Dissection Maps – Old Saw
Old Saw
Dissection Maps
EP
Experimental
Louis Pelingen
November 30, 2024
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Video games... right? They just aren't cutting the mustard anymore. From DLC content crippling the sense of freedom and adventure they once had to a lack of real heroes to drive forward the interactive narrative that a good game should be built around. If only there was a good video game... a game that could be whatever you wanted it to be. A game like the classic old games. But a new game. A new classic old game... with a badass hero.
Enter Sexdick.
We spoke to Jada Paige who, for the last month and alongside a growing number of people online, has been helping preserve and remember this game and its music.
So, The Fantastic Adventures of Sexdick was a video game developed some time in the 90s for a game console called the Dango, and almost all the information about the game, the developers and even the console have seemingly been lost to time. To be honest, I don’t even know if Sexdick was ever released, but what I do know is that there’s an ever-growing community of people digging up any and all info we can find about the game today.
Growing up, my family and I would visit my older cousin’s place sometimes, and one day, while visiting when I was around six, I saw her playing the game with her boyfriend. She probably wouldn’t call herself a “gamer”, but she always liked going to flea markets and picking up old consoles and games, and Sexdick and the Dango were one of them. It looked interesting, they even let me play it for a bit–maybe 30 minutes–but I didn’t make it very far. I got some help from my cousin, but even she couldn’t make it that far in the game, it was very difficult, as I remembered.
Though for the record, I did ask to see if she still had her copy of Sexdick, or the Dango, and she said she unfortunately lost both of them during a move a long time ago.
From what I remember from back then, the game’s story takes place hundreds of years into the future, with Sexdick having this confrontation with the game’s central antagonist, Dicksex, who kidnaps your partner, making you go and rescue him. One of the main enemies you’d have to deal with were these robots that shot projectiles at you, and you’d have to time this force-field move to bounce the bullets back at them. If I’m being honest, it was kind of finicky and felt a little underutilised. The game was pretty barren, come to think of it, but that might have just been the version I played.
The music’s very fitting for the game’s tone! It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s also space-like and futuristic. The game itself is kind of dystopian, but in this very tongue-in-cheek way. And yeah, I don’t know who made the music; no one does, in fact. I’m hoping we find out who composed it soon, it’s super well done, and feels definitively Sexdick, in my opinion.
Oh, absolutely! The community’s support around this one game has grown overwhelmingly fast, and even if we never end up finding a playable build of the game, we’ve at least uncovered tons of interesting info about the game and the studios behind it. We’ve heard the rumors about it being from Iran, but we’re still doing research, so we can’t say just yet, but it is interesting to hear!
I’m not sure, honestly. Maybe it’s the character design, or lack of marketing, or being too ahead of its time? Could also be a regional issue, since I don’t really know where the Dango got released. There’s a whole lot of nostalgia for 90s mascots that time forgot, like your Gexes or Wild Woodys, and I think people really like the idea of companies making a little guy with attitude, even if it’s cheesy or dumb. As for Sexdick, I think it’s just a fun oddity to study the leading hero for a game you never heard of, as the star for a console you’ve never heard of, and see what worked and didn’t back then.
But most importantly to me, I want to do it because I remembered it fondly, and want to remember it more clearly.
From personal experiences, what makes lost media so interesting is just thinking about how much different things could’ve ended up today. When I was younger, I was really obsessed with video game prototypes, like the idea of entire versions of games like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time that were unfinished with stuff that didn’t make the final game was just so inherently cool! A lot of that stuff that wasn’t preserved is lost nowadays, and is just a fuzzy memory of what was, or could have been. And I think that’s why I really like Sexdick: it was a thing I remembered from when I was younger, brought back to life from the digital archaeology I and others are taking part in, just to piece together a memory from when I was younger, and things were simpler, when the only thing I had to wonder about was what the beefed up mohawk guy on my cousin’s TV was about.
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