FACT! #64

Yes, there was a time many, many moons ago that a game like this could be created. Released by Spectravision in 1983 for the Purina Foods and based off of their massively popular Chase the Chuck Wagon advertising campaign.

The game was a standard maze game, the player controlled a dog, named Chuckie, that had to make its way from the center of the maze to the chuck wagon that sat at the exit of the maze. The game has a time limit of either 60 or 30 seconds, depending on exactly what difficulty was chosen. There to thwart the player's efforts are a "dog catcher" and a "bone" that, if the player touches them, stuns him temporarily to make it more difficult to accomplish the goal.

If the player makes it to the chuck wagon, the second phase of the level is reached where the player has to control the dog as it attempts to eat the food... Seriously. All of that work (well, "work") just to help a dog whose depth perception is so shitty that they can't accurately judge where its food bowl is. What a riveting experience.

Anyways, at the end of the second phase the points are tallied up. The point totals are based on how fast you got to the wagon and an additional 100 points were awarded for accurately getting the dog to eat from its bowl. Then the whole thing starts all over again with a different map!

The game was only offered to people who redeemed their proofs of purchase from Purina dog food, as was common for many, many years back in the 1980s. The promotion wasn't successful, has been considered one of the worst games from a period of time that crappy titles flooded the market and the game has become a sought after title.

So bitch if you want about the current gaming market (I know I do) but there was a time that almost every game on the market was absolutely terrible. When that happens, it causes an industry to completely sink.

A Return?

I'm not going to make any promises but after much consideration and thinking, I am planning on returning to this blog and expanding it by attaching it to an actual website! The long pause wasn't necessary, but it certainly feels like it was. I don't know how to explain it, but I suppose that's the best way to put it.

Life just happened. Things got in the way, my naturally lazy personality chiefly among them... And I guess I may have been burned out. But I don't think that's an apt description. Really, I just sort of lost touch for this blog.

In the time between my last post and this one, I have seen one of my all time favorite sites go through a long content drought and after several months, the owner of that site finally admitted that he was bringing an end to the site and announce that he was going to be starting on another site. Then another site I absolutely love has been on an indefinite hiatus since 2010 and while there are signs that they're going to continue with it, nothing has happened yet.

Both of those (not quite) ends have made me a bit upset. Not angry, just... A bit like a part of my ritual has been blocked. I joined those sites in midst of their creation frenzy, cranking stuff out on a regular basis that was all quality. Then they just stopped. No notice, no warning, just gone. When contact was made, it was to announce that one was going down and well, there's been no information on the other.

Of course, I am talking about www.x-entertainment.com and www.homestarrunner.com. Anyone who knows me knows how much both of those sites have influenced me and how important both of them were to me working on this blog.

It got me to thinking, though. I have wanted to restart this blog and get the actual Virtual Vintage site up and running for some time now. While x-entertainment is going to continue as another site... I feel as if there is a lull in new content on the random crap that site and my blog have in common and now was the time to continue work on my blog.

Long, rambling story short, I'm going to try and start posting new content here and will be launching my actual site soon!

I don't know when any FACT!s will return, I hope soon. I won't do the FACT! a day speed I was going at, but I am hoping to continue with them as well. It's not that I don't have enough information to share, it's that I am really lazy and doing one a day was killing me.

So expect some new stuff to be popping up here, and it'll again be worth stopping by every day or so to see what else is new.

Thanks for sticking with me. I'm shocked to see how often I'm seeing references to this blog out there (there are a lot, then again... More than three would be a lot to me) and between the people I know that were visiting and the number of people finding it, even while I was gone, has brought quite a bit of joy to me.

...Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Google sent me $100 to use to advertise this blog and my site. So that definitely helped motivate me. :P