FGC #684 Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy

So how about a game that is just… kind of not bad?

Before we get to the game, we have to talk about the giant. We could spend all day reviewing the concept of Ren & Stimpy as an unprecedented juggernaut not only for cartoons and “children’s programing”, but also prestige cable productions. Yes, I could go ahead and say something absurd like “Without The Ren & Stimpy Show, there would be no Breaking Bad.” But since this is a videogame blog and not an all-purpose media site (despite evidence to the contrary), we are going to just hit the bullet points of the Ren & Stimpy phenomenon. To that end:

• Ren & Stimpy premiered as one of the three brand-new Nicktoons on Sunday, August 11, 1991. Nickelodeon had not produced original, half-hour long animation before this point. The other two Nicktoons were Doug (the most low-energy cartoon ever conceived), and Rugrats (talking babies for babies).
• While Rugrats has ultimately proven to have more staying power, Ren & Stimpy was originally lauded as earthshattering. It was revolutionary for not only kids, but also any adults who happened to be watching (eventual) Snick. It had booger jokes. Bugs Bunny never picked his nose once in 51 years.
• Unfortunately, there were a myriad of behind-the-scenes issues, primarily involving Ren & Stimpy’s creator, John Kricfalusi. The result for viewers was an extremely lethargic release schedule. When you are eight years old, a single day lasts 80,000 hours. Without exaggeration, Ren & Stimpy Season 1 was 120 minutes of content (basically the length of one modern movie) released over five months. The number of reruns within that time was infinite.
• The John Kricfalusi productions totaled up to a mere two seasons and thirty episodes of variable length (most were 10 minute “half episodes”, a few [like the perennial Svën Höek] took up the full half hour), but that slow production schedule meant that the “authorial intent” seasons were current from Stimpy’s Big Day in August of 1991 until The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen premiering in May of 1993.
• And, while they were not as critically lauded, the John Kricfalusi-less episodes continued through to the finale (The Last Temptation) in October of 1996.
• So Ren & Stimpy started the concept of Nicktoons, and ended a meager three years before the premiere of SpongeBob SquarePants. For a non-Nickelodeon example of the era, Ren & Stimpy stopped one year shy of being contemporary with the Pokémon animated series.

To close out these historical facts, we will again recall that this is a videogame blog, so we are going to put it in terms that are more familiar to our controller-based audience. When The Ren & Stimpy show first premiered, Super Mario Bros. 3 had just hit the European market. When Ren & Stimpy ended, Super Mario 64 was the game of the year. That is a lot of time for a lot of games to be produced. Doubly so for the era when “producing a videogame” did not require a team of 10,000 people to animate a model’s nose hairs.

To the surprise of no one, Ren & Stimpy had their fair share of games. In an effort to make this article nothing but lists for days, here’s a quick rundown of all of ‘em:

• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Space Cadet Adventures was a Gameboy title where you only control Stimpy for a space adventure. I can confirm this was owned by a friend of mine, and, because I loved the show so much, I tried so hard to like it. I was unsuccessful.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots! was gorgeous on the Super Nintendo. It had absolutely nothing else going for it. There was a Gameboy version, and we are not going to think about that one.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Stimpy’s Invention was fundamentally the Genesis version of the Super Nintendo game. It was produced by an entirely different company, but was equally terrible. This one included a two-player mode that I attempted once with a friend who concluded I had “wasted” the chance to play a better game with them.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$! was a NES game released in 1993. At a time when you could be squeezing Battletoads & Double Dragon out of your aging system, you could also pick up something that is somehow less compelling than Family Dog. Run! Jump! Nothing else! There was an SNES port two years later, and it was both bad and ugly (and not this franchise’s good kind of ugly!)
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Fire Dogs was the 1994 SNES release, and if you still had the stomach/poor pattern recognition to play a Ren & Stimpy game, you would be rewarded with a game that was not only boring, but the dumb kind of boring that makes you feel the limitations of creativity on display. Ren & Stimpy had a different premise practically every episode! Why did someone think focusing exclusively on Fire Dogs and “firehouse gameplay” was a good idea? And was it the same guy responsible for that damn Earthworm Jim 2 level?
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Time Warp was the second 1994 SNES game. This one technically had more variety than Fire Dogs, but still did not innovate in any way over Veediots from the previous year. Could it be possible that THQ was just thoughtlessly pumping these things out?

But the one title not mentioned in the above list is our featured game of the day. Realtime Associates brought us 1993’s Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy for the Sega Game Gear. Cursed franchise on a cursed system, and, inexplicably, it is pretty alright.

Ren & Stimpy are on an adventure! They are questing for the Shaven Yak, and they have to traipse across five worlds comprised of a variable number of stages to find this (apparently?) valuable yak. You can control Ren or Stimpy, and they both have separate life meters so you can switch when someone needs a level off to heal (conceptually, at least, it’s not like they actually regain health while resting). Both of our stars control the same, though, with basic running, jumping, and projectile abilities. Those projectiles even get a little variety, too, as you can grab soap for high-flying bubbles, a remote control for electric zaps, or flying toast for gentle arcs. The “monsters” across the different levels generally look like they belong in this universe, and there are cute pause animations to remind you that Ren will scratch his own butt in public (the scandal!). Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy is a passable game that generally reminds you of an enjoyable animated series.

And, considering the sheer dreadfulness of its contemporaries, it is easily the greatest Ren & Stimpy game out there. It is at best mediocre, and that makes it the best.

And maybe there is a metaphor for Ren & Stimpy as a whole here. Maybe this is a reminder that the “great” John K seasons had their share of issues, and the “lesser” later seasons weren’t all that bad. Maybe, in the fullness of time, it is a monument to the fact that Ren & Stimpy has influenced a generation of animators, but it was the middling Rugrats that wound up with 70 seasons, a movie, and its own theme park rides. Maybe the mundane greatness of this Game Gear title is a memento of the possibility of the little-Sega-portable-that-couldn’t somehow beating out its contemporaries for the best version of a licensed game. Maybe Ren throwing toothbrushes is a metaphor for health care in America. Anything’s possible!

Or maybe Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy is just.. not bad. Maybe it is just a game you can play on your Game Gear that wouldn’t make you cry on Christmas morning. Maybe it is just a fun little game on a fun little system starring fun little guys. It’s just… there.

Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy is just there, and that’s all it ever needed to be. If you wanted something as groundbreaking as the parent series, if you expected more of a Ren & Stimpy game, you are, clearly, an eeeediot.

FGC #684 Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy

• System: Game Gear! In checking the archives, it appears this is the first Game Gear-exclusive that has ever been covered on the site. No, do not ruin this by claiming there was a Master System version, too.
• Number of players: You can switch between our two heroes, but only one at a time. The Game Gear had two-player capability in some capacity, right? I’m not certain it ever came up…
• What’s in a name: So Ren Hoëk gets his full name in the title, but not Stimpson J. Cat? I see how it is.
• Skip Ahead: A save battery would be unheard of on a cartridge such as this, but there is a password system in place so you can pick up where you left off in the adventure. And said passwords are relayed between levels by Ren & Stimpy being attacked by various maladies, so codes are “ZOWCHH”, “AURGHH”, or alike. Good to see Ren’s full vocabulary on display.
• Surprising Omission: There are no bonus stages between levels. This was the era of wall-to-wall bonus stages, so it is staggering they did not toss in a roulette wheel or balloon pop minigame or something.
• Did you know? The Shaven Yak and Yak Shaving Day both premiered as part of a short following the third episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Boy Who Cried Rat! That would be the episode where Ren disguises himself as a rat with Stimpy playing rat catcher to earn some cash. Relevant to this article: this is the same episode that inspired the first, terrible level of The Ren and Stimpy Show: Veediots! So, basically, the same ten minutes of cartoons inspired both the best and worst of its videogame adaptations.
• Would I play again: If it were 1994, and I was stuck on a desert island with only the Game Gear library and 8,000,000,000 batteries to my name, this would be one of the first games I would play. However, I now have the option of playing literally anything else, so I am probably going to hit those up first. Sorry, Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoëk & Stimpy, you might be the best Ren & Stimpy game, but you’re still not all that great.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen one last duo (but not one known for being animated this time): it’s ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron! Feel the funk my friends! Please look forward to it!