some of them happy endings and some decidedly not

March 30, 2022 1:08 PM

Good news for Residents fans and game nerds. If you missed out in 1995 on their classic cd-rom game Bad Day on the Midway, now you can have a lousy time too at Midway amusement park, thanks to the laudable efforts of Max Wegner. You can download the game and play like it's 1995, or just read about Timmy and the other characters. Come right in! See Lottie the Human Log and the other attractions! But watch out for murderers and that RED RAT PLAGUE.

The Residents and Timmy previously

posted by fregoli (14 comments total)

I remember hearing about this when it came out, read some reviews, never saw a copy cross my path. So this is quite interesting to me. Thank you for posting!
posted by hippybear at 1:26 PM on March 30, 2022

Oh that's exciting! The Residents' CD-ROMs in the mid 90s were hugely innovative; Freak Show was a highly influential multimedia piece. There's more Residents CD-ROMs and floppy programs released than I knew existed. I have it in my head one of the band members was also in the tech industry at Apple or something.

The Residents are still an ongoing concern, thanks in part to being able to swap members underneath the masks. They've got a big tour planned in 2023 and a couple of appearances in SF in just six weeks (with lots of tickets available, yikes.)
posted by Nelson at 1:28 PM on March 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you don't know Snakefinger Lithman's early 70s south London country band Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers, you're missing a real treat. Here's their Desert Island Woman as a taster. Whenever I listen to then now, I always think they sound like Dire Straits.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:58 PM on March 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Did RED RAT PLAGUE inspire Nick Cave?

"Designed and directed by his red rat plague."
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:59 PM on March 30, 2022

This game had a profound impact on me as a young teen, such that I made a t-shirt that said: "Childhood is a terrible thing, Timmy; a terrible thing"
posted by deadbilly at 3:40 PM on March 30, 2022

Oh wow, I was just listening to the Residents earlier today and was considering writing an AskMe about a particular concert recording. Back in the day I had the CD ROMs of Freak Show and Gingerbread Man, and was keen to play Bad Day but somehow never procured a copy. Very excited for this second chance!
posted by ejs at 4:36 PM on March 30, 2022

I was wondering last week what VM contortions I would have to perform in order to get this game running again. Some of those stories (and some from the Freakshow CD-ROM) still haunt me in idle moments.
posted by BYiro at 5:51 PM on March 30, 2022

ZOMBYS! Freak show is included in the DOSBox! You simply MUST check out the freak museum.
posted by BYiro at 6:00 PM on March 30, 2022

Thanks, fregoli. I would've missed this if you hadn't posted. As one of the names in the credits, playing the game after 20+ years is just incredible and nostalgic and surreal; bittersweet, too, given the loss of some of the brilliant minds behind the project. So many amazing memories and, most importantly, an experience I can finally share with my daughter. Until now, I've only been able to show her the boxed copies of BDOTM and Freak Show + promotional swag archived in a crate in the garage. Hopefully more multimedia projects from the 90s will be archived in a similar fashion--iNSCAPE's Dark Eye and Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol, Peter Gabriel's Xplora and Eve, and all the wacky interactive projects from David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, Thomas Dolby. I suppose we should also throw in Queensryche's Promised Land CD-ROM for competionists.
posted by prinado at 10:42 PM on March 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oh god. I never got to play these (got into the Residents a little later - these games came out when I was in elementary school) but I know all the songs from Freak Show like the back of my hand and remember watching the bits on Icky Flix with game footage just STEAMED I wouldn't probably ever get to play it. Nooobody laaaaughs when they leeeeeeeave.

Thanks for sharing this.
posted by potrzebie at 10:58 PM on March 30, 2022

God I would love to be able to play Dark Eye again, that scared me so badly when I was a little kid. William S. Burroughs reading The Masque of the Red Death, can you believe it
posted by rifflesby at 11:02 PM on March 30, 2022

thinks, does the math, realizes he was in fact twenty years old
posted by rifflesby at 11:34 PM on March 30, 2022

I didn't get into The Residents until after the Multimedia era ended, and I didn't _really_ get into The Residents until playing Bad Day on the Midway was logistically impossible. I'm excited to give this a try. I will say that the Have a Bad Day soundtrack album is one of my least favorite Residents releases, but I suspect the music works a lot better in context.
posted by SansPoint at 6:43 AM on March 31, 2022

William S. Burroughs reading The Masque of the Red Death, can you believe it

My aforementioned BDotMW archive includes a VHS tape labeled 'William S. Burroughs b-roll', which I digitized last year. It captures bits and pieces of the production team's visit to Burroughs' home in Lawrence, KS, to record his voiceovers for The Dark Eye. A highlight is Burroughs relaxing in his chair by a window, arm draped on his cane, reciting the first few sections of the Masque of Red Death from memory. Quite a discovery, especially given it was a 'garage find' in a crate wedged between my Nintendo 64 collection and camping gear.
posted by prinado at 2:37 PM on March 31, 2022 [3 favorites]