So what you're saying is that the ideal video game interpretation of An American Tail would be "Papers, Please".

Wow I was so engrossed in that debriefing of the movie....And then you go "and then it was made into one of the worst video games ever." lol way to hook us in.

I absolutely broke down when you mentioned that Assassin's Creed came out a few months before this did

You know when you momentarily forget what you're drinking, so like you go to take a sip of tea thinking it's soda, and when it hits your tongue, for just a moment it's the weirdest thing you've ever tasted? This is like that except instead of drinks it was reading the title "Fievel Goes to Video Game Hell" and thinking "That's...not how I expected the third Shades of Gray movie to go."

Man the third fifty shades went in a really different direction.

Okay so when do we get the 4 hour extended cut of that intro? cause Im all hot and bothered for some way too deep analysis into An American Tale....

The absence of games like this is why, I think, the PlayStation Classic cannot recapture the essence of owning that system at the time. Having a bunch of trash or obscure nonsense, perhaps received as gifts from well meaning relatives, was such an important part of the experience.

This video is so good, you don't even notice the transition from discussing revisionism of 18th century racism to instructions on how to clean your PS2.

"I believe in the value of failed art" maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.

Wow, when you said "pirate ship" I thought it was just a generic term for a ship in a video game. But nope, it's flying the Jolly Roger.

Can't wait for your speedrun at a GDQ for this gem

What a lovecraftian nightmare for the pigeon level. You might fight the heat death of the universe as assets load, but those frail, insignificant symbols of man's hubris will only slow you down....

As soon as you said Data Design Interactive I instinctively let out a big "Oh no"

American Tail Any% World Record Progression

I sincerely hope someone's around in twenty years time to bang out shovelware based on the Fifty Shades trilogy

I love how it ends with “MAYBE you can finally enjoy life ” they won’t even let you have the satisfaction of ending the game. The game developers are keeping you on the edge of your seat forever.

An American Tail, not available in America

I saw An American Tail as an adult. The "There Are No Cats in America" song broke my heart at the time and continues to every time I sing it.

I was there for the livestream where Dan first played this. There are no words to describe the moment when he finally reached the cheese in the flying level. Over an hour. Just...holy crap. The music's playing in my head right now. I can't... **Stares into the abyss** Great counterpoint for the vid, art when imperfect can reflect a lot in the human experience though I wonder when the imperfection reaches the level of *royalty-free saxophones of the damned* whether your directly touching a part of human experience but a distortion unavailable to constructed art. You're not seeing life, you're seeing the antithesis of life born from entropy.

Wow, I never expected to hear anyone talk about this stupid game. I had the An American Tale game on CD-Rom and I remember that it was impossible for my child brain to play. I also remember being stuck on the home screen for hours and begging my dad to help me figure out how to play. I wonder if it was anything like this version. My family tried to introduce me to technology but could only afford a couple video games. I genuinely think it was rushed, cheap games like this that convinced me that a) I hated video games b) I was bad at playing them and c) computers as a whole weren’t really for me. It took me a while to overcome my disinterest in computers afterward. Thanks for helping me revisit this weird, foggy memory. Please continue keeping a record of bad/forgotten art. I think you’ll find it’s unexpectedly meaningful to people!

“Chokes and dies on its own assets” that’s such a great line

One hell of an intro

Super drunk watching this but I love it

A close friend (and former colleague) of mine worked at Data for many a year as an artist, and his tales of Stuart Green were... entertaining. They knew what they were making was rubbish, and the aim was to put out as much of it as they possibly could. And for a while it worked. The staff at the company weren't bad people or even bad at their jobs, it was that the place they worked at was set up to produce nothing but, well, as FI describes it - shovelware. One of their games was described in review as "a curly turd excreted from the anus of the games industry." So, yeah.

I don't know who I feel worse for - the kids who asked their parents for this game because they really enjoyed the movie, or the developers who probably got into the industry hoping to make good games before they wound up working at a shovelware studio.

For some reason, the name Data Design just went past me. Then I heard that weird royalty free pop jazz, and something felt horrifically familiar. And when I saw that nonsense half filled heart health bar, suddenly I was dragged back to a hellish world filled with cookie ninjas, anubian jackals, and Elvis Presley. God damn you, Data Design, god damn you.

Strongly agree with your thesis at the end. Preservation of ephemera is just as important as preservation of important things - look how much archeologists have learned from studying middens!

I'd only just put on my glasses and the title looked like "An American Tail: Fievel Goes to Hell, the Video Game" for a few seconds.

If this game is worth remembering then everything is worth remembering. I find this both inspiring and headache-inducing.

Despite the somewhat different approach, so much of you work reminds me of Daniel O'Brien's "Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder" in that 1) I can't fathom what would compel you to inflict this upon yourself, 2) you have an awkward, dry wit that somehow not only makes me care about media I have no interest in, but elevates it to hilarious.

Oh. Oh dear. I remember that stream. I remember the flying level. It haunts me to this day.

In the short essay, I would like to add that the sequel hammered in the 'realities' by having Fivel and his family realizing that New York is a complete shit-hole and they are living in possibly WORSE conditions then they did in Russia, just without the massive raiding and Cossacks. One of the biggest statements from Fivel Goes West is said by Papa when he talks about how in Russia he was making wonderful money not just as a musician but by selling his violins yet in New York he can't do anything with the talent he has. And when they finally get to the West they are still sanctioned off to bad living conditions and put under even MORE tyranny by cats. The original American Tail series, while softening things up for the audience, was a look into growing up as an immigrant through the turn of the century American as the land itself was going through massive cultural changes from everyone, leading to Fivel an his family not only learning to survive and make it through together but also giving them the harsh realities of the world outside their own home of Russia. It truely is a classic. ..... BUT HEY, LET'S FORGET THAT SHIT AND MAKE A GAME THAT RIPS OFF SUPER MONKEY BALL AND SOME OTHER THINGS! Fuck Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg for trying to make a good story and lovely animation! Super Monkey Ball! Super Man 64 levels of flying! Timed chases! It's all fun! IT'S ALL FUN! (This video game is not available in your territory)

This is the most eloquently worded, and calmly executed AVGN video I've ever Seen. GG, 10/10.

This game really makes you *feel* like a mouse riding a roller skate.

"Now on to the 6th and final level, level 5!" @_@

I love this amalgam of a very thoughtful sociological critique of 80s media and gamer rage.

"I believe in the value of failed art." ^ YES! THIS!!!

"Like... I feel like I should be on this cheese... but I'm not... I'm still in front of it..." - FoldableHuman, 2018

Now the question is... Are you going to speedrun it?

12:18 - Now, I will praise one - and _precisely_ one - part of this game: that flowing water effect - especially the waterfalls - in levels 4-1 and 4-2 is surprisingly nice looking. It feels like they just ripped a square of drawn water from the film and just pasted it into this game; and somehow IMO that's the only good-looking part of the whole thing.

watching for like the 5th time, the swing from the movie critique to the game makes me laugh every freaking time

That clickbait worked, KZfaq showed me your upload for the the first time within 3 minutes of upload/publishing time. Every other time I was notified 2 hours up to 2 days later.

»Fievel has a double jump […]« - Dan, Folding Ideas Thank you, Dan...

I love the way Folding Ideas will go from a massive, semi-serious (but still hilarious) deconstruction of Fifty Shades of Grey's use of cinematography to "let's make fun of this terrible video game I found". And we still get something meaningful out of it!

I've watched this many times, and the line "America is full to the tits with cats" has made me laugh everytime.

Hbomb needs to do a speed run of this game.

Serious and interesting analysis of a highly allegorical animated film... followed by a review of a terrible movie license game from 20 years later. 👍

interesting thing to point out: in the tailing level, whenever fievel jumps... that animation? that's just the ninjabread man jump animation. I didn't know this engine was so versatile.

Those first 5 minutes were so comprehensive I completely forgot this was a video game video.

I'm a simple man. I see "Elsa Spider-Man", I click thumbs up.

The issue that you have with "American Tail's" happy ending is similar to the issue I have with the endings to movies like "Elysium" and "In Time." Presenting a complex real world problem and then offering an unrealistic movie solution. "In Time" especially amuses me, because at one point, the hero is actually disappointed that robbing one bank didn't solve poverty. But it turns out (SPOILERS) he just has to rob a really rich guy, and that solves poverty. The difference is, I feel like the ending to "American Tail" fits much better with the rest of the film. It's a fun animated adventure with a serious historical subtext. Right at the beginning, Fievel runs out into an attack shouting "go away, cats!" and comes out completely unharmed. Then, he falls off a ship in the middle of the ocean and comes out completely unharmed.

When the original PlayStation was in its twilight years, right after the PS2 became available, there were companies that focused exclusively on producing shovelware for it, making games at a low cost and selling them for cheap. This included both original games cashing in on recognizable names (Billy the Wizard is one such thing) or licensed ones, like those mentioned in the video. Licensed stuff sells much better but getting the rights is costly, which is why they went for "outdated" brands such as Top Gun, Babe and Xena. Recognizable by parents but the video game rights would cost next to nothing. These publishers even recycled and re-published some of them for the PS2. This pattern continued onto the Wii. If you want to check the games out, look up Phoenix Games, Conspiracy Entertainment and The Code Monkeys. Some of those games are even worse than what Dan just reviewed. As an example, see if you can find London Cab Challenge...

I don't remember what first brought me to your channel, but I am so so glad it did

Oh god that low effort "cosplay" at the end. XD

I remember trying out the Xena game for trying a PS2 emulator to see where they were probably about 15 years ago. The performance was awful, the graphics were glitched, and the controls unresponsive. "Wow, PS2 emulation must be hard!" I said to myself.

I love videos about animated movies like this because as a kid growing up in a third world country, all I watched was random pirated animated movies, and it feels amazing to find them again years later. Like, I had a CD of Felix the Cat: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, which is from 1936. Why did I have it? I don't know. Who the fuck decided to pirate and sell that movie instead of a recent one? I have no clue.

Ngl, I was hoping for more dissecting of the movie... You spoil me with your film analysis, sir!

Preservation of bad art is exactly why I don't like deleting my old music etc.

With a title like that I couldn't not click the notification....

I’m gonna guess that someone insisted the game only have 5 levels as a play on the main character’s name. Five. Fivel. Fievel!

When you said "Assassin's creed, a game that came out before this one" I lost my fucking mind. It felt like I just read the necronomicon or something. I thought this game was from like, 1994

“A grim portent of things to come.” I love this.

I was wondering where the hell I recognize the Data Design Interactive logo from. Turns out they made LEGO Rock Raiders, which was pretty great. Wonder if it was more of a happy accident, or if they still had some degrees of care and self-worth back then.

Love the vid! Also, I was thinking about what you said about American Tale's ending where all the the cats are thrown off docks was historical revisionism that damaged its story structure as a whole, I thought to myself "well they didn't get rid of ALL cats in america." Maybe it was just a small victory over a small force and characters blew it to huge proportions? That would have been an interesting follow up premise I think.

American Tail was such a big part of my childhood, and I really need to rewatch it because I never caught all the metaphor and allegory. I'm also a huge history nerd. I think I'll do that. And avoid this game like the plague as I do so.

Data Design Interactive made Lego Rock Raiders which was a pretty cool game, that i have currently installed on my hard drive and modding extensively. I was a child when it came out and it friggin changed my world.

just as that "wind noises" part came up my AC kicked in and I was treated to a riveting 4D experience. Thanks, guys! Excellent work! Subscribed!

Thank you so much for this!!! This sorta content is so interesting to me (as a so-called "connoisseur of bad video games"), & I absolutely agree w/ you that creations like this need to be archived like this.

Surprises from this video: 1. Someone thought shovelware for a dying console could be profitable 21 years after the original was published. 2. The later levels seem to be better-designed than the early ones. 3. "Bowdlerize" is pronounced "baw-dler-ize."

I want a full-length essay on the movie after that five-minute teaser.

At 20:30 he starts to explain the exact reasons he made his review of Doug Walker's The Wall. Bad media is a passion!

18:58 Never have I been more happy to hear the word "was" in the phrase "was a developer."

I can only thank god that there was never a Secret of NIMH game.

It just hit me now, this was released in 2007. The same year as Bioshock, COD MW, and Portal. Edit: and the original Assassin's Creed

It feels rare to hear a word that I can't glean the meaning of through context and basic knowledge of etymology, but my brain hit the brakes when you said "epicaricacy".

I'm blind in one eye so that street level with the bad depth is just my life

On the Linkedin thing, I want to say 2006, maybe 2007. The Wii had just come out, and consumers were complaining about lower quality games flooding the system over its popularity with the casual market. So either EGM or Game Informer had a spread in one of its issues about this problem and how Nintendo used to have its golden seal of quality, but removed it for this new system, leading to our beloved Ninjabread Man developer credited with dozens of games in a single year.

This is one of my new favorite video titles

"He's the calmest gamer you ever heard..." Looking forward to more short bad video game videos

i love this man; his dialog is so dense if i stop to text for even a few seconds i have no clue whats happening because so much was said in such a short amount of time.

I can't believe Dan missed all the metaphors in the Feivel game that would have explained every artistic and gameplay decision.

The ending of this is the best part.... Fun to sit through, but that end still though....

this channel is now my new favorite youtube video essay channel, seriously your dry wit is hilarious really makes you wonder why after 5 years of these at least you havnt hit 1m, wtf is up with that

This and Fievel Goes West were some of my favorite movies as a kid, in that I could see myself more in Fievel's family than any of the princesses. To the point that one of my games as a kid was "mouse tenement"....

I now need to see a speed run of this.

I really love that you do videos about whatever you happen to find interesting that week, and focus all your energy on it, rather than following an expected formula or topic. One of the things that pushes me *away* from many channels is them having a repetitive singular focus. Your channel is much more organic and varied. Stay with that.

I'm glad you dug into the flaws of An American Tail, honestly. I've never gotten why people hold it up as one of the greatest of animated films. Don Bluth has serious deficiencies in story-building that bog down every one of his movies except Secret of NIMH (which went through like fifty script rewrites). An American Tail is like Hercules or Hunchback-real neat, but messy. You should've done an analysis of how the metaphor continues in the journey to the West, though. ;D

"The sixth and final level, level five" really hit me in my giggle-muscles. Great video!

So, weirdly, this just reminded me of one of the game banes of my existence as a kid - TailSpin for NES. You know, TailSpin with Baloo. Which aired before school in the early 90s and was beloved by first graders. And then the game, which was so unbelievably hard, that even my high school-aged brother couldn't beat the first boss. Were there other levels? I made it passed the waterfall *once* - and for any one who never had the displeasure of playing, that waterfall is, like, 2 minutes into the game.

My entire life is a revisionist myth.

The thumbnail goes against all conventional practices on KZfaq. I love it

as soon as you said “data design interactive,” I was like yup that tracks

I accidently skipped the video to the point where the game footage is shown, I thought it's a typical obscure & forgotten movie adaptation ps1 game, ...Until you mentioned that it's a ps2 game released in 2007. Holy crap.

Awesome that you put the video I was hoping this was in the front. I would have been happy even with just that 5 minute introduction. I did THOROUGHLY enjoy the rest of this 22 minute video. As weird a thing as it sounds, your logic here reminds me of Ian from Forgotten Weapons, He does videos on rare and forgotten firearms and uploads all the obscure documentation on them he can find to the internet, because Once a friend of his died, and all of this one of a kind documentation he had accumulated was just thrown away by his family.

Wow, today I learned that there is actually an English word for Schadenfreude (epicaricacy). Thanks, Dan!

Holy shit. I loved this movie as a kid and I never noticed ANY of what you said in the intro. God damn.

what i always want to know is, what are the conditions of the workplace for the poor souls who have to programme, rig, level design, etc these shovelware games? (same for horrid gatcha mobile titles and the like now) i don't expect it to happen any time soon because the money just _is not there_ and the audience doesn't really exist for it, but if kotaku writers and/or jason schreirer ever want to jump in on an investigation of what it was like to make 2000s shovelware or whatever, i would be excited as fuck. because it's one of the dark sides of the industry, the absolute flipped coin of AAA crunch nightmare factories. these are not games that get time that is absolutely needed to make a game. and the people working on them are not allowed or enabled to make anything of value. _at very least_ the poor souls at AAA crunch hellholes are able to wrap it up and say 'well, for all that hell, at least the game is solid, critically acclaimed or brings joy to the people who are playing it finally'. shovelware workers don't even get that, gatcha mobile trap games don't even get that (though it must be stated that from what i hear, mobile game factories are actually not that terrible as far as the culture tends to go in the video game workplace, but they are certainly not prestigious and your pay won't be anything worth note--bug testers in mobile games in particular are notably paid like shit as usual, but not treated as the company pariahs like is common in AAA workplaces. this we know from the investigative inquiries aimed towards bug testers in particular.) what i am trying to say is, there is absolutely a story there, because it must be a uniquely demoralising experience. your work is shit, is acknowledged as shit, is not enjoyable and you learn _nothing_ that can further your goals to make anything you aspired towards during your decision to go to school to make games some day.

Longtime fan of your channel. Just love the though that goes into each piece of content here. It is refreshing to have someone around who actually puts a lot of though into decyphering art and media in a way such as yourself. Really, you are great.

I especially appreciate the “why” section, and offer you a 3rd “why”, reflective of why I watched this video through to the end. Today video games and game development have come so far that finding a “bad” video game feels like the exception, even on platforms like Steam. In “the before times” it was not unusual to get a game with a major flaw or simply bad, and struggle through it because it must be the player, not the game where the error occurred. My teenage self thanks you.

I appreciated the use of the underused word 'epicaricacy'. Thought it was a nice choice to make me and 3 or so other people smile at being secure in their obscure knowledge of the english word for 'schadenfreude'.