Welcome to the Twilight Zone’s Arcade
by Evan Shultz
The alien invader sweeps back and forth across the screen, mocking me with his waving tentacles. I’ve never been good at Space Invaders — my game was Centipede — but this looks easy: nothing on the screen but my cannon and a single ponderously slow victim. I line up my shot and fire. Not even close. The next shot is too early. I wait for the alien to drop and change directions, then hit the spacebar again, splitting the difference. Direct hit! Red and yellow sparks fly off the alien’s hull as it sails by. I fire again. Another hit. More sparks, but still no dead alien. How many shots does it take? I shift my cannon and fire once more. The bullet and its target meet in mid-air. The alien menace finally bursts into flames. Sweet victory.
Then the burning wreckage crashes into my cannon, destroying it.
Okay. In a game like Halo 3, something with a chaotic playground attitude backed up by a physics engine, I could understand downed aircraft or traffic-cones-turned-shrapnel accidentally pwning my avatar. But in Space Invaders? They don’t even have color. Then again, I’m not technically playing Space Invaders.
I don’t know what I’m playing — a game? an interactive flash cartoon?
The website hosting it, retrosabotage.com, calls it a “sabotage.” This on is titled Nice Shot! , and it just punk’d me.
Sabotages — fourteen so far and counting — consist of short vignettes featuring classic video games gone horribly wrong and answering questions such as, “What happens when Pac-Man eats too many power dots?” Most are bite-sized, simpler than the original and take no more than five minutes to explore, making them perfect entertainment for a coffee break.
So far the victims include Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Pong, Tetris, and Breakout, each getting three or four facetious treatments. The sabotages themselves run the creative gamut from game to sketch comedy: Twenty Lines offers little more than an odyssey with an interactive pretext, while others, like Build On and Compromise, achieve full-on flash game status with nary a punch line in sight. Most fall somewhere in the middle, the mutant offspring of an interactive flash cartoon and a practical joke. All of them achieve brilliant, twisted humor.
Of course, mockery of video games arose shortly after video games themselves. Today the sub-industry features web comics such as Penny Arcade and PvP, as well as humorous games like Videlectric’s wickedly funny knock-offs in the Games section at homestarrunner.com. But the work of retrosabotage.com offers something different, something that bridges the gap between gaming and parody: not full-on games with humorous settings, not jokes in a linear medium pointing back at gaming from the outside, but anecdotes that climb inside of interactive, goal-oriented video game costumes and then deliver punch lines instead of end bosses. Retro Sabotage does with games what M. C. Escher did with representational art: skews your perspective. You play/watch/experience one, then laugh, then spend five minutes wondering why no one ever thought of doing this before.
But a groundbreaking concept remains merely a curiosity unless it has good content to back it. Not a problem at Retro Sabotage. Even the sabotages that require you to play along in order to get to the punch line are well worth mashing a few buttons for. And once you’ve played through them, there’s still evil fun to be had sharing: just get a gamer friend to “help you kill that last space invader” and watch his face as digital reality breaks down.
Still, there’s something creepy about an old arcade game that breaks its own rules. Before Donkey Kong hit the arcades with its coherent narrative and characters that looked like, well, characters, video games were abstract. In Pac-Man you control a yellow circle with a mouth, eating white dots littered through a rat maze while trying to avoid four brightly colored ghosts. Yet the rules of the game create a construct that assigns meaning to the abstract signs — or in plain English, we might not know what to make of a pink ghost but we all understand the concept it represents: enemy. So suddenly seeing Inky or Pinky break that construct in half feels disturbingly close to going insane.
Like most entertainment sites, retrosabotage.com updates weekly; in this case, every Thursday. Unlike most entertainment sites, the madmen behind Retro Sabotage would actually like to hear viewer suggestions. So if you’ve always wondered what would happen if Donkey Kong invaded Joust, feel free to drop them an email. I’m waiting to see how they sabotage Centipede.
