Commercial Break Monday Says: OMG DUDE WTF
In today’s Commercial Break Monday we take another trip into the world of video, to see an advert seems to have been especially designed to make people react in a certain HOLY JESUS WHAT IN CHRIST’S ASS IS GOING ON AAARRGGHH MY BRANE
Yes, it’s Centipede.
I have no idea if all those black and white clips were originally in that advert, but considering how mental the rest of it is it really wouldn’t surprise me. It’s literally got everything – the creeping shadow, the homeless guy as first victim to the Centipede menace, a woman waking up in bed with a frigging centipede and of course the good old ‘noooo the game is pulling me in’ trick, with a twist that makes me want to vomit and cry.
Seriously, I’m ready to hurl. I have an excuse – I’m taking a break to write this from a pitch to A Proper Yank Comics Company (wish me luck, fans!) that involves some pretty serious body horror – so much so that I made myself sick. I actually can’t bring myself to look at what I’ve written in case I have nightmares. This may sound like a good thing to you, but it’s me that has to proofread the bastard. So the last thing I need to see or hear is Insect Boy sobbing “HELP! SOMEBODY!” as he desperately clicks the horrific mandibles that will never kiss a girl now that he’s a freak.
Anyway, why is this advert so mental?
The only thing I can think of is that Centipede in its original arcade form was seen as a game for girls – possibly the first game for girls, given that Ms Pac-Man was basically a great honking drag queen of a game. (Although it did have the patented Pac-Man ‘cute factor’, he said sexistly.) Granted, this is all out of my old copy of the Winners Book Of Video Games, which I’ve not seen for years, but allegedly the whole shooting cute wee insects in a garden thing was seen as much more feminine than shooting aliens in space with a big butch tank or a phallic spaceship. Sounds like cobblers to me, but there we are.
Could it be that Atari desperately wanted to man up Centipede and get a larger market share from penis-owners? Or did they think that the incredible goofiness of this sick creation would make it even more appealing to the ovary-possessing gender – taking it ‘ovary and above’ previous expectations, if you will? Or did they just not think at all, but instead gibber to themselves, eyes rolling around in their heads as they hurled their own excrement at a board until the strange patterns of stinking foeces told them what nightmare they must create?
We may never know.
More later, as promised, but right now it’s time to get back to the horror. Wish me luck!
