Weirdest movie to game adaptation? Porky's on Atari 2600

A lot has been said of Atari’s E.T. game, over the years. It’s a game that really strove to offer the player a more in-depth experience than what other licensed games were doing at the time. Aliens was made into an Atari game, and it’s essentially a Pac-Man clone, for instance, and while developer Howard Scott Warshaw’s vision proved too lofty for his five week time limit to create E.T., there’s some good ideas in there, and more importantly, from a movie that made sense to make the move to video games. It was a family movie starring an alien trying to get home, that right there has some substance for a game concept.

Why though, did someone look at the movie Porky’s, a raunchy, R-rated comedy about teenagers going to a strip club and trying to lose their virginity?! And, perhaps even more perplexing, how the heck did I end up owning this game, at the age of 4 or 5??

So first off, the game. The first screen you’re greeted with is kind of a Frogger clone, with multiple lanes of traffic you have to cross, each getting faster. Apparently each lane may have some kind of tie to the movie, though having never seen it, I can’t really say. There’s I think a boat, some cars, some guys that according to the manual are Porky’s bouncers. Each lane gets faster, until it’s literally impossible to not get hit. When you do, you’ll end up in the next area, the swamp. Here you have to pole vault back and forth and try to swing yourself up to an upper area that has a flashing block, then swing to the other side to use the brick to make a ladder. Do that a few times and you’ll be able to climb your way out, which leads to…

The shower scene. I guess this was a pretty famous scene in the movie, where the guys are peeping through a hole to see the women showering. I believe they get caught, and hilarity ensues, or some such nonsense. So that scene is recreated here, with a screen that kind of resembles a Pac-Man maze, but like, if a Pac-Man maze had gravity, since you can’t simply go up the screen, you have to climb ladders. And there’s a showering naked woman instead of a group of four ghosts, that’s different too. At the top of the screen is an item you need, and once you pass the midpoint of the screen, which is level with the peep hole, the woman will notice you and chase after you. You’ve got to push the item down the screen and drop it into the hole, then drop in yourself.

There’s a bit more to the game, but really I don’t want to give an entire play by play of this weird title, I’m just trying to describe how crazy weird it is that they made a game of this movie, on the Atari 2600. The game ends with you climbing some scaffolding and eventually blowing up Porky’s bar. I used to be able to beat this game as a kid, but I lost patience with it in my replay in order to write this blog post up, even though the game can be beaten in like 15 minutes. It’s a weird game, with a weird theme, based on a movie that absolutely does not hold up to modern scrutiny. How in the world did this end up in my game collection as a kid??

I can only think of one thing, and that’s the misleading cover. You see, for the movie, the poster and VHS art was of someone looking through that shower peep hole. The poster was a pretty good indicator of what the movie was going to offer you. The Atari box art, on the other hand, uses a kind of poor rendition of a guy and girl pig in neon. With a title like Porky’s and that box art, a quick glance might make you think you’re looking at Porky and Petunia Pig. I can only guess they were trying to fool kids into buying it? And hey, it worked for me! No idea how I got it, but I can remember being super young and playing it, so there you go. So yeah, Porky’s on the Atari 2600. Worth checking out just to see how weird it is they did this at all, but man, what were they thinking!