5 Classic Games You Didn't Know Had WTF Backstories
A lot of classic arcade games have straight-forward, logical plots that drive them: Turtle dragon stole your woman, stomp mushrooms until he gives her back. That's cool; we're on board with that. But some of these other classic, seemingly self-evident games actually hid madness and dementia behind their fun, childish veneers.
#5. Donkey Kong
Via What we thought was going on:
We all know the story of Donkey Kong, right? It's just the plot of King Kong, Japanified: Giant ape escapes, kidnaps a woman, runs to the top of someplace high, is put in its ape-place by a plumber who isn't entirely clear on his job description.
"Well, there's your problem."
The WTF Backstory:
Except that Mario is the villain in Donkey Kong.
According to the game's manual, Donkey Kong was actually Mario's pet ape. Without even venturing into the shaky moral and legal issues of primate ownership, it gets way worse from there: The reason Donkey Kong escaped in the first place was only because Mario was abusing him. That's not our accusation; the manual spells that out, plain as day: "[Donkey Kong] is actually [Mario's] pet who was mistreated." The manual doesn't get really specific as to exactly how DK was being abused -- presumably because even jaded 1980s game designers figured that was some heavy shit to lay on a kid -- but it's not hard to fill in the blanks: Here's a screengrab of Mario sticking Donkey Kong in a cage, chaining him up, and what's that in his hand? A whip?
Isn't this basically how the Planet of the Apes got started?
The poor beast suffered years of physical abuse and neglect, can you blame him for reacting poorly when he finally got his shot at freedom? We don't blame the abused dog if it bites the mailman, can we blame DK for grabbing Mario's girlfriend, Pauline (safe to assume also an animal abuser, if only by proxy) and simply running away? He didn't even hurt anybody, he just ran. And we all know what happens next: Mario, possessed by the invincibility of rage, hurdles every obstacle in the pursuit of his frightened pet -- barrels will not stop him, fireballs will not stop him, ramshackle construction sites will not stop him, nothing will stop him, not even death (he's got extra lives) -- until he slowly but surely chases down the cornered, abused, terrified monkey, and drops him from the top of a skyscraper.
Teaching children around the world a valuable lesson about pet care.
We should probably tell you that the Donkey Kong of today -- the one seen happy and healthy in all the current Nintendo games? Rare made a very specific point of mentioning that he's not the original DK; that's his son. Now, they're not outright saying what happened to the original Donkey Kong, but it's best not to look too closely between the lines.
...
Because you'll probably find Mario there, covered in ape-blood, screaming in unearthly fury.
"When they talk to you, you just fell down the stairs, right?"
#4. Super Street Fighter II
What we thought was going on:
A bunch of characters fighting one another in a martial arts tournament. That's a wholly encapsulated backstory right there: Here are some dudes (and dudettes). They are in a tournament. They would like to win said tournament, and plan on doing so via the liberal application of punching. It's like Bloodsport, but with fireballs. We're done here, right?
Although we wouldn't mind learning the backstory behind that one-piece.
The WTF Backstory:
You get hints of crazy throughout the game (especially if you were the kind of lonely child who played fighting games single player and actually saw the endings) but the depth and complexity of Street Fighter's completely needless backstory still might surprise you. To find it, you need to grab the character bios from the obscure Street Fighter role playing game. Here's a glance to give you a hint of the scope of M. Bison's backstory, for example:
We always assumed his backstory began and ended with "steroids".
M.Bison, the man holding the tournament, who you thought was just kind of a dickhead -- maybe a dickhead with some kind of military background -- actually has a larger agenda: He's only hosting the matches in the first place so he can corrupt the street fighters with his psychic abilities.
All that crazy shit he can do in the game, like flying horizontally, bursting into flame, or wearing absurd power-lesbian shoulderpads? It's all the result of psychic abilities that he's developed ever since he found a meteor in a cave and started sleeping above it.
Step 1: Sleep on a rock. Step 2: Burn half-naked women with your thoughts.
Bison also heads an evil organization known as Shadoloo, which he took over with the help of his power-meteor, and the whole point of his plan to psychically corrupt martial artists is to eventually recruit them into said organization. How does this weirdness affect the actual gameplay? Well, let's look at Cammy:
Ok, that's long enough -- she's a cartoon, you sick freak.
If you're the kind of person who worries about spoilers for a twenty year old fighting game, you should probably click away now (we suggest visiting whatswrongwithmypriorities.com).
If you beat the game with Cammy, she's revealed to be a double-double agent -- that is to say, she thought she was working for the British Special Forces as an undercover agent in the competition, but that's only because she has amnesia. In reality, before she lost her memory, she actually was a member of Shadaloo, as well as M. Bison's brainwashed lover.
Above: The least appropriate use of a cheering crowd in video game history.
When Street Fighter takes place, Cammy is 19. According to her backstory up there, she suffered her bout of amnesia -- the one that made her forget her torrid love affair with Bison -- starting at age 18. Which means that fun little fighting game round you just played? Where you thought the story was "beat that guy because you're supposed to beat that guy"? Yeah, that was actually the brutal revenge of a psychologically traumatized amnesiac with sexual identity issues (punching dudes while wearing a thong falls a little outside of even Great Britain's freaky sexual norms) against the psychic pedophile that hypnotized and molested her as a child.
Wasn't that fun? Put another quarter in, kids!
#3. Centipede
Via What we thought was going on:
Centipede was a typical 1980s top-down shooter -- kind of a Space Invaders variant. The player controls a small ship at the bottom of the screen, and the goal is to shoot a giant centipede that descends toward you from the top of the screen. In the player's way are a bunch of mushrooms that can be blown up to clear space to hit the thing, and some other bugs like spiders, scorpions, and fleas.
And of course, everything was colored LSD-neon.
The WTF Backstory:
The arcade game itself offers no story, and why would it need to? You're a spaceship fighting freaky alien bugs. Nuff said. But then the console version came out, and it included an official comic book that explained the plot in surprising depth.
See, in reality, your "ship" is actually an elf with a magic wand.
Clearly.
According to Atari, the elf -- your ship -- is named Oliver, and he lives in a magical forest with his pals the centipede, the spider, the flea, and the scorpion.
Oh, no. What?
This is a game about murdering your friends?
All of your bug-pals turn evil when a wizard decides he wants your wand, and hypnotizes the creatures of the forest into attacking you and stealing it for him. Now, you're not a monster -- these are your friends here, after all -- so your magic wand doesn't outright kill them; it only transforms them into toadstools. You know, toadstools, like the ones you have to shoot through and... explode... to hit the centipede... before it reaches... you...
Photos.com
Just shoot the colored dots, asshole.
So all that fun you were having just now, blasting away, nimbly dodging bullets and raining hellfire into your enemies? Well the only reason there weren't tears streaming out of that tiny elf-ship the whole time is because there wasn't enough memory to render them back then.
Oh, and the wizard that causes all of this? Nowhere to be found in the game. Even though the comic gets a happy ending, at no point does that happen in the actual gameplay. There is no final boss scenario here -- no ultimate showdown with the guy who ruined your life -- there's just an endless cycle of death and tragedy as you mow down wave after wave of the things that used to be your friends.
So, in a way, Centipede was the very first survival horror game.
I didnt read the whole thing, whatswrongwithmypriorities. com is pretty good tho
ReplyActually, the bit about Cammy being his lover was made up by the Japanese branch of Capcom (not the US branch, as is often blamed -- the JP branch actually had a tight rein on how the games were translated at the time) for the US market because they didn't believe that US gamers would be able to sympathize with a character who kills people, and the original version of the ending had Bison/Vega (They switched the names around for the US version because the original M. Bison was the black boxer who was too obviously supposed to be an unflattering version of Mike Tyson with his original name -- enough so that they feared lawsuits) saying Cammy used to kill for him. Incidentally, this is also the reason the character Akuma was named Akuma (he was originally the more neutral-sounding "Gouki") and portrayed as evil in early appearances -- Capcom of Japan was convinced US gamers would be utterly bewildered by a scary-looking guy who goes around killing people but _isn't_ evil.
ReplyI will forever now know Centipede as the Game of Utter Dispair.
ReplyOh and Marian is the reincarnation of an ancient non-Japanese princess, which puts her in league with about 3000 other Japanese media heroines.
ReplyLike everyone here, the only one I knew was Street Fighter 2, and I thought they retconned that into her being his clone-body a while ago.
ReplyThey never ret-conned it, because there was never a "love story" in the first place.
It's just that the Americans decided to make up their own bullsh** story, instead of just translating the Japanese bullsh** story.
Cammy is a clone of M. Bison? Aren't clones supposed to, I don't know, look identical? Or is it just implied that M. Bison's company is so bad at genetics they got the wrong gender?
ReplyNobody said cloning is perfect. None of the Snake brothers look completely like one another or like Big Boss. Also: Capcom.
Also, Bison has a fetish for being inside women in a completely nonsexual way. I think that's true for both Cammy and Rose.
The word "clone" here is used loosely.
Cammy has "some" genetic material from Bison, but they worked on her to make her body a perfect receptacle, so they tinkered with her genetics (possibly mixing Bison's genes with those of an indefinite amount of other people). The result is a really good body, and a valid receptacle for Bison's Psycho Power... which just happens to have blond hair, blue eyes and boobies.
So... she's not much a clone as an "in vitro" daughter.
Much like Wolverine's clone, X-23, is a girl with green eyes not nearly as much superfluous hair. Her genes are MOSTLY Wolverine's, but since the scientist who created her didn't have Wolverine's full gene map, they doubled the X chromosome and made a XX (female) instead of XY (male). Also, one of those scientist, green-eyed Sarah Kinney, put a little bit of herself in it as well.
Another example: Jurassic Park's dinosaurs. They got a large part of dinosaur DNA from fossilized amber mosquitos, and just made up the rest with frog DNA and some similar sh**.
Cammy is M. Bison's cloned replacement body. The lover backstory was added for the English language version.
ReplyShould the Centipede one really count? Since it wasn't actually for the original game, clearly some poor sap comic writer was assigned to come up with a backstory for something that made absolutely no sense to a non-drug-addled mind. He did his best, even if it doesn't make any sense/is horribly cruel when you think about it.
ReplyExcept Nintendo has explained that the original Donkey Kong is now Cranky Kong from Donkey Kong Country.
Reply...Wonder why he's so cranky...
Wait, so Double Dragon is just a rip-off of Fist of the North Star?
ReplyATATATATATATATATATATATATATATA HUWAHH!
I was hoping I'd see Star Craft on that list. I played the heck out of that game back in grade school, then one day I actually tried to read the manual. Holy back story overload... Although I guess the game does a good enough job of integrating the back story into the campaigns that you'd learn about 90% of it anyway if you were actually paying attention instead of skipping all the briefings so you could get back to spamming guardians (heck, I never said I was a good player...).
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesThen again, I guess the game integrated the back story into the campaign well enough that you should have picked up on 90% of it just by playing, is you hadn't been skipping all the cutscenes and briefings so that you could get back to spamming Guardians faster (heck, I never said I was a good Star Craft player)...
I hate it when my browser decides not to refresh the comment section. I thought my edit didn't go through. Darn!
Starcraft didn't have a WTF backstory. I'm not gonna try to say that the backstory was realistic or plausible, but it matched the gameplay and wasn't that big of a deviation from typical sci-fi fare.
yeah... even if u skip all the cutscenes you get a lot of the story from just the in game talking... you'd have to intentionally try to ignore the story to miss it. And the story isn't very crazy..
I thought everyone knew the backstory for SF... Oh well.
Reply#2 almost feels like a justification of the Double Dragon movie. Like the director was trying to stay original to the story.
ReplyI'm scared now :(
Calling apes "monkeys" make you appear even dumber than apostrophizing non-possessive plurals. Just sayin'.
Replygrammar nazis: they suck and we hate them.
to add more messed up things to cammy's story is that she is actually bison's "clone".
Replymy older brother and i grew up playing double dragon. i was younger so always 2nd player.so i was proud to be Jimmy and luigi. didnt know jimmy was responsible for kidnapping, rape, torture, and attempted fratricide. thats awesome!
ReplyIsn't Bryan from Tekken Tag a reanimated corpse?
ReplyThe Arkanoid one just blew my mind right off. I played it a lot when I was a kid, and it actually had a backstory? And one that is kick-ass?? WTF.
ReplyDoh is a moai?
ReplyWhy else would Homer call his name?
I didn't understand the ending of the Arkanoid one. What does it mean?
ReplyGuessing it means you escaped the time warp and went back in time to the Arkanoid before it was destroyed.
or there was gunna be a sequel?