Who doesn’t remember Garbage Pail Kids? Kids born after the PlayStation was released? OK.
In the peak year of toys and cartoons aimed at children, 1985, sports trading card manufacturer Topps released a fun, non-sports related trading card series called Garbage Pail Kids. A parody of the then also-popular doll line called the Cabbage Patch Kids by Coleco, these cards had humorous gross out characters intended to be as different to the Cabbage Patch Kids and as revolting as possible. Plus, they were stickers! This was also the decade when kids were rediscovering Mad Magazine and buying other gross out toys like Madballs, so it was the right time for this kind of collectible. This franchise peaked in the 1980s, but had a Saturday morning cartoon, and a famously terrible live action movie, before it bowed out.
What it never got was a video game for the NES, an egregious error now being corrected by new developer Retrotainment, with help from Digital Eclipse and iam8bit. Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike And The Quest For Stale Gum is a new old NES game, featuring characters from the cars themselves in an all original adventure. Retrotainment actually convinced IP holders Topps to license the Garbage Pail Kids to them, for a new release for this old system. And this is a proper release, with manual and box, that will work with your NES or Famiclone. While iam8bit is doing the publishing, they acquired Digital Eclipse’s help to bring the enhancements they bring to other retro video game releases for this game to have in modern platforms. So if you get it on Steam or your favored console of choice, it will come with save states, a replay feature, and a virtual gallery where you can collect the Garbage Pail Kids cards you earn in game.
If you’re a fan of these rereleases of old games, these names might already be familiar to you. That’s because Retrotainment and iam8bit have already worked on prior restocks of old games for old video game consoles, like Street Fighter II, Mega Man 2, and Disney’s Aladdin.
Now, for the strangest part of this game. The game is a sequel of sorts to Garbage Pail Kids in Mad Mike: Fury Load. Fury Load was a series of stop motion animation shorts written by Adam F. Goldberg, the writer for ABC show The Goldbergs. Retrotainment also worked with Adam for the scenario for this game, which features the eponymous Mad Mike himself. Mike saves the day and just wants to eat some stale gum. However, Brainy Janie’s factory can only make their gum fresh, so he goes on an adventure to collect all the ingredients to make his gum stale. if you’re even mildly curious, you can check out the Fury Load cartoons on YouTube. CW for some gross out body humor jokes.
Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike And The Quest For Stale Gum will be released on October 25, 2022, for the NES, Nintendo Switch, Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. You can already wishlist it on Steam here.
Source: GameInformer, GPKGame
