Bite-Sized Game History: 80s and 90s Board Games, Wolfenstein 3D’s Treasure Trove, and ThinkGeek’s Last April Fool’s Day

I’m sure some people may enjoy it, but I am definitely not a fan of April Fool’s Day. I don’t know, calling someone a fool after you’ve deliberately lied to them just seems dumb. Pretty much the only thing this crummy holiday had going for it was the annual catalog of gag gifts from Thinkgeek. But this year we can’t even have that after the online storefront was shut down in June of 2019.

We’ll talk about the April Fool’s Day that could have been in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as a few video game-inspired board games, and just how much gold is hidden in Wolfenstein 3D.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

We’re living through a golden age of tabletop games and it has produced an abundance of good games that go well beyond the childhood classics. But in the rush to explore new themes and settings, tabletop game designers have begun to adapt a wide variety of video games for the table.

Just in the past few years, we’ve seen Centipede, Dark Souls, Doom, Resident Evil 2, This War of Mine, and XCOM all re-rendered in plastic and dice. And many more are on the way, including a Bloodborne adaptation that was recently funded through Kickstarter. But like most trends, this one is much older than you might realize.

As you can see from this recent tweet from Nicolas Ricketts, a Curator at the Strong Museum of Play, Milton Bradley spent the 1980s and 1990s turning your favorite video games into tabletop games. The Legend of Zelda, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Sonic the Hedgehog all received the board game treatment back then, as well as Donkey Kong Country: Pog Pitchin’ Game, which tried to rope in one of the other notorious fads from the 1990s:

Hitter’s supposed obsession with the occult was most likely fictional, but the existence of “Nazi Gold” was all too real, and this stolen treasure has played a part in a lot of World War II stories over the years. Id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D was one such story, as noted Nazi-puncher BJ Blazkowicz recovered a significant number of crosses, chalices, and crowns on the way to his showdown with Hitler.

But have you ever wondered how much those items are worth? DS Wolfing did, and thanks to a little mathematical acumen, we now know that BJ was probably quite rich after the end of the war…

Finally, let’s check in with journalist and consultant Mike Futter for a report about the April Fool’s Day that never was.

Thinkgeek has been gone for almost a year now, but the marketing folks at the nerd-friendly company were already hard at work on preparing their April Fool’s Day 2020 catalog before GameStop decided to close the online storefront.

Futter recently came into possession of the descriptions for this year’s items, and he decided to share with the rest of us. A Spaceballs-branded flamethrower, a Shame Bell from Game of Thrones, a Microsoft Clippy Personal Assistant, and quite a few other products that I would have absolutely bought (if they were real) were on the menu. You can see the complete list in this thread:

Thanks to Nicolas Ricketts, DS Wolfing, and Mike Futter for the very serious selection of tweets for this edition Bite-Sized Game History.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.