There was a copy of this that went unsold, right next to a sealed-in-box copy of Mafia II for the PC, for years at our nearby Target. Sometimes, I wonder what brought this eyesore to the store in the first place. I wonder how long it sat there for, where it went after my Target dealt with its clearance, and where the games like it go. I can envision a time in which a con like this was successful. More peaceful times when you came home from the grocery store, hugged your child, pat them on the head, and gave them a copy of this and Big Rigs that you bought from the local Walmart as a last-minute gift. I wonder about the capitalist grief that fuels those purchases—the thought process that led to my cousins giving us GameStop gift cards every Christmas, which is why we have a UDraw Tablet for the PS3 sitting somewhere around here. I wonder about the Wii U Gamecube adapter and NES mini and SNES mini that my father had to stick his neck out to get, and I wonder if, at all, he'd go back and stop himself from the hassle, knowing full well those are all items collecting dust in cabinets we hardly ever look at anymore. And it all beckons me to ask: Is there affection in hedonism? Is it more appropriate to let our memories of such gestures settle like the wind, or should we all laugh at associating such a concept with a product as half-hearted, inherently dated, and embarrassingly corporate as 700,000 Games is? If IGDB is right, this came out in 2013. How anyone thought stocking store shelves with this 20 years after it would have been viable is fucking insane. I'm assuming it was pitched to Viva less in terms of being a successor to Action 52 and more as an attempt to bank off of the momentary success of Flash Games. I can see that pitch meeting going down in a board room, and what I would have been willing to tell the average Joe behind this if I were in the room is this: You don't understand Flash Games. You have to understand Newgrounds was popular, not because it was a nice, civil place, but because it was transgressive, abhorrent, and, at times, pornographic. You have to understand that the tamer examples, like DuckLife, Papa's Pizzeria, and Learn to Fly, were practically phone games played by kids who didn't own a phone. EdsWorld was a counter-cultural icon that never made it to TV because, sometimes, what following your dreams really means is knowing how to ingratiate yourself to a board room that will boot you off the air multiple times if the imagination of you and your crew don't provide enough dividends. What school computer is going to stock 700,000 Games on the device they use for their math or literature classes? And that's not even getting into how much of a boneheaded decision it is to name your game 700,000 GAMES. Do you think Activision or EA could make 700,000 FATHER-FUCKING GAMES if they wanted to? Do you know the absurd amount of resources that it would take for even one of those games to function in the slightest? I mean, of course, they knew. This doesn't actually have 700,000 games in it... which means that NES pirate carts with the same games repeated a million times are less intellectually dishonest than this. Think about that for a second. Holy shit.

But you know what the real crazy part of all of this is? Viva published a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before this. Talk about range, man.

...

Hi! What you've just read is a sample from my list Errant Thoughts On Games I've Never Played Before/Haven't Played Too Much. I figured I'd share the most recent addition to that list separately because I like it enough to feel like it warrants that. I do update that list every now and then. Do be forewarned if you intend to look at it, I do get pretty political in a couple of areas. But anyway, hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Byeeeeee.