IT WAS JUST A JOKE

You’ll never hear those words come out of someone’s mouth who is sure that what they said wasn’t shitty. Dropping some sort of offensive, disruptive verbal bomb on people, then hiding behind the shield of “Haha, just kidding!” is a technique for assholes that has been seen in young shitheads as early as the age of five. The reason for that is, it gets them what they want – “just telling it like it is” bravado twisted swirled with plausible deniability, and just a hint of gaslighting. It’s why Dave Chapelle and JD Vance spent much of 2024 “punching down” (Dave’s words, not mine) on marginalized groups who couldn’t fight back for the sake of… comedy? That’s what they claimed anyway, though there’s nothing funny about the transphobic legislation that the Trump/Vance administration passed on day one of their 2025 term. Having mean jokes be the basis of government policy sounds absurd, but that’s where we’re at, and it will likely get worse from here.

Their goal, it seems, is to bring us back to days when bigotry towards trans people was the universal cultural norm. Ironically, the world crawled out of those dark days thanks, at least partially, to hiding behind “jokes.” Which brings us to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

IT’S SO BAD IT’S FUNNY

When I was in high school, I started our wrestling team. Then I quit because the coach decided you needed to jog every day in order to be on the team. That’s not important, though. The reason I bring it up is, the guy who ended up being captain of the team did like to jog. And lift weights. And crush a man using a mix of physical skill and raw power. And, as it turned out, he loved the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film adaptation of the stage play of the same name.

The captain was stereotypically masculine, listened to Aerosmith, wore jeans and t-shirts to school, and was generally unremarkable in appearance. So it came as a surprise when he told me that he was going to a midnight showing of Rocky Horror with some girls that could only be described as “spooky,” and that this was the fifth or sixth time they’d seen the movie in theaters. “You should come,” he said. It’s so bad, it’s funny. The whole crowd makes fun of it while it’s on. Like when Tim Curry is in the pool, you all sing, ‘Don’t drink it, I peed in it.’ It’s hilarious.”

This was not, of course, hilarious, but it was definitely interesting and intriguingly unexpected. Why did this otherwise humorless, straight-laced captain love this bizarre nonsense? Was there more to it? And was it, in fact, something I’d love? I had to find out for myself.

That Friday, we went to the show, listening to the movie’s soundtrack on the drive into the city. The captain, putting on a black wig and red lipstick, while one of the spooky girls (who usually wore a black wig and red lipstick) drove the car. About ten percent of the people at the near-sold-out event were also in costume, and a few got on stage before the movie started to make a few opening remarks. It was the first time I’d seen men in women’s lingerie, and they were loving it. The captain was among them. And the movie was, by and large, extremely well done. It drags a bit here and there (no pun intended), and not all of the characters seem to serve a narrative purpose, but many of the songs are legit bangers, and most of all, the story is largely successful at what it sets out to do. The movie wasn’t funny because it was “so bad.” It was funny because it was successfully making fun of a straight white couple, the kind that most mainstream movies and TV shows told us was normal, while also revealing that underneath their stiff exteriors, they wanted to get kinky and gay. And the anti-hero who helped them on their path of self-discovery was a gender-non-conforming alien that was extremely horny for a handsome, muscular, nearly-nude monster he made in a lab.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter and the titular Rocky defy tidy stereotypes on multiple fronts, both cliché and transgressive – the former a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein’s monster, and the latter being the picture of idealized masculinity who is ultimately romantically devoted to his spooky creator from the planet Transexual. The two modeled how there were multiple ways to express queerness, from vamp to stud, top to bottom.

So yeah, the movie was camp, but the underlying subversiveness was clear, even to my dumb teenage brain. And I could also see that fans of the movie had a deep love and admiration for the film, even as they feigned disrespect for it. A year or so later, right after graduation, the wrestling captain would work his way completely out of the closet. His conservative parents disowned him and blamed Rocky Horror in part for perverting and corrupting him, just as Frank-N-Furter was accused of doing to “the straights” Brad and Janet in the film. The resulting fallout left him unsure of where he stood in this world, lost in space and meaning.

That’s exactly how I felt the first time I beat Mega Man 2. So for this and a few other reasons, it made perfect sense to me when I heard Freakzone Games was adapting Rocky Horror to an NES-style game.

ANTICI…

It’s hard to impart unto young people just how unsettling and exciting the NES-era of gaming was. Adaptations of R-rated horror movies, like Friday The 13th and Nightmare on Elm St., were commonplace on the console, available to kids of all ages, with no ESRB to hold them back. Back then, most people didn’t think games were powerful enough to scare, corrupt, or otherwise affect anyone, even children. Like how Rocky Horror hid behind “it’s just a joke” silliness to fend off potential attacks from bigots, games of the 80s could claim “it’s just game” when they feature transgressive, or even potentially disturbing themes. Seeing games that adapted R-rated movies Rambo, Predator, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St., or even ultra-violent, super-horny cartoons like Gologo 13, right next to Super Mario and BurgerTime on store shelves, was commonplace. This freedom was rarely taken advantage of in any attempt to challenge societal norms or anything. Or maybe the developers of the day were trying to be more subversive than we think. If they did their jobs well, we still wouldn’t know for sure. The potential lying in that inky black mystery of intent is why, even today in the year of our lord 2025, YouTube videos with names like “Mario Bros. is secretly pro-capitalist propaganda” or “Birdo made me gay and she did it on purpose” can still get hundreds of thousands of views (more about Birdo later).

The Rocky Horror Show Game is a hypothetical look at if that dark mystery hit the NES back in the day. It’s a fairly faithful adaptation of the source material, with the bulk of the film’s infectious soundtrack making the leap to 8-bit chiptune format. The “straights,” namely Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott are the playable leads as they journey through the Dr.’s maniac mansion, doing battle with them one second and being seduced by them in a tastefully understated cut scene the next. These cut scenes feature character portraits that feel like the film’s characters without looking exactly like them, likely to avoid lawsuit. This is one of the few ways the game can’t feel totally true to the era it apes. In reality, NES games in the 80’s were usually quite liberal with their theft of celebrity likenesses. Konami, specifically, had no problem lifting the likes of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, or Sean Connery’s “Santa Clause except grizzled and violent” type guy faces and slapping them directly in a game without fearing legal repercussions. Being dismissed by nearly everyone in the adult world allowed games to subvert the copyright law as well as the laws of normal society without much chance of blowback.

The game also has a few direct references to actual NES games, like Super Mario 3, that definitely wouldn’t have happened in an actual 8-bit Rocky Horror title. Unless, of course, that title was published by Nintendo themselves. And I suppose that could have happened. This was, after all, the era when Nintendo paid the extra expense to add Mike Tyson to their Punch-Out franchise. It was also the period in the publisher’s history when they created Birdo, a Super Mario Bros. 2 mid-boss who many view as the first (but not last) inarguably trans Mario universe character. And come to think of it, this Rocky Horror game actually plays a lot like SMB2, with a lot of picking up blocks in the environment to kill enemies and solve environmental puzzles. In the movie, Brad and Janet never picked up a wooden crate and chucked it at a disembodied brain or jovial skeleton, only to use that same crate to build a staircase to get across a bottomless pit. But somehow, these decidedly game-y actions feel very on brand. Shigeru Miyamoto and Tim Curry would be proud. That’s not a sentence I ever expected to type. So now I’m proud, too.

And now I’m thinking about Birdo, whose trans-ness is undoubtedly the reason why she’s the only boss from Super Mario Bros. 2 to continue to be a mainstay in the franchise. While some at least remember Wart’s name, the angry bomb-throwing mouse in sunglasses, and the fire-breathing, three-headed snake have been largely forgotten. I only remember the mouse’s name because it was almost unbelievably uninspired (Mouser). But Birdo is still playable alongside Yoshi, Bowser, and Peach in the bulk of Mario’s driving and sports games. It has to be, I think, because she was willing to give us something real, something genuine, by simply existing as a trans character. Like Rocky Horror, she was played off like a joke at first, but today, we can look back and see she was also a gateway for trans people to find some kind of representation in mainstream media. Albeit flawed and potentially stereotype-reinforcing, Rocky Horror worked as a little oasis of trans acceptance in a time when transphobia was the default. As some in the world push to bring us backwards to that time again, the Rocky Horror videogame offers a return to a time and space, where some insects called the human race, could break free from societal norms through gender rebellious emanci…

…PATION

8/10

This review was conducted on a Nintendo Switch using a digital copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.