The Weekly WTF: How ‘Surf Champ’ Invented the Most Craptastic Sport of All Time

Nope, that guy's playing a different game. But don't worry, this one will make you look like even more of a dick.

Piss-poor plastic peripherals will always have their place in video games. In the Wii era, Nintendo brought us all kinds of horrible, horrible controllers. The Mario Kart wheel thing. The Wii Fit Balance board. Those half-assed tennis racquet/golf club attachments that had absolutely no effect on the game at all. They were all bollocks, and none of them even had the decency to be biodegradeable. The environment will be blighted by this crap for years to come.

We haven't forgotten about the Virtual Boy either, Nintendo. What the hell was up with that?

But screw it, this is just the sort of thing that happens when you innovate for the sake of innovation. It's all bound to get a little whack. But Surf Champ's weeny little keyboard-mounted surfboard controller? There is no excuse for that. At all. Ever.

Surf Champ, for those of us who aren't decrepit old dudes, hit the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum way back in 1984. Even if you were around back then, you're unlikely to have ever heard of it. This one's obscure as hell. Even on the Internet, it's a sight as rare as the Loch Ness Monster. Or unicorns. Or a celebrity lady who can resist snapping photos of her ladyparts on her cellphone, then proceeding to bitch about it when some intrepit hacker shares them with the world.

See this, R.O.B? Something worse than you does exist.

Still, sabotagetimes knows their stuff. They know that this craptastic surfing game used ‘a haddock sized plastic surfboard which you slapped on top of your keyboard and used your finger to control, as if they were the stubby legs of a surfer.' And if that sounds freaking horrendous to use, it's because I'm assured that it was.

After all, there's a reason PC games mostly conform to the good ol' fashioned mouse, arrows and WASD approach. Primarily because it actually damn well works, and isn't as counter-intuitive as getting pregnant by thrusting your wang in a bacon slicer. But screw it, Surf Champ has no time for that sort of logic. It's finger-surfboard or nothing ‘round here, buddy boy.

But then the developers took a step further, into true crazy-ass territory. ‘They believed the game was so realistic that it would be used by professional surfers for indoor competitions during the off-season,' the report continues. This resulted in the creation of the World Computer Surfing Championship, intended as an annual event. Unsurprisingly, somebody quickly noticed that, hey, this is a pretty mothereffin' stupid idea, right here, and it happened just once in 1985.

Surf Champ was, by all accounts, a terrible ballache. But it sucked in style, so that's... something.