Video game programmer Giuseppe Navarria, much like a genius scientist whose groundbreaking theories upend our understanding of the natural world, has just identified a previously unidentified game genre. Over the course of a series of tweets, Navarria outlines the classification of a kind of video game we’ve all seen before, but perhaps never thought to sort into a category all its own: Real Games So Bad That They Look Fake.
In an introductory tweet that functions as a kind of journal abstract, Navarria asks if readers “remember when in TV shows in the 2000s they had to film someone playing a game and sometimes they invented fake games, with wonky looking game footage that didn’t really look like real playable games.” He then presents a series of examples, drawing from a deep well of material that’s been all but lost to time.
First up is 1996's Skull Cracker, an absolutely beautifully-titled game that Navarria calls a good entry to his newly identified genre thanks to its “mix of very poorly drawn animated graphics and the high resolution/color.” Here, as in the rest of the tweets, he links a YouTube video of someone playing the game. The Skull Cracker clip shows a buff cartoon dude awkwardly punching and kicking his way across a crowded screen that looks tailor-made to be used in the background of a network drama. It’s a perfect demonstration of what Navarria means about these kind of games.