“Hello, do you have the game Battletoads?” In 1991, this was a perfectly normal question. Rare had just made a visually stunning game for the NES (which they dreamed would become a franchise) and fans of the time were eager to get their hands on it. The problem is that GameStop employees received this question not in the early ’90s, but in the fateful year of 2007, more than 16 years later. It was one of the first massive trolling incidents on the Internet at a time when no one intended to hurt anyone: just to annoy. To be funny. The result was as epic as it was unprecedented: a joke that has endured over the years, and is worth remembering to understand what “the Internet used to be like.”
Battletoads, tell me?
Over the years, Battletoads has earned a more than fair legacy: that of the hardest video game in history. Its three protagonists, Rash, Zitz, and Pimple, have remained in the collective imagination as true gamer nightmares since their release in 1991. In fact, although the reviews were positive, many reviews had to lower their scores precisely because there were few who could get past certain levels. Who said that the debate about introducing an “Easy Level” in all games was just a thing of the present?
Years went by and the world forgot about Battletoads… until, on September 12, 2007, 4Chan users, en masse and without knowing who started the movement, called 40 different GameStop stores continuously asking about the pre-order for Battletoads in all its formats: Battletoads 2, Battletoads for Wii, the Battletoads remake.
The mass attack lasted three days and drove its employees absolutely crazy: some decided to introduce the real game into their database and allow reservations. Others bought a unit and put it up for sale at $999.99 to troll the trolls (not only did no one buy it, but GameStop could not allow its sale). But most either kept the phone off the hook (at the risk of receiving a complaint from the higher-ups) or responded in imaginative yet routine ways. It was a nightmare for a few, but a delight for the Internet at a moment that, inevitably, has become nostalgia and 2.0 history.
In fact, many were forced to change their greeting when answering the phone by adding the phrase “we don’t have Battletoads.” Obviously, trolls reacted quickly and started saying they were calling for other reasons, keeping them on the line before asking them, of course, about the game in question. Now trolls send people to your house or reveal your secret identity to the world; before, we were content to annoy employees during their workday by asking them about games from 1991. The course of history, I suppose.
The thing was forgotten (more or less, because it resurfaced throughout the following year) until 2015, when someone must have remembered that game and announced its arrival in the compilation Rare Replay, which fixed the difficulty of level 11, which until that moment no one had been able to complete due to a treacherous bug. The story of Battletoads is, really, that of a failed franchise: it had several games in the 90s and a television series in the works that never aired a single episode, but it has gone down in history as a mere running gag. Who knows if in 34 years we will be talking about a little joke that someone made at the expense of Concord.
