[PEN-L:7690] Sado-imperialism

[knowware@xxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

>Hiro leaps to avoid the rocket-powered missiles, then pivots and fires.
>Green laser beams ricochet off the fortress walls, exploding like fireworks.
>
>Superfly's fragged! Body parts drop from the sky like bloody rain, gibs
>splattering the walls and if you don't know that's short for "giblets",
>slang for chunks of flesh, then you're a llama, a newbie loser, and
>shouldn't be hanging around Kyoto 2455 AD in the first place.

I have an idea for a first-person shooter game called American Meat-Pie. In
it the player takes the role of a "foreign terrorist" who seizes a busload
of hideously obese American tourists (called "tubbies"), ties them up and
blows them away one-by-one execution style. The gimmick is that when you
shoot these disgusting creatures, semi-digested junk food splatters all over
the place instead of blood and guts. To make the game more interesting, each
of the tubbies wears a celebrity face that the player can select from a
database of news anchors, government officials, billionaires, corporate CEOs
and hedge-fund operators. The bus driver is always saved for last and can be
left to grovel and plead for as long as the player wishes. While he is
grovelling, the player orders the bus driver to eat the vomitous junk food
bits left behind by the exploding tubbies.

I think there would be a huge market for this game, both in the U.S.A. and
especially outside the U.S.A.


>The Guardian, London 					Tuesday June 1, 1999
>
>In the line of fire
>
>To computer game fans, John Romero is a god, the man who created some of
>the most gruesome and commercially successful shoot-'em-ups. But since the
>Colorado school killings, people have been asking him difficult questions.
>Does he have blood on his hands? Paul Keegan reports
>
>
>Hiro's on a rampage. He's a vaguely Asian crusader with giant muscles
>bursting through an armoured torso, but since you're watching the world
>through his eyes, all you see is his Ion Blaster gun and dungeon floors and
>walls hurtling by so fast your stomach somersaults into your throat.
>
>Whoa, look out! It's Superfly Johnson Hiro's gargantuan bald and black
>nemesis streaking by, blasting away with his Sidewinder gun.
>
>Hiro leaps to avoid the rocket-powered missiles, then pivots and fires.
>Green laser beams ricochet off the fortress walls, exploding like fireworks.
>
>Superfly's fragged! Body parts drop from the sky like bloody rain, gibs
>splattering the walls and if you don't know that's short for "giblets",
>slang for chunks of flesh, then you're a llama, a newbie loser, and
>shouldn't be hanging around Kyoto 2455 AD in the first place.
>
>"Ha! Take that, dude!" John Romero sits at his computer, chortling. A
>colleague curses from another room.
>
>It's early March, before anyone has ever heard of Littleton, Colorado, and
>the co-creator of the computer games Doom and Quake is showing off his new
>gorefest, Daikatana. As Hiro, he has just fragged a co-worker playing
>Superfly Johnson in a "death match", a battle via linked computers.
>
>"That's cool, huh?" Romero says. "You can see how much more visceral this
>game is." Romero is 31, with long, silky black hair. He wears tight designer
>jeans and a black T-shirt. It was Romero, along with a programming genius,
>John Carmack, who revolutionised the computer games industry in the mid-90s
>with the seminal shoot-'em-ups Doom and Quake, two of the biggest sellers
>of all time. The pair made millions, bought several Ferraris each and
>turned Dallas into the blood-and-guts capital of their industry.
>
>Though they have since broken up in a spat over precisely what makes a
>computer game cool, to hard-core fans they are still gods "the Paul
>McCartney and John Lennon of our business," says a Dallas game developer
>who insists on being identified only as Levelord.
>
>Then the United States was suddenly confronted with the image of Eric
>Harris and Dylan Klebold, both avid Doom fans, rampaging through the halls
>of Columbine High with an arsenal of deadly weapons and laughing at the
>"gibs". For the mass-market audience that developers like Romero have
>always coveted, the connection was hard to miss.
>
>Video and computer games had been criticised for violent content before,
>but what happened at Columbine High instantly gave the industry term for
>this relatively small game genre "first-person shooter" ominous new
>resonance.
>
>The same qualities that made Doom and Quake so adrenaline-pumping, so
>unlike any other form of violent media, now made them a primary target of
>outrage. These games plunge you into a three-dimensional world where you
>must kill to survive, whether your opponents are controlled by the computer
>or by real-life rivals.
>
>Romero refuses to talk now about the events in Littleton, but when he sat
>fragging Superfly Johnson into bloody chunks, it seemed that nothing could
>threaten this world he'd created. With a severed head rolling one way and a
>rib-sprouting torso bouncing another, he was perfectly candid when asked if
>he was concerned about criticism of game violence.
>
>"I'm the one who made this stuff why would I care about that?" he said, not
>looking up from the screen. "I make games I want to play. If I want to see
>more gibs, I make it. If people don't like it, they don't need to play the
>game."
>
>The penthouse office of Romero's Ion Storm is an astonishing place, like
>something out of a Jetsons cartoon with walkways suspended above a maze of
>stainless steel cubicles, wall lighting embedded in marble sconces, glass
>cases filled with models of one-eyed monsters, the whole enterprise wrapped
>in clouds and sky.
>
>It bustles with 88 employees, including screenwriters and producers,
>developing three games at once and making plans to branch into movies,
>action figures, comic books and clothes. There are leather couches and
>giant projection screens, a locker room with showers, ping-pong and pool
>tables, a million-dollar recording studio for making game soundtracks and a
>special area for death-matching that's linked to 16 television sets in a
>nearby spectators' lounge.
>
>And, of course, all the junk food you can eat.