5 Games That Took Maniac Liberties With History

The plot is your typical JRPG nonsense: an evil Count has a plan to control people via a magic powder and it's up to a bunch of children in stupid clothes to stop him. Every once in a while, you learn factoids straight out of Chopin's Wikipedia page. But then, when Chopin and the young friends he's made along his journey reach the end, they have to fight the final boss: Frederic Chopin?

Bandai Namco Games"Or ripped off from Final Fantasy games, anyway."

Chopin realizes his friends are the result of his brain misfiring and decides he must fight them in order to face his soul, which just sounds like an excuse to beat the crap out of a bunch of kids (as if you needed one in your dreams). Of course, at this point the player controls the other characters, so they end up beating Chopin's wimpy ass. Somehow this results in his soul achieving eternal peace anyway.

The director says he made this game to teach more people about Chopin ... and how he died fighting some anime dream beings, presumably. He actually sent the people at the Frederic Chopin Society in Warsaw the text to this insanity to ensure that the game was "historically accurate." We're guessing they just looked at the first page, saw "Chopin is dying of tuberculosis ..." and figured the rest must be equally grounded in reality.

Instead of going through all that trouble, the developers should have followed the example of Amadeus Revenge: a simple '80s game about Mozart going around shooting other musicians.

"There can be only one."

Apparently the developers opened an encyclopedia and started adding whatever random French historical figure they could find as an opponent. Joan of Arc? Sure, some demon brought her back to life. Nostradamus? Was he French? Yeah, probably, throw him in too. Also, Joan calls him "grandfather," even though she died like 70 years before he was born.

NintendoOn the next level you fight Gerard Depardieu.

The plot involves Napoleon real-time strategizing in places like Egypt, a floating island inhabited by ancient Greeks, and finally hell itself, where he must fight a giant nostril-shaped monster that shoots lasers. Oh, and the demon they've been fighting this whole time turns out to be Madame Tussaud, who is also Marie Antoinette, because Tussaud picked up Antoinette's head after she was guillotined and their souls merged. Shame on you if you didn't see that one coming.

Nintendo

NintendoThe game's moral: don't pick up severed heads from the guillotine. Let them roll over a bit.

In the end, Napoleon heroically sacrifices himself to save France, but he's resurrected by the ghost of Louis XVI so he can "make the people happy, bring the world liberty, equality." And then he lived happily ever after! (Until he got exiled to a shitty island and died at 51.)

As Gorby goes around the factory, he must fend off Soviet guards. Why are the guards fighting their own president? Maybe they think he's some other middle aged guy with the exact same birthmark on his head, or maybe their Sega fanboyism is stronger than their loyalty to the motherland. In any case, you attack the guards by simply breathing on them:

SegaIt must take a lot of vodka to reach this effect.

After you do that for 32 levels, the ending shows a large crowd of people cheering Gorbachev by a massive wall. Apparently, in this timeline everyone in Berlin was too distracted playing with their state-provided video game console to tear down the wall.

The second Gorbachev-centric game of 1991 was Gorby's Pipeline for the NES and other consoles, which is about the construction of a pipeline across the USSR. The protagonists are the two little children entrusted with this major construction project, but a cute cartoon version of Gorbachev is prominently displayed on the title screen and cover art. Clearly, he was the main selling point here.

Tokuma Shoten

Tokuma ShotenExcept in the US, where it was released as Child Exploitation Fun.

This one has no ending. It goes on forever, just like the eternal Soviet Union. And of course, 1991 also saw another major highlight in Gorbachev's career: his inclusion on Zangief's ending in Street Fighter II, which revealed his sweet dance moves.

CapcomThe implication is that he's hiding Zangief-like guns under that suit.

That's weird, but maybe he just happened to be there that day to pick up some personal items, or maybe the Cavs refused to meet with the other guy and Barry stepped in. Hell, maybe this is actually taking place in his house.

But then, when the Denver Nuggets win in 2026-2027 ... Obama is still there. And it's definitely the White House.

2K Sports"Excuse me, I play for the what?"

As Bois points out, Obama has been president for 19 years in this reality. Somehow, the artificially-induced decline of the NBA has damaged the American psyche so profoundly that everyone sorta forgot about presidential term limits and let the same guy keep ruling the country. On the upside: hey, no election season.

By 2034, as the NBA games devolve into dwarves clumsily bumping into each other while occasionally touching the ball, 74-year-old Obama is still there, and he hasn't aged a day. After so much time in power, the process that makes presidents age faster than regular people has broken down and reversed itself, rendering him immortal.

The NBA dies in 2053, but the Obama administration lives on, and no one seems to mind. Millions of years from now, residents of Obamerica won't even be able to conceive the possibility that there ever was another president. (Biden, long dead, will still be registered as candidate every 12 years or so, but no one remembers the meaning of this ritual.)

But there's good news for basketball fans: looks like Obama eventually gets bored of his eternal reign and revives the NBA just to become a player, as shown by this NBA 2K17 modder.

Maxwell Yezpitelok co-runs a Nintendo-centric YouTube channel, NintendoDuo.