'You just know crap when you see it,' says man judging bad video games contest
2023 Crap Games Contest invites users to program the worst possible retro garbage
What makes a video game truly crap?
"There's no hard and fast criteria, really," says Jamie Bradbury, 44, of Hull, England. "You just know crap when you see it."
Bradbury is the host of the 2023 Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Contest. The tongue-in-cheek competition, held since 1996, invites contestants to code the worst possible games for one of the U.K.'s oldest home computers, the ZX Spectrum.
"If you have great ambition, but maybe your skill level as a programmer doesn't meet that ambition, then that could make something crap," Bradbury told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
"If you've got a certain sense of humour and you want to sort of build a game around that, then that could be quite crap."
This year's entries include Cocaine Bear, loosely based on the 2023 film, which itself was loosely based on an actual bear; Face Punch, in which the player very slowly moves back and forth punching an opponent until he falls down; SUPER (advanced fishing simulator), a fishing simulator that is, in fact, not very advanced at all; and several games based on the popular drawing toy Etch A Sketch.
Bradbury's job is to play and review every single one. He's done close to 30 so far, and will continue doing so as submissions roll in through the end of the year.
"Imagine if you've got five different Etch A Sketch games and you've got to write a ... review on each one and they're all essentially more or less the same thing," he said.
To the loser goes the crown
So how did Bradbury end up with such a tedious responsibility? It's his reward — or punishment — for submitting a relatively decent game to last year's contest.
Every year, the person whose game is judged to be the least crappy is tasked with hosting and judging the following year's competition.
Bradbury earned his job by creating Isle of Jobo, in which you play a corrupt prime minister who tries to hold onto power for as long as possible while lining his pockets and those of his cronies.
"I'm proud of the game I made, definitely," Bradbury said. But he's got mixed feelings about the consequences of his victory and/or loss.
"There's definitely a lot of work that's involved … to run a year-long competition where you're reviewing games, you know, with a very mixed quality standard," he said.
"It's quite a lot of pressure to think of something novel and interesting to say with a game that might have taken one five minutes to make, and it doesn't really do anything."
Started with an April Fools' joke
A game for the ZX Spectrum that barely does anything is, in fact, what started this whole thing. It was called Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
"The only thing that you could do in the game is press the letter M , and if you held that down, then a small lawn mower would start to very slowly mow the lawn," Bradbury said. "And then after a certain amount of time, the lawnmower would break down."
In 1988, the computer magazine Your Sinclair published a glowing review of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator — which, at the time, did not exist — as an April Fools' joke, according to a Guardian article by Rich Pelly, one of the now-defunct magazine's former writers.
A month later, Your Sinclair released an actual copy of the game on a cassette tape attached to the cover.
'100% crap factor'
That inspired readers to send in their own terrible games, which the magazine started reviewing in a column called Crap Game Corner, penned by Pelly.
"My job description included reviewing games and taking screenshots (at first, with an actual camera and a hood over the telly, until someone worked out a more technical method)," Pelly wrote in the Guardian.
"The dichotomy of Crap Game Corner was the longer it went on, the crapper the games became, and the more delighted the readers were when I slagged them off. (Games were rated up to 100% Crap Factor)."
That column morphed into the contest, and here we are.
"I've always found it tremendously amusing to sort of quickly code a crap game over lunch and then ... see what people think about it," Bradbury said. "It's nice to be part of that history, really."
Each submission is meant to hearken back to the era of the ZX Spectrum, a system that could display a whopping eight basic colours and had 90,000 times less memory than a modern iPhone.
That, Bradbury insists, is part of the charm.
"People of my generation, it's the first computer that people had in their homes. So I think there's a lot of great childhood memories and nostalgia connected to it."
The games are all free to download, and modern gamers can play them on their computers by using an emulator — a program that simulates playing an actual ZX Spectrum.
The contest ends Dec. 16, at which point Bradbury will decide which game is the most crap, and which is the least crap, damning another creator to a year of reviewing absolute garbage.
"I'll try not to let the power go to my head," he said.
Interview with James Bradbury produced by Chloe Shantz-Hilkes.
