The Worst (Or At Least Stupidest) Game EVER

There has been much debate over the decades about which video game is the worst. E.T. on the Atari 2600? Bah! Aquaman on the original Xbox? Take out those pathetic submarine chapters, and the game's entirely playable (Superman should be able to fly as freely in his games as Aquaman swam in that game). Never Dead, on any system? Well, that one was pretty bad, but only because it was so glitchy. If the team put a bit more time into it, say a century, it could have been average.

Virtually every bad game could have been better, if only one or two minor (or major) things had been changed. But there is one game that is so far beyond saving, that even Atari historians rarely mention it. ANAGRAMS!

That's right, in the late 1970's, someone thought it was a good idea to put out a cartridge (the average price per game back then was around $30) that did nothing but scramble the letters of whatever word you entered. It didn't even make a new word, it just moved the letters around according to a logarithm. This meant that the 1st letter of any word was always placed in the same spot, followed by where the second was, etc. The only exception was a space. That never moved.

Why is this trivial cartridge so burned into my memory? This game came out when I was either a freshman in high school, or the year before.  I didn't have a license, and there weren't any buses that went to the nearest Sears in my area, since I lived in the wrong part of town for that. So whenever my friends and I wanted to play Atari, we would walk roughly five miles to Sears, and five miles back. Can you imagine how happy we were the first time we saw Anagrams?

For you younger readers, I should point out that the 2600 originally cost over $300 dollars. I'm not an economist, but I can guess that $300, back when the minimum wage was still $2.90, was worth a lot more to people than $300 is now, when the minimum in SOME areas is close to $10. Of course, taxes were also lower, gas was under $1.00, etc, etc. But that's beside the point.

There was no way to put any censorship into it, so you could type a dirty word, scramble it, and then wait for an adult to walk by and get upset. Especially a salesman. The salesmen hated us. That's when they started to put a plastic case around the game, so you couldn't reset anything. You could still play the games, however.

Maybe that was the redeemable feature of Anagrams. Entering a dirty word into it, scrambling it, then watching the salespeople get upset when they had to get the key to unlock the case after some little kid unscrambled it, only to have us put the word back in while he was returning the key.

Nah! The "game" ukscs.