What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Video Games

"Gabe: What happens if your Noby Noby Boy gets cut in half? Tycho: You have to devour your own asshole. Gabe: Game of the fucking year."
 * There was some platformer back in the 80's that featured the main character consuming mushrooms; whereupon he would immediately believe himself to have grown gigantic like Alice, or, if it was a green mushroom, that he would be revived upon death! He would also take frequent trips through pipes and could collect leaves that created a puff of smoke that would transform him into a raccoon tanooki tanuki. Then there was the surreal imagery of winged turtles, turtles flying around on little clouds, and walking mushrooms with angry little faces. In fact, there were faces, or at least eyes, on everything: mushrooms, stars, clouds; the hills themselves, even, in the sequels that would follow.
 * Normal Super Mario Bros. is essentially what happens when you take an already surreal premise and increase the LSD levels to unprecidented, horrific new heights. It starts of quite like the original Super Mario Bros.., but then you touch the Fuzzy and everything goes straight to Hell. Mario starts to sporadically grow and shrink, the Goombas are replaced by, but it takes several episodes to convince your brain you really are seeing what it thinks you're seeing.
 * Doug Ten Napel is a sober conservative Christian. You'd never know it from Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood.
 * One could be forgiven for thinking so, however - particularly Earthworm Jim 2, which featured, among other things, a ride on a stair chair with portraits of sharks on the wall while avoiding falling old ladies and listening to bagpipes, playing a gameshow inside someone's intestines while dressed as a blindworm, and a boss fight against a firebreathing steak on top of a giant pizza.
 * Consider the fact that The Neverhood is essentially based on The Bible. Can you really put that on drugs? Speaking of The Neverhood, Terry Scott Taylor doesn't appear to be on drugs either, yet his soundtrack to the game can give a different impression. Needless to say, it further contributes to the game's trippy feeling.
 * Rez, although the basic concept behind the game is to invoke synesthesia, a feeling of all one's senses blurring together, which has been reportedly experienced by people who've taken LSD.
 * Rez is also allegedly inspired by the works of Wassily Kandinsky. Whether he was on drugs...
 * Better yet, Child of Eden.
 * Lumines
 * Legend of Mana
 * Garden Gnome Carnage. Just, Garden Gnome Carnage. It numbers among the Freeware Games, so you can check it out for yourselves.
 * Katamari Damacy and its sequels. Interestingly enough, the intro for the original game contains images of both mushrooms and herbs of a questionable nature.
 * The "herbs" could plausibly be Japanese maple leaves, which totally look like pot leaves. Not that this makes the intro sequence (or the game in general) any less trippy.
 * Keita Takahashi says that he doesn't drink, either.
 * Just to be clear, the backstory to this game is "God went on a bender and destroyed the cosmos".
 * Earthbound. You're a little American boy out on a quest to fight an ultimate evil that a space bug from an asteroid told you about. Said ultimate evil's army consists of worthless protoplasm, unassuring local guys, ramblin' evil mushrooms, dice wearing little top hats, and erratic spheres that smile at you while they explode. You also get the help of little... people, of whom have doctors that work in trash cans, irregularly colored hot springs, and coffee that sends you into an acid trip. All of this is nothing, however, compared to Moonside, described in detail in Bizarro Universe.
 * Tanetane Island in Mother 3 is a much scarier sequel to the above's shenanigans.
 * Killer7 and No More Heroes, and anything else made by Suda 51. The man's a walking drug trip. Depending on the game, sometimes it's a bad trip. The cover of Shadows of the Damned explicitly calls it a "Suda 51 trip."
 * Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings et al. has Mira. After going through the trippy psychadelic Trail of Souls, you end up in a place with candy towns and a picture book city that looks like something out of Paper Mario.
 * The whole game. It plays very much like a typical JRPG plot put on a steady dose of LSD.
 * Touch Detective. Oh boy... Zombielike denizens that are the "normal" inhabitants, a robot butler, walking fungi, a Dream Land accessed via microwaved mushrooms, and the Cornstalker. It makes the Funny Animals look normal and the humans out of place.
 * Twisted Metal. Not only is this a trip, it's a pure nightmare trip. Yet David Jaffe claims he doesn't use drugs - he's just really immature.
 * Kingdom Hearts (which, among other things, features Alice in Wonderland as a level, turns Mickey Mouse into a badass, and has final levels where it seems physics has given up and gone home).
 * Ever wonder where the ideas for the earliest video games came from?
 * Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg was a game that involved kids in chicken suits who beat up crows with eggs. They had to save chicken elders who were trapped inside eggs by making a chicken noise. They were doing this to save Morning Land, a world inhabited by chicken people.
 * Gaia Online's story line isn't really meant to be taken seriously. So far it has included a Zombie Apocalypse, a family feud ended in an spectacular way (Everyone involved gets better), a second Zombie Apocalypse with zombie bunnies, a fight between Santa Claus in a Humongous Mecha and the spirit of Halloween, a parody of the original zombie plot with elves, a superhero parody, a Sphere of Destruction that only killed one person (maybe), an alien invasion involving energy drinks and a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Tom Cruise, Santa Claus turning into a cow, a Twilight parody mixed with gratuitous Ho Yay, Orphans, the (cyborg) Easter Bunny blowing everyone up, a prom, more elves (This time dark), gratuitous fantasy races completing in bizarre Olympic events, a subplot about an item that makes you grow an Evil Beard, and an MMO in which various inanimate objects (including Imperialistic Lawn Gnomes come to life and attack people. It adds to the charm, but the whole Santa!Cow thing still sort of creeps me out...
 * Wait until you find out who's BEHIND the events of the MMO...
 * The [Zelda games made for the Philips CD-I system featured bizarre distorted animation that seemed almost designed to frighten children. Brace yourselves and watch this example. There are several reasons the animation is like this. 1.) the traditional Russian school of animation does everything by hand, with pen and paper; so the animators were inexperienced at working with computers and 2.) The anime-style artwork of Zelda isn't exactly compatible with the Eastern European school of art.
 * The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask. A giant, lunar body with a creepy expression,   In addition, there are creatures that spit rocks under the rule of a monarchy, cows getting abducted, reliving the same 3 days over and over, a terrifying, unsettling mask salesman who's always grinning, a temple that requires you to FLIP THE UNIVERSE UPSIDE DOWN to complete, an opening sequence right out of Alice in Wonderland, it's all there. Oh, and the final boss is
 * Never mind The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening. Your entire objective during the game is to Add on top of that the thoroughly bizarre characters, such as a goat who writes letters, signing them "Princess Peach," or demonic enemies that look and act exactly like Kirby. Never mind While amazing, this story must have been influenced by something...
 * Psychonauts, especially with Meat Circus.
 * And Brutal Legend, and any Tim Schafer game. Believe it or not, he's as straight-laced as they come. He's just that Crazy Awesome.
 * "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy" in Yoshi's Island: The bizarre drug-like distortion of both the level map and the background music is quite creepy.
 * It's bizarre in real life too.
 * The Whoa Zone from Super Paper Mario. Am I going up, or down, or sideways, or... Aaargh!!
 * Wario Ware Inc.'s mini-games.
 * Nicktoons MLB. Many of the previews/reviews inform us that were not seeing things and/or that this isn't a joke.
 * Giant Bomb's Quick Look video has one of the guys stating he questioned his sanity when he saw it at E3 (at 00:37).
 * If there wasn't drug use involved in the production of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force golf videogame, someone has to be given a stylish canvas blazer with sleeves that do up at the back. This kicks in when you realize you're playing as a fast-food cup killing giant monkey wrenches with The Power of Rock on a golf course made entirely from candy, with the level soundtrack consisting of an infinite loop of some rock song using the word "PARTY" far too often, as a result of a meatball putting on a cursed T-shirt. This is only about halfway through the game.
 * DTET, a Tetris fan clone, has trippy backgrounds and visuals that must be seen to be believed.
 * There is an older, less well-known Tetris-based game entitled The Trippy Block Game—its gimmick is that it's a two player game: one player plays Tetris, while the other controls the erratic swinging and distortion of the playfield.
 * Metal Gear Solid? There are probably a million articles on this, go read any of them. And see if you agree.
 * Odama was described by the now-defunct Electronic Gaming Monthly as "We can just imagine Yoot Saito, Odama's creator, lounging on a beanbag chair years ago and smoking heroic quantities of marijuana, listening to Close to the Edge by the band Yes, and daydreaming about pinball. What other story explains the inspiration for a game that combines a stone ball the size of a house with an army of expendable soldiers in demolition-friendly feudal Japan?" Yes, that is a verbatim quote. Oh, by the way, you command these troops by yelling commands into a microphone. Seriously.
 * Ultima Underworld II featured mushrooms that distorted your vision; potions that made the colour map go crazy; levitating brain creatures which would attack your mind with a similar effect; and a plant which, when eaten before sleeping, would send you to a bizarre dreamworld full of bright colours and strange imagery. Later in the game, the player would arrive in this world consciously.
 * Plants vs. Zombies. A tower defense game wherein you plant flowers and various other vegetation and spores to defend you against a horde of extremely creative zombies. They do this by exploding, shooting peas, and shooting walls of elemental peas.
 * The Parappa the Rapper series. Especially the toilet rap.
 * Also, UmJammer Lammy, an off-shoot in the Parappa the Rapper series, is a giant trip. Very little of the game makes sense. Nonsensical moments include Lammy being Mistaken for Pregnant after eating too much pizza and being taken to a maternity ward run by a giant big-bosomed caterpillar who keeps vomiting, to Lammy's demise, and her famed catchphrase, "MY GUITAR IS IN MY MIND!"
 * Most of the games made by Swedish game developer Cactus Software seem to take place in bizarre nightmare worlds, but Mondo Medicals / Mondo Agency really take the cake. There are Let's Plays available.
 * World of Goo. Essentially it's Lemmings (which, by the way, arouses several questions on its own accord). But instead of lemmings there are various living multicoloured lumps of, well, goo with eyes. And they build inticate web-like structures out of themselves so that their more lucky... comrades?... siblings?... could reach a discharge pipe and be sucked in it. And there are flying lumps of goo that can reverse time. And the major goal for the goos is to leave the planet and fly away. And a part of their journey lies in digital enviroment. And all the excessive goos are stored in a special realm for you to build a highest possible tower out of them. And all of this is one huge Take That at consumerism.
 * Rayman. The bosses include a giant mosquito, a big saxophone with eyes, a man made of stone, and—best of all—a woman named "Space Mama" who travels around in a washing machine wearing a viking hat and wielding a rolling pin that shoots Frickin' Laser Beams. Also, the final few levels take place in a world made entirely out of candy.
 * The MAIN CHARACTER HIMSELF! He has no neck, no arms, and no legs! He's simply a bunch of floating body parts!
 * The Rayman Origins level where you get swallowed by a dragon counts. The dragon's insides are inhabited by green monsters wielding toilet plungers, its heartburn is fire, and its intestines go upwards and up through its mouth!
 * Genetos. The first four levels (or "generations") are quite tame, but the last generation has you flying through an ever-changing surreal environment shooting at enemies like flowers and jellyfish.
 * Don't Eat The Mushroom is a drug trip.
 * Parodius. The series was created by Konami as a parody of their own series, Gradius. Just one of many examples is the first boss in one of the games: a panda bear wearing a pink tutu with a pink (quacking) duck's head sticking out of the top of its head. Play this game and just try to argue that the development team wasn't passing around something illegal amongst themselves.
 * A literal is example is from Touhou in the form of Imperishable Night, which was partially designed while ZUN was drunk. It is noticeable in that it's the easiest game in the series. Though that's not saying much.
 * The battle against Reisen in Super Marisa World.
 * Oddly enough, Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, at least when compared to the rest of the series (and most notably, the games that they are a remake of). Some of the dialogue is just... well... comparable to the type of stuff found in the Metal Gear Solid series. Other things involve rematches in which a trainer's team is oddly unbalanced in terms of levels, a trainer with three level 50+ Metapod (who also reveals in the post-battle conversation that he initially mistook you for a giant Venonat), and a man who seems downright mentally unstable (see: Crowning Moment of Funny).
 * Oh, yes, there are also the elevators. There's one elevator in the Olivine Lighthouse, which goes all the way to the top. However, the area you need to get to is locked from the inside, so you have to climb the stairs. The stairs...do not go all the way to the top, at least not directly. You have to jump out of a fourth-story window to land on a third-story balcony in order to progress. Then there's the elevators at the Celadon Condominiums. There are two, one that only goes to the second floor and the roof, and one that goes to the first and third floors, but not the second floor, and to a different part of the roof. Both the second and third floor have doors for both elevators, with a sign over the doors to the elevator that doesn't stop at that floor telling you this.
 * Also, the Kimono Girls. Especially the last two you meet. Later, they help you summon the legendary Pokémon, in a cutscene that appears to have been dreamed up by Hayao Miyazaki.
 * Considering that the writers for the Pokémon games are the writers for Earthbound...
 * In the same games there's also this, quite possibly the most trippy thing in any game, ever.
 * In general, most Pokémon species often fit this trope quite well with their bizarre looks and all.
 * Samba De Amigo. Not so much the concept (though some of the characters are very weird), but the backgrounds are very psychedellic and often downright trippy.
 * Exposure to Yoshitaka Amano's concept art for the early Final Fantasy games tends to invoke this response. Interestingly, his more recent work for that series is much more coherent. Stylistic evolution, or rehab?
 * Good god, LSD. The name of the game and the opening scene really shows the outright trippiness of the game. It's based off a 10-year dream journal, so that's to be expected.
 * Now here's one that really looks like someone was on drugs. It's called Neptunia which is Console Wars meets Video Game. Yes, the three consoles are in one game. Developed by Sega, Compile Heart, Gust, Idea Factory, and Nippon Ichi. Definitely on drugs on this one.
 * Sonic Colors. Not only do levels include a tropical resort IN SPACE, an underwater Asian city, and a military base made out of food, Sonic gets power-ups by fusing with magic alien squids. Seriously, this game is going to give Super Mario Bros. a run for its money in the "pure weirdness" department.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog in general, really, most notably with Colors. Try to explain Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, Sonic and the Secret Rings, or Sonic '06 to someone who's not familiar with the games. Go on, try.
 * As for the special stages in the games that have them... "Dude... the fish, dude" is all that can really cover the ones in the first game, aside from a full description - you're in a rotating maze of colorful square blocks that look like gems, along with red and white checked circular... things that either do nothing or change the speed or direction of the rotation of the maze, and other circular things that flash red and are marked "GOAL" that send you out of the stage if you touch them (the maze spins faster and faster all around you while the screen turns white and an odd sound effect plays), trying to find a magical gem somewhere in the maze that is surrounded by smaller diamond-shaped blocks that change color each time you touch them before disappearing, and the background is dark blue with green tiles that turn into fish and birds while the matching generic scenery switches between being clouds and bubbles. Yes, really.
 * Noby Noby Boy is easily the most absurd game premise ever. You're a worm boy who can stretch and eat things and people. There's no objective you just kind of move around a tiny suburban environment seemingly floating in the sky.


 * Hellsinker is a very strange game. Most shmups don't have very involved stories, so it's easy to overlook strange things like characters being sentient umbrellas or giant flaming robotic bees, but Hellsinker stands out in that it actually has a plot - it's just a really strange one. One of the player characters is a topless fairy inside a mech, a recurring midboss looks like a giant bleeding quartz crystal but screams like a cat, one of the (robotic) bosses cracks apart to reveal a glowing humanoid figure, and then there's the ending. Even years after release, it's still hard to make total sense of the plot.
 * Patapon. You're the god of a tribe of eyeball people, which you must command into battle against other tribes of eyeball people by drumming four sacred, colored drums, so they can reach their ultimate objective; IT, which is located at the end of the Earth and no one knows what it is, but is said to grant eternal happiness. Along the way, you deal with masks with great powers that wipe out memories when worn; giant multicolored easter eggs with several Sealed Good in a Can inside, including a princess and the core of the world; massive Eldritch Abominations with a second head on their stomach; star-shaped people that drop money from their body, demons, bird-riding people, and overweight djinns and Fungus Humongous that chuck rocks. Yep, not made on drugs indeed.
 * Cargo the Quest For Gravity and other games by Ice-Pick Lodge have been thought to have been made on drugs. It involves kicking anthropoid babies for FUN, or making them dance for FUN at which point random objects fall from the sky. Enough FUN means contintents get their gravity back, but beware the giant pinguins. Oh, and the protagonist also says random things like: "Autumn falls, continents fly away to warmer countries."
 * Ufouria is an obscure NES game, where, among other things: One of the main characters attacks by knocking his eyeballs out of his head and letting them fly out to enemies, you climb giant trails of drool in order to get to higher places, the world's rivers are controlled by a giant faucet, and one of your allies is a wingless bird who flies via means of a propeller cap and who carries you around on a rope made of... actually, it's probably best not to contemplate what it's made of. It's about equal parts drugged up and unadulterated Japan.
 * And can be seen in a Let's Play on this very site.
 * While the Bit.Trip series wasn't made on drugs, it certainly feels like it when you get to MEGA and on occasion, ULTRA. Interestingly enough, the storyboard for Growth (BEAT's last song) was made on drugs - dental drugs, to be exact.
 * Siren: Blood Curse will make you ask that at least once. Earlier games in the Siren series definitely had a few momments (such as fighting a giant disembodied and screaming head) but this game takes it up a notch. There are half-insect shibito flying around on lacy wings. Shibito that have heads that look like giant maggots standing on their ends. Closets with large disembodied heads that scream at you if you open them up. But what takes the cake is the final boss. You fight it in a trippy arena of swirling and shifting colors that would not look out of place at all at an Iron Butterfly concert. The boss is a stripey, multicolored insect-like creature that shifts it's form by flying apart and coming back together into various strange shapes. And you defeat it by using the blue flames of a magic cube and a sacred samurai sword. Oh, and you have to keep track of it by sightjacking your invisible, dead friend. Yeah.
 * Death Crimson OX, a light gun game for the Dreamcast. You play two youngsters who are using handguns invented 5,000 years ago in ancient Sumeria. You aim to defeat the plans of a monstrous terrorist general who still manages to wear a pair of snappy tan trousers despite having a mutated upper torso. You end up fighting giant robots, Langoleer-looking things, animate skeletons, guys who are...blue and scimitar-wielding Bedouin (within the first fifteen minutes, no less). The bosses include a Perky Goth who bounces erratically on a disk of light, cyborg rats and a giant ant. But the second-to-last boss beats them all. A man who has been "possessed" by having his head replaced with what looks like a giant egg and what looks like Japanese Kanji written on it and a pair of giant red lips. His weak points travel from his elbow to his crotch and once his body is defeated said big red lipped egg swells up, flies off of his body, splits into six other head/eggs and starts shooting lightning bolts at you.
 * Any game by Jeff Minter. Just look at Tempest 3000, Gridrunner Revolution, and Space Giraffe.
 * The Sega 32X platformer Tempo is one of the strangest games ever. You play as an anthro grasshopper that looks more like a child in an insect costume, and he goes to many strange places while being filmed for a TV show, such as (what looks like) the inside of a CD player that has insects endlessly dancing in the background, a fuzzy white beast that has living cheeseburgers and multiple hearts inside it, a Christmas-themed winter wonderland, a circus, and more. And then the bosses are weird too, you fight living boxing gloves, headphones, boots, and more (a few of the bosses don't even have anything to do with the level you just finished, such as the boxing glove one, which you fight after finishing the Womb Level).
 * Also, the American box art is weird too, and has nothing to do with the game whatsoever. Get this: The box art shows a mutant human/insect crossbreed wearing a headset, sunglasses, and a scaly reptile-like suit, holding a musical note in one hand, and kicking a red squid-like alien in the face.
 * Hatoful Boyfriend is an otome-style Visual Novel (with a female protagonist and male suitors) where you date pigeons. Pigeons.
 * It later becomes clear in Bad Boys Love and Holiday Star that the story is meant to be taken seriously.
 * Rise of the Tomb Raider left many, many people who know Russian dazed from giggles, yet this have to be only a weak echo of what the creators experienced, because some parts bear a mark of minds expanded all the way out of smokestack. Never mind moments like Bulgarian text passed as Russian, uniforms 30 years later than the supposed events - on mostly intact corpses because Siberia evidently is in Antarctica (after we learn it has mountains and includes a city which sank in a lake near Nizhniy Novgorod, this doesn't really stand out), or map of Russian Empire stuck there for some reason - those trifles can be attributed to common ignorance and laziness of someone just lifting the first reference from image search. Latin car plates, as well as graves with both Soviet and Nazi symbols could be from modern Baltic states. But then there are weirder elements:
 * A family photo that supposedly did belong to the Mysterious Sectants - who actively avoided other humans from about 10XX-something CE to 1930-something (when they were imprisoned).
 * An NKVD ID, with description "A gulag identification card for one of the prisoners". How exactly can one find a high-quality picture of this and not know exactly what this document is?
 * The Quality Mark painted on a ramshackle wooden barrack/barn/whatever it is. It's not from stock wood texture, it's HUGE and painted on. One could suspect it's a joke, but then it's also present on a plaque in a metal fence.
 * The heroine burning space propaganda posters on the wall (there's an achievement for this). Does she have some sort of a vendetta against Soviet space program, tries to erase its evidence from history, or what?
 * Wooden Tetris. Yes, you did read this right.
 * From an expansion: "Baba Yaga's broom" is… guess what? A scythe. Again, the question is "how?" Or "Okay, you don't know Russian... but at least English you have to know?" Did they really sniff some very trippy flowers?