Terrible Old Games Done Justice Thanks to Ashens

Terrible Old Games You Probably Never Heard Of is the kind of name I wouldn’t hesitate to make fun of if I weren’t the guy who came up with Crowdfunding Analysis Time. Nevertheless, the video series of the same name by Youtuber Stuart Ashen is incredible. Unfortunately he’s stopped the videos, but the format lives on in his novel of the same name, which he crowdfunded with the help of newcomer Unbound last year.

Unbound is a book publishing/crowdfunding website that’s a little different from Kickstarter. Aside from being limited to books, they’re also a publishing house. Every book that’s successfully crowdfunded on the site is published directly by Unbound, meaning they also take a cut of the profit out of every regular sale.

Only the highest of quality pictures.

They also don’t list the funding goal for projects or their deadlines, only the percentage a project has earned towards its goal. Usually I would tear those kinds of practices to pieces, but it’s a book crowdfunding site, so it’s not our problem.

TOGYPNHO is rife with the kind of British humor that’s popular with the youths these days, as well as British gaming culture throughout the 80’s. As you probably guessed, the book and video series are about crappy old games. What really makes this book stand out from the rest is that it’s not like those Top 10 articles you’d find on Buzzfeed with popular bad games like ET or Superman 64. These games are much, much worse than those because they were released before the days of quality control, and anyone could make a game in the span of a couple of hours.

To prove this point, Ashens created his own terrible game called Button Press 3000. It’s available to download from the book, and by “download” I mean creating it yourself in a ZX Spectrum, assuming you know how to write up the lines of code provided. Ashens is about as good as coming up with names as I am, and the game is exactly what you’d expect. Press a button forever, with no goal other than to keep pressing that button.

It wouldn’t stay open, okay? This is the best I could do.

The book is full of entries detailing the worst games you really haven’t heard of, which are broken up by interviews with games journalists from the 80’s as well as other popular British Youtubers. You can hear more about the book in our latest video. Or don’t, we’re not forcing you to.