Everyone knows the tale of E.T. for the Atari 2600. The film took the world by storm and Atari rushed to develop a licensed game to ride the coattails of its success. Atari spent millions acquiring the rights, churning out a game in under six months, and printing out as many copies as possible. It was supposed to be a smash hit but the game was bad and poorly tested, so instead it was an expensive failure that became the figurehead of an industry-wide crash.

While E.T. was a disaster, video game companies kept coming back to the same idea: strap a successful license onto a bad game and the bad game will sell tons. They were probably right, at least up to a point, because the history of video games is littered with mediocre-to-awful licensed brawlers, shooters, adventure games, and action/platformers. There are games based on The Sopranos, CSI, Prison Break, Rocky, Jaws, The Godfather, Deadliest Catch, The History Channel, and Reservoir Fucking Dogs. Among others.

So I’m going to be streaming them. And writing about them.

I’m doing this for a lot of reasons: to promote my own upcoming game, to learn from the mistakes made by sloppy or bad games, to make gifs to post to twitter, to indulge in masochism, and because a lot of these games are dirt cheap these days. After all, like E.T. they were probably produced well in excess of demand.

I’ve already started up with X-Files: Resist or Serve as you might guess from the gifs I’ve interspersed throughout. And I already have a few more games lined up after that. It will be mostly a mixture of PS2/PS3 titles, but I have all sorts of systems available if I stumble upon the right game. If you’re interested in following me live, my efforts can be found at twitch.tv/RedbirdMenace but there will be gifs posted on twitter after each session, and write-ups here (probably with video) as I go along.

I don’t have a microphone yet, so for the moment the streams won’t have commentary. But I’m looking to maybe expand into doing commentary as well, and for now it’s all the easier to hear the bad voice acting. Generally, I will be playing blind but, in full disclosure, I will not stop myself from using in-game cheats to complete games with restrictive save points if they’re available. No one wants to watch me beat my head against a wall forever, and I’m more interested in seeing all the terrible content rather than the challenge. I’ll

Games up ahead will (probably) include The Sopranos: Road to Respect, Star Trek (starring Zachary Quinto), 24, and others! If you have any requests, feel free to let me know.

And God help me.