10 Video Games That Were MASSIVE Jokes

8. Super Hi-Res Chess

pyst gaming
Glitchworks

Deep Blue might have caused Garry Kasparov to tear his hair out, but it never came close to matching the chess pains caused by Bruce Tognazzini's tongue-in-cheek checkerboard 'game' for the Apple II.

That's because his 1978 application, Super Hi-Res Chess, was a complete fabrication. It sounded too good to be true for early adopters of Apple's new-fangled hardware, and it was. Opening the phony programme would 'crash' the system, parodying the computer's command line processor with an array of sarcastic comments directed at the user. At no point would chessmen appear - hi-fidelity or otherwise - meaning the ultimate goal was to escape the syntax error hell.

Piecing together the clues from the command line would eventually reveal the safeword: 'egress'. When Steve Jobs saw the programme, presumably frustrated with his inability to exit, he promptly banned Tognazzini from wasting any more time on it. Obviously, the programmer then spent the next two months perfecting it.

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Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Benjamin was born in 1987, and is still not dead. He variously enjoys classical music, old-school adventure games (they're not dead), and walks on the beach (albeit short - asthma, you know). He's currently trying to compile a comprehensive history of video game music, yet denies accusations that he purposefully targets niche audiences. He's often wrong about these things.