Retro Gaming Australia

Not the type of pussy we tend to associate with the Clinton administration.

Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill was an ultimately unreleased video game starring Socks, the Clinton family cat. Someone actually greenlit this project, believing it to be a good idea, and it got very far into development before being cancelled. Ah, corporate stupidity.

Sean Connery is a totally believable Russian.

The Hunt for Red October is a video game adaptation based on the film adaptation of the Tom Clancy-authored book of the same name. The Game Boy and NES versions of the game were developed in Australia by Beam Software, but were not well received.

Licensed handheld games, woo!

Gremlins 2: The New Batch was based off the feature film of the same name. It’s a pretty straightforward licensed cash in, something which the Game Boy excelled in.

Scary to think that it’s been 7 years since NFL games peaked.

Once upon a time, the NFL awarded licenses to any video game publisher who wanted them. There was a large market for video game football, and they wanted their share. Eventually, it came down to just EA’s Madden and Sega’s NFL 2K series. Typically EA would win the sales war, Sega would get better reviews, so Sega decided to do something different – release all of their new season sports games for $US20. While it resulted in a sales explosion for an awesome game, the NFL felt it cheapened the league’s image, so they approached EA with the offer of an exclusive license. Since then, the lack of competition has treated us to seven years of half-assed video game football.

You got Starship Troopers in my Turok, you derivative bastards.

Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. was based on the Armorines comic created by Valiant before Acclaim bought them out. While the original series focused on a crack team of government operatives, the video game was basically a cash-in on the cult-classic film adaptation of Starship Troopers. The game was poorly received due to technical shortcomings.

Well, at least he’s not a chicken with an attitude.

Alfred Chicken was a platformer originally developed for the Amiga. It later made its way to a number of home platforms. Technically, some of these later releases are actually sequels, but they all still use the same title.

Once upon a time, Activision made more than just Guitar Hero and Call of Duty.

MechWarrior 2 is a mech simulator based on the popular BattleTech property. It was one of the earliest hits for the newly reborn Activision. The game was deep, challenging and hugely customisable – almost nothing like what Activision produces today. We recommend tracking down the 3DFX enhanced version – it looks so much better than the base version.

One of the better early PlayStation games.

ESPN Extreme Games is a racing game based off the then new ESPN X-Games competition, which debuted in 1995. The game predated the whole trick/combo based extreme sports style gameplay best implemented by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – it actually shares a lot in common with Road Rash. It was later re-released as 1Xtreme after the ESPN license expired.

One of those games where the advertising budget must have been double that of the development budget, based on the sheer number of ads in magazines.

Buck Bumble put players in control of the titular character, a cyborg bee fighting in some resistance movement. It’s all highly derivative and technically unpolished – kind of like everything Argonaut produced after Nintendo poached their best talent.

Because everybody wants to play board games on their video game console.

Trivial Pursuit was a popular board game in the 80s and 90s, back before the Internet, Google and Wikipedia ruined general knowledge quiz nights for everyone. Why you’d make or buy a video game based on it is anyone’s guess.