Hold on to the Night and there will Be No Shame

Like a significant portion of the internet population, I've had Erasure's Always stuck in my head for the last week or so.  There is a perfectly good reason for this.  That reason is called Robot Unicorn Attack.

Press "Z" to make your dreams come true! 

It's certainly not because I like Erasure.  Nobody likes Erasure.  They allegedly have legions of fans (particularly in the UK) and Andy Bell is regarded as a famous gay icon (so is Liza Minelli - good company you're keeping there), but I've never met anyone who said "Erasure?  Fuck yeah!" except in the context of "Who write's this song?  Erasure?  Fuck yeah I'm changing the station!"

I don't know why you'd be so excited about changing the station.  Maybe you're the kind of guy who just gets really into everything you do, like "Fuck yeah I wanna eat a burrito!" or "Fuck yeah, I cannot fucking wait to rock the shit out of this tax audit!" and if that's true, Fuck yeah - you're fucking awesome. Wooooo! 

 Good comic - wish I'd drawn it.  Thanks Anon.

But as so much depends upon context, the song Always found its own perfect time and place as the recursive soundtrack for Adult Swim's new and insanely popular flash game Robot Unicorn Attack.  In the game, you play, no shit, a robot unicorn with a shimmering rainbow mane that prances across a fantasy landscape of rainbows and waterfalls, galloping over purple grass-covered cliffs and leaping gracefully through the air while smashing through stars and catching fairies.  

Rainbow Dash Attack is Fucking Unstoppable!

You smash the stars with a rainbow dash attack. I have not made any of this up.

If you think that's gay, you have missed the point by a wide margin.  The only thing gayer than Robot Unicorn Attack is calling Robot Unicorn Attack gay.  Wow, really?  A game about prancing unicorns on a gum drop mountain could be considered gay?  You're so clever!  You should be writing for Seinfeld.  What?  Seinfeld is off the air?  Guess I'll just go shit in a bucket!  

Of course it's gay - that's the point!  But it's gay in an incredibly safe and fun way.  It's super gay, Liberace gay, mega ultra Kaoken ten-times-ten gay, completely over the top beyond the point of self-parody.  It's so gay that only straight people would play it, heads bowed, cheeks red - a guilty pleasure. 

Here's a rainbow, now jump over it - Fuck Yeah!

And it never takes itself seriously at all.  To be clear, some pretty solid craft went into this thing - the animation is as smooth as can be expected, the controls are simple, but responsive, and the sound sync is nearly perfect.  That doesn't even mention the sheer creative force of the people who conceived this game (I couldn't find a name to credit it to - it's just "an Adult Swim" game for now).  But when you die, your unicorn explodes in a fiery death-ball, and you are treated to a gruesome close up of your own severed robot horse head, crying out real tears the way only a robot who wants - wants so very badly - to be real can! 

This picture is called "Robot Unicorn Death" - I am fucking METAL! 

Furthermore, while the game refers to your lives (you get three) as "wishes," and announces your death by telling you that "You became a star," it's all done tongue-in-cheek*.  The game is not meant to be held up as a fine example of game craft on its own merits (mechanically, it's just another twitchy runner in a sea of similar Flash games) - it is meant to take the player to a very specific time and place.  

Anyone old enough to remember the movie Labyrinth will probably find something familiar about Robot Unicorn Attack.  Although the song Always misses the mark by having been released about 8 years after its target date, the sound of the song is pitch-perfect - there are strains here of Bowie's long cresting notes, and a definite Neverending Story tone at work.  It could have been released in 1986 (except for those terrible goddammed mid-90's synth horns), and it makes an excellent score to the game because the game itself has a very particular mode:  that of an adolescent girl circa 1986.  

Fucking Dolphin - I lost a wish getting this screen capture.

If you're my age, you recognize 90% of Robot Unicorn Attack as being line-for-line copied from the purple airbrush-art notebooks of the girls in your fifth grade class.  The magic dolphins, the little fairies - it's a saccharine sort of high fantasy birthed after the rise and fall of fantasy (in large part thanks to D&D) and including such luminous 80's classics as Legend and The Neverending Story. 

The point is, this game couldn't be more 1986 if it mailed you a free Bruce Hornsby hologram poster and an invitation to join Hands Across America and contribute to Chernobyl Relief whenever you played.  It couldn't be more 1986 if, after you were finished, Max Headroom teleported you aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger and crashed your fiery remains into Haley's Comet.

Too soon?

I guess that's why I like it so much - 1986 was a weird year.  In sports, the bears won the Superbowl with the Superbowl Shuffle, other than Falco and Cameo it was a musical wasteland, Lazer Tag was well on its way to supplanting Baseball as America's favorite post-apocalyptic pastime, and Top Gun made people believe if just for a little while that Tom Cruise was perfectly normal baby-oiled heterosexual**.  

If you lived through it, you probably remember the cold war as this big dismal gray thing hanging over your head.  There wasn't a week that went by that we weren't reminded of the grim inevitability of nuclear winter, or that the communists would march in and force us all to wear gray clothes and work in joyless labor camps forever.

 Why the hell did I even write a blog?  This picture says it all.

When you pair that with the dread cold of a Michigan winter (my own particular circumstance), and the gradual approach of millennium madness (the notion that the world would end in 2000), you've got some bleak circumstance indeed.  Fantasy was exciting and indulgent - no one was going to nuke you in the land of rainbows and lollipops, and that I think is why it was so popular in that one little place and time. Robot Unicorn Attack puts its finger right on that pulse, serves it up with a reverence, nostalgia, and humor. 

In any case, it's a damn fine flash game - addictive, fun, and silly.  Go play it! 

All of them, every single one!

*That wasn't a gay joke, but I see what you did there.

** Of course, we know better now.