Screenplay, 1983
originally played on Commodore 64
Even among the most chaotic of individuals there is a
habitual need for an order in the world, manifest in some way or another as a
fetish or a process or a mode of administration. Driven not by hate or love, tied
to a pogo stick for some reason unknown to even the most cruel of
existentialists, the protagonist of Pogo Joe (1983) is one of the lesser-known heroes in the halls of early digital
gaming. Like most people who knew the game, I encountered Joe on a Commodore 64 disk
filled with at least ten other games, pirated from who knows where. My
research has since taught me that Pogo
Joe did in fact see a retail release, but a copy didn’t make its way to
Thunder Bay when I was there, or if it did I never saw it.
Essentially a Q*Bert (1982) clone with sufficient additional gameplay elements to justify its existence such as teleporters and areas in complete darkness, Pogo Joe is an isometric platformer which tasks players with jumping on pillars
laid out in a variety of geometric patterns in order to homogenise their
colour. Of course, monsters such as balls, tops, lizard-looking creatures, tadpole-things,
and other abstractions are also jumping around the levels, randomly seeking to
disrupt Joe's desire for an OCD-safe environment of universal colour distinction. Points
are gained if players land on the balls before they ‘hatch’ into monsters, who
are otherwise indestructible. Basically, distilled to its
essence, Pogo Joe is either a masterpiece of feng-shui minimalism or a genocidal nightmare. In either case, it's quite an impressive copy of Q*Bert.
Q*Bert itself is
an interesting thing. A psychedelic colour and light show featuring surreal
abstract cartoon enemies, Q*Bert used an isometric vantage point and a control
scheme centred upon a diagonally-oriented 4-way joystick. One of the first videogames to convincingly simulate
a 3-D effect (note: like Zaxxon (1982) the 3-D effect is a 2-D illusion) as well as an early example of the use of digitised speech synthesis, foul-mouthed Q*Bert became one of the icons of the first generation of videogames. Reproduced
on lunchboxes and t-shirts, part of CBS’s Saturday Supercade, with popular
conversions of the arcade original for home consoles and computers, Q*Bert may
not have been as widely-known a character as Donkey Kong or anyone in the Pacman
family, but he held his own for at least one or two holiday shopping cycles. I never
liked the show much, but then again I did like the piece of shit Rubik’s cube show, so what did I know?
Pogo Joe is a
clear attempt to cash in on Q*Bert’s
pop culture success. Oddly enough, it makes a lot more sense for a guy hopping
around on a pogo stick to be restricted to isometric grid-based movement than
it does for an adorably marketable alien creature with anger management issues living
in a possibly multidimensional Euclidean abstraction with constant threats to
his life being interrupted only by momentary instances of joy which otherwise
mark as Sisyphean a tragedy of endlessly exploited custodial labour. Much like Q*Bert’s later levels, some levels in Pogo Joe remove the columns from under
the colour-changing platforms, which results not in an actual gameplay change
so much as a challenge to not be visually thrown off. Pogo Joe is in some ways an easier game, as players cannot fall off
the columns by jumping the wrong way. However, it often tasks players with
traversing levels which are far more restrictive than Q*Bert’s large pyramids. Unlike Q*Bert’s fancy hover discs which
let him escape from enemies when he’s caught in a pinch, Pogo Joe has been
granted an athletic double jump or bounce, or whatever the fuck you do on a
pogo. Mastery of this jump is necessary to advance in the game. You’ll probably
end up dying a lot in this one, at least until it gets very easy. As in many of the games of this era, enemies are
rather predictable and don’t adjust their behaviour. So the trick, then, is to learn the patterns.
Perhaps it’s tough to tell from 2013, but Pogo Joe’s graphics were fairly
spectacular for a small-budget release in 1983 on 8-bit computers. The ad makes
a point of comparing Joe favourably
to the arcades before offering one $10,000 prize to anyone who passes the tenth level.
Nothing beats the bribery of children for the purposes of consumerism. So many
ads in the 1980s were contests of skill or chance with cash prizes or expensive
electronics that I am amazed I never participated. Actually, that’s not entirely
true. In 1986, I was thoroughly hooked by the G.I. Joe Live the Adventure
contest which offered people who solved a mystery extended across numerous
G.I.Joe products (re: purchases) the chance to win either the infamous
seven-and-a-half foot long G.I. Joe aircraft carrier or the new G.I. Joe Spaceship.
In retrospect, I probably spent more than the cost of either of those excessively
hyperbolic dream toys trying to win one of those excessively hyperbolic dream
toys. It was the spaceship I wanted. One of my best friends already had the aircraft
carrier. I wanted the spaceship.
Pogo Joe himself is a bit of a clown demon, really. Joe and
the monsters are rendered in large, colourful sprites which allow for a good
amount of expressive detail in their characterizations compared to those in
similar games of the era. On the other hand, the title screen scared the fuck
out of me as a kid. Not in a bad way, but rather that kind of kindertrauma
which excites and confuses in the best of all possible ways. The circus
performer outfit I can handle. Growing up, there was this old guy on our street
who lost his larynx to throat cancer. The man still smoked, of course. He
lived right across the street from our house and used to come over and present
us with things stored in his garage – shitty jewelry boxes encrusted with plastic
diamonds, broken hockey sticks which were clearly no longer regulation even if
they were in one piece, football cleats from the 1960s, and a child’s circus
performer outfit. I’m not at all sure why my parents were ok with this
behaviour. It didn’t happen often, maybe six or seven times in total. Each time
he came over, he ended up scaring the absolute fuck out of my brother and me, dressed
either in an old Canadian naval uniform or a housecoat and frayed slippers,
speaking broken Italian-English through an electronic voicebox held against his throat which made him sound like a Chipmunks version of Darth Vader, a
cigarette in one hand and some random shit donation to our childhood in the
other. In the four years between me being old enough to pay attention to weirdos
like him and the day he died and was taken down the street to the hospital in
an ambulance which had to lap around the block, I never saw anyone visit his
house. He used to stare at me from his porch as I ran around the neighbourhood
with friends. When I told my mom that I thought he was weird, she told me that
he had lost his own children when they were adults and crashed their car into a
river. Like that old man, Pogo Joe on the title screen is a reminder that it’s
really the eyes and the smile which trouble the soul and keep kids awake at night.
