forgotten and thrown away… at discount prices.”

Elias gurgled as he finally gave up the ghost. Strains of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” mingled with notes of Goldsmith and Poledouris. The posse on horseback continued to clamor forward, never truly gaining ground. John Rambo was right. This would never resolve itself. It did not exist.

Solstice: Quest for the Staff of Demnos

Acclaim, 1990

Here we have game art that ticks off two check boxes: First, unforgivable false hype (Solstice is a goddamn puzzle game). Second, art that is so representative of what its year of origin was about that it could be used as an example for academic purposes. This is so 1990 that I can smell the PVC and hairspray.

“BODY GLOVE SPONSORED ME! I EVEN BROUGHT MY BONG, SEE? COME ON, THE REST OF THIS SHIT IS DRY CLEAN ONLY! HOW DARE YOU CLAIM THAT I AM NOT TUBULAR ENOUGH TO ENTER THE FORTRESS OF GNARLINESS?” Neon Gandalf needs to chill out. All that Deca-Durabolin has really started to give him some un-radical roid rage, despite how ripped he is for a wizard. Imagine wearing a full purple cloak but not a shirt. He doesn’t have to imagine it. He’s living it, pal.

Neon Gandalf would actually be a pretty badass name for a stoner metal/80s New Wave revival mashup act that would doubtless fail to live up to my expectations.

immediately opens eBay in a new tab and searches “vintage keytar” and “wizard cape”

Adventure Island II

Now Production/Hudson Soft, 1991

I picked this one based entirely on the premise that a rhinoceros has T-Rex teeth on it. Master Higgins looks so scared! He’s so fucked up over it that he can’t even stay in one lane on his pterodactyl. Which by the way, seems to be the only creature not busy leering hatefully at either Higgins or the person viewing the image. At least this is fairly accurate to the content; this series of games is pretty unforgiving (but fun).

There’s all that photoshopped art on the internet with horses that have carnivore teeth. Why not a rhino? And yeah, give him Satan eyes, too. I not only can live with that, I endorse it.

Another BurgerTime Cover

Interceptor Software/Data East, 1982

Peter Pepper doesn’t give a fuck anymore. He’s been doing this for so long now that he’s just on auto pilot. The milkshake is a new thing; he knows it pisses them off, and he’s glad. This isn’t what he wanted his life to be like. He imagined his life as a restaurateur would be a very different thing by now, and he’s deeply resentful of this situation – no, this nightmare, but he’s just so jaded now that he’s consuming his own inventory and daring fate to consume him in turn.

Maybe it already has. From the look in his eyes, BurgerTime has eaten him, and he knows it. He just doesn’t feel the teeth yet. Perhaps the worst part is that he never will.

Damn good milkshake though.

Monster in my Pocket

Konami, 1992

If you needed one more reason not to wear blue jeans, here it is. Not only is it a questionable fashion choice for most men and very prone to fading, denim comes with the inherent risk that tiny skeletons, goblins, and werewolves could erupt from your ass violently and without warning. They don’t even look happy to be free. Look at that goblin’s face. You think he likes being trapped in your ass? You think he’s into that?

Skeleton Dude was into it, but we all know Skeleton Dude is into pretty much whatever. That guy doesn’t just live on the wild side, he is the wild side. It’s easy to cut loose when you have no skin.

I hope this latest misadventure into the box art vaults has left you more amused than injured… though I claim no liability for the latter, dear readers. Stay Retro!

I’m talking about “true classics.” While not the earliest examples of their type, these games – ones that existed within the cycle of arcade, 2600, ColecoVision, and other formats – are certainly the earliest “household names” commonly summoned up from the sediment of our collective long term memory. They’re less often examined nowadays because they appear so rudimentary to your average person, but their worth has not changed. This is some serious, actual oldschool shit, and it’s time for the whippersnappers to sit up straight and start taking notes. We’re gonna do a grab bag on the solid gold oldies.

NOTE: In this article, since I’m talking about games that were released when video gaming was still in its formative (even primitive) stage, I won’t spend much time talking about graphics or sound. It’s a safe assumption that these aspects will be very basic in any game from the era, but if one of them is exemplary for its time in a particular case, I’ll mention it.

Pitfall!

Activision/David Crane, 1982

glug glug glug.

Part of what I really like about Pitfall is that it’s not only a great game, it was part of Activision basically saying “fuck you” to Atari for assuming it’d established some kind of imperial monopoly on

game development. Activision grabbed talent from Atari and other sources over time by offering game designers something Atari absolutely refused to: credit for their work. Eventually, the popularity of the titles developed at Activision pressured Atari to start licensing them. A victory against the Eternal Asshole. Hallelujah.

Anyway, Pitfall gives you control of a dude named Harry, and you have 20 minutes to navigate a decidedly unfriendly environment in order to get some sick loot. The game itself is a very early example of an action platformer, and it even gently tugs on the RPG line, at least in my view. At the very least, it’s got one of the common tropes of that genre: you’re risking your entire ass to poke through a terrible place to find something of value.

The action is pretty damn knuckle-biting for its time, and is one of the reasons Pitfall is considered a classic. There is a constant level of tension and sometimes your decisions boil down to “which horrible risk do I want to take?” High adventure at its finest. My personal favorite is the crocodiles. I love how harry just kind of disappears vertically into them, into some pocket dimension in their lower jaw or something. Regardless of that, Pitfall is a lot of fun to play on any of the systems it was licensed for, and proof that a game with a simple premise and good design is timelessly and universally worthwhile.

BurgerTime

Data East/Mattel, 1982

the egg’s not even that into this. Peer pressure at its worst. That pickle though… it’s pissed. It’s really decided to put everything into this conflict. IT WON’T HEAL THE WOUNDS INSIDE PICKLE

It is known to a few sages of the obscure and the forgotten that the word “BurgerTime,” in the language of the Ancients who sailed across the great astral sea of space to seed our world with the components necessary for abiogenesis and new life, means something akin to “Thunderdome.”

In other words, You don’t just exit BurgerTime. You have to fucking fight your way out.

They can smell your fear. Your fear, and the alluring aroma of sizzling ground beef.

In another simple premise typical of the era, in BurgerTime you are a dude named Peter Pepper who has one job to do: knock some fucking burgers together so you can clock out. The problem is, there are anthropomorphic eggs, hot dogs, and pickles all over your burger scaffold doing their best to stop you from achieving your burger-stack goals. Whatever their problem is, they’ve apparently decided that Peter’s the cause. Fortunately, you can fight back by using pepper not unlike pepper spray, as well as smashing the bad guys under a falling burger part or getting them to stand on it just as you make it drop. Not terribly clever are these rogue ingredients, despite their lust for your blood. The game gets harder as you go, requiring more burgers per stage and throwing more pissed off eggs and pickles into the mix.

I have been an enthusiastic fan of this game for a longer time than a lot of other games that came out before I was born, mostly because I have fond memories of playing it on a beat-up cabinet at a local pizzeria during my childhood. More importantly, it stands alongside Circus Charlie as a video game that reinforces an important concept: conflict, despite its unpleasant nature and ultimately harmful effects, is a perpetual and omnipresent phenomenon. There can never truly be total peace.

Not while those pickles and eggs have a fuckin’ attitude, anyway.

Q*bert

Warren Davis/Jeff Lee, 1982

Gottleib’s most successful title, Q*bert is one of those early arcade games that became a readily recognizable property readily seen as a symbol of the video game.” I even remember the younger of my two older sisters, who didn’t give half a shit about video games at all, having a Q*bert button on her backpack in high school. While the little snoot-dude doesn’t even remotely approach Mario or Pac Man in terms of being a household name, during the early 80s he made quite a name for himself. That’s because his game is actually pretty novel for its time, not to mention fairly fun to play.

Already all kinds of fucked.

As Q*bert, you’re trying to jump all over a set of isometrically drawn cubes, changing the color of them when you land on them. This sounds like a pretty easy thing to pull off, until you consider that snakes, monsters, and all kinds of shit are chasing you around while you do this, trying to preserve what I guess they see as the cube color status quo of the iso-pyramid. Shit can get a little heated, especially since the green monsters can change back the cubes you’ve touched. Things can quickly dissolve into bullshit.

Even cooler than any of that, and something I’ve not been able to personally experience in full since I use emulators for most of this, is the level of effort that went into the Q*bert cabinet. Not only was a speech synthesizer used to create the sound Q*bert makes when he gets caught by a bad guy, but pinball components were even included into the machine to create certain sound effects. The digital sound components use 128 bytes of memory to to their job, which is quite a bit for ’82. I personally find this to be the most impressive part of Q*bert, especially since I’m really shitty at the actual game.

Pitfall! – 7/10 (It’s really fun and involved for a game of its time, and if you can appreciate games this old at all, then it’s even exciting.)

BurgerTime – 8/10 (it can be a real motherfucker, but it’s an early example of Data East not shitting the bed with the lights on while designing a game, so I’m very fond of it.)

Q*bert – 7/10 (A lot of innovation took place when this game was unleashed on the world, and it’s faded from prominence a bit, but it’s not to be overlooked.)