Name That Tune is a solid, thoroughly proven idea. It’s a game that’s stood the test of time on multiple platforms, notably excluding the attempt to turn it into a 1986 arcade game. The problem here, obviously, is that songs are a little harder to recognize when it’s a 1980s sound chip trying to gurgle out a recognizable rendition of popular music with blood pouring from its figurative throat. Think about the fact that you’d be playing this in an arcade, one of the louder places on earth, and it’s just a terrible idea from tip-to-tail.
Beat ‘Em and Eat ’Em
American Multiple Industries
If you read that title and giggled, thinking they’d accidentally named their game something that sounds very naughty, I have bad news. They named their game that because that’s exactly what happens in the game. Notoriously gross game publisher American Multiple Industries (we’ll get back to them in a second) released, as if it was fine, a game where a man masturbates off a rooftop and you attempt to catch his… projectiles. A game for which the word “porn” feels far too genteel.
Custer’
s Revenge
American Multiple Industries
The same guys who let out Beat ‘Em and Eat ’Em, a game I can’t believe I have to italicize the title of, also released maybe the most infamous game of all time, Custer’s Revenge. If you’re intrigued by the first, but were hoping that racism and implied sexual assault could be included, too, this is your game. The less said about this one, the better.
E.T.
Atari
A game that I would be packed into a brazen bull for not including. Possibly the most famously dogshit video game ever made, anyone with even a passing interest in gaming is probably well aware of it. If you’re not, just know that it was a game that, despite being based on an incredibly popular movie, was so unplayable, and therefore unsaleable, that they ended up burying thousands of copies in the desert. Literally, it’s a game that they created a personalized landfill to dispose of, like it was nuclear waste.
Look, just make a Pac-Man clone where he’s brown, eating Reese’s Pieces and be done with it. Oh right, they couldn’t.
