Big Brother Simulator

Another anniversary post!  10 years ago, T.M.R was running the 'Crap Game Compo 2006' and as the name of the competition suggests, the idea was to create a crap game.  Duh!

I decided to make an entry and came up with 'Big Brother Simulator'.

As the title suggests, the game was a supposed to be a 'simulator' and, yes, that part of the name was indeed inspired by a certain publisher called 'Codemasters' and their simulator (and seemingly endless) series of 8/16bit games.  The rest of the title was from the, in my opinion, trashy television series 'Big Brother'.

The idea of the game was quite simple - make a series of choices that increase your popularity and therefore increase your chances of staying in the 'house'.  Making a string of outrageous choices actually decreases your popularity, as does choosing boring options constantly, leading to eviction.  The best course of action was to make a balanced choice to slowly increase your popularity and stay in the house until the end of the game.

At least that's how it was coded initially but of course this being the 'Crap Game Compo', I broke, on purpose, all the carefully coded calculations that would average out your choices over the course of the game.  Therefore the game ends up being almost impossible to win; if you do happen to win it will be through sheer luck.

To pile on the 'crapness', the game is obviously coded in BASIC and contains some pretty dreadful PETSCII graphics.  Counter-intuitively, a lot of thought actually went into the graphics and code to make it as bad as it was!

There was also going to be a small (and also awful) intro with a badly wired bitmap 'Big Brother' logo and some tuneless music roughly sounding like the TV theme tune.  Unfortunately, this never got completed and all that's left is the logo which is badly corrupted for some reason; the music was written in an older version of Goattracker, but is lost.

The game was sent to T.M.R for inclusion in the compo.  The compo was never concluded; I vaguely recall their being a rather pathetic dispute about something or other which annoyed T.M.R, who quite rightly cancelled it all.

Somehow, the game ended up on Gamebase64 and can be viewed here.  I've no idea how it ended up there or who had access to the file other than T.M.R.  This is interesting because it never appeared on the 'official' CSDb page here.

Regardless, I offer a download direct from this blog, which not only contains the game itself (protected by disabling 'Run Stop'), but the corrupted logo bitmap mentioned earlier and an 'unprotected' version which can be loaded into a C64 and the code viewed after hitting 'Run Stop' and listing.  Grab the files here...