Infamous Moments in Gay-Gaming History: Johnny Turbo
I love when a reader writes such a fully formed article that all I need do is copy and paste it..and voila! content!
Forum regular and self proclaimed “token straight guy” Paul Soth left this lovely treasure for me to unearth this morning..
“First off: I’m so sorry.
This was floating around the net a few years back, but in case you missed it I’m going to bring it up here. For those who don’t know, Johnny Turbo was a series of three comic book multi-page ads for the TurboDuo. To be honest, it was a last ditch attempt to save the system and throw in some attacks to the Sega CD, and we know how that turned out, but let’s move on.
The comics basically were about “computer expert” Jonathan Brandstetter (based on then TTI designer and developer John C. Brandstetter) who would become the big fat, bearded superhero Johnny Turbo in order to fight the evil goons of rival game developer FEKA. In the meantime, John lived with the scrawny, nerdy Tony (based on TTI employee Tony Ancona) who spent most of his day in the kitchen.
Anyway, the first two comics just had Johnny beating the crap out of the MIB like FEKA goons as they attempted to push their CD system on kids, with Johnny making sure the kids knew the awful truth that the FEKA CD system didn’t work on it’s own and that TTI had been putting out CD games for years. Big deal, right? But it’s with the third comic that things go in a much different direction.”
By this point, whoever was in charge of the campaign just stopped caring, and whoever was actually making the ads must of realized that they were making a comic about a big dominant bear living with a sissy domestic twink, at least that’s my guess anyway. And so the third comic was about Tony’s journey through a surreal dreamland filled with homoerotic metaphors and bursting with orgasmic glee about TurboDuo games. Really, we’re talking all kinds of Freudian imagery floating about, and the books on Tony’s bed leaves much to speculate. I can not see how this was not the intent.
And with that, the ads were never seen again, the TurboDuo failed, and John C. Brandstetter went on with his life. And these comics leave us wondering about what was going on with the people behind this ad campaign. Did they just not care? Was the artist trying to see how much he could get away with? Or was it all an elaborate attempt to simply make fun of John C. Brandstetter the whole time?
Really, just read them for yourself here.
The commentary isn’t all that work safe, and a bit homophobic, so be warned.”
Fruit Brute
Posted to Video Games on 27 August 2006
· Comments (1)
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