Beavis and Butt-Head Do Hollywood
Publisher: GT Interactive
The Basics
Beavis and Butt-Head are not role models. They’re not even human. They’re cartoon characters. Some of the things they do would cause a person to get hurt, expelled, arrested, possibly deported. To put it another way: Don’t try this at home.
Well, actually, you might have been able to try their tricks at home, but GT Interactive pulled the plug. Already stars of some latter-day SNES and Genesis games, Mike Judge’s gruesome twosome almost made the jump to 32-bit.
Humor is obviously the most important element of any game starring these two. Yes, you need the graphics to be recognizable, but underneath all the icing, you need to ensure that the underlying game is rooted firmly in adolescent, ridiculous humor. And B&B was designed very much with that in mind. The game was set in Hollywood. The plot went something like this: After the guys had finished work on their latest movie, they found they didn’t have any money with which to get home, so they took odd jobs on film sets in order to make cash. Conveniently, there were all sorts of movies being made, so B&B could have traveled through some varied environments with vaguely “filmy” themes.
At its heart the game was a simple 3D graphic adventure with smallish locations that contained tasks that melded platform elements with puzzles and stupid jokes. The gameplay itself wasn’t particularly hilarious (although some of the puzzles were reasonably chuckle-worthy), but what really stood out was the interaction between Beavis and Butt-Head. You didn’t just control one character or the other; you actually controlled both. By switching between the two, you could manipulate objects, lure things, push things around, and distract people. It wasn’t spectacularly original in concept, but it was refreshing to see the idea used in this context.
WHAT HAPPENED?
GT Interactive decided to clean house and save some money. Beavis and Butt-Head didn’t do Hollywood, or the PlayStation, for that matter, and were kicked to the curb with other GT console titles.
