Castle Paradox

[Gizmog1]

I was recently thinking, about how someone had blamed the Joke Game for the current state of the community, and I got to wondering, what really was the first joke game?

My own memory and experience would seem to place it, quite strangely, at Piccolo's Adventure, an unintentionally bad DBZ fangame which came to be synonomous with poor design. The joke really was more a creation of the community, who'd refer to things as "The Next Piccolo's Adventure", although I'm only guessing that this was the first. Magnus too fits into this category, but is so famous (Even spawning a Sequel Marathon, which had it's own share of joke games) that it doesn't really need inclusion.

Arfenhouse couldn't have come too far after that, and I'm really not sure I could do it much justice, asides to say that it's probably responsible for more bad wanna-bes than any other "Joke Game" and has also spread the farthest on the Internet, really earning it a place in the history of the OHR. It also really pioneered the art of Newbie Speak, something which hasn't really been done well since.

Although it's not really all that funny, Harlock and Rinku's Game which includes Bill's Never Go West (As it is insanely over named) implements some of the hallmarks of a "Joke Game" in particular the title segment, in which the Player can do anything they want, until they go west.

I don't think I could go through this brief little piece, without mentioning Gilbert. I Made Dis isn't much of an RPG at all, but it's really had a very large influence. The hero is insanely overpowered as he leads Elvis vs. The Zombies, the battles are suitably campy, and the introduction with Batman is arguably the best done cutscene I've ever seen. Also notable, is Gilbert's genius for spreading rumors of deleted scenes featuring Crocodile Dundee, (A promise he'd eventually made good on in the Director's Cut edition, and he didn't disappoint, bringing the same goofy sense of comedy to the additional content. His excuse for forgetting it all these years? He got drunk and forgot, only to be reminded when Mick Dundee called him.) starting what I believe may've been the first instance of lying and creating a false hype and buzz around things that didn't exist in the game.

These tactics which would later go to use in lots of games, notably ChaosNyte (I believe)'s After The Apocalypse, a black screen with absolutely no text or graphics, save for the title. Forum goers made many a comment about the game, praising it for it's realistic depiction of the post apocalyptic world, and getting many suckers to play. Also notable in this regard is Gilbert's Airship 2600, a purely imaginative game which he suggested in regards to the terrible entries to a contest. Airship 2600 was voted the winner of said contest, though the prize wasn't actually awarded to it.

I was really inspired by I Made Dis, and released my own game Don't Push The Button, in the January of 2000 or 2001. At the time I was hoping for it to really take the mantle of "Worst Game Ever" from Magnus and Piccolo's Adventure. It never really caught on that regard, but it has had a bit of a cult following over the years, and I feel it's the best of my work.

PHC, the creator of Walthros, long reknowned as one of the great rpgs, threw us all for a loop when he began releasing his joke games. I'd characterize his works as powered by imported images (Of which he shows an incredible mastery, importing pictures with quality that I don't think anyone has ever been able to really come close to), and also by a very off the wall sense of wit. The games often feel like drug trips, and this had led to a sort of subcategory of the "Joke Game" (Hentai Quest comes to mind) in which the game is mostly reliant on imported pictures, with some kind of gimmick in which the pictures become more and more grotesque, usually ending with your screen freezing (Although PHC has not to my knowledge ever used this gimmick himself).

Perhaps one of the most intriguing lost "Joke Games" is Dr. Clock's GopherBallZ and sequel, GopherBall GT. The games were released either a few hours, or a few days apart, I forget which. While I only briefly played it, the game featured lots of references to gay sex, including an attack in which the Sesame Street character Grover sodomized his foes. The games were quickly removed from Op:OHR's gamelist, and Dr. Clock seemingly banned until he resurfaced as Alex and released a vampire game. I've yet to find GopherBallZ archived anywhere, and if you have it, let me know. It's likely that they may be gone forever.

One of the most promising games we're ever likely to never see, OHR Roadtrip, was a proposed project betwen CN, Fortis, (And maybe someone else, I forget) which generated MASSIVE public interest. The idea was that the various OHR Forum personalities would tour the country on a bus, meeting other pesonalities, and completing miniquests and general whatnot. However, creative differences between the designers pretty much sealed it's fate, and it's unlikely we'll see a revival of the idea.

OHR House shows the marketability of such an idea, and it's only a matter of time until someone else tries to make the next big community "Joke Game". Surprisingly, OHR House is not related to the real life OHR House in which ChaosNyte, Harlock, and Nova Kaiser got together and had mischief, and the game and movies they made while there also seem like they've either been lost, or will never see release.

Anyway, that's not a complete or detailed list of joke games, but it helps establish where we've been. If you can remember some older or more influential joke games, feel free to tell us about them, especially the ones that inspired you. I'd kind of like to see discussion of where we'd like to see joke games go, what they've done, and which ones were the ones that we enjoyed the most, or that maybe gave us some ideas of our own.

[Moogle1]

OHR Road Trip's staff also included Ralfo and me. It had the best dancing cactus tile the world has never seen.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Bob the Hamster]

Joke games are an extreeme example of "Fourth Wall Breech" which is as old as entertainment itself.

The idea got started in theater, where characters would address the audience directly.

Fourth wall breech is common in cartoons, for example, when in a bugs bunny cartoon, the film breaks and leaves the characters on a blank screen, or the Strong Bad E-mail in which Strong Bad's computer-- and subsequently the whole cartoon, gets infected by a virus

In a fourht wall breech, the game (or play or cartoon, or comic, or whatever) becomes self-aware that it is not real, and that there is an audience. The particiular nature of a fourth wall breech varies depending on the medium. Games in general, and RPG'ss in particular provide lots of opportunities for this kind of humor.

The idea of a joke game was even common in amateur RPG making even before the existance of the OHRRPGCE. I was a frequenter of the Verge message boards in the early days of OHRRPGCE development, before I had even released a public version, and I remember seeing joke games made with Verge. Even the standard demo game that came with the engine included a fair amount of self-aware humor.

Of course, in the case of many OHR joke games, they take this sort of thing so far, that It could be called first-second-third-fourth-and-maybe-fifth-wall breaching :)