Marco.org

(via justinday)

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis. This was actually kind of a fun game, decent visuals for the time too.

I was hoping someone would post this. It has quite a history — it was a bestseller for the Genesis, then during his first child-weirdness scandal in the early 90s, it was permanently pulled from the shelves.

The point of the game is for Michael Jackson to kill bad guys and zombies by dancing and kicking magic dust at them in order to rescue young children who are inexplicably hidden in closets in nightclubs and graveyards and are suddenly very happy to see him (“Michael!”) before his monkey comes and sits on his head and points him to the boss which is actually just a large collection of bad guys or zombies who can all be simultaneously killed by engaging in a brief coordinated dance routine with Michael Jackson.

It’s weird. It’s creepy. It’s comically absurd. It really doesn’t seem like kids belong there. Yet, I can’t see anything malicious about it — I’m not even sure that anything here is inappropriate. But it seems like something about it should be, which maps eerily to the tragic battle that Michael Jackson had fought against society for nearly two decades.

I won’t remember Michael Jackson for most of his music, directly — but it will always be fun to load Moonwalker into a Genesis emulator every five years and remember this odd game that depicted, with probably unintentional accuracy, this odd person.