The Untold Truth Of The Nintendo 64 South Park Game
South Park 64 was like a match made in heaven for pubescent edgelords in the pre-internet era: First-person shooter violence combined with offensive comedy.
Two things happened in August of 1997. The massively successful GoldenEye 007 was released for Nintendo 64, and the first episode of South Park ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe") aired on Comedy Central. A little more than a year later, a baby was born. South Park 64 was produced by the now-defunct Iguana Entertainment and was later ported for PC and PlayStation.
South Park 64 seemed to have everything that fans of the show loved. Goofy animation. Silly music. Foul-mouthed quips. A range of hilarious weapons that included urine-drenched snowballs, a toilet plunger gun, and a "sniper chicken" that you could shoot eggs from. The game also gave fans of the show a virtual tour around a three-dimensional town of South Park. Running on the same engine as popular FPS series Turok, the game seemed to have a lot going for it.
But the fun faded quickly, especially after hearing Stan say "Dude, sweet!" for the 500th time while killing the same enemies and hearing the same looping background music.
Everyone trashed this game. Even the South Park creators.
For a show that had great writing, especially in its early days, the plot was threadbare. There's a comet headed to the town of South Park and it's making a bunch of weird things happen. There are mutant turkeys, evil clones, and killer toys. Look, just kill enough of these things and you get another cutscene with Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny. "This game is so damn BORING you'll want to kill Kenny yourself just so something interesting happens," GameRevolution said.
South Park showrunners and self-described video game geeks Matt Stone and Trey Parker also didn't spare any love for South Park 64, or any South Park games released in the late '90s (anyone remember Chef's Love Shack or South Park Rally?). "I'll say it right now. We did this deal with Acclaim and they just screwed up every game they did. It sucks," Parker said in an interview at a PlayStation 2 event in 2000. "We have no control over it. They just take your franchise and they step on it and they don't care."
"We've had really bad video games, but we want to do a good one," Stone said.
It almost got a GameBoy Color port
Around the same time as South Park 64, Acclaim was working on another South Park game, except that this one was for GameBoy Color, according to the Unseen 64 video game archive.
Issue 114 of Nintendo Power previewed a host of upcoming titles for the soon-to-be released handheld console in North America in its November 1998 issue. Among those games, the magazines teased a screenshot of a South Park platformer for GameBoy Color. The game was listed in the magazine's release calendar for the fall of 1998 but never actually came out. According to Unseen 64, Stone and Parker didn't think a South Park game would be a good fit for the GameBoy Color's younger demographic. For years, the show's creators owned the only prototype copy of the GBC South Park game, but the game was eventually found and dumped online for fans to check out for themselves.
The animated show didn't find its stride in the video game industry until 2014, with the release of South Park: The Stick of Truth, and again in 2017 with South Park: The Fractured But Whole.