I’ve made it no secret that I love bad video games. I’ve written columns aboutterrible fighting gamesandsix-minute-long money wasters. I bought theDead SpaceRemake the same day as a… I guess what could be described as a“horse stroker.”And even when it comes to good games, I loveweirdo, awful, bonkers ports. I love the broken, the weird, and the things that have no reason to exist.
I love bad games so much that I literally collect them. I even occasionally do live comedy shows where comedians play them on stage and then I usually give the game away if it’s not too expensive and/or something I’ve owned since I was seven. They’re fun shows. You should come to one sometime. Oh, you can’t make it? Aw, that’s alright! I’ll get you in for the next one.
Now, I get that collecting bad video games seems more like an affectation than a thing a human being would actually enjoy. But it’s not! I enjoy this! I’m not collecting bad games ironically or to wink at an invisible camera and conclude I’m completely different from other boys andsooooorandom. I collect bad games because some of the biggest misses still have the most beautiful swings. I collect bad games because - like my love of broken ports - they often shouldn’t exist. I collect bad games because they’re fascinating.
Of course, very few developers want their games to turn out bad. Some companies may rush to crap out licensed shovelware, but not many developers intentionally create a game that’s going to get pummeled by Steam reviewers who inexplicably still put 200 hours into the game. People virtually always want to make something that could be theoretically fun… and I love pulling apart all the threads of how that did not end up happening.
For example, one of my favorite bad games is Where’s Waldo for theNES. The game, like the book, is about finding Waldo in a vast, colorful landscape. Except instead of children’s book drawingsthat weirdly included nudity, it’s a game with 8-bit scenes that look like a muddled collection of sprites you’d see when an old console crashes. But there’s joy in figuring out what work went into making italmostplayable. Some poor sap had to sit at a computer and pick out the pixels of each and every thing in that scene - and it couldnothave been nearly as fun as drawing it.
Meanwhile, playing the game is an act of self-hate. I imagine how many children received this game for Christmas and then never touched it again after December 26. I love it. I love imagining every stage of development.
Or Time Killers! Hoo boy! Time Killers tried to out-fatalityMortal Kombatand instead came up with some Looney Tunes ass chop ‘em up. Limbs fly off as you struggle to make the characters on screen do literally anything - anything at all. Imagine Eternal Champions mixed with Mortal Kombat and then you had a stocky relative hit you in the back of the head with a hammer - that’s how it feels to play Time Killers. Time Killers is almost the platonic ideal of a ‘90s video game designed to outrage parents before it was designed to be fun. It’s gorgeous.
And, of course, there are the classics. Superman 64. Terrible and frustrating. ET for the Atari. Awful and broken. And, hell, perhaps it’s been my experience with far worse games, but Shaq-Fu has grown on me over the years. Honestly, a fighting game with a professional athlete against mythical creatures works betternowthan it did in 1994. That said, they did a sequel to that one thatalsogot bad reviews.
Also, fun fact: Shaq was also in the Read 2 Rumble series! Not important, but I just found that in doing a little research for this article. Neat!
I wish we celebrated bad games as much as we celebrate bad movies. Sure, we do have the aforementioned classics we’ve all agreed are bad. But those are pretty few and far between. There are so many flops and failures people will never play - mainly because they’re flops and failures. Games that took real human beings a lot of time to make. Licensed Garfield Kart Racers. A Game Boy Advance Britney Spears rhythm game with just five songs and almost no words. And don’t even get me started on the religious Wisdom Tree games kids would get for their First Communion. I haven’t been able to play it, but apparently Wisdom Tree’s last release was called Jesus In Space. I meancome on, folks!
Not for nothing, collecting bad games is also a relatively cheap hobby. Outside of a few games like Time Killers, most of this crap can be bought for pennies on the dollar. It’s why I regularly give out copies of War Gods on the Nintendo 64 at my shows. It’s easy to go to conventions and used game stores and eBay listings and pick out the junk nobody wants. You can take the wheat; I want all the chaff. Give me that chaff. I’m not entirely sure what chaff is, but lord do I want it. And because collecting pure crap is inexpensive, I can do it.
When we talk about preserving games, we shouldn’t just be focusing on triple-A classics and beloved indies. We should be preserving the bad. The inexplicable. That’s all part of game history as much as Ed Wood films are part of movie history. We’d be worse off without Plan 9 From Outer Space and we’d be worse off without Shaq-Fu. Usually I wouldn’t compare a classic movie with a classic video game, but I think here we can pretty much say it tracks. Also, remember that fun Ready 2 Rumble fact?
The very normal person Alan Moore once said, “As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books.” Bad games help me appreciatebettergames. And they are inspiring to me in an odd way: even when I suck, even when I fail, at least I’m trying to makesomething. It may not be very good, but maybe some idiot will collect it in the future.
