I grew up in an era when VCRs were considered expensive and exotic luxuries, maybe one home in every twenty had cable television (much less one of the premium movie channels), and the internet as we know it today was the stuff of sci-fi writers’ imaginations. Easy access to films and other video entertainments — offbeat, adult, or otherwise “forbidden” ones especially — did not exist for the average kid growing up in the late seventies and early eighties.

There were occasional exceptions to this rule, ranging from shoddily written novelizations to indulgent parents, older siblings, or babysitters (either your own or a friend’s). Mostly, though, we had to rely on playground lore to keep current with the purient details of whatever off-limits entertainment was currently in vogue.

Like most oral traditions, the accuracy of playground lore was dubious at best, either riddled with the transmission errors associated with fifth-hand accounts or, more likely, simply manufactured on the spot for the benefit of an eager and receptive audience. While most of the specific examples have long since faded from memory, I do recall that these accounts tended to combine the extremes of the lurid and the quaint in equal measure — the pre-adolescent’s concept of the transgressive, in short.

“..and then the monster came and ripped off the lady’s bra and you could SEE HER BOOBS. Then he ate her brains and there was blood and chunks EVERYWHERE!”

Such was the case with Porky’s, Bob Clark’s 1982 teen sex comedy. The original film is, even after twenty-five years and a flood of weak imitators, still surprisingly raunchy in terms of content, especially on the male nudity front(al?). Even so, the playground lore synopsis of the movie represented it as something akin to an ABC Afterschool Special production of Caligula.

As extremely bizarre as that might be to envision, it at least bore a stronger resemblance to the genuine article than 20th Century Fox’s attempt to bring Porky’s high-spirited, horny hijinx to the 2600…

Like most “complex” 2600 titles of the time, Porky’s consists of a sequential series of minigames put in the ostensible service of a grand narrative, or as the manual puts it:

Revenge is sweet – and the objective of this game is to “get it.” Your task is to help Pee Wee blow up Porky’s bar and obtain as many points as possible.

“Get it,” get it? Hur-hur-hur. (The manual, written in what appears to be a monocellular life form’s attempt at written English, is riddled with similar damp squibs posing as double entendres. The lesson here is not to confuse a Delta Sigma Phi kegger with a recruiting workshop for technical writers.)

So you’ve got a Frogger-esque level, an inexplicable pole-vaulting (hur-hur-hur), level, and a level (pictured above) supposedly based on the movie’s infamous shower room scene, but good luck trying to figure out what the objective is (besides the siren song of monochrome low-res “nudity”). I guess the “poke your pecker through the peephole” minigame had to be cut due to the same technical limitations that killed the “stuff gym shorts into Kim Catrall’s mouth” timed challenge.

It’s a shame that the Great Crash of ’83 killed Fox’s plans to turn even more of its movie licenses into hot gaming properties…

…because what right-thinking gamer wouldn’t want to help NASCAR Kenny Rogers raise a band of wisecracking orphans or aid Barbara Hershey in her efforts to fend off a boob-groping poltergeist?

Related posts:

  1. Growing Up 2600: Do you copy?
  2. Growing Up 2600: Making this up as I go
  3. Growing Up 2600: Take me to the river