Get Played - BONUS: Caper in the Castro

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Originally Released on June 23rd, 2021 as Premium DLC. In honor of Pride Month Heather, Nick and Matt discuss Caper in the Castro, the first video game to include LGBTQ+ themes! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @getplayedpod. Check out our premium series Get Anime'd on patreon.com/getplayed or on Stitcher Premium. Join us on our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/getplayed Wanna leave us a voicemail? Call 616-2-PLAYED (616-275-2933) or write us an email at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Premium DLC. Premium. Premium DLC. Was that Clinton? Yeah, he's back. I did not have premium DLC with that woman. It's a premium DLC-gery. It's a premium DLC-gery. Sasha, Malia, if you go to bed, if you don't go to bed in time, you won't get your premium DLC.

I want the audience to know that I am here for these things. I'm just staring straight ahead. You know Obama famously putting his daughters to bed all the time. That's the thing we know about. And promising them premium DLC. That's the thing. That's how they grew up to be so good. We're going to build the most beautiful premium DLC anyone's ever seen.

I'm still here. I'm still here. I'm still here. Oh, we're going to get some premium. Is that a fucking gremlin? What the fuck was that? It was a bad Nixon. It was a good Nixon. I liked it. He doesn't deserve proper parody.

Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Finally, someone says it. He doesn't deserve proper parody. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Finally, someone says it. Hey, maybe appropriate that we're getting political at the top of this episode. Because we're discussing for this edition of Premium DLC a game that has some, I mean, a good degree of historical significance. Yeah, I mean, we're talking today about Caper and the Castro, which is, by all known measures, the very first LGBT video game ever released, which was released in 1989 and programmed by C.M. Ralph. And just to give you an idea, what's going on in 1989? Well, I mean, like the Berlin Wall,

right? Yeah. Am I right? And also video games like DuckTales, Super Mario Land, Final Fight, like DuckTales, Super Mario Land, Final Fight, Batman, Golden Axe, Mother 1. And here we are on the Macintosh system using the HyperCard protocol, or the HyperCard engine, whatever. Yes. The very, very first gay game. Game. And that's on the title screen for this game.

That's on the title screen, yeah. G-A-Y-M-E. While you mention the Berlin Wall real quick, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this premium DLC. You want to know what else is happening? Nope, you're going to keep going? You're going to keep going? No, you do yours.

Mine wasn't good. Go ahead. Go ahead. Just keep digging. I was going to say, you know what else was happening in 1989? What's that, Matt? What, Matt? I was still a sperm. Ah, Jesus Christ.

Or an egg. I'm not sure which. I was like, it's a little bit of both. Yeah. Who knows? Mother nature is a mad scientist. So here we are in pride month.

And how did this get played? And I was like, maybe we should cover a gay game. And then Nick, I think Nick, maybe it was Apodaca, one of you guys found this game that had been released in 1989. I'd never fucking heard of it. Yeah. And it's historically relevant.

You can play it in an emulator in a browser, although I did try and get it running on my Macintosh Classic 2 and couldn't figure out how to swap the disk image in. Anyway, the point is, can I say what I was shocked about with this game? Please. Yeah. The lead is a lesbian. Yeah.

It's a lesbian. Yes. You play the role of Tracker McDyke. Great. McDyke. Great. Heather will handle saying the protagonist's name in this episode. Tracker McDyke is a lesbian private detective who's trying to find her kidnapped drag queen friend, Tessie LaFemme.

And it's based on the historically gay San Francisco neighborhood, The Castro. It's a Zork-esque, not Zork, but point-and-click adventure. Yes. No inventory, which was great, because every time you die, you start from the beginning,

but you can go immediately to the place that you were moments earlier. Yes. Puzzle-solving solving don't like that and it was released for free as charity wear uh and players were asked to donate to um hiv aids uh charities back in the day um this was apparently also one of the first games or only games to reference the AIDS pandemic back in the 80s. So this is significant on all fronts. Right. And it was distributed kind of via BBS's bulletin board systems,

which are, if you're a young person like Matt, you may not have ever had an experience with. I dabbled in BBS's just a shade in the 90s. But it's kind of a precursor to internet forums, which are kind of a precursor to social media. That's an okay way, I guess, to describe it. But yeah, a lot of this was an initiative, or basically wholly an initiative, a personal initiative of CM Ralph to make this game on their own. Yeah. It's wild. There's like old newspaper articles and stuff about the release of this.

And like the way that you would get this game from the Washington Blade, it says, Keepers a lot of fun and available free online via modem from GLIB, the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau. It's also on sale as a Macintosh shareware disk at meetings of the Pink Triangle Computer Alliance, the new national lesbian and gay computer user group for owners of IBM or Mac computers that's headquartered in Maryland. or Mac computers that's headquartered in Maryland. Like, the way to get this game was either to, like, modem a specific phone number, or go to a meeting and get it, like, handed to you on disket. Yeah.

Like some kind of, like, contraband. And it was originally a gay game, and then it was reprogrammed and repurposed to be a straight game so they could sell it. Right. Yeah, it re-released as Murder on Main Street, programmed and repurposed to be a straight game so they could sell it. Right. Yeah. It re-released as Murder on Main Street, the most generic sounding thing. And basically just like, you know, it was just, it was made very, it was just made very straight forward as opposed to.

Straight forward? It was made for straight. I can do it too, guys. I can do it too guys I can do it too I like it I'm Abraham Lincoln yeah yeah

so the as far as how this game plays you kind of talked us through it Heather uses the hyperCard system which I was looking up other games that were made with the HyperCard engine. You Don't Know Jack the first version of You Don't Know Jack as well as

Myst was a HyperCard game. So it was a pretty flexible engine in terms of yeah just straightforward because basically what you're dealing with is just decision points and so it's just a big decision tree. That's how this game plays. That's pretty much how Myst plays. And there were other games that this immediately reminded me of. I don't know if either of you ever played Shadowgate, but there were a series of games that were ported to the NES. Shadowgate,

Uninvited, and Deja Vu. And there was a sequel to Deja Vu. And they were all the same sort of thing where it was like a first-person view of an environment. And then you had just the various options to interact with the environment that could, in all likelihood, would end in your death. But then you'd remember not to do that your next playthrough. And then I looked it up. And although Shadowgate was not developed using HyperCard, it was originally a Mac game. And if you look at the Mac screenshots, I'll put one in the chat. It aesthetically is very, very similar to what this game looks like, to what Caper and the Castro looks like. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. looks like oh yeah oh yeah well i guess a lot of the aesthetics of a lot of early mac games kind of looked the same sure a little bit there's only so much you could do not yeah i although prince of persia doesn't look like this so yeah you you know what nick i'm gonna give you this one i'm gonna let you have it i love it it's all i wanted that that was honestly one of the things that i loved about um because uh i mean i think we all played this game uh the same way on uh the internet archive archive.org uh in the software section and um the one of the things that i loved about it is that it it doesn't just emulate the game it emulates the experience of being on that computer which is not an experience that i've had in a very very long time so like seeing like an old mac screen was such a while like it made my brain feel like tingly like it was like

such an interesting thing to experience again. That even starts up with a single beep when you start the emulator. Yeah. It's pretty neat. I, I, I don't know how to talk about this game because simultaneously it was like I was in a museum with a treasured object. Yes.

But also it, as we've established on this show, it's my least favorite type of video game. Like, one of the things that you do in the game, you have a set system of interactivity. So you have, like, lockpick, lighter, magnifying glass, binoculars, gun. You can't use the lock pick on most locks, but you can shoot most of them with a gun in order to get inside. Which, as a human player, if I'm seeing a locked door and I use the lock pick on it and it doesn't open the door I'm like well okay

I can't go in there until some event happens later and then finally I got so frustrated that I looked up a tutorial and I was like wait you shoot the thing you have a lock and you shoot it even though you have a lock pick

come on can I I mean because I these are uh i think famously also not one of my favorite types of games but this one really clicked for me because i think i think before i even tried to use the key or the lock pick i was like well i'm just gonna try to shoot this lock right if i have a gun i'm gonna try to shoot it. And so the fact that I had the gun and I realized I could use the gun for more things, like fairly early on in my play, I was like, okay, so I think this, like I can, I don't know, it just opened my mind to what I was allowed to do more, like throughout my play. You can also use the gun like a lot.

Yeah. Like you can shoot bottles off of the back of a bar you can shoot like you shoot a window open yeah you shoot a window open do you shoot the trash can or do you light the trash can on fire i can't you can light the trash on fire when you find the trash yeah it's just a lot of shooting yeah it does say at certain points though like put that away say at certain points though i was like put that away it's the game scolds you like no no need for violence that's what it says and it's uh it's very very funny that was also something i really liked about i mean uh the the interface of the game some of these games i feel like um i don't know like the games that i think do this similar thing and try to be funny don't always hit for me.

But, like, there's, like, some very, very funny exit dialogue, like, window button, like, things. Like, there's very funny things in those buttons that I, like, I laughed quite a bit while playing this game. It's got a good sense of humor, it is like, you know, it is trading in a lot of film noir tropes, but I think it like it like trades in those well. It's like it's like you're you're hitting all the beats that you'd want to see if you're playing through one of these. Again, I already mentioned Deja Vu, but Deja Vu is like a hardboiled detective noir. Like that's what that's what that game is. it reminded me of this a lot in terms of just, uh, but with the layer of it's got the, um, uh, with the layer of, of, of, of a more humorous sensibility. I was shocked how well it had aged.

Like it's, it's not, I know that it's full of a bunch of references that we don't get that were specific to the neighborhood in the late 80s. But there's a lot of other stuff that just is like, oh, yeah, that's still happening. Like, for example, there's a moment where you're in the I think it's the bad guy's office. And up on the wall is honorary membership in the men for a whiter male society. Yeah. Yes. And then in parentheses, the detective's take is this is enough

to make your skin crawl. And I was like, oh man, that's still happening. Yeah. There it is. That hasn't changed. The villain,

Dulligan Straight Man, which I felt a little subtweeted, but all right. Sufficiently dragged. straight man which i felt a little sub tweeted but all right sufficiently dragged by the way i do want to acknowledge uh the the the the that this game is playable is via andrew borman and the strong museum of play and then adrian shaw uh helped get the game playable and then jason scott at the internet archive got it online and all this info is from lgbtq game archive.com uh so it's it it's it was it seems like a real labor of love to

get this sort of you know like heather mentioned this this thing from a museum up in a place where people can experience it but i i think it's i think that's awesome that this is just a thing that you can uh mess around with and i think if you have any interest in it or any any curiosity in this like it's it's worth playing a bit or or watching a playthrough and just sort of getting a sense of uh you know like you guys like you both were saying like how up. And also, I think it's like putting yourself in the mindset of like this coming out in 1989. This was a daring act like this is like this was such a completely different political climate. Yeah. Like the idea that you had to to play this, you had to sort of like get it in secret. I mean, I'm sure for Nick and I, two cis straight dudes, a very complicated idea to wrap our brains around.

Sure. That's tough. Hard to really comprehend. There's also just the... How do I make this not about me but about me no thing which is that like when you are in the past coming to terms with being queer there's also the fear that somebody's gonna catch you doing a thing like you're like i i was afraid the first time i i rent just rented a gay movie from blockbuster like not like attended a meeting or like wore wore a pride ring or like anything just rented a movie that other

humans who weren't queer could have rented like it yes i was so fucking scared that like not that the fbi was gonna come to my door, but that like somehow I would get in massive trouble. So the idea of like having a computer dialing a place to get the game, like that was probably such an act of courage on the part of the player. Yeah. You know, like that also is so fucking weird. Not just the publishing, but also the like receiving of the game.

And it kind of makes sense that so few copies existed that it took a while for it to be rediscovered. It felt to me like if there was like a, this would be a game referenced in a LGBT Ready Player One. Like that somebody would, that it would be a clue inside of a puzzle about some other major event because it was so,

I mean, like it's just, it's wild that it exists. I mean, there had to be a first one, but it's also wild that it was like so directly like, I'm making a gay game as opposed to like, oh, here's a gay character in The Last of Us, which isn't a gay game. Right. No. Thematically, this is about this is a gay game that that also addresses the AIDS crisis.

It's like this is just, you know, this is as as just like as hot button as it gets in this political climate. And speaking of the political climate, I looked this up, a Gallup's historical polling on gay marriage. They didn't even start pulling gay marriage until 1996. And in 1996, the first time this was pulled, 27% should be legal. 68% should be illegal. So that was the,

that doesn't cross over until majority legal until 2012. That's how recently this was normalized. What they did pull in 1989 on Gallup is, here's the wording, do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should, should or should not be legal? 35% legal, 57% illegal. So this is a thing that was viewed by a lot of people is like, this is a,

you know, this is a, this is a deviant criminal lifestyle choice was the, you know, that was how it was viewed in this time. It was a completely different era that is maybe if you're a younger listener, you might have trouble wrapping your minds around. And this is Heather, this is the climate you grew up in. Yeah, I still think it should be illegal. I mean, come on, guys.

Wow. Okay. I was not expecting that, but. I keep answering that poll. I'm like, come on, come on. Well, now that we all have permission to speak freely, just kidding. Oh boy. Just kidding. No, yeah, no, it's, it is weird how quickly it changed. And frankly, I think it is, and this is sort of thematically relevant. I think it is. And this is sort of thematically relevant. I think it's the Internet. I think specifically it was Tumblr that made it OK to be gay so quickly, because as soon as you put everyone online, like you might be the only gay kid at none of them know each other is gay. But the moment you give people anonymous spaces to discuss these things and then also to embrace their own identity, then suddenly you have this transformation publicly also. You might reference if you were I don't know, if you were a computer nerd in the early 90s, you might reference Caper in the Castro or even reference the straight version.

And that might be a signal to somebody like, hey, you know, does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Like computers facilitated social change specifically for gay people. And also, I mean, like, what, Will and Grace and Ellen? Those shows? Were those the shows? Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like Will and Grace put a lot of, like, I mean, put gay people into people's homes. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Get out. Like, there's the door tv oh man i wasn't publicly out until what two years ago yeah like my friends all knew but like i was like i was still like uh if i come out online there goes my career. And then somebody was like, what career? And I was like, fair point.

That was rude of me. I apologize. So the development of this game reminded me a little bit of Stardew Valley's development, just in terms of it seemed like CM was facilitated by a very supportive partner who helped them out financially while they worked on this. This is, again, from the LGBTQ Game Archive site. When I saw HyperCard's capability,

I thought you could tell a story with this. You could tell an interactive story with this. And so they did over the course of a year with a patient partner bringing them food and supporting them. They worked on the game. I worked on an eight-hour-a-day job in Silicon Valley, and I would come home and work myself in our studio room bedroom and work on this game just manically. And that went on for a year. job at the time, but also just like, you know, that there was this amount of just like kind of isolation and putting themselves fully into this project that was, you know, totally a labor of love that ended up resonating with a bunch of people. I like just in terms of like just history about this game, I like in this one news article that i found from 1989

that uh cm ralph has a quote uh ralph says that only two people have solved the game so far a 14 year old boy and the reviewer well that was that was such a thing because because there are some there are some there are some pretty up to ciphers that kind of can trip you up if you're trying to play through this and don't have a walkthrough. And I think that was such a big thing with adventure games, with point and click games, is that oftentimes it was like you were socially disseminating solutions to puzzles. Or if in a more commercial release, it would be like you'd find the hint book and oh that's the only way i can get through this is that i've famously like we've talked about this with leisure suit larry but they sold more copies of the hint book than the game itself because people were pirating the game and then buying the hint book to figure out how to get through it man those were wild times. There's a weird days.

Like it's, it's we, I mean, I know Matt barely has any understanding of time because he's been around for so little of it. Yeah. But I'm still getting it. But Nick and I,

I think we're born on the cusp of online. Like in terms of like we are forming long term memories while first experiencing chat rooms. And there's it's it cannot be stated enough how big the change was. Like, yes, the Internet made everybody. I think I've said this on the podcast before. Effectively psychic. Like suddenly you were hearing the I've said this on the podcast before, effectively psychic. Like suddenly you were hearing the thoughts of literally everybody on the planet. And there is definitely a before and after for that process.

Like, it's crazy. And we've learned we should not be doing that. We've learned that that's bad for everyone. I think, look, not to get into a broader philosophical conversation on a DLC episode, but I do think that there have been so many significant

positive changes because of the internet. For sure. For example, you know, the LGBT transformation culturally, that it is hard to peg the internet as exclusively bad i think it is chaotic neutral like it's really just dead center yeah you wouldn't want it in your party but you know it makes it makes everything more interesting um i think yeah it's it's a this is a

it's it's just a fascinating thing to experience and i i don't know i mean like i we talked about maybe doing this as a full episode as a normal episode and i think we kind of just all mutually were like it's it's strange to be like we're gonna review this game because it's more to be like, we're going to review this game, because it's more like it exists, and it's awesome that it exists. Okay, here we go. My positive thing is, I think that it's like, it's cool that it exists. It's cool that archivists have made this available for people to play and experience. And I don't know it's it's just uh it's just a fascinating piece of software i mean just it's so it was such a fucking bold stroke to just make this and just say like this is exactly what i want to make and then for that to find an audience i

don't know it's and and i i'm sure this game like you were talking about this heather i'm sure this game, like you were talking about this, Heather, I'm sure this game had a lot of importance to people who experienced it at the time. Yeah. I know we reached out to CM Ralph as like potentially to be a guest. And they were like, they Googled our show and were like, it sounds like you're going to make fun of this. Because our show is worst and weirdest yeah yeah but on the off chance that they listen to this episode that i mean that somebody else has a stitcher premium account and like rips it for them it's really cool and brave and awesome that this happened and what a neat thing thing to be able to...

I mean, it's also, it's just cool that we can play it. Yes, yeah. What stuff has been lost, guys? Like, we can't even download PS Vita games anymore, right? No, yeah. Right? I don't think so. No, definitely, I don't think so.

But even, I don't know, I feel like I heard about this game in a documentary and that's why it was like stuck in my brain when we were trying to figure out like what kind of game to do for Pride Month. And I can't remember what the documentary is and it's killing me. And I can't type it in and I can't Google it.

It's impossible. But I, like playing this, I also think as a game, as the type of game that it is, I don't think I've enjoyed one of these types of games more than this one. I felt like a really, I felt like a genius solving these puzzles. When I lit that blank paper with the fire and it revealed the safe code, I was just like, you're a king. You're a god god you're the best detective that's ever lived also i will say i died a bunch of times and every single time that i died

i laughed and laughed because it was truly very very funny um what it says like here's like a here lies like a worthless bad detective hilarious so funny also you die like all of the stuff like it's like there's a glass of wine on the bar do you want to drink it i'm like yeah fuck yeah i'd drink a glass that you're dead oh it's like it's poison idiot yeah you get a get a grave marker like an elbowing when you die it's not like it's not like and thus you've made a terrible decision, the end. It's always like, why would you do that, dummy?

Yeah, it's got a great tone. And yes, it's a good version of one of these games just as a game, as this sort of classic point-and-click adventure game. We played Twilight Zone, the game. Oh, this is way better. And we played this. It's so much better. It's so much better. It's so much better.

It's so much better. And that development team, that was commercially released. People had to pay money to play that. And like an existing IP. Yeah, exactly. This is way better. Way the fuck better.

Isn't there, am I crazy or isn't there a twilight zone sting in this game did you guys play with the sound on i was i got too far yeah no i didn't i swear there's a twilight zone sting in the game too like you do a thing and like you'll hear like a pop pop like as the sound comes on and off. Uh-huh. Yeah. Crazy.

10 out of 10. Are we doing that? What are we doing? Yeah, 10 out of 10. I'm going to give it a gay out of gay. Okay, well, you'll give it that, and I think Dick and I will. Yeah, I'll stick with a 10 out of 10. Yeah, we'll give it 10 out of 10. Yeah, we'll give it a 10 out of 10.

Caper in the Castro, check it out. Maybe we'll post the link to if people want to play it on our social media. Yeah, absolutely. Because it is an interesting experience. And hey, that'll do it for this episode of Premium DLC. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at GetPlayedPod. Or send us an email at GetPlayedPod at gmail.com or leave us a voicemail at 6162PLAY that is 616-275-2933

Happy Pride. DL, see you later.