We Are All Sick and Twisted
I actually have a story that fits in perfectly with this post. It was 1993 and I was on travel to California (Point Mugu to be exact) and my Marine buddies and I were on the Venice Beach boardwalk. I haven’t been there since, but in the 90’s the freaks all hung out there. I mean there were freaks and geek-type shows everywhere. Jugglers, Magicians, Bible Thumpers, Weight Lifters, Muscle Heads, and so on, all over the boardwalk. We were walking and this girl was passing out pamphlets and saying “Praise Satan”. I politely said, “No Thanks”, as we walked past her and refused the pamphlet. She said, “Sick and Twisted!” (referencing me as I didn’t accept the Satan pamphlet), I immediately turn around and said, “I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else, I’m Sick and he is Twisted”. We all got a good chuckle about it and walked on down the boardwalk.
Let me get this straight, no one is up in arms (or could care less for that manner) about a video game where you are killing everyone and everything (First Person Shooter), but once you introduce a character that is “off-limits” then you suddenly care about it.
The history of First Person Shooter (FPS) games is long and actually started in the ’70s believe it or not, with games like Maze War and Spasim which really didn’t gain much fame. The first FPS that really had a decent-sized following was Battlezone, which was released in 1980.
Maze War (1974)
Spasim (1974)
Battlezone (1980)
The convenience store on the way home from Jr. High school had Battlezone and Defender as the two video arcade machines inside the store. We would play for hours at a time, I was actually pretty good at Battlezone back in the day.
Then the FPS games really evolved when id Software started to pump out FPS games in the early 90s. They started with the Castle Wolfenstein series (Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) then evolved into the Castle Wolfenstein 3D games and Doom series.
Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
Wolfenstein 3D ushered in a brand new type of gameplay, the graphics (which were 3D) look more “first-person” than the “Line Drawing” games that came before it. The Wolfenstein series continued with Spear of Destiny (1992) while other developers used the game engine from Wolfenstein 3D to create popular games like Blake Stone (1993)
Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
Spear of Destiny (1992)
Blake Stone (1993)
The Doom series from id Software burst onto the scene in 1993 and forever changed the FPS world. Doom brought a new look and feel, a new gaming engine, new graphics, and more blood. Rise of the Triad (1994) was also competing for players.
Evolution of DOOM (1993-2022)
Games like Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage were popular games, as Doom released new version after version. The Unreal game engine was released in the late ’90s which ushered the Unreal game series (Unreal, Unreal Tournament….). The Call of Duty (COD) series fought its way to the FPS realm in 2003 and it is the defacto in gameplay today. The Call of Duty franchise has released 20 different COD games in the past 20 years.
Evolution of Call of Duty Games (2003-2020)
It seems that large chunks of the population don’t care about FPS games like Call of Duty (I love that game series) or other games where there is a ton of murder, blood, guts, shooting, and things like that. Hell, there are mods for Grand Theft Auto where you can virtually rape someone. In The SIMS games, you can have naked children and in SIMS 3 & 4, there is teen pregnancy and Incest including pedophilia. There are so many nude skins that you can purchase to make your character fully nude and the detail is pretty good. You can select breast size, the color of your pubes, and how your pubic hair is trimmed and if you have a male character you can select penis length and you can make it erect when you want, plus you can do this for any character regardless of age. With the correct mods installed, your character can have sex and even take a piss. Sexual intercourse in just about any position isn’t off-limits.
But the world goes absolutely nuts when the game allows you to play as Jesus or President Trump and kill people like in the game “Jesus Strikes Back” (yes, I know it is technically a third-person shooter, not an FPS, but they are very closely related). Wikipedia describes the game as: In 2028, the world is ruled by the homosexual billionaire reptilian Satanists George Sorrows and Mark Cuckerberg (referencing George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively) and raided by an army of radical illegal aliens, who “spread from city to city, pillaging all in their path, looting and raping everything and everyone”. As the situation escalates, Jesus Christ – identified in the game as one of the greatest enemies of the New World Order – returns to earth to attack his enemies.
Jesus Strikes Back: Judgment Day
The second iteration of the Jesus Strikes Back game series is “Jesus Strikes Back 2“, which is described by my Metacritic as Amidst the chaos and insanity of a world ravaged by socialism and Satan, the savior will be resurrected to deliver another round of divine retribution. As evil shrouds the Earth, it’s up to J.C & friends to strike back and cast the first stone in this SATIRICAL, COMEDIC open-world adventure.
Jesus Strikes Back 2 (2020)
I think we have our priorities wrong in this world. I guess we are all “Sick and Twisted”.
**For the record, I have never played the Jesus Strikes Back games**
