Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24694408-20150310215558

A small hobby of mine is tracking down obscure Atari 2600 games and playing them. The Atari 2600 had huge problems regarding unofficial games as it was so easy to recreate them, leading to such monstrosities like Custer’s Revenge. Occasionally, you’d stumble across something good, or so hilariously terrible, that at it would be kind of enjoyable to play them.

There is a huge library of Atari 2600 ROMs on the internet, which means there is no problem if you just want to play a game, rather than owning it; in fact, just playing the game is only a couple clicks away, no matter how obscure, whereas trying to find an Atari cartridge can actually be a very difficult task.

I am digressing heavily here, so I’ll get to the point. I found a new game recently, which is a rarity. At first I assumed it would be a fake ROM or maybe something homebrew which had somehow got itself onto sites which only host official games but I opened it up anyway. The game was called ‘There is no food’. An interesting name for a game and not a particularly attractive one but intriguing nonetheless.

I booted up the emulator to a blank screen. At first I thought it was a joke, or that it was broken, but a tap of the enter key proved this wrong, as the game actually booted up. It simply showed what appeared to be a green humanoid looking figure, wearing a red hat and shorts. The rest of the screen was completely blank. Some Atari games started like this; not particularly an issue.

I walked along to the right, where the screen scrolled along, revealing three yellow looking people, all with a red hat and shorts, with the rest of the screen still completely blank. Walking up to one revealed in basic Atari text underneath ‘There is no food’. Walking up to the second one revealed the same text. ‘There is no food’. The same for the third man.

Walking along to the edge of the screen revealed three more men, but in orange, wearing a red hat and shorts. All three said the same thing, ‘There is no food’.

At this point I pondered continuing, but I persevered in hope of finding something interesting. A third screen three more men, except with blue colouration and a red hat and shorts. Walking up to them revealed the text ‘Is there no food?’ Walking along to the next slide revealed three more people, of green colouration, just like the character you played as, each stating, ‘there is no food’.

The final slide, still completely blank, except for your character and anyone else of it, only showed a single man, also of green colouration. When approached, he stated ‘yet we’re still here’. After pressing enter to end the text, the game bugged out and crashed the emulator. Any attempts to reboot the game just showed a blank screen before crashing.

I leant back in fascination, wondering why anyone would make this and for what intent. After some research, I found It was developed by the government, presumably as propaganda for the droughts that happened in the 1980s in Africa, although the game was presumably never finished.

I also found there was an NES version of the game released, but I was unable to find a working copy of the ROM, sort of. With some tampering with the settings in the emulator, I was able to get it to run for about 25 seconds without crashing.

All the game seemed to be was an exact replica of the Atari game, with slightly updated NES graphics, with each of the characters stating ‘there is no food’. The game would also flash up with ‘don’t forget version 3’ in the corner occasionally, but this didn’t seem to do anything until I accidently booted the game up in an obscure NES disc system emulator. The title screen actually showed up then, revealing ‘There is no food 3’ in bold letters, albeit not showing anything else. The game was exactly the same though, but used Mario and Luigi sprites for each of the characters from Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES.

At this point I was a little frustrated as I had gone completely down the rabbit hole to little avail. I then heard a loud bang at the door. I ran there, seeing three men in black masks attempting to enter the house. They yelled ‘open the door or we will forcefully enter!’ They smashed in anyway and ran straight the computer. At this point I was almost suffering a panic attack, assuming they would steal or destroy my computer. However, they quickly ran out the door, leaving without trace, my computer seemingly untouched.

Looking in my folders, everything was there. Except the two ‘There is no food’ ROMS. I tried to search for ‘There is no food’ on the internet, but it just returned no results. I don’t know what to make of it, I really don’t. Maybe I got caught up in something I wasn’t supposed to. I just needed to get this out there.





(Back to reality) What did you think, I'd appreciate feedback. I know the ending is terrible, and there is work needed to be done in the second half, but just to know whether it could work in the first place would be helpful.

<p class="MsoNormal">Cheers!

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