Jesus Christ, Dan: I grant you that Dig Dug is amazing. But you don’t have to shit all over Joust to make your point.
Joust was—and is, if you click through on the above link—a fine video game. The flying ostriches! The weird physics! The relentless bouncing and aimless flapping! If Dig Dug is a metaphor for homosexuality, Joust is like a really good round of masturbation. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

he just hates joust cuz he’s too fat for the bird.
Joust great.
Joust 2 kinda blah (way too crowded).
two-person Balloon Fight yay.
Joust rules. Dig Dug rules. End of.
I miss the feathers, for some reason.
You guys are really pushing this to an all new weird level. Why use these things to be metaphors? I know the fat idiots that were programming the games weren’t thinking about it. Everyone knows that us game programmers hate life and would never be that creative on purpose.
@5
I’m saying the Joust and Dig Dug programmers weren’t fat. It was the early 80’s, and they were most likely Japanese.
I don’t think there is any time period I am more nostalgic for than the era of the Arcade. Time for another round of Space Paranoids!
I’m playing joust with one hand and jerking off with the other right now!
Further proof of Joust’s awesomeness: it’s controls only used one button – “Flap.”
I am punching myself in the balls for using an unnecessary apostrophe in my earlier post @9.
@6: I’m saying the Joust and Dig Dug programmers weren’t fat. It was the early 80’s, and they were most likely Japanese.
gee, nice way to insult the fine americans working at Williams. the original classic williams games were designed by thin guys in the u.s. – some examples:
Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis (Defender, Robotron)
John Newcomer (Joust)
Tim Murphy (Bubbles)
etc.
brush up on your video game history, folks. i may even give you an activision patch for doing so.
Back in the day, there were two shapes of software guys (they were nearly all guys). They sat around at their desk all day and forgot to eat, so they were skinny, or they sat around at their desk all day and remembered to eat, so they were fat…
Joust was stoopid. Defender was awesome.
Paul, You are right, the physics really make the game.