Game “Preservation”
Mommy’s Best Games has acquired the IPs of “legendary” arcade developer Occidental Design and is wringing them for every last drop of latent cash by releasing the long-lost Bumpy Grumpy on PC.
Occidental Design was the horrifically disfigured lovechild of Baer Sternmidden and William S. Fushnell, who were behind such controversial classics as Rip ‘n’ Tear, Xordian Knot, and Hellbombers. Bumpy Grumpy had a regional test back in 1983, but never saw the light of day beyond that. Occidental Design then faced bankruptcy multiple times before giving up in the face of horrible poverty in the early ‘90s.
For almost all of us, this will be the first time we get to experience Bumpy Grumpy, and it’s actually quite surprising that Mommy’s Best Games was able to salvage working code from the diseased corpse of Occidental Design.
Not really.
I wasn’t planning on even doing this bit. Since my editors would likely be mad at me for misleading our readership, I should probably stop here. I only recently escaped the Destructoid Death Maze after the last incident. I can’t bear to be thrown back in there.
For real, though
Mommy’s Best Games head guy, Nathan Fouts, emailed me with this ruse. They’ve set up a website doling out the “history” of Occidental Design, and the whole thing is pretty fun. Creating a fake history of a retro-inspired game is a pretty great way to market it, and I enjoyed reading through it.
Bumpy Grumpy is actually a real game, though, and there’s a Steam page to prove it. Mommy’s Best Games was behind Shoot 1UP, which you’d probably recognize if you hung around XBLA back in the early ‘10s. It’s the shoot-’em-up that advertised itself using the lady with robot tits. I never even played it, but I can absolutely remember those metallic mammaries.
While Bumpy Grumpy is a lane-changing driving game, and that isn’t exactly the most unheard of genre, its commitment to the lost arcade aesthetic is a nice draw. Its marketing has certainly grabbed my attention, so well played.
Currently, Bumpy Grumpy will release strictly on PC. No release window has been given.
