Custer's Revenge Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 1/31/2021)

[Image from wikipedia.org]

Custer's Revenge

Developer: Mystique

Publisher: Mystique

Genre(s): Action?

Platforms: Atari-2600

Release Date: September 23, 1982

I have never played this game. You have never played this game. I'd be willing to wager that most of the users on this site have never played this game unless they were some high school-aged dork in 1982 that got creative with a fake ID to buy this game. This is a game in which its reputation precedes itself. It seems unfair to judge a game harshly even if one hasn't even played it, but this is not the case for this game. Custer's Revenge is notorious for arguably being the most controversial video game of all time. Unlike in the case of games like Grand Theft Auto, no one is defending this game's legacy.

You play as General Custer, a central figure in the American Indian Wars in the latter half of the 19th century. You walk around the desert plains of the wild west dodging arrows. Did I mention that Custer is naked? Being that it's an Atari game, he just looks like a peach-colored block of pixels with a cowboy hat, but I'm sure you all can use your imaginations. I don't think I have to tell you what the pixeled belt-area noodle is supposed to be. What's the objective? Well, there's another blob of pixels with a tanner color, a feathered headband, and some large protuberances from the mid-area leaning up against what I can only assume is a cactus. It turns out that the other blob of pixels is a naked Native American woman tied up against a cactus (...yay, I got it right) and the main objective is to rack up as many points as Custer by raping this woman while she's tied up while dodging arrows. Yeah, you read that correctly. This is a game where the only objective is to rape someone. What the fuck were they thinking?

Custer's Revenge is like the video game equivalent of Birth of a Nation. The only difference is that Birth of a Nation had a sense of spectacle and was a landmark film that many film historians still give credit to. This is just mindless, despicable smut. Decades later, having this game to top off your historic video game collection is like possessing Nazi regalia; you will have to make like Lucy and have some explaining to do. No one likes this game, and I mean absolutely no one. If Jack Thompson campaigned against this game back in the Atari era, every gamer would have just nodded their heads in agreement. Conservatives hate it because their children could've gotten a hold of it and it degrades someone that they consider to be an American hero. Liberals hate it because it celebrates rape culture and the white-centric power fantasy it displays. Gamers hate it because it's boring and makes our hobby look bad. It's almost beautiful how something so offensive and tasteless can bring all of these people together in perfect harmony which in turn is the only positive about this game.