The start of the affair: Porky's

5:47 AM on 06.30.2008   |   Jonathan Holmes

19 comments

The first videogames I ever played were Asteroids, Missle Command, and Space Invaders. I really liked them. All three had explosions and bullets, and two out of three featured (gasp) aliens. What wasn't to like? Keep in mind, I was three years old at the time, so I wasn't that hard to impress.

So from the start, I liked videogames, but never really loved them. It would be a few more years before I had reason to to truly love videogames. By love, I mean be fascinated, surprised, amazed, emotionally entranced, and most of all excited by videogames. It would take a piss-poor excuse for a game, licensed from a piss-poor excuse for a movie, before my passing interest in gaming would bloom into a lifelong romance.

That's right, people, I'm admitting to the world that I love Porky's the videogame. Hit jump to find out why.

There is a space in between parody and tribute where many of the finest examples of comedy lay their heads. Spinal Tap, for instance, both shows how awesome, and how awesomely stupid metal bands were in the 1980s. To mock a subject and to show the world that you love it at the same time is not only more difficult to achieve than to simply doing one or the other, but it's also more accurate to the way human beings really feel about things. The more you love something (or someone), the more likely you are to see the flaws in it, and therefore have the urge to mock those flaws.

What does that have to do with Porky's the videogame? Absolutely everything. Porky's the videogame was the first example I ever saw how perfect a tool videogames could be for simultaneously mocking and paying tribute to the human condition. 

Before Porky's, I thought videogames were good only for fantasies; specifically, fantasies in faraway lands involving explosions, spaceships, ghosts, and other larger-than-life subject matter. That's all well and good, but it's nothing to be taken too seriously. I considered fantasies to be kid's stuff, ridiculous nonsense with no relation to reality. If videogames were only good for fantasies, then they weren't good for anything substantial, or so I thought (at age six). Then I played Porky's, and my eyes were opened.

My eyes were opened very wide indeed when I saw that now-iconic shower scene in Porky's. There it was, a real attempt at the depiction of a naked woman, pink from head to toe, on display for my little six-year-old eyes to behold. This was the closest thing I had ever seen to a naked woman in my life, and it was amazing.

No, it wasn't amazing because of the feelings it activated in my loins and nethers. It was amazing because it showed me how god damn ridiculous human beings, and human sexuality, really are. There it was, a wiggling bunch of pink shapes. The image couldn't have been any more anti-climactic. That's what all the adult men I'd ever met were fussing over, dreaming of, trying to see and touch, to do whatever it was that they did to women that would make them have babies. That was all there was to it: a bunch of wiggling pink shapes. Ridiculous.

At the same time, though, I recognized that something inside me loved those pink shapes. As I played Porky's, I desperately wanted to be able to guide the game's player character into the shower so it could hump that heavenly body. Those pink shapes in that tiny shower room were just as fantastic and amazing as any UFO I could blast in outer space or any ghost I might do battle with in a neon blue maze.

It was ridiculous and it was awesome that I was a heterosexual male. That's what Porky's showed me. The truth of that fact caused me to laugh to (and at) myself in a way I had never laughed before: a knowing, adult laugh that amazed my six-year-old mind.

I laughed in the same way the first time I played Gologo 13 for the NES and saw Duke Togo's health return to full after he hugs a woman and then turns off the lights in his hotel room. I laughed in the same way I bedded my first hooker in Grand Theft Auto and saw the then nameless anti-hero's health fill up, just as Duke Togo's had all those years ago. And I laugh in the same way any time I see some guy trying to get with a girl just because of the way she is shaped, despite the fact that she and he have absolutely nothing in common.

It's funny because it's true, and true for every human being ever born. We unlucky humans are stuck with the same mindless need to reproduce, as are most primitive animals on the planet. It's a truth so close to who we are as a species that it's hard to step back and see it, but Porky's the videogame led me to do just that. Despite its repetitive, mostly uninspired gameplay, I'd play Porky's over and over again, endlessly fascinated with the wonderfully stupid sexual instinct of the heterosexual male.

Since Porky's, I've consistently gravitated towards videogames that mock and pay tribute to the way real life is. I loved the way that in the first Metal Gear, Snake's health goes down when he smokes cigarettes. Why would you ever smoke them, then? For the same reason all the kids I knew smoked cigarettes in real life, because it made you feel cool. That's stupid but true, and that's what makes it funny.

I loved how in EarthBound, if you went for too long without calling your mother, your ability to fight would decrease. Why would your ability to fight decrease if you don't call your mother? For the same reason it would in real life: human beings form illogical emotional attachments to each other, and if those attachments are severed, they lose the emotional energy to do anything with their lives (even beat on hippies with baseball bats). The fact that a human's emotions are so important to their ability to function is equal parts poignant and ridiculous, and that's what makes it funny.

That's one of the many things I love about videogames: how they have the power to show us the truth about the human condition and how they give us the opportunity to both laugh at and better understand ourselves. For me, that all started with Porky's the videogame, way back in 1983.

Thank you, Porky's for the Atari 800 and Atari 2600. I'll never forget you, and the shower scene that changed the way I look at life.