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Before hitting prime-time success with his cartoon King of the Hill, animator Mike Judge won viewers’ hearts with two rude and hilariously clueless teenage boys. Beginning with short cartoons in the early 1990s, Beavis and Butt-Head was picked up as an MTV series and quickly spun out into a media frenzy. Books, talk show appearances, a feature film, and of course…video games! Fast-forward a few decades, and the dim-witted duo are once again in the limelight. On the heels of a new movie and the revival of their television series, we’re taking a look back at one of the lesser known Beavis and Butt-Head games.
As a young die-hard fan of the show in the 1990s, I was fairly content with the games we received. The SNES, Genesis, and Game Gear each received completely different versions from two different developers (which oddly follow the same plot) in addition to a Gameboy title and a few PC games. As it turns out, however, there was one game we didn’t know we were missing. In 1996, Atari was hard at work developing a Beavis and Butt-Head arcade game – a forward-walking beat ’em up with the occasional mini-game thrown in. With crisp graphics, impressive animations, and a healthy dose of the show’s signature raunchy humor, the game showed a lot of potential! After market research, however, Atari grew skeptical and pulled the plug on the title before its release.
Image source: Kevin Page | VFX blog
https://kevin.page/
Fortunately, this story has a bit of a happy ending. Twelve prototypes were made of the nearly completed game, one of which resurfaced in 2016. Legendary Chicago-area Galloping Ghost Arcade obtained the non-functioning unit and was able to bring it back to life, giving anyone who visits the chance to experience this lost piece of video game history. But, if you’re (understandably) not able to make the trip, you can watch gameplay footage here.
