GAMES
VIRTUAL REALITY VINDALOOP BY JOE JASKO South Park has had so many classic episodes in its 20-season run. Imagine if these four episodes became video games:
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Towlie, a dried-up spooge rag, likely used his video game appearance fee to buy drugs.
But South Park isn’t an action thriller or a game show, or a competitive sport. Even if these were good games—and they aren’t—they don’t have much to do with South Park. The show is at its best when it uses crude humor to slyly dissect celebrity trends and pop culture. By contrast, aside from a few dirty jokes, Acclaim’s games played things completely straight. At a PlayStation 2 launch event, Stone admitted, “We’ve had really bad video games.” In an interview with Playboy, Parker was even more direct: “They’ve made all this shit and these video games that we hate.” For most of the 2000s, South Park stayed away from video games. A Grand Theft Auto-inspired open world game was cancelled early in development and would’ve remained completely unknown if a fan hadn’t discovered a prototype on an old Xbox development kit. Parker and Stone’s production company, South Park Digital Studios, found some success with the Xbox Live game South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!, but that game was
WHEN SOUTH PARK GAMES WEREN’T SO KEWL
Believe it or not, there was a time when South Park wasn’t run by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
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ver the course of its 20-year run, South Park has won Emmys, a Peabody Award, and it was even nominated for an Oscar. But what are the show’s co-creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, most proud of ? Parker has said in interviews that he’s most gratified that they haven’t handed it off. Parker and Stone still voice almost all of the raunchy animated comedy’s main characters. Either Parker or Stone is listed as a writer on every single South Park installment. Parker has also directed or co-directed all but 15 of 267 episodes. South Park’s voice is Matt and Trey’s voice, so it’s hard to imagine the show without them. Hard, but not impossible. In the late ‘90s, a video game company called Acclaim cranked out a series of South Park games without Parker and Stone’s involvement. It went as well as you’d expect. 56 DEN OF GEEK ■ NEW YORK COMIC CON
The show premiered in August 1997. By December 1998, it was everywhere. George Clooney, fresh off of his career-making run on ER, guest starred in episode four as Stan’s gay dog Sparky. The second season premiere, “Cartman’s Mom Is Still a Dirty Slut,” set the record for the highest-rated non-sports broadcast in basic cable history. In that climate, South Park video games seemed like a slam dunk. But Acclaim’s first effort, South Park for the Nintendo 64, wasn’t much more than Turok 2 with some South Park trappings and added fart noises. A few months later, Chef ’s Luv Shack mashed up South Park and Trivial Pursuit with classic arcade games. One developer joked that it was “the highest quality game you could get on the market in five months.” In 1999, South Park Rally dropped the show’s iconic characters into an uninspired Mario Kart knock-off.
IMAGES: UBISOFT
BY CHRISTOPHER GATES
“AS THE PAST 20 YEARS HAVE SHOWN, IF IT’S NOT MATT AND TREY, IT’S JUST NOT SOUTH PARK”
praised more for its gameplay than its use of the South Park license. In 2009, Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment and developer of Fallout: New Vegas and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II received a phone call from Parker and Stone. At first, Urquhart thought that the call was a prank. As it turns out, Parker and Stone really were on the line. They wanted to make a South Park role-playing game, and they wanted Obsidian to develop it. Obsidian got straight to work on a new game, and this time, Parker and Stone were involved every step of the way. Parker wrote the game’s 500-page script. South Park Digital helped design the characters and the environments, and funded the game’s early development, ensuring that the game met Parker and Stone’s rigorous standards. Despite some hiccups involving publishers, South Park: The Stick of Truth launched in 2014. On the surface, The Stick of Truth plays like a typical fantasy role-playing game, but as it progresses, the game carefully dismantles many of the genre’s most prevalent tropes. Character customization and the types of big moral choices that players make in games like Skyrim or Dragon Age don’t really matter. The exaggerated political drama of Game of Thrones and The Witcher 3 is reduced to petty playground squabbling. In other words, The Stick of Truth is a fun and authentic South Park experience—one that looks like it’s going to be replicated later this year when the sequel, the superhero-themed The Fractured but Whole, hits store shelves. Obsidian isn’t returning for this go-around, but Parker and Stone are just as involved as ever. That’s a good thing. After all, as the past 20 years have shown, if it’s not Matt and Trey, it’s just not South Park. South Park: The Fractured but Whole is due out in 2017 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
GOOD TIMES WITH WEAPONS
The season eight opener, “Good Times with Weapons,” contained every element needed for an outstanding South Park episode: a hysterical satire of anime action segments, Cartman’s topical “wardrobe malfunction,” and Butters with a ninja star in his eye. Imagine these intense imaginary battles between the boys, but reinvented as a Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom experience!
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CARTOON WARS
The scathing two-part “Cartoon Wars” saw the town of South Park butt heads with a newly emerging force in the world of cartoons: Family Guy. We’re not sure exactly what kind of game this would turn out to be, but if there’s one thing we do know, it’s that the team over in the Family Guy camp could sure use a few pointers when it comes to games. If you’ve played 2012’s Back to the Multiverse, then you know what we mean.
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IMAGINATIONLAND
If there’s one thing that comes to mind when someone says South Park and “trilogy” in the same sentence, it’s the three-part season 11 epic, “Imaginationland.” The episodes saw the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, spewing creativity out of every orifice. Every kind of person, creature, and fairy tale beast imaginable gets thrown into the mix. This is a good case for a South Park sandbox game in the tradition of Minecraft.
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MAKE LOVE, NOT WARCRAFT
And last but not least, we have the classic World of Warcraft-inspired episode, “Make Love, Not Warcraft.” In this epic look at WoW addicts, Stone and Parker actually teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment to help create portions of the episode as if they were actual gameplay segments from a World of Warcraft game itself! This episode is proof that the world deserves a South Park MMORPG.
DEN OF GEEK ■ WWW.DENOFGEEK.COM
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