Upsetting Day: Aliens vs. Predator Will Kill Your Mom (Patreon)

For everyone too young or too old to remember, the 1990s were the EXTREME YEARS of children’s advertising. Every product marketed towards kids had to be as EXTREME as possible. If your hot new product wasn’t vaguely threatening to beat the shit out of children or murder their families, then your product was dead on arrival. Dead on the vine, as they say. Which in this case would be dead on the shelf? Because shelves are where they keep the things you buy in stores? Listen, I don’t know stores. I’m not a storeologist.

Alien vs Predator for the 64-bit Atari Jaguar had a commercial that summited the mountaintop of EXTREME by threatening to beat the shit out of you with your murdered family. I saw this commercial a handful of times leading up to the game’s release in October of the distant year 1994, the flashpoint of all things EXTREME because by no small coincidence Timecop was also released in October of 1994. This incredible, vibrant, bellowing 30 seconds of televised commerce tore into my brain like the crew of The Core, or Arnold Schwarzenegger in that one part of Total Recall where he screams SCREW YOU!! while killing a man with a drill. I typed that last paragraph faster than my brain could produce enough words to catch up with my fingers, such is my excitement to discuss this very important piece of media.

A wee bit of context – the Atari Jaguar was a gaming console released in 1993 and bludgeoned to death by consumer indifference in 1996. Back then, the console wars were mostly about how many BITS you had. Nintendo began with a sissy old 8 BITS. Then your Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and Turbografx-16s and so on upped the ante by doubling the number of BITS to 16. Panasonic decided to branch out from its success producing affordable home electronics that no one has ever asked for by name and have only ever been purchased as a compromise by throwing its hat into the console game with the 3DO, which boasted an engorging 32 BITS. The Atari Jaguar was the first console to drag us into the future of 64 BITS, and buddy, if that ain’t EXTREME, then it’s time for me to hand in my EXTREME badge and gun, which are a flap of rhinoceros skin and a telescoping bazooka.

Now, I didn’t pretend to understand what BITS were then and I don’t claim to now. All I know is that BITS fuck. They fuck hard. And the more BITS your console had, the harder it fucked. So according to that very scientific equation, the Atari Jaguar was the most EXTREME console ever built, a gaming machine that fucked so hard it transformed scrotums into hummingbird wings.

The problem was, the Jaguar didn’t really have 64 BITS. Or, more accurately, it used two 32-BIT chips working together to reach new heights of raditude by achieving 64 BITS with their powers combined. (Again, I must stress that I am dumb as hell, just a barely sentient bag of hammers, and have no understanding of how these things work. This is merely what I have read in my travels.) It was apparently very difficult to design software that successfully got this two-chip team, the Bash Brothers of console gaming, to actually work together. So, the few dozen games that actually managed to get produced for the Atari Jaguar didn’t deliver on the 64-BIT promise, and most of them barely succeeded at being playable in the conventional definition of the word, i.e. “providing an enjoyable interactive experience preferable to sitting and staring at the wall all afternoon.” I would rather do homework than play 98% of the Atari Jaguar’s library, regardless of how many BITS it turgidly sprayed into my face. I maintain that my brief career as a petty criminal was borne from suffering through one too many rounds of Kasumi Ninja. Tempest 2000 was pretty killer, though.

But all of that was meaningless next to the Atari Jaguar’s flagship title, its “killer app” if you will. (EXTREME products thrive on killing.) Alien vs Predator was the Jaguar game. A first-person shooter released during the initial explosion of the genre’s popularity and one of the only licensed 3rd party titles developed for the console, the game promised a nonlinear campaign you could storm through as either an alien, a predator, or some asshole. And it was pretty good! But more importantly, it was EXTREME.

Atari knew it needed to pull out all the stops to convince kids across the nation that Alien vs Predator was so EXTREME they couldn’t afford to miss out. It needed to bully, threaten, and terrify kids into believing that without the 64 BITS of TESTICLE-RUPTURING POWER rioting within the 64-BIT ATARI JAGUAR, their lives were worthless shit-sucking hamster wheels of such non-extreme pedigree they might as well chug a bottle of bleach if they couldn’t get their hands on one.

Atari accomplished this task, perhaps all too well, with a simple 30 second TV spot. An angular teen boy sits in his botfly nest of a bedroom, playing his copy of Alien vs Predator on his 64-BIT Atari Jaguar connected to an entertainment center roughly the size of an ATM screen.

The game is so intense that he nearly jumps out of his teen boy skin when his mom slaps her arm heavily down on his shoulder, presumably to tell him that his game is far too EXTREME, could you please adjust the EXTREME knob on your MINIATURE TELEVISION because your father and I are trying to BLOW EACH OTHER and we keep being interrupted by the insatiable urge to SKATEBOARD.

Teen Boy breathes a sigh of relief, rebuking his mom with a gentle but patronizing, “Mom.” But Mom doesn’t respond. “Mom…?” he repeats with growing uncertainty. He turns around and learns several massive pieces of information in one second – his mom is dead, aliens are real, there’s an alien in the house, it’s the alien from the popular science fiction franchise of the same name, the very same franchise that spawned the game he is playing at this very moment, that specific franchise is somehow also real, the alien has killed his mom, the alien is puppeting his dead mother’s arm to play a fun prank on him, and, finally, the realization that the alien has developed a weird sense of humor. The boy screams, burdened with this terrible knowledge, and the commercial ends with his vital signs flatlining, because he has become the latest victim of a spectacular alien decapitation. Spectacular and EXTREME.

You may question the wisdom of marketing your biggest title of the year by suggesting that it will kill everyone in your house and defile their corpses. You might also question the wisdom of using the only commercial you made to hype up your must-have video game to show someone playing it on the world’s smallest television. But you are not Atari in 1994, a company that drove itself into insolvent oblivion after a series of terrible decisions. And in Atari’s defense, Alien vs Predator was a best-seller, and I have been quietly obsessed with this commercial for the past three decades. It is my favorite 30 seconds of storytelling ever produced.

First of all, the “boy” playing video games in his attic apartment is clearly in his 20s. He’s a 90210 teen. He’s 15 in Luke Perry years. Also, he appears to be living in the Amityville Horror house. I don’t know why his family would’ve moved there unless his parents got an incredible deal. Which is the exact plot of The Amityville Horror, so I guess it’s back on the table.

He’s playing his $70 copy of Alien vs Predator, the only title anyone would’ve conceivably purchased an entire Atari Jaguar in order to play, on a dark and stormy night. That’s $70 in 1994 money, by the way. That’s probably enough money to run for president. Atari wasn’t moving any of those fucking Jaguars, so they jacked up the price of their only good game. But I digress. So Elderly Teen Boy popped in his EXTREME new game on the most haunted night of the year. I don’t blame him because that’s exactly what I do when it is raining. Or really during any weather event.

Somehow, there’s an alien here. I don’t know if the spooky storm joined forces with the spooky game to Pagemaster an intergalactic rape demon into this suburban rumpus room, or if the alien rode a comet to Earth like Slim Pickens. Hopefully both explanations are correct. The alien sneaks in specifically to play a joke on our aged teen, which is “making him believe his mother is still alive.” It’s a fun game I’ve played myself on several occasions.

But most importantly, this commercial adds a fascinating new wrinkle to the Alien lore. In the movies, aliens are all business – building a new hive, gathering victims for the queen, eating Charles S. Dutton, etc. But according to the EXTREME canon established by the 64-BIT Atari Jaguar, aliens are mischievous little devils who like to cut loose with some tomfoolish hijinks every now and then. The aliens probably have their own YouTube prank channel, where they fool people by pretending to be plumbers or Obama or a runaway baby carriage or some shit and then start ripping faces and spraying acid everywhere. Maybe the alien lives in a TikTok house next door. The neighbors don’t appear in the commercial, which means my hypothesis is impossible to disprove.

In short, the Alien vs Predator Atari Jaguar commercial is the best Alien vs Predator movie ever made. I’ve been trying for years to buy it on Laserdisc, but like the Atari Jaguar, they don’t make those anymore.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is currently trying to summon bad dudes by playing Bad Dudes during a lightning storm.

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