Adolescent Wet Dream Gone Wrong: The Video Game

What follows is the box art of the 1990 Data East-produced PC video game Drop Rock Hora Hora. Based on the art, what would you conclude about the game?

Why, certainly you’d think that the game starred an effeminate boy in an oversized sweatshirt who fights to rescue a damsel — possibly his sister? — from a monstrous demon and his army of floating eyeballs and nocturnal, sentient, jack-o’-lantern-esque produce. Or perhaps you might guess that the game has you controlling the horned demon in an effort to find the most precious catatonic virgin in all the land — and, perhaps, as a sort of bonus round, also the young man, who, based on his attire and hand gestures, is probably not a virgin. Hell, maybe you control the eyes — player one is Blue Eye, player two is Topaz Eye — and your job is to bound around the room, viewing it from different angles until you have gained enough perspective to properly discern the relationships between the monster, the coma girl and the boy. (Very post-modern.)

All seem like reasonable interpretations of strange art that, honestly, could be either quite a literal or quite an abstract representation of the game. After seeing the art on this blog, I was interested enough to see how all the elements could possibly tie together. I found a gameplay video on YouTube. I watched. Initially, I thought I might have possibly decoded the box art, when I saw this screen:

You know, because by not meaning anything, it could mean a lot of things. Then, after a lot of Engrish, I got to the actual game play:

Surprise! (I guess?) It actually is a kind of shooter — basically Breakout (that game where you control a paddle that bounces a ball up to a structure that you chip away, block by block) crossed with Space Invaders. With fruit. I’d feel stupid, but I suspect that the fault lies in the artist not having played the game, perhaps instead only having heard about it while on a lot of cold medicine.

What I’ve written here, I feel, is the spiritual successor to this post.