Anyway, I played a lot of video games as a kid. In fact, I would say that video games played a pretty substantial role in my development. No one really seemed concerned about my video game playing growing up... much to my dismay, actually, as that also meant no one was concerned when my joystick started systematically giving me electric shocks on a daily basis. That's probably why I have such poor dexterity to this day. But, I digress. Point I'm trying to get to is, nowadays people are up in a dizzy whizzy about the deleterious effects video games are having on kids as if video games suddenly turned into these wicked creations that exist solely to corrupt the youth of America. But the fact of the matter is, video games have been effed up for a long time. Looking back as an almost 30 year old woman, I can, without question, say there were some seriously messed up games that I played as a kid.
Let's take a look, shall we? For brevity's sake, we'll only look at Apple ][ games. We'd be here all year if I started talking Nintendo, SNES, or Genesis.
1. ZooMaster - This was an action game released in 1983, in which the player plays a character who basically crashes a zoo and starts shooting all the animals. In case you didn't get that, this is not a hunting game and you're not shooting bison to feed your family like in Oregon Trail. Oh no, you play a dude who rolls up in the zoo, in his little car and just starts dropping all the animals like it's the streets of West Compton and they're all a buncha crips on the wrong side of the Tupac/Biggie Smalls feud. What. The. Hell? Why? Why would you put out a game that consisted of perpetrating a drive by on frickin' zoo animals?
3. Paperboy - Paperboy was an Atari arcade game released in 1984 and ported to the Apple ][ and other game systems in the later 80s, in which the player is a paperboy delivering newspapers to his faithful subscribers. Sounds legit enough, right? Hell, it might even teach us something about responsibility and having a job. Except that's only one third of Paperboy's objective. The others: eff stuff up for people who don't subscribe to your paper and hit people and animals who annoy you in the face with a newspaper. Essentially, Paperboy was an economic terrorist, breaking the windows, tombstones, and lawnmowers and killing the dogs of those who didn't purchase his wares and instigating class warfare by effing with blue collar workers repairing automobiles or working on roadside drains. Now of course, I didn't understand economic terrorism as a child, so primarily what I got out of Paperboy was the main goal was to piss as many people off as possible, so they would stop subscribing and I could vandalize the hell out of their stuff and knock them off of ladders. Which really isn't that bad of a way of life, except, jail.
4. MoneyMunchers - This is a 1982 maze game. The character would navigate his way through a maze, in which someone had made it rain, picking up the discarded cash money and avoiding the "money munchers" which were big creepy insect bastards that would eat your money and kill you. This is effed up for two reasons. One, it's essentially Patrick Bateman versus the giant bugs, sans Huey Lewis music, which means it's just a lame yuppie exterminator, and two, I firmly believe it and it alone led to the inspiration for and creation of 50 Cent's "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" which we can all agree is not a stellar piece of music.
5. The Oregon Trail - I'm not going to bother with a description because if you don't know what The Oregon Trail is, get the hell off my blog. Anyway, The Oregon Trail earns a spot on this list solely because it came with an educational label. Hear me out. I know we all played it at school so it seems like it was educational, right? But think about it. What did you actually learn? I learned two things.First, I learned people on the Oregon Trail were weak ass bitches who should have been going to the gym before hitting the trail. Why? Because "You killed 972 pounds of meat, but you were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon." Now really, if you can't lift more than 100 pounds, you probably should've stayed on the east coast and applied for some sort of 19th century disability. Seriously. Not to mention holy illogical, Batman. My family is starving and we need to get across the country before the weather turns bad, but hey let me take time to carve out exactly one-hundred pounds of meat off this bison before I head back from this hunt. And how the hell was it always exactly 100 pounds that he carried back? Did he take a scale out there on the hunt? Because I don't remember buying a meat scale at Matt's General Store when we embarked on this endeavor.
And second, schadenfreude. I learned schadenfreude. You show me the person who didn't think it was hilarious that their little cousin, the neighbor kid, and their BFF got cholera and dysentery. You can't. Because they don't exist. Oregon Trail bred a whole generation of little schadenfreudy sociopaths. "Hahaha! Jen's got cholera again. Let's pick up the pace and cut back her food!" Oh stop judging me. You did it, too.
