Ep 214: Video Game Bathrooms

Sep 6

Listen to episode 214 here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I grew up with video games. Back in the day, video games were a huge thing. I remember getting up very early, often before my parents were up, to play video games before they woke up. It was unstructured time for sure. Games were also more of a to do, what I mean by that is, it was tied to a gaming console or at least a pc and while there were some individually made games on the pc, they were not as big and were mostly tech junkies just seeing what they could do.

Things completely changed when the portable games market, things changed. I was no longer tied to the tv. I could take it on the road. So I got to thinking, was dropping your game boy in the toilet ever a thing. I never did it, but I was also but a grade school scamp, and from what I can tell taking your phone and or Gameboy to the bathroom is middle and high school beginner behavior. And it turns out, not only did Gameboys get dropped in the toilet, it happened a lot. How they know it is actually funnier, apparently a lot of Gameboys would come in to be sold or traded with water damage on them.

People have been playing video games on the toilet since the early 90s. And things only continued to pop off as games continued to be made more and more portable. Then when the smart phone was released in the late 2000’s early 2010’s bathroom gaming shifted. Phone apps, phone games, the never ending scroll, etc. While people have been playing video games in the bathroom for a long time, as was the case with movies and tv, it took longer for bathrooms and bathroom topics to be adapted and widely used in video games.

Today, we are going to take a brief stroll through video game history and how bathrooms and poop have been portrayed and have made their way into the gaming industry.

History of Bathrooms in Video Games

While there is no agreement, one of the best bets for the best actual prominent use and portrayal of the bathroom is in a 1984 computer pixelated platformer called Jet Set Willy. There was a text based computer adventure game in 1980 called Mystery House, it did not depict or show a toilet. Really it depicted a bathroom as far as a book would, but it happened to be programmed into the interactive game. I don’t count it, sorry to all the big text based adventure games out there, but you are just reading a book disguised as a video game.

The first time the bathroom was depicted was Jet Set Willy, and it didn’t just depict the bathroom, it played a role in the game. In the game Willy wakes up fully dressed where he passed out in his bathtub after a big party. They made it to where if you touch the toilet, you lose a life. And then after you do everything in the game, gather all the things, you have to make your way back to the bathroom where Willy goes back to “bed” in the bath tub.

I should note, this is kind of late stage in the process of all this video game bathroom discussion. Some blokes wrote an article called “The Purposes and Meaning of Video Game Batrhooms.” It’s a good read and it is a source below. But along with that they published a database where bathrooms in video games are catalogued. We will return to this.

For our purposes we are looking at some of the history of bathrooms in video games. While there are some exceptions, for the vast majority of early video games in the 1980s and the 1990s bathroom served an age-old role, that of comedic relief and slapstick humor.

Key examples of 1980’s-2000’s toilet humor in video games includes uses by Banjo and Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Usually, this puts the heroes or characters you play as in environments that were filled with poop, bathrooms, or other spaces that were stinky or filled with poop. In fact, Conker is famous for one of the first poop themed bad guys, the great and mighty poo who lords over poo cabin. If you don’t know, Conker is a cartoon squirrel or a beaver or something, but it is surely an adult rated M game.

In Conker, specifically in the level called poo cabin, he uses the prune juiced hyped diarrhea of some cows to get through the poo cabin to fight the great and mighty poo. It’s a wild world. But it is all supposed to be shock humor and goofy.

Nintendo’s Earthbound, while not featuring huge poop monsters, had irreverent poop themed humor. It set the tone for what sort of jokes could be used in the game. But in the early days of video games, the bathroom served 1, maybe 2 roles. Primarily it gave some humor to the game as it went. But it also made a connection to the players. Turns out, everybody poops, even the friends you make in the games you play.

However some maybe went too far as they explored what you could do with video games. One example is Duke Nukem Forever where players can pick a turd out of the toilet and actually throw it around the bathroom. It serves no other purpose, and it was supposed to be a funny bit.

Moving to Depictions of Realism and Functionality

As video game technology continued to grow, there became a desire to ground games in some level of realism. Especially when 3d video games took off, bathrooms were readily used to connect to the player and give a frame of reference. Famously, GoldenEye’s facility level played around the bathroom. Bathrooms were placed all over in video games throughout this early 2000s to 2010s era. They would have side missions where you had to go into the bathrooms. Some of the time, they would be used to show the state of things, such as Bioshock where the bathrooms can be found to hold audio logs of people in distress and often had blood painted graffiti.

In these, there were a lot of new turns to making horror or scary video games. We talked a lot when we discussed the scary movies and the use of bathrooms in them, but people love to put scary things in the bathroom, it really gets you going.

Silent hill 2 opens with the character in a disgusting bathroom and sets the gritty and unsettling tone of the game. They return to the disgust of a toilet when their character has to reach in to get a key.

Resident Evil, though not having a lot of bathroom horror, had one of the best. There is a bathroom in the mansion in the game, and if you drain the bathtub it triggers a big jump scare and a memorable trap for the player..

Also during this era was a new turn toward video games as storytelling. Bathrooms became a place to drive the narrative forward. Using bathrooms as “safe” or save point rooms. Video games moved from just another room to give it some connection, to having more playable aspects. You could interact with things in the space. And if you are like me and are an experienced bathroom interacter, you know some of the things you can find in there.

The next biggest jump in bathroom and bathroom related humor was functionality. Bathrooms dropped from being like a set piece, to be a critical part of the gameplay experience. They had a purpose. One example of this is in the sims. The Sims has you play as a fake human character known as a Sim and you have to have your Sims take a dump or they get sick. Just like in real life. The save room is also a functional mechanic. It borrows often from the horror movie trope of making it to the bathroom, except this time instead of running from diarrhea, you are running from some sort of deadly monsters. Dead Rising is famous for these.

Pretty much, there was a new attention paid to the toilets. Modern games like Fortnite use it both as an aesthetic piece as well as a functional thing to transport you. Your character can ride a porta potty as a tunnel across the map.

Others have you use the poop and pee in the world as a feature. Most famous for its modern depiction of world building and use of bathrooms in a game is Death Stranding. In it Death Stranding Bathrooms really capture much of the total of what video game bathrooms are and have become. They give you a break from the grueling world. They allow for some humor to sneak into the game. They ground the game reminding you that the character poops and pees like everyone else. But most importantly, you can actually use his bodily functions to craft necessary in game items. You can make a poo grenade which lures the bad guys in, you can destroy them using a blood grenade.

Video Games ABOUT Bathrooms

There is one more advancement in the bathroom and video game space, and that is also something that is more recent. Namely, bathrooms as the TOPIC or main feature of the game. This is essentially video games about bathrooms or poop. This doesn’t just have toilets or use toilets as a part of the game, it actually makes them the subject matter of the game. Some of these most famously include the co-op game We Gotta Go where you work together to help your friends get to the bathroom before you poop your pants.

Platformer Boogerman was an oldschool game where the hero dives in and out of toilets and uses his body functions to defeat enemies. The Toilet Chronicles are puzzle escape games where you have to figure out how to escape the randy bathroom. Muddy Heights has you dropping your poop out of an upper level apartment because you can’t get out and the plumbing doesn’t work. Pooplers have toddlers doing an area control with babies who have pooped themselves. It’s gross, but thematically there.

There’s a ton of them, and the one which kicked all this off to me was a game made by YouTuber Pewdiepie. He made a game called Poopdie where you play as a worm and you make poops to fight for you. It was a lot. What’s interesting is although there was a long history of games with poop and bathrooms as a theme or a centerpiece, his app was blocked from the app store. This is the key. Many of these poop themed games took off as indie games. Specifically, they aren’t tied to big corporations or publishing companies and so they are able to take some thematic risks and delve into the dirtier part of what makes us people.

People poop. While video games are games, as anyone who has done much gaming would tell you, they can be a lot more than that. They are stories and experiences that we can connect with, they can be pretty funny. Bathrooms are connected to video games in a huge way and have been for some time. And while we aren’t going there now, this is no doubt how we got Skibidi toilet.