In the 1970s video games were considered a niche market with a small cult following. Now though, with unbelievably realistic graphics and gameplay, the video games industry has grown to an $11.7 billion business. Despite the increased revenue and fanbase this hasn’t stopped some truly bizarre releases over the years. Below is a countdown of the weirdest games to come out.
1. Fast Food Atari 2600
Starting things off is this game from 1982. Some may consider this retro cool, others will just call it plain random and weird. The aim of the game is simple: you play as a giant mouth and have to eat as much junk food as possible. Why? And what is the point? In today’s modern age, with the rise in obesity in young children and the constant advertising of eating your five fruit and veg a day, this game would never get released. To top off the weirdness, if you ate six purple pickles then it was game over…I rest my case!
2. Sneak King
Keeping in line with the fast food theme, Burger King came out with this video game. You play as the Burger King and basically have to sneak up on people and offer them some of the fast food giants finest burgers, hence the name of the game. Now, I know what you must thin-king…you must be jo-king…see what I did there! OK, moving on
3. Mr. Mosquito
If you could be any animal in the world, what would you be? A cat? A dog? A unicorn?? How about a mosquito? Well if you have ever wondered what it would be like as a mosquito then wonder no more for in this game that is exactly what you play as. The whole point is to hover around a family in their home waiting for an opportunity to swoop in and suck their blood. Basically this game sucks!
4. The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy
Combine Mario’s advntures with Humpty Dumpty and this is basically what you get. Playing as Dizzy the egg you must save your family from the evil clutches of the wizard that has captured them by solving puzzles. It was released in 1991 on the NES and was truly egg-citing!
5. Toilet Kids
This very weird game was born in Japan and released on the Turbografx system in 1992. The general concept is a young boy wakes up in the middle of the night to use the toilet. In doing so he gets sucked down the toilet where he finds himself involved in a battle against creatures who resemble toilet fixtures, including a giant evil urinal. Only Japan could produce such a wonderous, imaginative and truly bizarre video game such as this!
6. The Typing of the Dead
Based off House of the Dead but with the aim of encouraging and educating boys to type, The Typing of the Dead was actually quite fun. Played out as a first-person shoot-’em-up, the gamer had to type the phrases or words that appeared on screen to kill off the zombies. Coming out in 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast this game was popular enough to have two sequels follow it. As fun and popular as it may have been, it was bizarre nonetheless.
7. Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure
By day, Snotty Ragsdale is a millionaire but by night he is a crime-fighting superhero who goes by the name of Boogerman. Yeah, I’ve never heard of him either! But a video game based on this gross character was released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo in 1995. To defeat villains Boogerman would flick his boogers at them, belch a green gas at them or fart in their general direction. Kinda funny, massively disgusting, insanely random!
8. Seaman
In this game you have to care for a pet fish…that has a human head. What more do you need to justify this inclusion? One of the only games to take advantage of the Dreamcast’s microphone, you used this to talk to your “pet” as it grows in its aquarium. The voice that was used to narrate this game and talk to your “pet” is none other than Leanord “Dr Spock” Nimoy.
9. Boon-Ga Boon-Ga
One of the most bizarre games included in this list, Boon-Ga Boon-Ga was a South Korean video game developed for the Japanese arcades. Otherwise known as Spank ‘em, the player approaches a denim clad bottom and selects from a group of characters they wish to spank. The eight characters include an ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, gangster, mother-in-law, gold-digger, prostitute, child molester and con-artist. Enough said!
10. Parappa The Rapper
Hugely popular in the 90s when this game came out, PaRappa was a rapping cartoon dog that goes on an adventure to learn new raps in order to impress a flower he has a crush on called Sunny Funny. Other rappers he met along the way included an onion with a black belt, a frog at the flea market and an Italian moose dictator named Mooselini! You wouldn’t think this game would have success written all over it, yet it’s originality appealed to thousands of gamers. Just goes to show that bizarreness can win in some cases.
