Mad TV
1991
- role-playing (rpg)
- simulator
- strategy
- comedy
- business
- sandbox
- single player
The story
Mad TV is a television station management simulation computer game produced in 1991 by Rainbow Arts. It is loosely based on Mad Magazine, and the game's introduction animation features the magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, smiling on a television. The game puts the player in the role of a new program director for a TV station. The player is in charge of selecting programming and earning advertising for the station, while simultaneously trying to marry Betty, an attractive woman working in the building.
What it’s like
Chunky early-nineties pixel art on a flat DOS and Amiga palette, with bright primary colours, cramped office interiors and a scatter of hand-drawn comic-strip cutscenes whose caricatured faces lean into the joke. The sound is a looping tracker tune and bleeping menu chirps, the kind of scrappy electronic music that belongs to a floppy disk. The vibe is goofy, lightly satirical and nostalgic, the feeling of a Saturday spent poking at a box that still smells of warm plastic. Days move in unhurried steps: you pick schedules, weigh ad deals and reshuffle programming in menus, with long pauses between decisions and small absurd payoffs that land more like a wink than a punchline. The emotional register stays easy and playful, with a running romantic side plot that stays cartoonish and chaste. Intensity is very low: no violence, no gore, no real peril, only mild innuendo and jokes about commercial excess. It suits retro collectors, fans of old management sims, and anyone wanting a silly, low-stakes game to dip into for half an hour at a time.
More games like Mad TV
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