Bozo's Night Out

Bozo’s Night Out was released in 1984 on the Commodore 64 by a company called Taskset, which released several games for the system.  This was back when games like this were commonly released on cassette tape instead of on floppy disk (imagine trying to explain that to today’s kids, to whom even the floppy disk would be a foreign concept).

The Commodore 64 was a very sophisticated system for its time, and was very popular as a gaming platform, predating the PC.  It was an 8-bit system, putting it in a similar realm as the Nintendo Entertainment System, but as a personal computer was on some levels capable of much greater sophistication.  This can be readily seen in the extremely large library of RPG titles available, including the extremely popular “Gold Box” series of Dungeons and Dragons titles released by SSI.  Some of these titles also saw ports to the NES, but a great deal was always lost in the transition.  The Commodore 64 sports some of the largest (not to mention most difficult) RPGs released, so fans of the genre have a lot to love about the system.

Then again, on the other side of things, you have Bozo’s Night Out.  A simple arcade game, one amongst hundreds of such titles released on the C64, Bozo hardly pushed the system to its limits.  Gameplay on arcade-style games like Bozo was generally less sophisticated, and yet Bozo exudes a certain charm and sense of fun that made it one of my favorite titles on the system.

The premise is simple: you play the role of Bozo, a drunk whom you must guide safely home from the bar each night.  There is a meter at the top of the screen showing the number of pints consumed by Bozo, and each night this meter increases by several pints.  With each new level and its corresponding pint increase, Bozo becomes more difficult to control, and will often stumble randomly about to the left and the right, making it a challenge keeping him on the straight and narrow path to safety.  Although this sounds like a particularly frustrating mechanic on paper, in gameplay it actually works pretty well for the game.  True, it is frustrating trying to walk Bozo between a thug and an open manhole, only to have him unexpectedly veer into one of them, but you learn to keep as much distance as possible and sweat your way through the close encounters, and it only truly becomes a matter of difficulty in the very last few nights of the game, when Bozo’s drinking has gone to extremes.

The obstacles Bozo must avoid include police officers who will haul him to jail, thugs, old ladies and women (hookers?) who will beat him to a pulp, and open manholes.  On the latter stages, as Bozo’s pint intake increases high enough, pink elephants will also begin roaming the streets.  Fail to keep Bozo away from these, and he does not die but restarts with fewer pints.  Run the pint meter all the way down, and it’s game over.

What makes the game so charming?  It’s the little things, mostly.  Bozo himself if a comical enough character, and being beaten by an old lady with a cane and sent to the hospital is entertaining as well.  Even the younger women have their own unique touches: Bozo’s Night Out sported bouncy boobies long before Dead or Alive and its dedication to “breast physics” ever came on the scene.  The music is a high point as well.  There is only one tune, but it is upbeat and very catchy.

As this is October and I’ve been focusing on horror-themed games, Bozo’s Night Out does have on last thing to offer: the town you wander through is surrounded by a brick wall, and here and there are doorways to go through and into the woods beyond.   This can be a handy way to escape some of the more dangerous situations on the street, however, attempting to shortcut through the park can be treacherous as well, as it is filled with monsters and goblins who will hunt Bozo down.  These freakish creatures include what appear to be mutant squirrels, strange mushroom men and skull-faced demons.  Whether the park is haunted or the ghouls are the figment of Bozo’s boozy imagination is hard to decide, but as a kid I generally avoided the park as meeting your fate amongst the ghouls seemed worse than incurring the wrath of Grandma’s cane.