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Pac-Man As Pot Head
1up.com has a look at the history of drugs in games, from the pellet-popping days of Pac-Man to the industrious sales efforts of the GTA games. From the article: "As games drew a wider audience, not to mention a wider variety of creative talents (some pretty weird stuff reportedly went on at the Atari offices in an evening), they necessarily drew on a wider spectrum of influences and inspirations...some of them chemical in nature. There have been games that were probably made on drugs -- Rez springs to mind, or the Virtual Light Machine -- and even reviewed on drugs, when A.C. Styles dosed the office coffee pot at Die Hard Game Fan."
Not a surprise if you think about it, or is there any relevant social group where there are no drug users?
And sadly enough art and drug (ab)use almost always were related.
Hallucinogens weren't the only thing to make Nethack great. It's nice how you can die from eating too much:
This lembas wafer is delicious!
You're having a hard time getting all of it down.
Stop eating? [yn] (y)
You choke over your food.
You die...
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq]
I love the attention to detail on little things like that. BTW, has there ever been a count of how many distinct ways to die in Nethack there are?
Remember RFC 873!
Ya know how many (most?) side scrolling games have those terminal gaps in the map, the bottomless pits you gotta jump over? Well, in Super Mario Brothers, the lovable Yoshi would invariably head for one of those cracks as soon as you lost control of him. Me and my girlfriend at the time used to spend many, many hours smoking cigarettes and all sorts of groovy things whilst playing this game, and "Yoshi's a crackhead!" became a constant refrain.
Oh, and, uhh, the mushrooms? Hello! Waiter, could we get some subtlety over here? Thanks.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
yes you are
Good call
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Gluttony is a sin, Nethack has some very Catholic lessons to be garnered!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Yoshi is an odd specimen indeed...
If a mushroom hatches from a Yoshi egg, you can get him to eat it, I am not sure, but this seems like some sort of drug-related cannibalism...
Very odd.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I take three prescribed medications, and listen to Amiga music. Does that count?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were obviously created while under the influence. I heard that Matt Smith (the creator) became a bit of a druggy after that, but is apprently doing ok for himself now with manic miner being licenced for mobile phones and the GBA. From the pics I've seen of him, the drugs have surely left their mark.
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
N!GHTS is one of the most fucked up games I've ever played, and strongly reminds me of the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" whenever I play it.
When I read the headline I immediately thought of that Bloodhound Gang song:
Pacman: Yo yo yo yo yo! What it is motherfuckers?
Man 1: Aw shit, here comes Pac-Man.
Man 2: Hey Pac-Man, what's up?
Pacman: Me you bitches! I'm high on crack! Wanna freebase?
Man 2: No Pac-Man, drugs are bad!
Man 1: Nope, can't help you man.
Pacman: Puss-ies. [Sound of a lighter and inhaling] Whoa! Holy shit!
Happyweed!
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea...
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
The title... what in the article is that referring to? What does Pac-Man have to do with pot?
Only thing that comes to mind is that Zonk is a bong ripping game and Zonk posted this shit.
Coincidence? I think not.
Ever design games... on weed?
God spoke to me.
How can any history of video games be complete without mentioning the psychedelic mushrooms in Rise of the Triad? The mushrooms would make the camera swirl around drunkenly while the colors warped around. Which also led to the most nauseating level in gaming history, the vomitorium. Which was a large cube room covered on all six sides with springs that would send you flying in any direction. With a liberal dosage of Rocket launchers, enemy robots and mushrooms floating in the air.
From the article: "...but that still doesn't explain how the fire-spitting flowers came into being..." Fire flowers are from a pun from the Japanese word for fireworks (hanabi), which is a combination of flower (hana) and fire (suffix of -hi, which changes to -bi). Fire flowers are the literal translation.
nt
Ok it is insanely hard to code even when your just a little stoned. .Perhaps you could draw quite well on past experiences ,but whilst actually on anything it would not be a good idea unless you like code so obsfucated that it makes badly written perl look like the nirvana of code. ;) unless your the graphics artist or story writer then they are all permanently wasted anyway,
Imagine trying to code a game when your tripping. I mean wooh dude Heavy number shittt man.
Recounting one time i was on acid , i completely forgot all about numbers and created some complex system involving blips of and the position of Christmas tree lights, This is not a rare incident , one time i turned a manual for the game 1080 snowboarding into the nix nax nox tobo , a religious book to live you life by , the devil being a tree outside and god being IIRC my light bulb.
Making a game whilst on drugs is really really hard if not nearly impossible
Perhaps it would be easier if your on a little amphetamines , but anything hallucinogenic is asking for trouble.
Not to mention the Voice over director who in most game pretty much has to have been smoking to Cheech and Chong levels
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I miss a few games on that list. Like Duke Nukem with the steroids and Starcraft with the junkie stimpacked marines.
If you got stoned and played Tetris, would it look like this?
The article probably missed a few things, but I distinctly remember "Stim Paks" in StarCraft.
Pump those into your marines and they'd lose about 20% of their hit-points, but run and fire about 50% faster for a good 30 seconds or so.
Good times!
-David
heh, I remember back in the day there was this game, Sword of Sodom, on the genesis. It had different colored potions in it, and you could mix them in different combinations to create new effects. If you had the patience to collect all the different colored potions and use them all together, which was hard, it would create a potion where the screen would turn black and with a message "winners don't do drugs" or something like that and nothing else would happen. it kind of pissed me off, but was funny.