Trivia / Emogame

• Creator Backlash: Jason Oda doesn't regard the games particularly fondly, seeing them as fairly immature goof-offs that got popular largely because there wasn't much interesting content on the internet in the early '00s. The games' homepage even has a letter that he wrote for the first game's fifteenth anniversary, in which he compares the experience of playing them again to going back and reading his cringeworthy high school poetry.
  "The first games I ever made were a series of badly programmed games about emo. They became pretty popular and were featured in SPIN, The New York Times, and on MTV. At this point, I have to say I'm pretty embarrassed I ever made these. They're pretty terrible and immature. The jokes are just barely funny. Back in the day when the internet wasn't very entertaining, these sort of games passed for fun. As much as I'd like to forget I ever made these, they are at this point, just an unavoidable part of my history."
• Vaporware: Super Emogame III.
• What Could Have Been: Some of the concept art for the third game showed an ultraviolent Grand Theft Auto parody (Grand Theft Omaha — the most violenterest level eva!), levels that homaged Zelda and Contra, the main characters battling in a post-apocalyptic world, and a boss fight against Ashlee Simpson, who is mutated into a giant spider.

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