McPop!

This is a shareware game of which about half a dozen versions appeared in quick succession in 1989/90 by Robert Roberds, who distributed his games under the name of BSX International. He wrote at least ten other games, including Dammit! and Leong.

McPop! and McDoe! differ in graphics and dungeon layout, but gameplay is the same to both of them and best explained by quoting the accompanying manual:

It is the year 2117. The planet Tralfaz has been taken over by the evil ex-hooker Madame Ching. Yer a member of the Resistance. When Ching captures you, she sentences you to the Dungeon of Ecstacy.

Don't get all jazzed up: the Dungeon of Ecstacy is not as great as it sounds. The Dungeon is the central Whorehouse of the Junta of Tralfaz, and it exists for their pleasure. BUT, when someone is convicted of a crime against the State, they are injected with pheromones and let loose in the locked building. If they are unable to find the necessary keys to get out, they die of sexual tension. If they do get out, they are free.

So you have to run around, grabbing keys and condoms and screwing girls when yer sexual tension gets too high. It's rough; real rough.

There are many "adult" titles that are successful even though they are poorly done. Madame Ching's Dungeon of Ecstasy is not among them. Whether or not you like this kind of arcade gameplay, the game is well done with a love for details. I especially liked musical score, just a few bars of many well-known tunes (played over the PC speaker):

• The Internationale on startup: To celebrate the demise of doctrinaire Communism. Toodles, doods.
• The USC Fight Song on picking up condoms: Because they're the USC Trojans. Get it?!?!
• The Star Spangled Banner on grabbing keys: Because it was written by Francis Scott Key. Caught on yet?
• Deutschland über Alles on opening doors: To commemorate the breaching of the Berlin Wall.
• Bang the Drum Slowly on falling thru a trapdoor: Beats me.
• Football Hero on screwing a girl: I have no idea.
• Help Me Rhonda on selecting HELP: Figure it out.
• Scary Music on pausing: Why the hell not?
• Little GTO on resuming action after pause or help: Because.
• The Theme from Superman on grabbing the X-ray Spex: Cuz Superman has X-ray vision.

And if (not when) you win, you'll hear To Win! the most sacred of Johns Hopkins lacrosse fight tunes.

Robert Roberds seems to have been quite a perfectionist, since he released updates and new versions every month, sometimes seperated by a few days only:

McPop!	1.0	89-09-09	Initial release. Decision made to use The Internationale for opening screen music to show support for the Beijing massacre victims and their fellow pro-democracy activists.
	2.0	89-10-16	Scorekeeping added. Online help, Boss mode, and sound control implemented. Condom, guy, girl, and stair graphics improved. Environment variable feature begun.
	3.0	89-10-18	Opening screen jazzed up. Online help simplified. Screen updates sped up immensely. Sex images altered.
	3.1	89-10-23	Bug fix made so you don't have to set the E-var, and may even set it WRONGLY, if yer running MCPOP from its home directory.
	4.0	89-11-27	Background tunes added to make this game truly top-drawer, old man. Environment variable stuff trashed. Time dependency reduced to allow 33-Mhz screamer fans to play, just like 4.77 MHz losers.
	4.3	Probably the last version, listed in the 1992 catalog. Release date unknown.
McDoe!	1.0	89-12-10	Initial release.
	2.0	90-01-08	Bug fixes in maze (no more walking thru walls!). Cosmetic fixups.
	2.1	Again the version listed in the 1992 catalog.

McPop! has EGA graphics, using the high resolution, while McDoe! is VGA, which makes it one of the first games to use this graphic mode exclusively. The dungeon layout is different and tiles are twice the size. Thus you see less of the dungeon which makes gameplay even more difficult.

I tried out all the versions I could download, that is McPop! 1.0 and 4.0 and McDoe! 1.0. I liked McPop! 4.0 the best. It has all the funny music and the better graphics. The archive I'm offering for download contains both 1.0 and 4.0.

Finally, let me quote the manual one more time. This is what the author had to say to potential critics:

OK lookit: I know that MCDOE! is an awful thing. It demeans women. It demeans men. It crassly exploits the beauty of the sexual act, and has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. SO WHAT? I don't care. Neither should you. I'm an American, and this is a FREE COUNTRY. If people like Dred Scott Tyler are free to abase the flag, if Klansmen are allowed to march down Main Street, and if the Reverend Al Sharpton is permitted to keep that hairdo, then DAMMIT, I should be allowed to write a program like this!

Download McPop! (165kB)