Harvester

Harvester was a point and click adventure game about High Scores released in the late 1990's that was meant to troll the concerned American public following the ESRB scapegoat taking fire at the time. It was created to spark drama following the recent speculation in American culture that violence in video games causes violence irl. Instead, it gleaned a cult following by gamers who recognized its unseen potential as being the greatest game ever made to parody VG violence.

Gameplay

You play the role of Steve Mason in the fictional town of Harvest, whose sole job is to embark on a few GTAesque missions to gain entry into the Masonic lodge. (Get it? Haha? Mason, Masonic?) Anyway the people in Harvest range from borderline personality disorder to schizophrenia, and the ones who aren't clearly out of touch are meant to be even more creepy because no one else in town seems to notice their clear psychological deviation.

The game usually takes most people one week to complete blind because some of the traps are honestly unfair with no indication on how to solve them. You can probably expect to die quite a few times after stumbling across some NPC who would've drawn their weapon on you simply because you'd chosen the wrong answer to an impossible to answer question.

Harvester's Main Message

Incredibly awesome violence and gore aside, there's actually a message hidden within Harvester. The message is not so subtly divided equally between both endings, so either one you choose will leave you with the game's main Aesop.

GOOD ENDING: Roadrunner Cartoons

• "Don't you know that people who watch violence become violent themselves?"
• "That's bullshit Mom."

BAD ENDING: Getting Married (Lulz)

There's the alternate ending: where the game's message STILL can't be escaped: The Harvester scientists stand over your freshly dead corpse in an examination room discussing just how useless it is to use video games to create serial killers. Instead, they hint that genetics may play a bigger role in crime. This hypothesis, obvious though it is, has the backing of science. Not, in fact, based on fridge brilliance created by politicians and overly concerned parents looking for something to blame.

If you're a SJW without the humor to see the message then you would've probably played your way through to find an ending fork that would leave a bad taste in your mouth either way. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of us with common sense, then you'd see that if you truly believe that video games create criminals, then you're a fucking idiot.

High Score: The Game

Even Retsupurae thinks this game is fucked up

The game itself lives on as a Top 100 for the most nerdy of gamers. Though it was largely ignored at its release and failed as the potential drama bomb that the developers meant for it to be (they complained that the programming took quite some time), decades later we can only speculate at just how much trolling it could have done had the compile time not taken a few months longer than the anticipated release date.

Harvester uses hilariously obscene amounts of full motion video gore to test the very idea that video games cause individuals to become serial killers. Attacking innocent NPCs in-game with something as weak as a pitchfork will lead to the defeated NPC to instantly explode to a gory shred of intestines, blood, piss, shit, semen and other vitreous entrails. Despite this cartoonish bending of anatomy, Harvester continues to keep its tongue deep in its cheek without directly revealing the joke by hinting that the ridiculous amount of displayed violence in games isn't anything like the violence in the real world because to a greater extent, the ways that people typically die in violent games aren't ever really comparable to the way that people die IRL. I mean, jesus fuck people, how many times has your mom's pancreas instantly burst from her chest after a single baseball bat swing to the head?

If this wasn't obvious enough for you because you're a concerned parent, then later on in the game at the pre-ending ultimatum, it's directly stated in the dialogue that video game monsters don't fucking exist... yet somehow after battling through a tower of them, you're somehow expected to instantly become a serial killer from fighting them.. amirite?

Harvester is part of a series on Gaming Visit the Gaming Portal for complete coverage.

Harvester is part of a series on Trolls Visit the Trolls Portal for complete coverage.