2021 was a fantastic year for nerds: you got big swinginâ dork movies, huge video game releases, and nobody stuffed you in a locker unless you had lockers in your house and married a bully â which you probably did because the sex is crazy. But most of all, you got all these prime nerding days!
A Brazilian Megaman comic? Why, that’s probably just the story of Megaman battling Cut Man and Guts Man in Portuguese, right? It certainly couldn’t be about a robot boy horny for his sister while unexplained new characters rant about local politics, right?
Let the whimsy of Seanbaby, inventor of being funny on the Internet, deck your halls as he adds altered words to unaltered screenshots from the hit ’80s cartoon The Super Friends! What a card! A Christmas card, that is!
Rob Liefeld is a hard thing to explain, but the art, storytelling, laziness, derivativeness, and complete collapse of 2021’s The Shield does a pretty good job. A man who can’t draw, and doesn’t want to, made another attempt at rebooting a Captain America character, really blew it, and abandoned the project to someone who wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Rated T Cover price: $3.99
There’s an arcade game I love called Growl. It came out in 1990 and it was about Indiana Jones killing poachers. Not a gang of poachers, but every participant in an industrial poaching complex living in a country made entirely of barrels each of which contained a machine gun or rocket launcher. It only had four different enemies, and only two of those weren’t women or children. Every night I stare at the fourteen Pac-Man strategy guides I own and whisper, “I wish just one of you useless pieces of trash was about Growl.”
Well, somehow the darkness answered. On my bookshelf this morning was 13 Pac-Man books and this…
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neil Bailey, who knows that vengeance smells like burning gorilla flesh, and it does not come out of khaki.
In the mid ’90s, Nintendo created the Virtual Boy and it’s going to sound like I’m making it up if you haven’t heard of it. It was mounted on a little tripod at the height least likely to line up with a human face, which is what you put into it to play. It could only display two colors, and one of them is not one you would think. Also, it hurt. And like with all new video game technology, someone had the obvious and awesome idea– oh shit, with this we could take Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to a whole new level.
And like it happens every time, this “whole new level” ended up being “worse, only also insane.” Let’s talk about Teleroboxer for the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
That cover is a 10/10. It’s a game about punching robots and the artist painted that so hard he didn’t leave enough room for the title. “Maybe the robot could be punching the logo right into the viewer’s fucking eye?” said a genius who gave perfect notes. But this does not represent the tone of the game. This robot looks like something Frank Miller’s Batman would build to punch-torture information out of Aquaman. But the actual game is more like Japanese producers adapting Frank Miller’s Pornhub searches into a kid’s show. I’ll explain, but first let’s adjust our Nintendo Virtual Boy Face Console IPD Game System.
At least the first three pages of every Virtual Boy game manual were delicate instructions on how to adjust the knobs and sliders to minimize headaches or seizures. That’s not important to this article, except to remind you Teleroboxer would have been played semi-nauseously as your brain and eyes disagreed on blurry shapes. If you’ve ever had an insect crawl into your ear while you realized you’ve failed again at making homemade binoculars, that’s Virtual Boy.
You may have already come up with this take on your own, but the name “Teleroboxer” fucking sucks. It’s no way to refer to a robot punching game. Teleroboxer is something Jeff Bezos would develop to replace your hometown’s factory workers. It’s at least two too many attempts at cute like calling Robocop “Robofficer CompuAndroidetective.” And I think they know, because the stupid word “teleroboxer” makes up at least 20% of all text in the manual. It’s as if they thought saying it over and over would make it work. It never does. “Teleroboxer” is a home office solution for your shipping needs. It’s an Esperanto word for underwear you found in a kitchen. It’s anything other than a first person mech kumite built out of blood-colored pixels.
The first enemy you face is a British man named Johnny who pilots a … let me see if I can describe his boxing robot. It has fish lips and a skull pried open to expose its brain. It has large entry holes on the nipples and handles on the sides of its head in case it needs to pull its own face off during a fight. Here, I’ll show you what it looks like through the Virtual Boy console:
This looks like something Vincent D’onofrio would pilot in a video game version of The Cell. It’s a robot CyberSatan would build to torment unfaithful fishwives. I don’t understand the tone of this game at all. Let’s look this up in the manual and see if we can find out more.
The man in that pain fetish suit is a punk rock baseball player? From a team called “Cookies?” And hold on, it says “he doesn’t like to dress like a punk rocker” right next to a drawing of him dressed like that. I imagine everyone has a different idea of what “dress like a punk rocker” means, but if someone was shirtless and holding their camouflage pants up with spike suspenders, you wouldn’t assume they were in a ska band. I don’t think Engrish and bad creative decisions can explain this madness. Maybe Virtual Boy manuals were how Japanese intelligence officers sent coded messages?
Anyway, I beat Johnny and found out these people aren’t inside the 12-foot-tall robots. They’re a few steps behind them, driving the teleroboxers with VR headsets. Which seems way less cool for almost the exact same amount of danger. Johnny, if you’re going to leave baseball to die in robot combat, do it from the center of a robot explosion, not accidentally stepped on after the future world champion invents “robot shoving.”
The next enemy in the game is a balding man with white hair named Rick, who might be lying about his age (32). And maybe the Teleroboxer developers knew the last robot was a little weird, so they made Rick’s pretty standard. He just pilots a very pregnant skeleton with spiked combat titties. You know, seeing me type this makes me realize I have some questions. Let’s see what the manual says about Rick.
Oh, (Big) Rick’s robot is SPOKONG, so that’s probably a gorilla tummy, not a post-term pregnancy. And look at the back story thrown together for Rick. He drove his twin brother away at age 15 and then became a teleroboxer to track him down? This sounds like a story an elderly man would tell you to explain how he got trapped in a robot. “I’m thirty two! Have you seen a mech pilot? Looks just like me? Hates me? Maybe we could look for him together in my gorilla, ladies?”
Wait a minute. I think I saw something strange when I punched (Big) Rick. Let’s look closer. Virtual Boy, ENHANCE.
I-is that a face? Smiling from inside his ape? Rick, I think I found your twin brother! He was with you all along! And I was kind of right about this ape being pregnant!
Unfortunately, a teleroboxer match doesn’t end until you punch your opponent to pieces, so if Rick’s twin brother was in there, he didn’t make it. He found him after all these years and he spent his last moments showing Rick precisely what he would look like if he was soup.
When I beat Johnny, he ran away in humiliation. Rick didn’t handle the loss quite as well. He went full gorilla, beating his chest at me until he caved in his own chest. I don’t think I’m misinterpreting the text to say he died right at me. His portrait changed to a picture of him with his eyes rolled back in his head and red foam pouring from his mouth. And it stays like this. For the rest of the game, I will be haunted by the corpse of the opponent who hated me so much he beat himself to death to ruin my post-fight interview.
Our next opponent is a… okay, I guess if I was describing this to a police sketch artist I’d say it’s a “combat medic ninja in a propeller helmet piloting a triangle-hatted catfish bot?” And they describe themselves as “SEX: ? AGE: 4“. I have a lot of questions, but this character isn’t in the manual. Fuck this thing. This looks like a Turkish Transmorpher. Did they include the last-place entry of a “design your own video game robot” contest as a joke? It looks like a buttplug and a tractor shared the same teleportation accident. Again, fuck this thing.
Next up is BOMKUN, who is finally something comprehensible. He’s a clown bomb piloted by a plum farmer in pajamas named PICKY from ?. I don’t have any followup questions, which is lucky because they’re not in the manual either. All we know is they’re 527 years old, that human face they’re wearing probably isn’t theirs, and that’s plenty.
PICKY and this sad face continue the game’s tradition of doing everything they can to make you feel bad for winning, but I think things are about to turn around because my next opponent is PRIN, a horny sex gremlin. There’s no way Teleroboxer is going to screw this up.
Oh no. The pilot is sixteen? Teleroboxer, you want me to punch apart a teenage girl’s sex robot? This has to be some kind of mistake. Let’s see if this thing is in the manual.
So Cheri wanted to be a fashion model, but before she left high school she decided a career in mech fighting made more sense because of her “tomboy looks and style.” And the artist chose to demonstrate this masculine style by giving her a twenty inch waist, the haircut toddlers draw to indicate “woman,” and a bra and miniskirt. And what’s this backstory? There’s a rumor going around that she pilots a stolen sexmech? Are you telling me in the near future there will be enough 12-foot sex robots that a child can steal one and no one will noti– ha ha listen to me. That’s the most believable part of Teleroboxer so far. There will definitely be a stage of human civilization where kids drive hand-me-down sex robots to their gig economy jobs as death arena fighters.
As I mentioned, Teleroboxer really wants you to feel uncomfortable when you win, and they will do so at any cost. So after you beat Cheri’s butterfacebot, the young pilot steps into the spotlight and starts sexily taking off her clothes. The enemies in this game are fucking nuts, but until now they’ve been made of disconnected hallucinations and incomprehensible choices. So it’s suspicious that the one female teleroboxer’s whole deal is “beautiful fashion girl, but a cool one, driving a pleasure bot who can’t wait to get nude.” If you asked the Teleroboxer staff to name a non-sex thing about women they wouldn’t understand the question, and we’re truly lucky one of them had enough sense to cut away from this kid’s strip tease before she took off more than her goggles.
Teleroboxer Developer #1: “It’s the ’90s, so the reward for beating the girl character is obvious. She submits herself to you and slowly removes her–”
Teleroboxer Developer #2: “Headset! Slowly removes her VR headset! Jesus, that was clo–“
Teleroboxer Developer #1: “… paaaanties.“
Back to Teleroboxer‘s idea of “normal,” your next opponent is Kevin, an Australian boy who dropped out of 4th grade to kill men with a kangaroo robot. I can’t wait to see how they make this weirder in the manual.
This 9-year-old’s bio is off to a weird start already because that’s a drawing of a full-grown man punching himself in the crotch. And it says Kevin only pursued boxing to prove himself to his father who already gave up on his acting career? This is tragic. I don’t want to be a part of Kevin’s cycle of abuse. Why are they trying to make me feel so guilty for beating these people? Next you’re going to tell me that after I win I’m going to thumb Kevin’s tiny eyes out.
Oh my god. I’m doing it. I’m thumbing Kevin’s tiny eyes out.
Okay, but that’s the end of the strangeness, right? Kevin’s not going to escape on a rocket of farts or anything?
God damn it, Teleroboxer.
Destroying Kevin’s life and taking his eyes was the last step in reaching the final boss. MAMORU isn’t in the manual or described in any cutscenes, so all I know about him is that he’s a ninja in a ninja bot, which is almost sarcastically normal compared with the rest of the game. He’s the kind of idea that begins with “I don’t know” and ends with “fuck you.” Sorry, everyone. After all this lunacy we’re going to end on a totally ordina– wait, what’s this?
We are not the true champion?
There’s a secret “LEGENDARY CHAMP!?” And their name, sex, age, and country are all “?” This is going to be the least coherent thing anyone has ever laid eyes upon. The Teleroboxer Legendary Champ promises to be nothing but dislogic and guilt taken form! A vision of irrationality from which I will never recov–
Oh, it’s a cat.
Being piloted by a cat.
And it has the name Milky. Maybe this is a reference to how all the robots have weird nipples? Unless this is… no. No, there’s no way a game developer was self-indulgent enough to make their stupid pet cat the final boss of their video game, is there? Impossible. If that was the case, they would have dedicated precious time and resources to an elaborate credit sequence where you punch photos of the lead designers. Which would be insa–
Oh, they did that. Your reward for beating this sci-fi boxing game about childhood trauma is traveling through the stars with people responsible, and hitting them. When you think about it, it’s the only way… the perfect way for Teleroboxer to end– using your mighty hands of steel to beat programmer Yuzuru Ogawa until he turns into a woman, and then punching him eight more times.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot DogSupreme: Mark, who is naught but a raccoon piloting a manmech.
There was a string of films in the ’90s that painted a very specific picture of the near future â 90s Futurism, weâll call it. Or, in laymanâs terms, The Promise of Timecop. The Timecop Promise swore weâd gallop into the next decade on the backs of Prodigy vocalists cloned by The Sixth Day technology, wearing clothes Marilyn Manson lost in a move. Weâd all have haircuts the 1980s were simply too cowardly to embrace. Every gun would look like it was stolen from a Virtua Cop machine, and every bladed weapon would be electrified. Physical media would not only continue to exist but would mutate into some indecipherable geometric riddle designed to flunk mentally unstable applicants from a bus driverâs exam. Or everything would just be Sony MiniDiscs. And virtual reality would be so lifelike youâd TimeCream your jeans.
The 1995 cultural flashpoint Virtuosity possesses all these elements: techno music and chunky handguns complimenting optimistic predictions of the evolution of physical media and an obsession with virtual reality. Virtuosity was by no means the first â90s Futurism film, nor the most commercially successful, nor the most significant. But it is my favorite â90s Futurism film, and therefore the best, because it features Russell Crowe wearing a series of fanciful suits in the colors of his favorite Ninja Turtles.
If youâve never seen Virtuosity, please check the URL in your browser, because you have mistakenly arrived at the wrong website. But in case you need a refresher, hereâs the basic story: It is the year 1999, and also the future. Because we cannot stop giving the LAPD a multi-billion-dollar budget, the police are at the forefront of technological innovation. Theyâre like Elon Musk if he sucked even harder but the stuff he made actually worked. The cops have designed state-of-the-art virtual reality systems and an entire subdivision dedicated to perfecting Artificial Intelligence, which they created at some point but donât like to make a big deal out of it. They also have a lab where synthetic human clones can be hatched from eggs.
The LAPD has conquered death, is what Iâm getting at, and the Queen of the Police, Louise Fletcher, drives around on an electric cart with her business slave, William Fichtner, to supervise all the exciting new CopTek.
For some reason, the cops are using their powerful VR system to run âtraining simulatorsâ for new recruits, because their real-life training of six months of community college and an obstacle course was deemed too dangerous. Presumably too many cadets were rolling their ankles during the tire hop or accidently stabbing their pencils into their eyes during particularly challenging written exams. To protect future officers from this embarrassment, recruits are strapped into Lawnmower Man chairs and immersed in photorealistic virtual worlds designed to teach them how to be more effective threats to public safety.
Because this is the futuristic world of 1999 as envisioned by screenwriters in 1995 whose understanding of VR was limited to whatever they could glean by spying on children at Software Etc., the training simulators are exactly as sophisticated as a Mega Man II stage â trainees must chase down a Robot Lord and fire as many virtual bullets into his virtual body as they can squeeze out of their virtual guns. The Robot Lord in question is one of the police departmentâs hyper-advanced A.I.s — an entity called SID 6.7.
SID is a composite of the personalities of 200 serial killers and also Hitler, a cocktail diluted by so much slobbering crazy that it loses all nuance. The simulator might as well be tasking recruits to protect citizens from a runaway boulder. SID is the training partner equivalent of letting a 6-year-old make you dinner â it sounds like a fun idea, but all youâre left with is colorful diarrhea and a solemn vow to never trust again. Matching wits with SID will provide trainees with the experience they need to hunt down a rampaging baboon, but little else in terms of functional detective skills. Maybe baboons are a big problem in the futuristic world of 1999, but the movie is unclear on this point.
SID 6.7 is played by Russell Crowe with the reckless abandon of a child who has just murdered his babysitter and can eat as much ice cream and thumb tacks as he pleases. Crowe approaches the role like he is trying to see how much he can get away with on a scene-by-scene basis until a crewmember wrestles him to the ground so the building can be evacuated. His performance is that of a man trying to conjure a felony drug conviction. If Joaquin Phoenix had won his Joker Oscar in 1995, Russell Crowe as SID 6.7 wouldâve run onstage and swallowed him whole. SID is the answer to the age-old question, âWhat if I hired Max Headroom to murder my parents and paid him in truck stop cocaine?â He is so dangerous that the cops are using convicts to test out the training simulator until they can figure out how to keep SID in line.
Disgraced former detective, Parker Barnes, in prison for shooting a camera crew who jumped in front of him like scare actors at a haunted house during an intense gunfight in a hive of terrorists, is the only convict to have ever outsmarted SID. At least, thatâs what we are told. The extent to which he âoutsmartsâ SID appears to be âhe correctly identifies SID as the only white person in a room full of Japanese businessmen.â
Parker is played by Denzel Washington, and that will never stop fascinating me. Denzel is one of the finest actors of any generation, and you would simply never know it by glancing at his filmography. He loves schlock. Schlock like Virtuosity, and the world is a better place for it. Parker also has a fully functional cyborg arm, as befitting the futuristic world of 1999.
SID figures out how to murder a guy in virtual reality, so the Queen of Police orders that he be shut down. But SIDâs sociopathic creator, Darryl, decides to set SID free instead. Darryl is a man with a frighteningly angular skull who has unquestionably written several Gab posts about involuntary celibacy. Darryl has lost more than one friendship over Magic: The Gathering. He rants about âhistorical inaccuracyâ from behind an anime avatar whenever black people or women show up in video games.Â
Darryl births SID from one of the synthetic clone eggs we discussed earlier, and SID begins murdering his way through the futuristic world of 1999 Los Angeles like the Hamburglar after shooting Officer Big Mac during a cheeseburger heist and deciding he has nothing left to lose. The police have no choice but to spring Parker from jail to hunt SID down, because none of their training has prepared them to handle SID (see ârunaway boulder,â above).
Parker and SID have a series of action-packed future adventures, including a futuristic car chase, a futuristic UFC fight, and a futuristic child abduction. SID collects a number of outfits, most notably a purple suit presumably donated to the production by Bill Bellamy.
Their game of future cat and timemouse culminates in a skyscraper fist fight and a battle of wits to defuse a bomb before it detonates Kaley Cuoco. Parker rips SIDâs twinkly electronic brain cube out of his meaty android skull and smashes it beneath a moving vehicle as Lords of Acid launch us into the end credits on a stereophonic bullet train of techno.
Virtuosity is a movie that takes place in a version of 1999 that I cannot stop thinking about. Not merely because it didnât come true, but because it never could have come true. The movie was released in 1995, which means the â90s Future it was predicting was only four years away. Thatâs a single presidential administration. Thatâs the length of time between two Batman sequels. We canât even reliably predict if a highway offramp will finish construction in that amount of time. Virtuosity makes the unfulfillable promises of an alcoholic who slept through Christmas. Virtuosity is a more embarrassing called shot than the time Babe Ruth pointed his bat to the heavens and confidently declared, âIâm going to take an uncomfortable shit on every star in this galaxy,â only to tragically die before space travel was invented. There was simply no way we could have ever reached the heights Virtuosity dared us to achieve in the amount of time it demanded we reach them.
In the interest of the public good, and because the only other way I can organize my thoughts about the film is in a stack of feverishly handwritten notebooks like Kevin Spacey in Se7en (and presumably like Kevin Spacey in real life), I will now chronicle my favorite â90s Futurism moments in Virtuosity.
The cops all dress in skin tight vinyl uniforms, like Goth Nazis. They look like inappropriately sexual furniture at a daycare center. Theyâre dressed like they exclusively police the splash zone at a Golden Corral. Theyâre dressed like personal trainers at Meatloafâs sexnasium. Also, Parkerâs partner Donovan is the evil cop from the SAW movies. Iâm not sure what that means, but I am certain it means something.
When theyâre inside the simulation, Parker tracks down SID by noticing a smiley face emoticon above a sushi restaurant. This is meant to be a training simulator for police officers, but the clue to discovering SIDâs whereabouts is completely unrelated to police work. Itâs a trivia question about â90s Internet culture, and itâs a trivia question for children. I can only assume this means that detective work in the future is indistinguishable from Celebrity Jeopardy.
Related to that point, Parker says something to Donovan about being on the lookout for SIDâs distinct eyes as they enter the sushi bar. But SID is âhiding outâ in the restaurant by being the only Russell Crowe wearing a Kelly green suit in a sea of Japanese people.
Both of those characteristics are going to leap out at me like an escaped jungle cat before I even get around to noticing his eyes. Again, it cannot be overstated how little anyone could learn about police work from this simulation. I suspect Police Queen Louise Fletcher had been looking for an excuse to pull the plug on the VR simulation program long before SID figured out how to kill people in it. Itâs comforting to know that the 1999 of the Future still has all the same problems with incredibly shitty software nobody wants to admit is bad.
Thereâs a big olâ TitanTron viewscreen in the police station broadcasting the simulation so the whole department can watch along. When Parker and Donovan get pulled out of the simulation, the view on the screen dramatically zooms out of SIDâs world like a Brian De Palma shot.
This means that the police took the time to program artistic camera angles to make the simulation more interesting for everyone to watch. Also, after SID electrocutes him to death in the simulation, Donovan stays strapped in his future chair convulsing like a werewolf transformation for at least two minutes before anyone thought to unplug him. We know they couldâve pulled Donovan out at any time, because they pull Parker out right before SID smirk-chokes him to death like a haunted puppet. So that room full of stuffed-shirt bureaucrats was just staring at Donovan as the man loudly expired. Just the noisiest, most distracting death imaginable outside of an elevator collapse. The Future Police are either far too professional to interrupt their notetaking to get Donovan out of the simulation, or the simulation is powered by human souls.
Okay, one last thing about the simulation â the Queen of Police notes with some dismay that âvirtual reality was supposed to be a safe place to train my law enforcement peopleâ after Donovan strokes out on a gurney. Once again, I must question what scenario this training sim was meant to prepare anyone for. A shootout with an indestructible night club manager? Is that a common beat for cops of the future? Given the evidence Virtuosity provides us, I can arrive at no other conclusion.
Also, SID possesses the combined instincts of 200 serial killers and mass murderers, and he uses this knowledge to shoot up a restaurant during lunch. Just like Hitler wouldâve done.
Prisons in the distant farscape of 1999 are almost entirely automated. Also, each cell is a backlit white cube, like the prisoners are a bunch of background dancers at the VMAs.
Parker is attacked on his way back to his cell, but he deftly uses his cyborg arm to defend himself. We have solved the problem of lost limbs in this future, but weâre still pursuing VR technology like it is the crudely polygonal road to Valhalla. â90s Futurism was inexplicably enamored of VR, which if you recall was a technology that fully existed in 1995, only with disturbingly shitty graphics. I want to see a ’90s future movie where VR is no less a fundamental part of everyday life, but the technology stopped at the Virtual Boy.
Darryl speaks openly to SID on the sim-room TitanTron about his secret plan to break SID out of the simulation and set him loose in the real world.
There are people working behind him in the background. Everyone can hear their conversation. SID is a program; surely this conversation couldâve been conducted via text. But we didnât have text messages back in the â90s Future, because there is nothing bodaciously futuristic about text.
Darryl has also built a sex chess A.I. named Sheila on the same official police training system as SID, and nobody has alerted the media about this.
As was similarly foretold in Timecop, futuristic sex pests just fuck their computers whenever and wherever the mood strikes them. Throwing on a visor and shooting ropes to techno music is a totally acceptable way to spend your lunch break in the office of the future. But perhaps Sheila is also being developed for training purposes. If thatâs the case, is she supposed to teach cops how to play chess or how to satisfy their partners? Because they donât seem to have much use for either lesson.
Weird cubes are the preferred media format in the Bradburyian futuretopia of 1999. They look like LED yo-yos at the Air and Space Museum gift shop.
Hands down my favorite aspect of â90s Futurism is the unhinged versions of physical media they invent. For some reason, nobody realized there simply wouldnât be much physical media in the future. This is especially poignant in Virtuosity, a film about a CD-ROM universe ruled by a digital Russell Crowe.
Also, murderous runaway androids appear to be somewhat old hat in this universe. Nobody bats an eye when SID escapes the computer system. They take it totally in stride. Itâs like if the cops found out the Christian devil was real and just sighed âhere we go againâ and put out an APB.
The first stop on SIDâs rampage is a loft techno club, which were big in the ’90s future, and constitute my second favorite aspect of â90s Futurism.
Everyone listens to techno in the future â90s. Not only does everyone listen to techno, but all music is techno. Itâs like La Bouche won the Franchise Wars from Demolition Man. Also, everyone in this 1999 Los Angeles of the future dresses like an off-duty American Gladiator.
Like every celebrity DJ before him, SIDâs first act of public violence is to hijack a programmable turntable and use it to hold a room full of people hostage.
He steals this turntable from Traci Lords. As with the Donovan/SAW connection, I am powerless to decode this information.
When Parker and his BFF psychotherapist Madison access Darrylâs home computer, we see that it is exclusively voice activated. Thereâs no keyboard â Parker specifically makes a note of this. I appreciate the accessibility option, and sometimes I want to be able to juggle while Iâm doing my work, but this must have made it extremely difficult for Darryl to hatch his nefarious plans if he had to speak every stage of them aloud to his desktop PC. Also, Darrylâs computer took the time to make 3D models of all the murderers in SIDâs personality and animate them shooting beams of light out of their mouths to a tiny infant version of SID.
The only reason to do this is because it is objectively hilarious, making Darrylâs home computer my favorite character in the film.
Virtuosityâs version of 1999 is far enough in the future for androids, glass-eating clone bodies hatched from glistening sweaty eggs, and Johnny Cab robot bartenders, but near enough for Ken Shamrock to still be fighting in the UFC at the Olympic Auditorium.
We have no choice but to believe that Ken Shamrock is an android. To be honest, everything about Ken Shamrock makes much more sense when you consider the possibility that he emerged from a giant egg as a fully formed adult.
SID is listening to a song by Russell Crowe’s band as he drives up to kidnap Kaley Cuoco. So, Russell Crowe exists somewhere separately in this elseworld, and SID is his biggest fan.
The other possibility is that whomever SID stole the truck from was listening to Russell Crowe, but I reject that explanation. Not in my Virtuosity.
SID brings his own Death TV graphics package with him to the television studio in the filmâs finale. He took the time to put that together, as it was an integral part of his plan to capture the imagination of TV viewers everywhere. I assume he made them on Darrylâs home computer using only voice commands.
When he realizes the heroes have trapped him back in VR at the end of the movie, SID sends Parker to digital Hell, which is a blood red landscape populated by Russell Croweâs face.
SID is an A.I. that can be removed from the simulation at will, which means itâs unlikely he would be able to alter the world around him to such a dramatic extent unless Darryl gave him admin privileges, which Darryl would never do, because Darryl has the nefarious gait of a man who despises sharing. His need to be in control is so complete that he prefers to play Dungeons & Dragons alone. His apartment has a single chair in it, because he is allergic to friendship. So, this can only mean the Russell Crowe Hellscape â the Pit of Crowekoon if you will â already existed in the simulation.
All roads – virtual or otherwise – lead to Croweface.
Ok, I’m just going to say it. Burger King is the incel of fast food restaurants. We all know the Burger King spokesthing is a disgusting grotesquery of fast food mascots. In the early 2000s, Burger King executives decided that since Mcdonald’s had cornered the market on advertising to young kids, they would focus their ad efforts on teenagers and young adults. Whenever marketers turn their baseball caps backward and try to figure out what teenagers want, it rarely goes well, and this time it went particularly bad. I like to imagine the marketing meeting that created The King started from this teen free association word cloud and went from there:
To celebrate this unholy mascot rebirth, Burger King decided to jump into developing three video games that were initially supposed to be downloadable only from Xbox Live, but the executives were so proud of the games they decided to make physical copies and sell them out of Burger King stores. There were three games in total: Pocketbike Racer, a fairly standard racing game, Big Bumpin, which had something to do with bumper cars, and Sneak King, the weirdest Advergame ever made.
The most insane thing about Sneak King is how it’s exactly the game Burger King wanted it to be. You play a man in a mask sneaking up on unsuspecting victims to give them Burger King. Here’s the thing, if people see you bringing the Burger King, they will not accept it from you. They look at the horror show bringing them food, and run for their lives from the restaurant’s mascot, and this is how the restaurant begged to be portrayed!
Weirder still, these NPCs want to eat. They’re given scores for how hungry they are, and the hungrier they are, the more points you get for delivering food to them. But it doesn’t matter if they’re starving to death on a desert island. If they gaze upon the Burger King mascot with that bag of greasy food they will reach out an emaciated hand and slap it to the ground in disgust. It also looked like shit. Check out the curb appeal of this hungry guy’s house. Hey buddy, if you don’t want to get ambushed by a burger monster, maybe don’t move into a place that looks like a gym toilet.
This guy is starving. He’s thinking, damn, I would love a Whopper. You can see the little cheeseburger above his head like a cartoon cat looking at a pet bird, but if he were to turn around and see the Burger King, he’d yell, “NOT FROM THIS CREATURE.”
And even if you do successfully sneak up on people with the burger, they still scream in fear after they see what’s shoved it into their hand. You do a little victory dance, but you’re alone in it. They don’t seem especially happy to get that burger at all. More like befuddled and threatened… unsure what to do with the burger, definitely not eat it of course, but worried about the consequence of not accepting. It’s like if you were in a car wreck and someone immediately ran up to you and tossed a pizza through your shattered window. You’re not happy, but you’re not going to start an argument about a free pizza.
If you are spotted, the person who spots you points and an alarm goes off. So, in the fictional universe of Sneak King, you play a known pest with a pattern. There are protocols in place to stop you. You are the menace. The city has placed alarms specifically for you and your, almost definitely, sex thing.
The trailer for Sneak King claims The King is the hero of the game, and the enemy he’s fighting is hunger, which doesn’t make any sense unless he’s some kind of Phantom Of The Opera style anti-hero who’s also attempting to teach us a lesson about not judging people by their appearances? Because, again, people around him will literally pass out from hunger rather than take food from this monster. They live their lives on high alert to avoid this pervert’s sudden and unsolicited burgers.
In an interview with Game Informer the year the Burger King games were released, the founder of Blitz, the studio that collaborated with Burger King to make the games, said Burger King brought a lot of game ideas to the table. The developers ended up striking a deal with them where they would get complete creative control over one game, Burger King would get full control over the other, and they would collaborate on the third. Sneak King is the game BK had full creative control over! With unlimited choices and a budget that couldn’t possibly be anything less than “fucking plenty,” they thought this serial burger ambusher simulator was perfect for their brand.
It’s not like they didn’t put a lot of consideration into this game. They really thought about how creepy they wanted it to be. One of the promotional images they circulated was The King hiding in a trash can as a young, unsuspecting, blonde woman approached it. According to the developers, Burger King was precious with their characters. They wanted them to be presented in a specific way; that way just happened to be creepy as hell.
Blitz project managers met almost daily with Burger King’s marketing staff to talk about the characters, but their concerns were weird. They wanted them to be big, taller than all the characters in the game. They also didn’t want The King to be exposed to any danger, without considering that in a video game, if you’re not being exposed to danger, you are the danger. But to that point, in a universe of no danger, what is the game aspect of the game? Burger King Presents: Carefully Turning The Page Of An Antique Book EXXXTREME.
Also, when I say Burger King had firm ideas for what they wanted from their characters, they really only had three characters to worry about: The King, The Subservient Chicken, and Whopper Jr. who were deep cuts from previous commercials of the late ’90s and early 2000s. They padded out the rest of their games by making enduring celebrity model, Brooke Burke, a playable character, along with two generic Burger King employees, a generic biker named Biker, and a woman called Jolly whose role in Burger King world remains unexplained. (I think she might be The King’s parole officer).
I believe it was a man named “Seanbaby” who wrote about this game in the pages of something called a “video game magazine” who asked:
It’s a real shame they spent so much time developing Biker, because there’s a deep, rich, Burger King extended universe they already created in the seventies and eighties. They went with a King Arthur adjacent theme, including Sir Shakes A Lot, who is always cold because he drinks too many shakes, and their Merlin was a french fry replicating robot named The Wizard Of Fries. He doesn’t have a cool wizard hat, and you never really see him perform magic, but he does ride a horse and wear a cowboy hat which means Burger King throws together mascots the same way I throw together birthday sex: wizard, robot, cowboy.
I tell you that only to show how Burger King has never known how to handle their characters. They brought The King back from retirement but left a wizard, robot, cowboy on the shelf because there’s no way that would appeal to eighteen-year-old stoners hungry for a late night snack.
When Burger King eventually decided to ditch The King as their Mascot, their CFO told Bloomberg news it was because he “tended to scare away women and children.” Yeah, no dip. He looked like he ripped the skin off children who spent the night in his museum. And do you think maybe this didn’t help, Burger King?
“Our Mascot will follow you home, laaaadies” is not going to draw women into your restaurant, my guys. Burger King does this all the time. They run weird, hyper-aggressive or hyper-sexual campaigns under the assumption “all publicity is good publicity,” and this will get us in the news. Remember when they tweeted, “Women belong in the kitchen” on international women’s day? It was to promote culinary scholarships for women they were providing, but also, it wasn’t. It was being an edgelord for publicity because that’s Burger King’s whole thing. They’re not sure who their ideal customer is, but they think he’s probably an asshole.
I honestly think Sneak King is the worst example of Burger King attempting to be edgy and tripping into creep territory, which is really saying something considering they once advertised their Spongebob Squarepants BK big kids meal with a parody video of Baby Got Back implying Spongebob was fucking Sandy Cheeks. I’m sorry, that’s just ridiculous because canonically, Spongebob reproduces by budding. He would find this disgusting:
Listen, I get it. Their fries are pretty good when they’re hot, and not many other fast food franchises carry onion rings. I’m not saying Burger King is any more evil than any other corporate overlord, but I do think they hate their customers a little bit more than other restaurants. Whenever they release a new ungodly hybrid of cheeto and meat, or tweet a pic of the Subservient Chicken in full bondage gear in front of a fryer with the caption, “batter me, daddy,” they’re spitting in your face and saying, “Yeah, you like that, don’t you. We act this way because of you!”
*Thanks to Burger King for sponsoring this article!
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