Custer's Revenge

I actually own this game to this day. When this came out, I was making a little extra dough while working in an adult video store. If any of you have ever worked in such places, you know the types of interesting people who just might pop in around 3 am. One such character was a regular who was a video game geek. I'm not sure which company he worked for, but he always had a good selection of new games to buy or trade for on his person at any given time. Long story short, I traded a few games and even a few movies (of the adult variety) for this one little game that came in an odd leather pouch. If I remember right, it was the only Mystique game to come in such a package. Anyways, I only ever played the game once. All things considered, it wasn't too good of a game. I was more into Pole Position and River Raid at the time. This game wouldn't fly today at all. It's a rape game, quite simply put. Pixelated rape game. It's not too hard to beat, and it's far from rewarding once you do. (unless you have some sort of psychosis) This was one of the first games in my collection which is one of the only reasons I've kept it around all these years. Sort of nice to look back in history at how far games have come since this. At least there are no more games that has a sexed up military man trying to rape the indigenous population. If you're absolutely after an adult game from this era, go with something else. (Beat em and eat em or Bachelor Party to name a few)

As for the gameplay itself...it's about average for its day. The controls are janky at the best of times. The arrows you are trying to dodge fall at such a weird angle which makes it more and more difficult to actually avoid them. It's not what I'd call "nintendo hard", but it's not super easy either. You can really only compare it to games of its era, and in doing so it falls somewhere in the lower middle section of the board.

I have never played this game. You have never played this game. I'd be willing to wager that most of the users on this site have never played this game unless they were some high school aged dork in 1982 that got creative with a fake ID to buy this game. This is a game in which it's reputation precedes itself. It seems unfair to judge a game harshly even if one hasn't even played it, but this is not the case for this game. Custer's Revenge is notorious for arguably being the most controversial video game of all time. Unlike with the case of games like Grand Theft Auto, no one is defending this game's legacy.

You play as General Custer, a central figure in the American Indian Wars in the latter half of the 19th century. You walk around the desert plains of the wild west dodging arrows. Did I mention that Custer is naked? Being that it's an Atari game, he just looks like a peach colored block of pixels with a cowboy hat, but I'm sure you all can use your imaginations. I don't think I have to tell you what the pixeled belt-area noodle is supposed to be. What's the objective? Well, there's an another blob of pixels with a tanner color, a feathered head-band, and some large protuberances from the mid-area leaning up against what I can only assume is a cactus. It turns out that the other blob of pixels is a naked Native American woman tied up against a cactus (...yay, I got it right) and the main objective is to rack up as many points as Custer by raping this woman while she's tied up while dodging arrows. Yeah, you read that correctly. This is a game where the only objective is to rape someone. What the fuck were they thinking?

Custer's Revenge is like the video game equivalent of Birth of a Nation. The only difference is that Birth of a Nation had spectacle and was a landmark film that many film historians still give credit to. This is just mindless, despicable smut. Decades later, having this game to top off your historic video game collection is like possessing Nazi regalia; you'll have to make like Lucy and have some explaining to do. No one likes this game and I mean absolutely no one. If Jack Thompson campaigned against this game back in the Atari era, every gamer would just nod their heads in agreement. Conservatives hate it because their children could've gotten a hold of it and it degrades someone that they consider to be an American hero. Liberals hate it because of it's celebration of rape culture and the white-centric power fantasy it displays. Gamers hate it because it's boring and it makes our hobby look bad. It's almost beautiful how something so offensive and tasteless can bring all of these people together in perfect harmony which in turn is the only positive about this game.

It completely fails at being a good work of art because it's flat-out a game about raping women. It fails at being a good game because it's mechanics while simple are terrible. And even if this didn't revolve around rape, it fails at being porn because... well, it's porn on the Atari 2600. It automatically fails at being the least bit arousing because of that regardless of the content.

Really, though, do I even need to give a reason as to why this is probably the worst thing ever?

The infamous Custer's Revenge, the game in which you play as a barenaked creepy cowboy and must dodge arrows in order to rape repetitively a tied up indian woman. Besides the part that the game is disgusting on a moral basis, there is also the fact that the gameplay is bad as well. The arrows become hard to dodge since there is very little you can see of them, and this is even more problematic towards the end of the screen. Since its one hit to get killed, there isnt much you can do besides get the fastest as you can to the objective and mash that button as fast as you can. Is it the worst game of all time? under a certain light i could agree with that, but at least it isnt broken on a technical level.

This game fails as an end in itself because it stands for nothing but transgressing the human dignity of women.
This game fails as an end for something else, because no one would get aroused with this and no one would be able to enjoy the playing of this game.

This game existence is only grounded on the existence of the patriarchy. Only such a material force would bring up such a nefarious object into being, only such level of ideology would have made someone think this was something ok to do; a game made in the shoulders of and to reproduce the oppresive structures that undermine women's lives every day.

Fuck men. Fuck the patriarchy.