It's been a while now, but I suddenly remembered it all in a flash the other day. I guess it all started in the early 90's when my friend Richard gave an old friend of his a really well done board game for a birthday gift. The game was named Reality and though akin to Monopoly, the protagonists are low life drug dealers/slackers/antique dealers/party animals, and the dangers are not prison and taxes alone, but a plethora of horrors including HIV, ODs, bad moonshine and sundry variants of hangovers. Based on popular kulcha and very loosely on semi-fictious persons, the first version of the game played a little slow, but was fun and to some even shocking.

Some years later, probably around 1994, Richard decided to use an inheritance to produce a board game for the public. During the past years, he had produced 3 more games as birthday gifts: Glorious (a Talisman ripoff where the players are all women, and where the objective is to get married [my personal favourite, a great cynical take on popular views on gender]), The Longing of the Satrap (the strategy game to end them all, being a struggle to gain control over the Osman empire, with at least a 100 different - and historically correct - kinds of soldiers and the Spring of the Patriarch (wherein the players are men trying to overthrow the matriarchy with evil "inventions" such as war).

But this was real. Richard had plans to start his own little game empire with literate, fun and controversial board games. The most controversial he thought, would be a remake of Reality, especially here in "don't even talk about drugs" Sweden. Richard recruited yours truly, and over the months we did the entire game on my old macintosh II FX. We printed the game, played & replayed it, redid it, printed it again and so forth and so on. Eventually we was pleased with the game, and had rinsed out most of the bugs. Much of the game has echoes of me too: words, looks, ideas. We did it using only word, quark 3 and photoshop 2.5. 8 megs of RAM. Lots of coffee and Gammeldansk.

The films were printed. The boxes were printed. The cards were done. We had worked like vermin for months without pay, almost 24-7. What happened then was really weird: When the board itself was printed, some PTA kinda person, protector of children, pro-censorship, know it all kind of person was visiting the print shop. The person looked at one of the printed games, was shocked and took it to Sweden's 4th largest daily, which frontpaged and wrote a big article headlined:

That was September 5, 1995, and it was the biggest news item that day. My friend Martin P. called me early that morning. I was probably hung over. Or at least tired. We were to release the game in a few weeks. We anticipated some media ruckus. But this! I jumped out of bed, afraid for anything from reporters knocking on my door (hardly likely, since I was not really responsible for the game) to the drug squad wanting to anally probe me with red hot prongs. For some totally unknown reason, I was safe-keeping 6 blotches of lysergic acid, and was also in possession of half a gram of moroccan hasheesh. I hurried out into the garden, hiding those illegal substances. What a moronic act! What can I say, I was in shock.

What happened next was me running home to Richard's brother Alexander, hiding out. A few hours later, Richard started getting calls from all major Swedish newspapers, nationwide radio and TV. The national news service TT cabled out a precis of the original article, even more distorted. Richard was made out to be some mysterious dark force out to cannibalize on the souls of the youth of the nation. He was in hiding, the news hinted at. It was wild!

Richard got invited to the biggest talk show in Sweden, and didn't make an ass of himself. The printers of the game box had burned all 1000 of them. Then the manufacturers of the board backed out. A person from one of the largest toy manufacturers in Sweden was quoted, saying that he found the game interesting, and was subsequently fired with immediate effect.

The moral panic was in full effect. I was shocked, but also angry. The game did NOT promote drug use, quite the contrary. Who'd want to be a bum such as the characters of the game? A far cry from the heroin cool of Travolta in Pulp Fiction or the blunting seen in sundry mainstream movies, Reality is more akin to the works of Ken Loach or some other social realist film maker. We - or Richard rather - was branded pro-drug, purveyors of things better left in the closet.

In December 1995, the game was released, in spite of all. Most stores refused to carry it, excepting several libertarian/anarchist/survivalist/crackpot outfits, as well as some dedicated games stores. The few who played the game and wrote about it were largely more than positive, averaging 4 out of 6. I guess that now, 5 years later, 500 out of a thousand games are sold. Richard just about broke even, but neither he, nor I, got any money out of it. But it was a great experience, and a useful lesson in the absolute corruption of media power. The sell of the ink. The cradle of cheap shots and lies. I noticed for the first time that ALL the media were more interested in sensationalist news than what really mattered. People starving and dying are second hand to "morally just" crusades against the smut peddlers, corruptors of youth, that we once were.

It all saddened me to no end. My eyes was opened. Things were never the same again.

Oh, and by the way, Free Jim Goad and gH!

/Mr. Pig

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Fuel:
Holy Basil, lemongrass, Reality, shoutcast, Defcon 7, meestervervalser & Xoloth 1, the Trojan Roots box, Jean-Claude Van Damme, children, cous-cous, Paris, Killer Tools IV, House Industries, Hank Williams, Johnny Paycheck, Blonde Redhead, Quintron, The Ween Live 2-CD, punkgarage.com, SETIathome, gerry's icq, the fact that my libido in limbo, The Front, The Apostle, The Exorcist, sunflowers, summer rain, thunder, dreams of silky thighs, coffee in the morning, Redneck Rampage, Speak magazine, camraderie, Jackie Chan, Invisibl Scratch Picklz and James Arness.