Bird Mother (C64)

Creative Sparks, 1984

Every voice is lifted skyward, not in joy but in terror and woe. The eagle, whose entire presence is wrapped in unearthly shadow, looms above all, accompanied by a thick, fat lightning bolt that would terrify any reasonable bird mom. The feather in the cap of this one is the tag line directly beneath the title: “LIFE’S A STRUGGLE.”

You think you walk the razor’s edge? Try raising a clutch of gross little bird-babies in today’s world. The decrepit house in the background leads me to believe that the humans have already called it quits; in Bird Mother, mankind has finally been swallowed by its own brute decadence, and now avian parents everywhere have inherited the stark existential horror we left upon the last battlefield.

Her kids look like lead paint or fetal alcohol syndrome could have been a factor. Who can blame her for drinking when the black eagle and the vector-bolt stand as certain signs that her world is nothing but kindling for the fires of the void? One of the kids is trying to eat a bee, which seems like a poor idea, especially since it has launched itself beyond the threshold of the nest. The other two sing an idiot song to no one as their mother screeches in torment, oblivious to her children’s plight as she is bathed in the cold liquid of her own.

Gobbleman (ZX Spectrum)

Artic Computing, 1982

For some reason, this song seems entirely appropriate.

Question one: God forbid the very notion, but is this thing sentient? Sapient? It looks like a tipped over McDonald’s french fry container. It has no eyes whatsoever, but a gigantic and terrible mouth filled with chunky teeth.

Question two: In what city is this chaos tolerated? After dusk, Gobbleman fires up his… I guess his anti-grav thrusters, and rips across the urban landscape, devouring what I hope aren’t prescription painkillers or amphetamines. Gobbleman has the entire city at his mercy, he himself in turn being solidly in the grip of a tragic addiction. It’s made him mean.

Question three: How big is Gobbleman supposed to be? The scaling is hard to interpret, and I have a feeling that’s because there is none implied at all. My best guess is that Gobbleman is about the size of a subway car.

This is a future that seems familiar, but it is one that I will not miss.

Deathsville (Amstrad CPC)

Bubble Bus Software, 1986

“Oh, the castle? Nah, it’s not mine. More of a timeshare thing. Point of advice, kid, not that it matters since we all die anyway: don’t buy into a fuckin’ timeshare.”

If you leave the interstate at a certain point, trace the back roads through mortality and fog, and grab route 0 heading straight downward, you’ll find yourself in a cozy little rural backwater called Deathsville. Population skeletons.

The robed corpse meanders out of the cold mist, shaking its hands like they’ve got something unpleasant stuck to them (if Death weren’t OCD, he’d be a lot worse at his job, but the germophobia thing still runs him ragged sometimes). The creature shoots you a surprisingly calm look of polite confusion, its one eye glittering red like a laser tripwire.

“Are you… you the one who emailed me on Craigslist about the futon?” it croaks out in a dry whisper. You shake your head. You know nothing of superfluous collapsible couch-beds. You know only that you have met Death at home, and that Death actually seems like kind of a fucking slob.

The hooded skeleton lights a Pall Mall, struggling to block the wind through its fleshless hands. Two hours later, you’re in the local Waffle House, waiting for the Bubble Bus (which has never run on time, the irresponsible little bastard). Death hangs out. He keeps you company, though his company is often silent and passively heavy, like winter snow on a freshly dug grave. Turns out he’s a pretty cool guy, but even though you exchange numbers, you never text or call him after. It just seems, unspoken, to be a childish breach of decorum.

Bun Fun (BBC Micro)

Squirrel Software, 1983

This is lewd. Gigeresque, even. In the biomechanical landscape, there’s pelnty of room for confectionary frosting and hot poop.

While untold thousands across the world labor and ultimately die miserable in sweatshops every year, this young man is absolutely overjoyed to be the one hitting the Simon buttons that make the… unidentified but suggestive cream exude onto the passing buns. Not even the obvious and repellent sight of a steaming pile of turds on the conveyor belt could ruin the moment! Nor the fact that he is also covered in the “cream,” for better or worse. This dude just decides to make the best of it, and puts little heaps of shit on top of every bun. The young man’s decency and stability long ago eroded completely, and though his current occupation is clearly a fool’s errand, he has that same trait that binds all madmen, buffoons, and captains of industry together: pride of workmanship and a grossly distorted sense of greater purpose.

It was he who shat upon the conveyor, who dumped creamy cream all over his own head, and who slew the factory’s night watchman with a chair leg before firing up the machinery.

Puckman (VIC-20)

Mikro-Gen, 1981

Whatever is happening, it’s on a cosmic scale, and we are beneath Puckman’s notice.

I don’t know what the fuck Puckman is, nor what he is meant to resemble or represent. While he bears a passing resemblance to the simple reptiles of our world’s Carboniferous pre-human chaos, he’s not that. He’s not a thing, maybe not even a living thing. Those eyes are a crude and clumsy attempt to appear real, and the outer shapes of him are so vague and unformed that Puckman is more an idea than a being. He exists, or something like it, in the spaces between. Puckman was there when the world was formed, and he knows the sum of its eventual fate, and none of this evokes anything within him except the same stark certitude that has passed for his consciousness from day one: all space is finite, and all things existing within that space are edible.

My gut feeling is that the grid-like area to the left is just filler, a pattern, an abstract meant to imply occupied space. Puckman is chewing – nay, inhaling – the very reality of that space. The sound of his meal is that of vacuum silence; by way of quantum singularity, Puckman is digesting the very substance of time-space. The serrated plates of his turtle-like skull are merely a non-sequitur, for he needs to chew nothing.

Shit, I’ve got this all wrong. Maybe Puckman is laughing out a universe, his joy giving birth to the sublime poetry of matter and void. Maybe this is an unbridled act of primal creation. Once again heat death has been defeated, for the moment. Puckman has laid his threads upon the loom and stitched reality a little more breathing room in the inseam.

Either way, Puckman is impossibly gigantic and proves all human cultures completely wrong about God. And look at him. Just fucking look at him.

We’ve been thins way before, and we’ll probably come back here again. Every wise man and woman acknowledges that even chaos has patterns, cycles. It is the mind-stretching notion that governs the movement of bodies in the night sky, the labyrinthine vagaries of chance, and it’s the same reason I’ll probably see you back soon with another set of box art images and my own delusional ideas about them. Stay Retro!

But not too tame. It’s still pretty bonkers.

ALCATRAZ II

Microdeal, 1982

So there’s no doubt about it… prison sucks. Even without all the darker parts of prison life (which we don’t need to detail; pop culture can and will do that for you), you’re still locked up. You’re not free. One of the worst was Alcatraz, just off the California coast, an island prison fortress that was meant to be nearly impossible to escape.

Well, since people kept attempting (and possibly succeeding, as in the 1962 attempt), Microdeal decided that Alcatraz needed a sequel. A meaner, iron-clad, merciless follow-up.

With a goddamn minotaur in it.

What immediately strikes me as strange is how cool they both seem about the situation. As if they had a conversation beforehand, free of rancour or posturing.

“Okay, so when you bolt down the hallway, I mean, I’m a fucking minotaur, dude. I’m gonna chase you.”

“Yeah yeah. I’m gonna run like hell, so don’t worry too hard about it. I’m not.”

“You know, I’m glad we talked about this. Thanks.”

“Yeah man, oughta be a good show.”

GOODY

Opera Soft, 1987

This is some straight-up Bakshi shit. A lot is loosely implied here, at least to me, and it’s done in that way that creeps in at the seams of the mind and leaks inward. I think this one deserves an itemized list.

• the policeman commands the power of the Moon itself to avoid a very, very “happy” gorilla gazing up at him.
• That bird (buzzard? What fucking kind of bird is that?) looks suicidally depressed. Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s just seen all this shit before. In any case, a city with birds like that flying around in it can’t be a cheerful place for humanity to thrive.
• Goody (is that this dude’s name?) seems to be wearing a coat, but are those his hands gripping it from behind, near the collar? If so, how the fuck do you pull that off, and if not, why isn’t he alarmed by it?
• That woman could be one of two things, going by how tropes work in this kind of media: a newswoman or a hooker.
• Wait, Goody’s an ape too, isn’t he? That woman’s trying to get it on with a gorilla.

Normally I’d go on a quest across Wikipedia and the Internet to find out more about this game, but I’m shook. Too shook to even open Google.

CASH MAN

Microdeal, 1984

This is what the working man’s day is like, represented by symbolism, I guess? Let me try:

You go to such great lengths (or heights) to earn your living. You grab and reach – everyone’s gotta struggle a little when they work for a living, right? Keeps you tough. Keeps you on your toes. The rank and file military man, he knows what it’s about; you have more in common than you might think.

Then the fucking vultures show up: the banker, the bill collector, the loan shark. Just as you’re starting to do well for yourself, you gotta deal with all this.

The title/logo being crafted weirdly out of smiley faces is a slapping contrast to this dark scene of class warfare and defeat. Also, I’m already noticing a theme with birds. The men and women involved in creating these games must have found birds supernaturally terrifying. Or they were just easy to justify as dickheads in any scenario. Because that’s true. Birds are absolute dickheads.

PIMANIA

Automata, 1982

Little preface for this one: there was a period of time in my early to mid 20s when I played around with psychoactives and hallucinogens a lot. I don’t think I did any serious damage to myself (though some people may enthusiastically disagree), but I did experience some… well, interesting things. I remember very clearly the tail-end of one LSD experience, sitting on my back porch and watching the grass visibly grow and recede before my eyes, as the sun was rising. Once it occurred to me that I could see the sun’s light, but not the sun itself, I froze with panic. Then, over the course of another hour or so, I kept carefully positioning myself so that the treeline or other solid objects would obscure the sun’s full disc from my view. I was convinced that a full look at the sun would drive me mad or destroy me.

I’m pretty sure this image is a good approximation of what my mind was expecting.

End note on this one: man, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you brought a telescope, a saxophone, a rubber ducky and a live snake, not to mention you are totally nude. Best of luck.

MR. DIG

Microdeal, 1984

Microdeal must have had a stable of depraved and insane artists on lock during this time period. Mr. Dig’s eyes aren’t eyes at all but eyespots; he must have echolocation or sense his way by tremors in the ground. He’s clearly in some hellish system of tunnels, and has just found an apple with more mass than himself. An underground Hadean giant apple. His face betrays no emotion. He’s… he’s thinking this one through. If Eris’s golden fruit wrought the discord so told in legend, what will a bite of this one do?

Also, it’s hot as fuck down here in those footie pajamas. He’s thinking the hardest about that – going back and changing clothes.

Thanks for joining me on another sojourn through the outsider art of the fringes of retro gaming. We may do this again. I’ll leave it on that note. A note of menace. Stay Retro!