Teamworking Day: Blaby Computer Games 🌭

The worst video game company that will ever be, Blaby Computer Games, was founded in 1983. For the next five years they published only one thing– bad copies of existing games for off-brand platforms. For instance, they made a copy of Tron for the Dragon 32 and called it Trun. Fucking TRUN. To put that into perspective, that’s one letter lazier than making a knockoff of Fargo and calling it Fart.

But worse than their ethics, creativity, programming skills, financial acumen, and dick game, was the box art these truns used to market their knockoff garbage. Let’s look at some!

BARMY BURGERS

Brockway: This is why the site isn’t called 1-900-BURGER. Everybody knows that hamburgers are the pussies of the grilled meat world. 

Nobody knows it harder than hot dogs. 

Seanbaby: Even a creature with the sub-animal intelligence of a burger knows when you see something like this, you point your main orifice away from it and run. What is this thing? There is no effort to communicate what kind of game it is or who the protagonist is. This is a painting made by a chef on death row to let people of all languages and creeds know he’s not sorry for all the sexual violence.

Brockway: This game came on cassette so it could moan when you stuck a pencil in the tape-hole.  

BORIS THE BOLD

Seanbaby: This was an era where a game’s entire plot could just be moving a baby to the other side of a sawmill. But I don’t think anyone was ready for the aggressive nothingness of “butternut squash looks into a basement.” What the fuck is this game that an artist chose to represent it with a vaguely something looking at a vaguely not anything?

Brockway: This game is all about trying to escape Boris’s sex dungeon, but there’s a glitch in the last level that makes it unbeatable. The only reason Boris has those tiny arms is so he can airquote the word “glitch.”

Seanbaby: It’s that look on your face when after hours of dodging the squirts and thrusts of his traps you realize the exit has no lock or knob… the moment where you realize there never was a way out– that’s what Boris craves. That’s what his loinsack bulges need to engorge for egg implantation.

DEATHKICK

Brockway: If you draw Bruce Lee’s entire abdomen, then he can sue for using his likeness. But if you only draw 73% of it, you are legally in the clear.

Seanbaby: Fun Fact: You can’t beat this game. Not because you make better choices with your life, but because it’s broken. This may shock you, but the programming team who used a row of ampersands to draw a crowd screwed something up in the code, and if you lug your non-animated man shape to the end of the game you’re met with an accidentally invincible enemy. So this game about deathkicking kung fu is actually a point karate tournament attended by keyboard symbols, they forgot to finish it, and the box art they went with was literally the first idea the dumbest person you’ve ever met would have. If a man hired you to paint a house and you laid down to shit your pants and said, “Toilet’s too far away. I also quit the painting job,” that man would tell people he met someone almost as lazy as Deathkick for the Amstrad CPC.

GI’S A JOB!

Brockway: I feel like this is racist propaganda from a country I’ve barely heard of, against an ethnic group I don’t recognize. Like maybe this is how Maltese are racist against Liechtensteiners.

Seanbaby: You’re weirdly close. This game came out in 1983, so the popular racial slur for Liechtensteiners in Malta at the time was “Halftorso Deathkicker.”

GOLD DIGGER

Brockway: I drew this while drunk in the fourth grade and I can’t believe they never paid me for my work. Wait… wait no, I can believe it.

Seanbaby: This is the first box that even comes close to communicating what the game does. One glance and I know I’m a potato monster stealing ear wax from a bear to have a sexual relationship with my brothers and sisters.

COPY EDIT NOTE: How big can the Patreon editor make the font size? I’d like to make that a giant pull quote: “I’m a potato monster stealing ear wax from a bear to have a sexual relationship with my brothers and sisters.” And then put my name and the year. In fact, let’s maybe take out all the other text and images?

‘GOTCHA’

Brockway: Man, I miss the good ol’ days when police brutality was a cute reference we could share with the kids.

Seanbaby: I think the cop has probable cause here, but clubbing a suspect’s head open is a pretty dangerous thing to normalize when you’re a computer game company who sells fraudulently broken games based on stolen intellectual property. Blaby should have considered making a game called LENIENT SENTENCING or, unrelated to what I’m talking about, DEATHKICK WITH TITS.

GUIDO

Brockway: Guido is legally distinct from Bugs Bunny because he fucked Bugs Bunny to death. That is law in Toon World. That’s how lawsuits are settled in the brutal and hideous world of Toons. Guido is the last thing you see before you die in a public bathroom. 

Seanbaby: You still think of Guido as a thing, but Guido is sideways in a direction no finger can point from what you know as things. Guido is how the darkness tells you you’re being hunted. Guido are the panties stretched across a moist penis in a cave. Guido is the salty brine of your own living flesh as you become a part of Guido, tasting what Guido tastes.

Brockway: Look at that start screen. There’s a field called Nuclear Semiotics which recruits artists and thinkers to warn people about toxic waste, even if it’s so far in the future they no longer have human language. They had to come up with universal symbols and abstract concepts to communicate the danger within. The grainy freckles on Guido’s face are how you say “run, motherfucker” in 41st century Glorpese. It is your fault if you hit start on that screen. You want to see what your genitals look like as a flag.

HIGHRISE HARRY

Seanbaby: Highrise Harry is so fucked. All he has is a bucket of red paint and he’s being chased toward certain death by a creature who’s already red. I’ve never seen anyone more about to die than this, and I once watched a child whisper “Guido” into a hand mirror.

Brockway: Highrise Harry was the most effective PSA about drugs in the workplace that 1978 OSHA produced. To this day, I will huff nothing stronger than dust cleaner within 500 feet of a construction site. 

JUMPMAN

Brockway: If you only draw 73% of Mario’s… wait, we’ve already done that joke. Okay: Jumpman is legally distinct from Mario because he fucked… that, too? Damn, there was really a whole cottage industry of slipshod video game developers trying to trick your grandma out of $20, wasn’t there?

Seanbaby: These guys might have invented that industry, but they’re so uniquely bad at everything they do they didn’t quite get their knocking off right and this Mario Bros. clone is really a Q*Bert clone and you play a monster named Hubert. If you don’t know anything about video games, let me assure you this is like stuffing the remains of a cat into a sock, naming it “Free Dog,” and selling it to someone looking to buy a horse.

Brockway: Maybe they shouldn’t have been making games, but Blaby made some damn fine art. Look at the depths of utter despair communicated by the single black pixel of Hubert’s eye. That is a pixel that has looked behind the curtain of the universe and seen what awaits us all. You can recognize that pixel in the eyes of soldiers that did not fully come home from war. 

KILLER KONG

Brockway: Oh. Oh no. I know that face. I know that face so well. That’s the ‘something in this room knows what the inside of my ass looks like, and you can’t leave until you guess with your tongue’ face.

Seanbaby: You’re acting like you’d hate that, but Killer Kong sort of has nice titties.

Mac Dougal’s Last Stand.

Seanbaby: “No, NO, the kangaroo is digging my grave!” shrieks the madman to everyone and no one. “The cantaloupes are coming for your secrets!” he continues. He pulls the knife across his throat gargling, “Help, HELP! The robot took my bagpiiiipes!”

The lead designer from Blaby Computer Games turns to his wife and says, “Someone should do something about all these cra– hold on now, what was that last thing he said!?” His eyes turn to dollar signs. His wife grimaces at this, his latest impotence. She is, ugh, she is just a total beast.

Brockway: Can we not make light of the tragic death of MacDougal at the hands of HexBot 5000? It’s Scotland’s most precious holiday, you monster.

MORBID MANSION,

Seanbaby: This one is how you know these people are true lunatics. It was pretty strange they made a business around slapping children’s drawings on broken ripoff games for 8th-rate computer systems. And it was weird when they added an apostrophe to both sides of  ‘GOTCHA’. And it was pretty troubling when someone put a period at the end of Mac Dougal’s Last Stand.. But is that a motherfucking comma at the end of this game’s title? Did these goddamn maniacs end a video game title with a comma!? That shit is going to drive me,

Brockway: Is the rest of the title a DLC? This is a bullshit Activision move.

PERILOUS PIT.

Brockway: Oh, here’s the sequel to Morbid Mansion.

Seanbaby: 

“What do you think about JaMarcus Milkwolf’s Journey into the Perilous Pit?”

“Who the fuck is JaMarcus Milkwolf!? It’s called Perilous Pit! Period!”

“Pretending you literally meant to include that period will be my greatest act of defiance. You trun. You gorilla fingering trun.”

“What!?”

“N-nothing. Perilous Pit (period) just like you said.”

RICOCHET

Brockway: Rambon’t.

Seanbaby: More like Rambon’toh, god damn it.

RUBY ROBBA

Seanbaby: Stealing rubies from an exploding snake pit is #7 on my Top 10 Spectacular Deaths list. Number six is Broken Parachute Over “Most Simultaneous Breast Feedings” Guinness Record Attempt, but any entries above that number would be homicidally irresponsible to share.

Brockway: This is room four of Boris The Bold’s Infinite Fuckpit. This is what Boris is smiling about.

Wreckless Roger

Seanbaby: We only know one thing about this mysterious space mission– it would go a lot smoother if Roger didn’t fuck around so much.

Brockway:

“Roger, I’m telling you – there is zero way you can hit your ex-girlfriend with a handheld laser from space. It’s lunacy to even try. It’s beyond lunacy. It’s… it’s….”

“What does my fucking nametag say, Careful Carl?”

“I don’t-”

*Laser charging*

“WHAT DOES IT SAY?”

“W-wreckless Roger.”

“You’re god damn right it does. Now I need you to do three things in this order: Step back, open the airlock, and live your life in the shadow of my greatness.”

*Airlock opens*

“WHO’S IMPOTENT NOW LINDAAAAA!?”

Seanbaby: A star hero is born. Space was right to fire Careful Carl.

THE BELLS

Brockway: The ol’ Medieval Snooze Button.

Seanbaby: I worry how at this point in the article a joke about murdering a hunchback to shut up his bell seems almost wholesome.