If you’re not an American, you’ll likely have no idea what Jeopardy! is. It’s a general-knowledge quiz with questions sorted into six categories and put in order of difficulty, like so:
Harder questions = more cash = fun for the whole family. In the early nineties, a company called Park Place Productions released a version of Jeopardy! for the Megadrive / Genesis, which is where the screenshots in this article come from. It’s a fairly standard quiz game and is decent enough if you like that sort of thing. It does have the nice bonus of allowing three players to play with only two pads, but unfortunately it is so glacially slow that even those fakirs who live on top of poles in the desert for decades would get frustrated with it and move onto something more fast-paced, like watching the subduction of tectonic plates.I don’t give a stuff about that, though. I just wanted to have a quick look at freakish contestants that you can choose to act as your avatar in this grim hellscape of general-knowledge torture. And here they are!
Bank manager alert, with maybe a hint of Al Pacino in Serpico. His jacket appears to be strangely corrugated, like maybe he’s wearing a fur coat with lapels. Between his beard and grey-and-pink tie, he’s the very definition of an early nineties businessman, thus making him the most boring-looking. I bet he’s really extreeeme when he’s at home though, always riding around in his yacht and doing coke off a supermodel’s popliteal fossa. Ugh, you dirty sod, where did you think the popliteal fossa was? You disgust me.
This young lady, who may well be Dobby from Peep Show, is storing nuts in her cheeks to eat at a later date. Her most impressive feature, however, is her impenetrable helmet of hair, thick enough to harmlessly deflect a .45 round yet soft and yielding enough for a woman. Wait, what? I lost my train of thought there for a second.
This guy’s not a freak. How do I know that? Because he’s quite clearly Mathew St. Patrick, an actor most famous for playing Keith in the excellent Six Feet Under. Check it out:
Uncanny, no? I think it's the lantern jaw that does it. Maybe he was a contestant of Jeopardy! before he got famous and he was accidentally digitized into the game world where he had to find his way out by riding a magic motorbike and throwing a Frisbee and oh no wait that’s the plot of Tron. The only mystery is why he’s wearing a janitor’s coat. Actually, I don’t think that’s a coat: I think his whole torso has been carved out of wood.
Patrick Bateman? Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s everyone’s favourite American psycho. I literally cannot see anything else when I’m looking at that picture. It looks a little like this:
Or even this.
However, don’t stare at his tie too long, because it is actually a swirling vortex that leads directly to a universe of pure madness. Just so you know.
Finally, there’s this charming lady. She seems nice enough, even if her blouse does look as though someone vomited onto a Jackson Pollock painting and her eyes are two soulless black pinpricks. Hmm, those eyes are worrying me; I’ll just ask her straight out about her intentions. Hey lady, are you a raving lunatic who will creep into my bedroom while I sleep and stab me over and over again with a screwdriver, only stopping when you lose your grip on the murder weapon because your hands are slick with my blood?
Well, I’m glad we got that sorted. And those are the contestants on the Megadrive / Genesis version of Jeopardy! They sure were a bunch of freaks, huh?ARRRGH.
Also, I am terribly immature. So long!
