Trey Parker and Matt Stone Absolutely Despise The ‘South Park’ Videogame That The Fandom Loves
This past Thanksgiving weekend, many South Park superfans celebrated the holiday by dusting off the old Nintendo 64 and booting up the video game that gave Trey Parker depression.
27 years ago, the now-defunct game publisher Acclaim Entertainment released the first of its three South Park video games, simply titled South Park, just four days before Christmas. At the time, South Park was the biggest hit in households that paid little attention to the recently instituted TV parental guidelines, and parents were lining up at malls across the country to get their foul-mouthed kids the very best merch from their favorite show.
As such, many South Park fans who later grew up to become foul-mouthed adults got the gift of South Park on the N64 that Christmas morning in 1998, and they spent the entire holiday pelting giant mutant turkeys with snowballs on the war-torn streets of South Park, Colorado. Those life-long fans have cherished both that memory and that game ever since.
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South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, on the other hand, do not have such a sentimental connection to the first-ever South Park game. In fact, in the DVD commentary for the South Park Season 1 episode “Starvin’ Marvin,” which introduced those dreaded giant turkeys into the South Park canon, the duo admitted that they were “so bummed out” by how “crappy” South Park (N64) turned out that they never wanted to make another South Park game again.
Parker recalled a trip to the mall on Black Friday during the early seasons of South Park when he saw stores stuffed with both South Park merchandise and parents buying it for their kids. Noting that he and Stone received a pitiful cut of the profits from those early knick-knacks and stocking-stuffers, Parker said, “It made feel like people were in my room taking my things, in a way.”
“We had decided, from the get-go, to stay out of (merchandising),” Parker explained, noting that he and Stone resolved to skip the meetings about which fabric to use for novelty South Park t-shirts and focus on making the show. “Because most of the stuff they made was just crap.”
Stone chimed in sarcastically, “The videogames are sweet! Those are awesome!”
“Oh God, they were so bad,” Parker lamented, “We were so bummed out on those, because we love playing videogames … the first thing was the turkey shooter, and it was just the crappiest video game, we were so bummed out.”
Stone noted that, at the time of recording, Viacom was pressuring the pair to make more video games, but they had declined due to the poor quality of the first attempt.
The critics certainly agreed with Parker and Stone – South Park (N64) received poor marks for its sloppy, barebones gameplay, its ugly graphics, the terrible audio and the endlessly repeating voice lines. "South Park is definitely one of those games that is bound to come up when you start thinking about the worst game you've ever played," one particularly negative reviewer for GameSpot noted.
However, in the South Park fandom, South Park (N64) is still a cult classic – last Wednesday, one OG superfan shot to the top of the South Park subreddit with a post about the game, titled, “Don’t forget to play the greatest Thanksgiving game tomorrow.”
“That game 10,000% slapped as an 8 year old playing it when my parents and older brothers weren’t home,” one nostalgic South Park fan commented.
Another agreed, “This was my absolute favorite game to rent at Blockbuster.”
“Better than goldeneye if you asked kid me,” one more added.
Nevertheless, Parker and Stone thought that South Park (N64) was so bad that they stymied any efforts to make more South Park games for over a decade – but not before Acclaim could drop South Park Rally and the absolutely unplayable South Park (N64) sequel, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack:
