Weird Wednesday: Skunny, part 1 – Back to the Forest

pcinvasion.com:

Weird Wednesday is a chance for us to dive into the stranger PC games and stories from the last few decades. For this week, we look at Skunny the squirrel, a mascot character created by game developer Copysoft.

Over the course of three years, Copysoft pumped out six Skunny games, each with its own brand of terribleness. Sexism, awkward innuendos, terrible controls, the games had every sin you could find in ’90s children’s video games. But today, I want to focus on the game that is arguably the least playable platformer ever released for PC.

That’s right. We’re looking at Skunny: Back to the Forest.

The screen that greets you when you run a Skunny game.

Everything about Skunny makes me uncomfortable. The first name alone feels slimy, but what did Copysoft provide for his last name?

Hardnut.

His name is Skunny Hardnut. And he loves — and I’m not making this up — children, animals, and “sticky nut puddings.”

Even the devs knew nobody wanted him.

Video game mascot characters were huge in the 1990s for good reason: games were often marketed for children, after all. Epic Games had Jazz Jackrabbit. Titus France had Titus the Fox. Accolade had Bubsy.

Honestly, I think Copysoft made a good choice with a squirrel. According to my five seconds of searching “squirrels in video games” on the internet and clicking on the first link, Copysoft made the first true squirrel mascot video game character. The company beat Sunsoft’s Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel by just a year. And despite the terrifying logo screen for Skunny games, his species is very easy to identify, and he’s arguably cute.

To be fair, Copysoft was located in Belgium. While the word “nut” became an innuendo in the English language by the 1920s, it’s highly unlikely the