Goat Jump

There exists an edited version of this story, which attempted to make the story a bit more 'professional', it can be found here.

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Old video games tend to be a source of weird shit - PC titles obviously, but even unlicensed cartridge games were fairly easy to do on a lark, as I'm sure some people remember first-hand and others have heard.

I like to collect these weird games when I can - most of them are just shitty shit made by mongoloids, but some are funny or even creepy. Take Goat Jump - I got it from a pawn shop owner that I know who knows I buy old games. I don't know if Goat Jump is the actual name, because the original label had been peeled off and a small one affixed with just those two words.

Anyway, Goat Jump is an apparently-unlicensed NES game. Pop it into your NES, starts right up. No credits, no start screen, no explanation. Graphics consists of a scrolling ranch/prairie, with the player being a really shittily-rendered, small cowboy. The "goats" don't really look like goats, but I guess they don't look like anything else, either.

A makes you jump, while B doesn't do anything. Pressing start will pause the game - the screen is filled mostly with the word "STOP" in white block letters - pressing select will make your character stop moving and a loud buzzing sound will play (what the fuck). Music is low-quality pseudo-western beeps.

Walking into a goat causes the same buzz to emit as if you'd pressed select, and the screen switches to black with the word "LOSE" filling the screen. Game has to be manually reset from there.

Gameplay consists of you jumping over goats. Your apparent reward for this is 1 point per goat, with scroll speed and goat number slowly increasing. Around the 15 minute mark (what can I say, I'm tenacious), things start getting strange.

The music is occasionally interrupted with loud beeps or scratching tones out of sync with the music. The goat sprites begin to get varied, with color errors and such; some are really just incoherent masses of colored pixels. Your cowboy sprite kinda flips back and forth, so it looks like he's moonwalking.

This gets steadily more severe, and the terrain is eventually effected, too. Gray sky, brown trees, and red pixels which I assume are supposed to be blood. By this point the music is incoherent screeching and beeping with no tune, your sprite is gliding along on his back, and the goat sprites are half-sunk into the terrain.

You come to the end of your journey around the half-hour mark, where you enter your first and only building rendered shittily in gray brick. From there, your sprite glides into some sort of threshing machine or something and a shitty "scream" plays; you get 100,000 points. A black screen with "YOU ONE" pops up, with a really fucked-up goat sprite dancing below the words.

Again, the game has to be manually reset. Graphical and sound glitches appear earlier or randomly in subsequent playthroughs. Goats are replaced with your cowboy sprite laying on its back with 'blood' on it (and occasionally missing pieces). Randomly, your cowboy is replaced with a goat and, bafflingly, a large boot.

Like I said, weird. I've never found any information on Goat Jump anywhere. I assume it was a joke or a personal project or something. What the fuck.