The Worst Game of All Time

When asked what the worst video game of all time is, most people are quick to read off a short list of commonly scorned titles. Superman 64. The Matrix. That Mortal Kombat Gameboy Advance cartridge.

Well, they’re all wrong. The worst game of all time is Where’s Waldo? for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s so horrible that it made the inside of your NES corrode and rot when it hit the contacts. It’s so astoundingly terrible that it was responsible for fourteen plagues, ninety murderous rampages, and one forgettable children’s cartoon show. It’s so undeniably and marrow-tearing AWFUL that several future filmmakers played it and went insane.

In case you’re too young to remember, “Where’s Waldo” was a series of books created by Martin Handford. Each installment featured drawings of busy scenery, with a humongous crowd taking up an entire page of more. In the midst of the chaos your job was to find a nerdy guy named ‘Waldo’, his wizard, and several dozen random objects. The books were an invaluable source of entertainment on long car trips or substitute teacher days, and finding Waldo gave me a sense of euphoria because if I wasn’t going to accomplish anything else for the rest of the week, hey, at least I got one thing done.

But sometime during the Waldo phenomenon (if ‘phenomenon’ is a word anywhere close to describing its somewhat notable popularity) the publisher decided to turn the series into a video game. The studio handling the project, Bethesda Softworks LLC, took a look at the books and opted to make two changes: Waldo, they concluded, was too easy to find. And the artwork wasn’t ugly enough.

So in the video game Where’s Waldo, you’re expected to find the titular character all over again. You’re given a time limit and scrolling cursor, and each time you press the action button on a character that isn’t Waldo, you lose precious seconds. There are nine levels and the timer remains consistent in each one.

The problem is that the art is so bland and terrible that literally any individual in the onscreen crowd can be Waldo, and you’re reduced to painstakingly poking through shoddily drawn pieces of art to find him. Each individual person in the picture has a featureless white face, tiny stick arms and legs, and the exact same matching outfit. Waldo, by contrast, has a featureless white face, tiny stick arms and legs, and the exact same matching outfit. It’d be easier (and more fun) to find a drop of fresh blood on red carpet, or a sliver of your toenail in the Pacific Ocean.

And it gets worse. There are levels like ‘The Forest‘, where randomly clicking doesn’t cost you time but you’re supposed to find Waldo on an almost entirely black screen. In some places when you find and click on the real Waldo, the game only recognizes it as a guess and penalizes you. Scanning the atrocious graphics puts strain on your eyes, so having a bottle of Tylenol next to your television or computer screen is necessary and highly recommended.

I’ve been playing games since I was five years old. I’ve suffered through a lot of bad ones, even played a few through all the way to the end. But I have never come across something so unbelievably repellent, so noxious, and so foul as Where’s Waldo on the NES. Feel free to argue me with me on this, but it is my opinion that this easily carries away the title of ‘Worst Game of All Time’