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Part-Time Genius

What's the World's Most Ridiculous Video Game?

Part-Time Genius

iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope

Society & Culture

4.52K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Remember how fun it was to save up your quarters and go to the arcade? These are the games you didn't want to play. From the Tetris sequel that features Abe Lincolns and Frankensteins, to a game that somehow blends Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with an anti-smoking campaign, to the greatest (maybe only?) game based on Noah's Ark; Will, Gabe and Mango try to out-do each other with the most ridiculous video games they can find.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an I-Heart podcast.

0:07.5

Welcome to part-time genius, the production of I-Heart Radio.

0:15.9

Guess what, Mango?

0:17.3

What's that well?

0:18.1

All right, so I was looking up old video games and video game systems this week, as we've talked about. I know both of our boys are obsessed with video games these days. And William is trying to find every game ever made on every system ever made. And they, of course, make these little computers where you can go back and try these games from pretty much every system. So it is kind of fun

0:38.4

to get into it with him, but there's one that he's not familiar with. So I don't know if you know this,

0:43.8

but before they were making graphing calculators, Texas Instruments used to make a computer for kids.

0:49.9

It was actually called the Ti-99. So weirdly, I actually know this because I had one.

0:55.5

No way.

0:56.1

My dad was super into gadgets and early computers, and so I had one in my room when I was

1:00.7

like four, which is crazy.

1:02.2

But, you know, the weirdest thing about the system is that, like, the TI definitely

1:06.3

had a place for cartridges, but it could also hook up to a cassette player, and it would play games

1:12.0

through, like, tape cassettes, essentially. So, like, the cassettes would feed data into the

1:16.3

computer, which is nuts. And I actually, like, thought about this, like, a few years ago and

1:21.3

had to look it up because it felt like a dream. Like, it didn't feel real. But, but the weird thing

1:26.3

about my TI-99 was I had none of the fun games.

1:29.6

Like, everything my parents bought for me was educational.

1:32.1

So I think, like, the most fun game I had was chess.

1:37.2

It's a little bit of a relief because I thought I was going to tell you everything I knew here.

1:40.9

And you're going to be like, sorry, I already knew that.

1:43.0

But so there's a TI-99 game that's definitely not educational. It's called garbage belly.

...

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