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Where Did All Our Weird Games Go?

Where Did All Our Weird Games Go?

The upcoming release of Splatoon has awakened a sort of fire in me. It’s a sort of fire that pines for the bizarre. The idea of kids who turn into squids and shoot ink at each other is just too crazy not to love. It’s perfect. It makes absolutely no sense and serves simply as an interesting conveyer for its mechanics. But it doesn’t have to make sense! Its charm is that it doesn’t make sense. The randomness and absurdity only adds to my desire to play it. Why? Because the art of the weird game is a lost one, and I want to see more.

Weird games used to be a matter of necessity and innovation. The NES and Atari couldn’t do much, and so things needed to be simple and recognizable.

If you think about it, Mario has always been a weird game. It’s a story about a plumber eating mushrooms and stomping on turtles. Why? Well his mustache was because the NES didn’t have enough resolution to really draw a face. His overalls were to allow his hands to pass over them and give the illusion of a running movement. His plumber job was a result of the original Mario Bros . game, where he teamed up with Luigi to clear sewers. His cap was because the NES couldn’t draw hair well. Mushrooms and flowers stood out well against the NES’s limited background choices, and looked significantly different from the enemies, some of which showed up in the original Mario Bros . and some of which were a product of running with the mushroom theme. As a result, these constraints created the mascot that we all know and love.

But Mario wasn’t the only weird game. One of my favorite games on the NES was Burger Time . Here you had to run across gigantic burgers while running away from giant mutant hot dogs and fried eggs. You could stun them with pepper and crush them with your giant burger parts. Why was any of this happening? Who cares? It was fun!

Where Did All Our Weird Games Go?

Now that we don’t have limitations, everyone wants to make the next great epic narrative in games, and I like that. I like that people are trying to be artistic. But visual art has had a lot of different movements. They weren’t all photorealism. The bizarre and weird has its place in the art community too. I would love to see more interesting and bizarre ideas in games fostered.

To me the, “screw it, let’s make it because it’s fun” attitude is one that we need more of. What do you think? Are games better today because they aren’t as weird or do you want to see more weird games be developed? Let us know in the comments.

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