Barneysplat
Barneysplat is a humorous, satirical strategy door game for bulletin board systems in which the player tries to sabotage production of the Barney & Friends children's television program. Barneysplat was created for PC BBSes by Austin Seraphin in 1993.[1]
Premise
Barney & Friends premiered in 1992 and was quickly criticized by older children and young adults for being "saccharine" and "childish."[2] Barneysplat, with its goal of killing or harming Barney the purple dinosaur, Baby Bop and four children, is an example of anti-Barney humor that arose in reaction to the program. [3]
One reviewer described the player character in Barneysplat as "a sociopathic Beavis and Butthead-style radical stoner anarchist (of the ~1992 variety), hepped up on H/P/A t-files and prepared to vent his disgust at all the problems of the world on one moronic purple dinosaur ..." [4]
References to drugs, alcohol, and violence abound. As the game progresses, the player chooses from a list of various ways to sabotage activities associated with the filming of Barney & Friends. Examples including spiking the tea at Barney's tea party, ramming someone's bike during a bike race, or offering beer to the children.
"[T]he goal is to get that lovable purple dinosaur and all his too-cute sidekicks wasted," wrote one newspaper columnist in 1995, "and then you waste them."[5]
The game is essentially single-player. Players cannot interact with each other inside the game. The game offers limited competition in the form of a high score list. [6]
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The bike race in Barneysplat -
A status screen in Barneysplat -
The game over screen in Barneysplat
Break Into Chat blog articles
References
- ↑ Austin Seraphin (11 Apr 2010). "Hello again to all my friends, I'm glad you came to play!". Clear White Light. Archived from the original on 4 May 2024. Retrieved 17 Sep 2025.
- ↑ Mitchell, W.J.T. (1998). "Chapter 37: Why Children Hate Dinosaurs". The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-53204-6.
Parents admit to a cordial dislike of the saccharine saurian, and no self-respecting second-grader will admit to liking Barney ("He's too childish" was the response of first-graders I talked to at the University of Chicago's Laboratory School.)
- ↑ Thombs, Dann (2009-06-23). "Barney Splat (1994) review". Goshzilla. Retrieved 18 Sep 2025.
This game came my way from a friend right after graduating from junior high. At the time, we were all in the height of Barney hating. ... Overall if you still don't like Barney, you can re-live some of the glory days of hate and get a few things worked out.
- ↑ Rowan Lipkovits (20 Mar 2006). "BarneySplat". MobyGames. Retrieved 5 Feb 2013.
- ↑ Kerr, Justin (25 Jan 1995). "Hot stops on the Calumet Infobahn". The Information Age. The Times. Munster, Indiana: Howard Publications.
- ↑ Adams, Tyrone L.; Smith, Stephen A., eds. (2008). Electronic Tribes. University of Texas Press. p. 31. ISBN 9780292784475. Retrieved 18 Sep 2025.