Totally Tasteless Video Games
The Super Columbine Massacre and Other Games
A selection of some of the most boring, poorly executed, and totally tasteless video games ever made
Social critics often point the finger of blame at video games for today’s deviant youth behavior much like earlier generations of social critics had pointed a similar finger of blame at comic books, rock and roll, jazz, hooch, and fluoridated water. But, some video games are only guilty of being tasteless, derivative and above all, boring.
First, the boring:
Atari’s cartridge game “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial”, based on the Spielberg movie of the same name, had such boring game play that word-of-mouth and the game critics’ ire combined turned it into one of the biggest commercial flops of the 1982 Christmas season.
In 1983, with millions of unsold game cartridges in their warehouse, Atari decided to get rid of them all in a spectacularly controversial fashion. They took all the cartridges to Alamargordo, New Mexico, near the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion, and dumped the entirety into the city landfill. As the coup de grace, they had all the cartridges crushed, buried, and then covered with a layer of cement. This was probably one of the most politically incorrect decisions a company could’ve made even in 1983.
Then, the tasteless (and there are so many):
In 1999, many social critics and politicians blamed the tragic Columbine High School massacre on the popular shoot-em-up video game “Doom” because the two young killers were big fans of the game. In 2005, while it was certainly no surprise to those familiar with gamer geeks, “Super Columbine Massacre”, an online game, was released. In response to critics, the game’s creator claimed that he had developed the game for society’s benefit by offering a first-person view into the killers’ minds. The game followed killers Harris and Klebold from plotting their assault to carrying it out and then on to their final adventures in Hell.
In 2004, the video game “JFK Reloaded” was released. Like “Super Columbine Massacre”, the game’s developer told critics that he had created the game with good intentions. He said that “JFK Reloaded” had educational value because it examined and debunked every JFK assassination plot theory. For many critics, the most tasteless and offensive part of the game was that players assumed the first person persona of a 3D-animated Lee Harvey Oswald throughout. And there was also a very graphic “money shot” of the bullet splattering the President’s skull, all viewed from the Texas Book Depository window.
And, just when you thought that gameboy creators couldn’t get more tasteless, within days of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, the game “V-Tech Rampage” was released online. It’s a first person shooter game where players assumed the murderer’s persona and went people-hunting in the halls of the Virginia Technical Institute. To make matters even more tasteless, the geekster who created the game actually asked his many critics for $2000 and then he’d take the game off the Internet.
And finally the poorly executed:
1999’s “Superman 64” Nintendo game, a highly touted video game, wound up universally panned by critics for its notoriously substandard game graphics. One critic even said that the Superman character looked “like a flying log in panties, and the entire (game) world is covered in a dull green fog.”
