Retro Bytes

A LOOK BACK AT THE WORLD OF RETRO GAMING WITH CHRIS JACKSON

- Chris Jackson

We usually like to keep things pretty positive around these parts, but let’s get this out of the way right now what we’re looking at this month might be the worst game ever made. It’s definitely the worst game based on a popular TV show, at least. ‘Popular’? Go on, admit it. You quite liked it at the time. Looking back now though, you wonder how they managed to stretch it out to three whole series. Let’s see if we can live up to their example by getting two whole pages out of this horrendous turd of a TV tie-in.

For the uninitiated, Little Britain was a BBC sketch show starring Matt Lucas (possibly familiar to genre fans from his stint as Nardole in Doctor Who) and David Walliams (a sort of modern-day cut-price Kenneth Williams) that started life as a radio show in 2000 and eventually spawned a hugely successful TV show and ran for three series from 2003 to 2005. A further USA offshoot followed in 2008, and since then it’s all gone rather quiet apart from a handful of short appearances on charity telethons and, bizarrely, a TV advert for a bank...

The show featured a huge cast of overly exaggerated characters, mostly played by Lucas and Walliams themselves, with a supporting cast that included Buffy’s Anthony Head and narration by Doctor Who’s Tom Baker. Someone somewhere decided that these characters were a perfect fit for a game, and Little Britain: The Video Game was released for the PS2 and PC in February 2007. This was a strange bit of timing since the show had been off air for a while by this point, save for a poorly received 2006 Christmas special, and Little Britain was no longer the cause of great excitement that it might have been a few years earlier. But that was the least of the game’s problems.