Good Enough is Enough

Happy Halloween!

This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, queen of the queer cult movies, long may she reign. It may come as a surprise to some of you that in my misspent youth I belonged to a RHPS shadowcast, which is a thing where people get up on stage and act out the movie while it is playing at weekly midnight showings. (This complicates the question of how many hundreds of times I've "seen" the movie, because much of the time I was facing away from it.)

But now I am old and boring and go to bed at 10:30, so instead I spend my free time playing video games that are nearly as old as I am, such as The Rocky Horror Show for the Commodore 64, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Since it doesn't have "picture" in the title, I guess the game is nominally an adaptation of the 1973 stage musical on which the movie is based, though it does use visual details from the movie. But the movie follows the play closely, so it doesn't really matter either way. You can choose to play as either Brad or Janet, two all-American kids whose car breaks down, forcing them to seek help at a nearby castle (castles don't have telephones, asshole!—no, no, I'm not doing this, I'm stopping now) where they encounter Dr. Frank N. Furter, who besides being a mad scientist is also the one thing that is the most threatening to 1950s all-American mores: a fabulous drag queen.

( Unfortunately the game does not actually tell you any of this, nor does it include the satire of midcentury horror and midcentury queerphobia that is the entire point of the thing... )

You can play The Rocky Horror Show in your browser on the Internet Archive. Note that it wants a numpad for the controls, so if you're like me and use a laptop without one, you'll have to either play it on a different machine or confuse the hell out of yourself trying to control it with the number row.