Author: Merritt K
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Nerding Day: Ghost Dog the RPGðŸŒ
We’ve discussed Mark C. MacKinnon and Guardians of Order once before. But a game about cartoon rodents was far from the strangest product they ever shipped out to hobby shop shelves. That honor belongs to what may be the only licensed tabletop roleplaying game to be based on a film in the Criterion Collection. It’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Role-Playing Game and Resource Book.
Can we just take a minute to really process this? A year after Jim Jarmusch’s postmodern samurai mob movie came out, a small Canadian publisher released D&D but for people who wanted to imagine being Forest Whitaker with a katana. Today, that concept would get you upwards of three likes on your itch.io page. But in 2000, your family could get you declared mentally incompetent for even proposing the idea. And yet, somehow, it gets stranger still.
Ghost Dog isn’t your typical RPG. It’s intended to be a one-on-one experience, where one player is the Game Master and the other is Ghost Dog. Mark pitches this as being a more convenient game for busy roleplayers on the go. But as someone who’s slung my share of dice, they do not seem like equivalent experiences. Hanging out with a group of friends and goofing around is a lot of fun. Being alone with a single other person and co-imagining a story about Forest Whitaker? That’s foreplay.
Maybe you’re like me and have been totally meaning to get through Jarmusch’s filmography and like Night on Earth was really good there’s just so many other movies, you know? Despair not. Roughly half of Ghost Dog‘s 158 pages are dedicated to recapping the events of the movie and explaining its themes, which include: sword, Mafia, and what happens when the worlds of sword and Mafia meet and make forbidden, passionate love.
I know it was a long time ago, but the authors seem way too excited about the idea of a black samurai. Ghost Dog is a cool concept, but when you get all breathless about how a gangsta player is actually an honorable warrior, it feels like maybe you have some preconceptions about different types of people that you should explore. Like, do the words “black” and “gangsta” always need to go hand in hand?
So what is Ghost Dog all about? Long story short, a Mafioso shoots three children who were beating up a fourth child. That child finds a book about samurai and decides that’s his whole deal from now on. He tracks down the mobster and swears fealty to him. It’s sort of a Han and Chewbacca life debt situation, if Chewbacca just hung out on a roof with pigeons all day until Han wanted him to shoot someone in the face for breaking space omertà .
Ghost Dog is assigned to kill a guy who’s been having an affair with a mobster’s daughter, but in doing so, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that results in nearly everyone in the movie getting stabbed, gunned down, or exploded. That’s the fast version. The book, no joke, lays out a scene by scene retelling of the movie as if the authors were in the room with you trying to pitch you on the concept.
The summary is six pages long. And maybe it was useful to have a synopsis of the movie in the pre-Wikipedia era, but I have to imagine that anyone purchasing this book was already familiar with the film. But the authors had to consider every contingency. What if the player hadn’t seen the movie and the dozens of pages of summary and background material didn’t adequately convey the experience of watching Ghost Dog? Well, there’s a solution here.
Something about this paragraph bothers me, and it’s not just that this “advice” is the equivalent of telling someone “to satisfy your hunger, there is simply no substitute for food.” The phrasing of “theatrical movie,” the needless parenthetical… These are the hallmarks of a writer desperately struggling to hit a page count. Are there any tortured reaches comparing the themes of the movie to those of a beloved children’s series?
How about needless enumeration of the film’s entire cast, including “Dog,” and “Jaguar Lady?”
Wait, did they just misspell the name of one of the more important characters in the movie? I am now developing a theory that the authors penned this book under duress. I believe they were pressed into this impossible task by profligate licensor and Guardians of Order CEO Mark C. MacKinnon. They did their best to complete the project with the minimal amount of effort possible in order to satisfy their mad king.
As Exhibit A, I present the numerous sidebars throughout the text, which contain quotes and useless bits of trivia. Take, for instance, this list of businesses owned by the Vargo family:
Or consider this list of all of the cities where Mafia lives, maybe?
Or what about this misspelled quotation? Who could forget that classic Ghost Dog character, “Long Hiared Man?”
Exhibit B: The actual mechanics of Ghost Dog are simply lifted wholesale from Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Like Kevin Siembieda before them, Guardians of Order managed to pad out their books by copying and pasting the same insane, dysfunctional rulesets across all of their products. In the case of Ghost Dog, it’s just BESM but without all the elves and magical spells. You can still put points into being sexual dynamite, though.
It costs the same number of character points to be the most attractive person in the world and to be a low level Mafia soldier, by the way. Need more points? You can always take a Defect. For an extra character point, why not be a 15 year old? You can’t legally buy cigs or booze, but you can — uh, I’m not sure this is right — legally consent to sex?
Let’s not worry about that too much. We’ve got bigger issues. Since this is Tri-Stat, the combat is just as unwieldy as it was in BESMouse. We don’t have Scratch points to contend with this time, but if your narrative-focused vibes-heavy one-on-one RPG needs a flowchart to work, then you have failed your Role-Playing Game Design skill check.
Got all that? Because we’re not done.
Fuck me, I don’t want to do math, I want to tell a story based on the work of the guy who comes up with his movie ideas while riding an adorable bike in circles around an empty Williamsburg loft.
If Ghost Dog were a game actually designed for two players to recreate the movie or variations on it, I guess I could understand that. I’m still not sure who it would actually be for, but it could have worked as a fifty-page softcover book that explores the vibes of the world and has some thematic rules calibrated for quick combat punctuated by reflective moments of downtime.
But it isn’t that. It’s a hardcover tome that spans over 150 pages, and its pretensions to being a new and interesting kind of RPG collapse almost immediately as its authors admit that there is no reason why you couldn’t simply add more people to the mix.
Have you ever wanted to roleplay as Mark Wahlberg trying to fuck a teenager? How about Lou Diamond Phillips and Robin Dunne doing an annoying, interminable bit about tracing a phone call? With the power of Ghost Dog: The Roleplaying Game, this is finally possible.
So, hold on. There is absolutely nothing about Ghost Dog that makes it any more suited to one-on-one roleplaying than any other Guardians of Order book. Is there anything that distinguishes it mechanically from BESM, a genre-agnostic game?
Of course not! Do whatever you fucking want, you shmuck. You already bought the book, whadda we care? Eyyyy, fuggetaboutit.
But it doesn’t stop there. Now that we know that Ghost Dog is just reskinned BESM, a lot of possibilities open up to us. Hell, the authors even point out that we could bring Sailor Moon into the mix.
And remember, this is the year 2000. Today, I’m fairly certain that you can play as both Forest Whitaker and Sailor Moon in Fortnite. But imagine the roleplaying campaign that could have come out of someone owning both of these books a quarter-century ago. Ghost Dog is assigned to kill some deadbeat who started a new beauty salon and won’t pay protection money to the mob. But when he takes the shot, it turns out that the target is some kind of space monster! Bullets are useless — only moon magic can defeat it!
But how will Sailor Moon deal with the revelation that Ghost Dog is involved with the Mafia? And how will Ghost Dog, as a sort of proto-weeb figure, react to the knowledge that anime is real?
More importantly, how many bee stings from Big Ears, Small Mouse would it take to kill Forest Whitaker? Recall that the true-to-life “suicide” bee sting inflicts 15 Scratch points, which resolves to three normal damage points. And Ghost Dog has 70 Health Points, thanks to his “Damn Healthy!” Attribute.
Thus, we learn that it would require a mere 24 bee stings to defeat Ghost Dog. What about the rest of the cast? Well, nearly every named character in the film has 40 Health Points. Due to the quirks of the Tri-Stat system and/or authorial laziness in statting out the cast of Ghost Dog, everyone from a middle-aged gangster to a mob heiress in her early 20s to a ten year old child is equally as resilient.
It would take a mere fourteen stings to bring down each of these characters. That might seem like a strangely low number, considering that 1,000 to 1,500 is the usual range given for lethality. But the Ghost Dog book, with all of its rich detail on the film’s setting, has the answer to this conundrum.
And here I thought all that background information was useless. What a fool I was. I must now commit seppuku, as I have dishonored myself. No, Sailor Moon. Don’t try to stop me. This is the Way of the Samurai. But if I can’t get that last slash done, I will need you to take my head off with your Moon Tiara Magic.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, my original OC (do not steal) of a cool guy samurai mafia hitman assassin hedgehog that uses katanas and guns.
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Nerding Day: SkunnyðŸŒ
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t write about video games more here at 1-900 HOT DOG. Usually, my response is something like, “who are you, and how did you get in here?” But once security’s hauled them away to be repeatedly tased on the butthole, I bring up the live feed of the butthole tasing room and give their inquiry a little thought. The truth is that of everything I write about, video games are the hardest to cover without walking ground so well-trod that you’d think the Troddlers (1992) had been there.
Gamers are obsessive to a degree that is frankly frightening sometimes, which is why you can freely browse the DVDs at Goodwill but the Super Nintendo games are behind glass and you have to ask the 20-year-old employee to show you their prices. Then you have to decide whether it would be more embarrassing to thank her and slink away or to drop fifty dollars on Super Mario Kart in a ridiculous attempt to recover some tiny piece of your long-gone childhood.
Back in the ’90s you could have a column in EGM about weird or bad video games and launch a whole career off it. Even into the mid-2000s, a guy yelling about Castlevania into a camera was inventing an entire genre. But today, half of YouTube is clogged up with unwatched six-hour streams of Darkest Dungeon and videos by rapidly aging men calling Troddlers a “hidden gem.” Then again, the other half is race hatred and two hour video essays people won’t stop telling me to watch, so I guess by comparison the games stuff isn’t so bad.
The point is, it’s hard to find something worth talking about in the world of video games, something obscure enough that nobody’s written a tearful personal essay about what it meant to them as a lonely child.
But today, I think I’ve found such a game. It’s called Skunny.
God, what a vile-sounding name. I thought “Mr. Nutz” was bad, but Skunny takes things to another level. He was the de facto mascot of a company named “Copysoft,” which is the worst name I’ve ever heard for a game developer, and I include Stormfront Games in that. So maybe the guys behind this whole venture were just really bad at naming but good at making games. I mean, “From Software” isn’t a great name either, but there are more hours of video content on the meaning of the shitty little guy that sells you weapons in Dark Souls than anyone could possibly watch in a human lifetime, so who knows.
Thankfully (?), our culture is obsessed with preserving its most inconsequential products, so Skunny has been preserved in digital amber online. You can’t play PT anymore, but you can play Skunny!
Skunny: Back to the Forest is a DOS-based platformer that came out in 1993. Every PC developer at the time was desperately trying to make a Super Mario game instead of sticking to their strength — incredibly slow-paced dungeon crawlers and airport management simulations. And sure, it was a technical achievement when John Romero got Commander Keen to scroll smoothly on a home computer, but it’s impressive in the same way as a dog standing on its hind legs and barking the vague sounds of Bible verses — it’s a wonder that it could happen at all, but you kind of wish it would stop.
Copysoft provides some backstory for Skunny in the game’s menu. He allegedly loves children and “sticky nut puddings,” in that order, and he is a real earth creature who contacted the humans at Copysoft to shrink him and put him inside the computer.
I mean, Mario was just a guy who killed turtles, so I’m not sure we need this level of meta worldbuilding, but fine. Sure. Skunny is an ideas guy who roped people with actual skills into making his video game for him. Great start.
The actual plot of the game is that there’s a villain who wants to capture Skunny because then he can do infinite crimes. This guy lures Skunny in by kidnapping his friends, and our “hero” and his girlfriend (a supermodel btw) go to rescue them.
Mechanically, Skunny was gunning for Sonic the Hedgehog. They even call out Sega’s mascot by name, which in 1993 was a display of bravado on par with saying “move over, food! Drywall is here!
I guess squirrels probably are faster than hedgehogs. But Sonic was designed by genius developer/insider trader Yuji Naka, so the character feels good to maneuver. Skunny, on the other hand, was designed by the sick fucks at Copysoft who were too busy putting the words “children” and “sticky nut” next to each other to program a decent game. As a result, Skunny flies all over the place, and in a decision so insane that I have never seen it in any other video game, he experiences knockback from defeating enemies.
The developers tried to compensate for the atrocious control by making it so that flying into an enemy just subtracts a few seconds from your timer, which you can restore by grabbing food. Fine. But then they went and added enormous obstacles that immediately end Skunny’s life on contact.
So the first level goes like this: you launch forward, jump on the first enemy, and get catapulted directly into one of these obstacles. Mega Man had spikes, Sonic had water. What does Skunny have?
Toads.
Touching a toad is anathema to Skunny. I feel like there must be some kind of bizarre psychosexual implication here that I’m not willing to investigate, because I don’t think toads typically eat squirrels. The closest thing I could find was a video from 20 years ago of a man feeding a dead baby squirrel to his pet frog and it really freaked me out.
But back to Skunny. This feels like a prank. This is Kaizo Mario shit. The idea that someone sat down and deliberately designed the first level of their video game for children so that the main character’s movement crashes him into an enemy is too dark to contemplate.
Oh, and did I mention that he screams? He screams a lot. Skunny hates this. He regrets everything. Why did he let them put him in the washing machine to shrink him down?
They wanted thirty of God’s own American dollars for this back in 1993, which at the time was roughly the down payment on a house. And yeah, plenty of kids got tricked into asking their parents for games based solely on the cover art in the ’90s — that’s how I ended up with The Rocketeer for the Super Nintendo — but this was shareware! The whole idea was that you’d try the game and like it so much that you’d send away for the full version. That’d be like if I kicked you in the nuts once for free, then asked you to pay me to do it several more times. (For this analogy please assume that you aren’t into that sort of thing.)
Well, that’s Skunny. Like countless other also-rans in the great mascot wars of the 1990s, he was a one and d—
Sorry? There was a second Skunny game? Well, I guess even James Pond got a sequel.
Skunny: Save Our Pizzas sees our sticky nut pudding-loving abomination sent back in time to Ancient Rome to recover the recipe for pizza after an evil chef steals it. Sure. It makes just as much sense as turning a fish secret agent into a RoboCop — whose main thing was that could stretch his body vertically — trying to rescue Santa.
Say what you will about Copysoft, they learned one lesson from Back to the Forest: it’s best not to have your platformer character lurch across the screen like a piss-drunk Roadrunner. This time around, Skunny moves more deliberately. But don’t worry, Skunny fans, jumping on enemies still results in that classic uncontrollable spasming that makes the game completely unplayable.
I made it a minute into the first Skunny game before I dropped it. In Save Our Pizzas, I couldn’t get past the second guy. If you pause for even a moment when you encounter this Roman musician, he starts firing off explosive notes nonstop, ensuring that you can never leap past him.
Fuck this game. I’m glad Skunny died in Ancient Rome, sparing us from his existence in the 20th century. The end.
…is what I would say, if there weren’t a third Skunny game.
The Skunny series has more titles than Gunstar Heroes. More than Portal. More than Shenmue, which famously is a series of two games.
Christ. Well, let’s fuck this rotten melon.
Skunny in the Wild West‘s primary innovation is to give Skunny a gun. That sounds like it would solve all of Skunny’s problems, solve them once and for all. But don’t get too excited — it’s just a water gun. The gun takes about a half-dozen hits to kill the most basic enemies, like snakes and— aw, hell no.
Copysoft was only asking $20 at this point, so maybe they were beginning to sense that the demand for Skunny was somewhat more elastic than they’d initially imagined.
Again, I only made it a little ways through the first stage before I gave up. And it’s not just me. I found one complete playthrough of this game on YouTube, whereas there are a dozen or so videos where someone gives it a shot, dies repeatedly to awkwardly-positioned enemies and abysmal controls, and decides that they’d be better off making videos about the great replacement theory.
I worry about that one guy, though. Did he grow up with these games? What kind of effect would that have on a person? I shudder to think, though I am happy to have gotten through the Skunny trilogy.
…
…
…
You’ve got to be kidding me. Someone is making these up with AI and backdating them online to fuck with me specifically. Well, here’s Skunny: Lost in Space, which emphatically is not called Skunny: Special Agent for Hire. It exists.
The game opens with some cheap jokes. I’d call Lost in Space a cheap joke, but they were still asking $20 for it. That’s maybe the most insulting price yet, since this game is just worse Moon Patrol, an arcade game that was already a decade old when this was released.
But hey, you know what Moon Patrol didn’t have? Screaming. Now that I think about it, that might be Skunny’s most consistent trait. Copysoft tried to brand their mascot as an “animal with attitude” like countless other Sonic wannabes — Rocky Rodent, Aero the Acro-Bat, Awesome Possum, Zool, etc. But Skunny isn’t like a smirking little rascal. His is a life of fear and pain. Most video game protagonists die silently. Not Skunny. In space, everyone can hear Skunny scream.
And ho, what’s this?
Well, of course there’s a fifth Skunny game! That doesn’t even surprise me at this point. Copysoft was staffed by malevolent fiends who may once have intended to create family-friendly entertainment, but somewhere along the line learned to revel in wickedness. It’s possible that they were, in fact, extradimensional entities who prolonged their wretched lives through the inflicting of torture upon innocent souls. And so: Skunny Desert Raid.
This time, Skunny hops in a biplane to go kill Saddam Hussein and countless caricatures of brown people. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I mean, Saddam is named Sadman Insane here, but yeah. You might think it was a crude attempt to cash in on the Gulf War, but it came out in 1993, so I guess it was a tie-in to the time the US fired Tomahawks into downtown Baghdad as revenge for a failed assassination attempt on Dubya the Elder.
Five games is five more than Skunny deserved. Who was so hungry for Skunny — a phrase that might be the opposite of “cellar door” — that Copysoft kept pumping these out? We may never know the motivation at work. Perhaps we should simply take solace in the fact that Skunny never got a remaster. Did you know that if you count compilations, there have been more Bubsy releases in the 21st century than the 20th? The world is a strange and frequently nightmarish place. Goodnight, and goo—
I’m in hell. I’m dead and in hell. That’s the only explanation.
Skunny Kart is just bad Super Mario Kart. It rips off everything about that game, except that it runs at about ten frames a second, there’s ghosts on every track blocking your path despite being fucking ghosts, and there’s an octopus character named Pussy. Haha! Jokes! We love it!
Still, doesn’t this seem odd? Yes, Skunny Kart is uncreative dogshit. But it smacks of more effort than any of Copysoft’s previous releases. Why bother to build a whole new engine for a game when you were doing just fine making the same platformer and scrolling shooter over and over?
Well, what happened here is that Copysoft lived up to their name. Back in the early ’90s, a guy named Andy Edwardson took his prototype Mario Kart clone to Copysoft to see if they were interested in publishing it. They passed, but noticed that Andy had accidentally left the game’s source code with them. The enterprising miscreants decided that they might as well steal the code, throw in some stolen sound effects, and beat Edwardson to market.
Thankfully, this is one case where history has favored the just. Apogee published Wacky Wheels — which retains a niche following to this day — while Skunny Kart was an utter failure that signaled the final death of Copysoft and their bastard creation, Skunny. Sometimes, good really does win over evil.
No. I refuse. This isn’t possible.
Skunny got a “special edition” in 1995? Skunny starred in a Donkey Kong Country ripoff with shitty prerendered graphics, barrel-focused gameplay, and a level creator?
All is chaos. You can respond to this in one of two ways. You can despair at the fact that a squirrel named Skunny appeared in a full half-dozen computer games over the span of several years despite a total lack of interest, and that no God stepped in to stop this from happening.
Or you can find strength in this state of affairs. You can look at Phillipe Mercier, President of Copysoft and Clown Prince of Belgium, and take from him the inspiration to do whatever you want with your precious time on this earth, whether that’s making a video game about a screaming squirrel, dressing up in Troddlers cosplay and having disgusting Troddler sex, or making six video games about a screaming squirrel.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin who said he will stream a runthrough of all six games in a row if someone sends him eleven dollars.
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Nerding Day: Big Ears, Small Mouse
