While not officially existing, Peak Weirdness dates somewhere around 2001 to 2004 – or roughly when a commercialized Internet was at its most lawless and insane. YTMND’s had just taken off, complete nonsense Flash shorts (centralized at Newgrounds.com) were blowing people away, and thanks to high-speed Internet connections and file sharing networks, Americans were finally being exposed to weird videos of Japanese origin like Yatta and those Schwarzenegger commercials. For Peak Weirdness to have any sort of meaningful impact, one might have had to be in college, a time often associated with discovering yourself and your place in the world at lage. As an expression of culture, Keebler Elves flying out of someone’s butt, Sean Connery audio loops, and those silly (and somehow deathly serious) commercials from the other side of the world were paramount to constructing an Internet-ready identity. Humor seemed to be built on non sequiturs, and Peak Weirdness embraced that aspect of connected culture.
In the realm of interactive entertainment, the ultimate expressions of Peak Weirdness were found through Keita Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy and Nintendo’s WarioWare, Inc: Mega Microgame$ – two gameplay focused titles that also happened to be composed of the craziest shit imaginable. One featured its protagonist rolling up everything known to man while the other obliged short attention spans with rabid context in short bursts of gameplay. What people tend to forget, or at the very least, overlook, was how Polygon Magic’s PlayStation game Incredible Crisis provided a foundation for both of those games some four years earlier. Rather than oblige any semblance of a popular design when it was released in 2000, Incredible Crisis opted for an madcap narrative and backed it up with over twenty different minigames.
Minigame collections found their footing with Mario Party, but hadn’t often been incorporated into a single player narrative. The objective focus of Incredible Crisis’ story is each member of a four person family desperately trying to make it home to celebrate Grandma’s birthday. On the way there everyone suffers the most incredible crisis possible. Your success in each particular game is measured by a slowly exploding head in the upper-right corner; if the head blows its top, you fail the game. Fail enough times and it’s game over. Players have the opportunity to earn more “lives” by performing exceptionally well at the minigames and an infrequent save system makes it a bit easier, but generally Incredible Crisis functions as a destitute collection of hard-as-hell challenges seemingly meant to rectify some sort of personal tragedy.
Narrative weirdness endemic to Japan is conceit of Incredible Crisis’ narrative. Taneo, the father, escapes a work dance party only to be chased down a hallway, Temple of Doom style, by a giant boulder. The party functions as DDR-lite button pressing minigame, and “Bowling Inferno,” as the escape run is called, charges Taneo with pounding energy drinks and avoiding obstacles not unlike Pepsiman. Later he jumps out of a window and has to complete a balancing act on a flagpole, and shortly thereafter engage in another running minigame while flying down the street on a hospital gurney. Fate then dictates he gives a woman a “massage” in a Ferris wheel car before destroying countless UFO’s with a machine gun.
After taking all of that in the narrative switches over to his wife, Etsuko, who has an even crazier time. For the duration of her escape home she’s tormented by people with wolf faces, materializing in a crude stealth minigame, and an almost-impossible-to-complete rhythm game. After snowboarding away from armed wolf-people she hops in what appears to be an F-4 Phantom and engages a mission literally called, “Looks Like Top Gun” by negotiating the jet around rapidly closing doors. And then she uses her jet to fire missiles at a giant pink bear wreaking havoc, Godzilla style, on the city before she flies home for Grandma’s birthday.
With no interest in letting up, the Tsuyoshi, the young son in the family is the weirdest yet. He gets shrunk by a laser death ray, and has to battle a warrior-beetle and a giant spider before escaping from a huge praying mantis. He also never regains his actual, normal-human-being size. The tale of Ririka, the daughter, is somewhat tamer in its approach. She only has to befriend a UFO colored like Simon, use that UFO to play Simon, and then escape a seemingly infinite downhill chase from a sentient killer crane.
Looking at all of these minigames with 2014 eyes, few are refined enough to be enjoyed without some whimsical appreciation of days gone by. Many of the challenges that pit a character on an obstacle course have been obliterated by the endless runner genre prevalent on mobile devices. “Stealth” sequences like sneaking out of a classroom or avoiding wolf-people weren’t great in their time. The snowboarding and jet fighter games aren’t as good as their peers, which makes them feel especially dated now. The only challenge that really stands out is “De Crane!! De Crane!!,” in which Ririka has to evade a monster crane with an endurance run of rapid button pressing that would make Revolver Ocelot blush.
And yet Peak Weirdness dictates these tenets of gameplay shouldn’t be the focus of Incredible Crisis, or at the very least not what it should be remembered for. No one really understood what Yatta meant or what the hell Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to sell; value was achieved exclusively through the rapid fire weirdness of its audio and visual assault. Incredible Crisis has a similar function with attached weirdness born to an interactive medium. These things were nuts because you were vicariously doing them, lack of precise control be damned. The call to adventure was tangible, and at the time nothing was as weird as getting power-bombed by an old man in a boat or helping a tiny UFO make it back to its UFO parents. Incredible Crisis moves along and doesn’t bother to take questions.
Incredible Crisis was a silent investor in Peak Weirdness, a saboteur of common sense with a specialty in shocking circumstance. While it’s maximum weirdness and interactive delight would eventually be overshadowed by more developed (if not less conscious) games, one important aspect will never be replicated. Constructed in the late 90’s, Incredible Crisis is blessed with a Ska soundtrack courtesy Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, a feat that, at least in its present form, will never be accomplished again. When the world is ending and/or you need to make it to a birthday party, a melodic collection of horns, drums, and screaming is an apt soundtrack.
