WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Panic!

Publisher: Data East Developer: Sega Released: 1993

A virus has infected the world’s computers (and cars, and coffee makers, and elevators, and televisions, etc, etc), and it’s up to Slap and his dog, Stick, to enter the central computer and administer an antidote.

To do this they have to navigate a maze full of bizarre rooms containing switches. And that’s the entirety of the gameplay in Panic. You jump into a room, get a short animation, and are presented with a series of switches. Tap one of them and see what happens!

The switches are randomized. Sometimes you’ll get a funny animation followed by a do-over. Sometimes you’ll teleport to another room. And sometimes you’ll get a game over (a booby trap). The switches aren’t marked in any way, save for the booby traps after you’ve tripped them once, so the entire experience is a crapshoot.

But you have to go into Panic understanding that finishing the game isn’t the goal. The whole point of experiencing Panic is simply to experience it. To tap on random buttons and enjoy the results, no matter how bizarre they tend to be. The Mona Lisa could transform into a Medusa and turn you to stone. A giant foot could crush you, Monty Python style. It’s all quite strange.

Panic was developed and released by Sega in Japan under the name Switch. It was co-developed by a group called Office I, which I really haven’t found much information about other than the company developed a few more games for later Sega consoles.

Finally, Panic was created in conjunction with a Japanese comedy troupe called WaHaHa Honpo. I have to guess this group had a hand in some of the gags from the game, and their members did all the voice acting in the Japanese version (as well as most of the sound effects). I believe the US version of the game retains all of their effects, though spoken lines were dubbed to English.

The issue with Panic is that the gags mostly aren’t all that funny. There’s a bit of a payoff here in that, the first couple times you play the game, you’re not sure what to expect. But after a while the extreme non-sequiteurs don’t garner any chuckles. And when you consider that the entire point of the game is to laugh, that’s kind of a big failing.

The game made its way to the PlayStation 2 in 2002, though not without a few changes. In particular, the Sega CD version featured a few scenes of famous world landmarks blowing up. In the PS2 game, those landmarks now have diarrhea. According to the Japanese wikipedia page, this apparently had something to do with the attacks on 9/11. In fact, the article claims that the game was delayed from 2001 to 2002 in order to make these changes.