RetroGaming

I am here to defend Blues Brothers, which wasn't a crappy tie-in as much as a bad version of a game that made a lot of sense (and was much better) in the computers where it orginated. I played the crap out of the DOS version of Blues Brothers when it came out and absolutely loved it. I was very confused about its reputation in mainstream US-driven retro culture until I tried the Nintendo versions.

But yeah, I mean, you guys aren't wrong, popular consoles generated tons of shovelware since day one. The entire first party structure of the NES is an attempt to mitigate how bad it got on the Atari 2600, and don't get me started on the libraries of unlocked Western microcomputers.

I don't know that it disproves the argument in the article, though. It's true that nobody knew what the set structures were, and that was itself part of why you could jam together some absolute garbage and nobody in the process, from creators to first parties to reviewers and end users, could tell it was terrible. It led to heaps of praise put on absolute garbage, often engineered by toxic patterns and malicious marketing, but it also led to a lot of quirky creativity.

And damn, that beeper rendition of Peter Gunn was stuck in my head for a good chunk of the 1990s.