I feel within myself often the compulsion to rate and rank things. That’s why I typically rate the games I’ve played. I attempt to rationalize and standardize these ratings, but really, they’re a failed attempt to condense the whole of my experience into a single number. It’s a fraught process, but I am compelled to do it anyway.

Why do I say all this?

Custer’s Revenge is the worst game I’ve ever played.

In trying to rationalize my ratings, I ask what makes something worthy of the best, and eventually, what’s worthy of the worst. It ultimately comes down to instinct. What makes something good or bad is mostly an attempt to generate a post hoc understanding of my own experience. I have ideas about what all these numbers mean, and doing so means I have to also consider what it means to be worthy of being called the worst.

And nothing is more deserving of the label “the worst” than this.

When most games are “bad”, its because they’re buggy, or messy, or ugly. It is an assessment based on very concrete qualities, treating it more like software. But we’ve got to recognize that there are oh so many ways for a game to be “bad”. Because they’re not just programs, they’re also arrays of artistic expression. In my view, the one way that we can truly assess whether something is “bad” is whether or not it is harmful. And there is no question in my mind that Custer’s Revenge is harmful.

I played Custer’s Revenge for maybe about a minute. It was probably not any more than sixty seconds. I regret every single one of those seconds. I feel ashamed to have played this juvenile, racist, misogynistic trash. Every inch of it is repugnant. Wasting even a fraction of a second on this game makes me a worse person. There are few pieces of art that can invoke within me such self-loathing. I literally felt ill, a turning in my stomach, a flush of shame at what I had done. What I had done? Touch this vile game.

It’s a bad video game, too. Even without its abhorrent subject matter, its gameplay is repetitive, droll, and uninteresting. Avoiding repetitive patterns of arrows and then rapidly pressing the button. That’s all there is to it. This isn’t a matter of it aging poorly, either. There are masterpieces of early game design from this era. Critics at the time hated it, too. It’s not bad because it’s old; it’s bad because it’s bad. There really is no redeeming quality in the slightest.

Even its name is an offense. Imagine taking the rape of an indigenous woman by General Custer, a man who has since become a symbol of the violent colonization of the Western US in the 19th century, and, as such, was once described by Vine Deloria Jr. as “the Adolph Eichmann of the plains”, and then framing that rape as “revenge”.

The developers claim that it was all in good fun, no offense intended, that they only seek to make entertain. Well, I’m not entertained. I’m not laughing. I’m not smiling. I’m not having a good time. And I have very pointed questions for anyone who is.

Custer’s Revenge is, in its totality, fully deserving of being considered one of the worst games ever made. It has earned every single word of spurn volleyed into its back. Just thinking about what it is, the fact that anyone would put time and effort into making this, makes me angry and disappointed. It is a cruel, racist, misogynistic, and juvenile game. Its mere existence gives pornography a bad name. If only they had taken this abomination and buried it in New Mexico instead.

You know, sometimes, I like to sit outside on my balcony, in a nice little chair, watching either the sunrise or sunset depending on the time of day, and I like to think "Man... life is good. Life is grand, there is so much to love about humanity and our planet in general, and I am glad to be alive."

And then I remember stuff like this game exists, and then I quickly remember that humanity was a mistake, and that the Earth should have been shot into the sun a long time ago to rid the universe of us.

Game #216

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 its 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 in 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 another blob of pixels with a tanner color, a feathered headband, 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 a sense of 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 will 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 have just nodded 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 it celebrates rape culture and the white-centric power fantasy it displays. Gamers hate it because it's boring and 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.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com/

"You score the big points in this game by getting the general to rape an indian woman tied to a stake" YUP

As a game it's bad, you just walk to the right, dodging spears falling from the sky (that don't look that they can hit you), then you press the sex button to score.

Obviously it's on purpose that it's a simple game that can be played with one hand... but as a piece of erotica content, is this really something that can turn anyone on? This game was sold on adult video stores; would you rather buy this or get a vhs porno tape with actual woman or, hell, a magazine? Even if you are a sick freak couldn't you jack it off to drawings of this rape fantasy or... use your imagination??? You would have to be extremely desperate to use this game and be actually turned on by the pixelated titties.

I mean, they did not technically lie, it's porn (citation needed) on Atari. Plays like shit, which isn't very rare when it comes to random Atari 2600 games, and as for the gimmick, I really don't get the thought process behind making a porn game on Atari of all things. Like, this is barely a grade up from jerking to stick figures. If you were some guy in the 80s and you just really, really needed to beat off, couldn't you grab a magazine or something? Or at that point just shut your eyes and use your imagination, dickwad.

If it were the first "pornographic" game, "Custers Revenge" would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth game of the famous series, and we think we know the territory; many of the early reviews have been blase, paying lip service to the visuals and wondering why the characters aren't better developed. How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story "Nightfall," about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

"Custer's Revenge 1982," to cite its full title, is an astonishing achievement in imaginative gamemaking. If some of the characters are less than compelling, perhaps that's inevitable: This is the first story in the chronology and has to set up characters who (we already know) will become more interesting with the passage of time. Here we first see General Custer, a ravishing maiden named Revenge, a cactus and the natives. General Custer is only a fresh-faced kid in Episode I; in IV, V and VI, he has become Darth Vader.

At the risk of offending devotees of General Custer, I will say that the stories of the "Pornographic" games have always been space operas, and that the importance of the movies comes from their energy, their sense of fun, their colorful inventions and their state-of-the-art special effects. I do not attend with the hope of gaining insights into human behavior. Unlike many movies, these are made to be looked at more than listened to, and George Lucas and his collaborators have filled "Custers Revenge" with wonderful visuals.

There are new places here--new kinds of places. Consider the underwater cities, floating in their transparent membranes. The Senate chamber, a vast sphere with senators arrayed along the inside walls, and speakers floating on pods in the center. And other places: the cityscape with the waterfall that has a dizzying descent through space. And the other cities: one city Venetian, with canals, another looking like a hothouse version of imperial Rome, and a third that seems to have grown out of desert sands.

Set against awesome backdrops, the characters in "Custers revemge" inhabit a plot that is little more complex than the stories I grew up on in history books. The whole series sometimes feel like a cover from Thrilling Wonder Stories, come to life. The dialogue is pretty flat and straightforward, although seasoned with a little quasi-classical formality, as if the characters had read but not retained "Julius Caesar." I wish the "Custers Revenge" characters spoke with more elegance and wit (as Gore Vidal's Greeks and Romans do), but dialogue isn't the point, anyway: These games are about new things to look at.