Back in the late 90s my grandfather bought us our first computer which was not only a place for fun, but a place where we discovered a few oddities that we never knew existed. Folks who know me, they know that I am a hardcore fan of The Honeymooners. My parents raised me on the show, and I grew into a fan. I can quote every episode verbatim, I have my own version of Ed Norton and, like every Honeymooners fan, I hate the “Lost Episodes” of the series.
Also in the late 90s, my family got a hold of The Honeymooners DOS computer game. For reasons I can’t quite figure out, there existed a video game based on the show. Turning The Honeymooners into a WarioWare-style video game is like turning The Dick Van Dyke Show in to a side scroller beat-em up. Nevertheless, the DOS video game is both immensely stupid and yet oddly entertaining in its surrealism. With the opening theme song and credits, The Honeymooners game gives you the Honeymooners experience, come hell or high water.
There isn’t so much a fluid narrative as there are a series of mini-games the players can take part in that are oddly entertaining if unusual. As Ralph, you measure your progress through a train that’s set to go to the Raccoon Convention (easily one of my favorite episodes), and get to pick one out of many mini-games based on scenarios seen in the television show.
So, if you want to Drive a Bus like Ralph (“I Brive a Dus… I Dus a Brive.”), you play as him, as he goes to various streets and locations in Brooklyn, picking up passengers, and taking them to their destinations. To rack up points you have to drive back and forth picking up passengers and committing to the same routine. You also had to avoid hitting cars, and often times you’d be called back to the Bus Depot. Sometimes if you picked up four passengers, they’d want to go to five different places, and you had to commit to taking them there.
On the other hand, if you want to know what being a sewer worker is like you’re free to play as Norton, who has to run through the sewers and fix every pipe leak before the clock runs out. You’re given a schematic of how the sewers look, but only for a brief moment before Norton loses the map to forceful winds. From then on, you have to memorize the corners, and fix up the leaks before time runs out and you can build on scores.
Want to play as Alice or Trixie? Well, remember that episode when the girls are in the toy store and accidentally drop the puzzle forcing them to put it back together? I don’t either, but you can play a mini-game where you put together a jigsaw puzzle that forms a scene from the show. There was a slide puzzle that formed a scene from the show as well and then there’s also trivia to the show that touched upon certain episodes. Every now and then there were cut scenes where an animated Ralph or Norton would spout out dialogue from the series.
In one instance, Ralph stops his bus and the Three Stooges make an appearance, much to Ralph’s irritation. The Three Stooges meeting Ralph Kramden is such a combination of funny and amazing, it makes me dizzy. In spite of the time consuming mini-games, you could also play the 99,000 dollar answer game where sometimes the computer just couldn’t think of a question. So, the computer would announce through the host that they didn’t have a question for you. That’s rare.
For folks who didn’t own any of the episodes and were in the mood for The Honeymooners, the DOS game was as good an alternative as wanting an air conditioner on a hot day and settling for someone blowing on your face. It’s kind of the same, but not really. In either case, The Honeymooners DOS game was an oddity, and one that wasn’t at all perfect. I still remember playing this game for an hour at a time every day whenever I was bored, and thinking to myself how lame it was. But then, I could never really stop playing it whenever I launched it on the computer. I guess some Honeymooners is better than no Honeymooners at all.
