Remembering the Outrage Over 'Custer's Revenge'

LOS ANGELES—Reason magazine has an interesting article in its June issue. Titled "A Short History of Game Panics," writer Jesse Walker explores the Good Ol' Days when masses of people got upset by, for instance, the proliferation of pinball parlors in New York City—until, of course, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had the cops seize all of the city's pinball machines in 1942, then invited the news media to film the cops dismantling the machines with sledgehammers. According to Walker, pinball arcades remained verboten until 1976 (though we seem to recall that some were around even in the mid-'60s when a younger we were trolling Times Square looking for entertainment that wasn't X-rated). But of more interest to adult entertainment fans (and pros) is likely to be the section on Custer's Revenge, a cheesy 8-bit video game for the Atari 2600 system that featured a naked cowboy (presumably Gen. George Armstrong Custer) with an erection whose mission, while evading volleys of arrows, was to locate as many female American Indians as he could find, tie them to a stake or cactus, and rape them. What might surprise adult entertainment fans, though, is the appearance on the game's packaging of the logo for Swedish Erotica, which most remember as a series of film loops, later collected and released as videotapes by what was then Caballero Control Corporation, beginning in 1978 and starring many of the popular adult performers of the time. However, the box for Custer's Revenge indicates it was released by a company named "Mystique"! "'Mystique' was just a name we came up with for this little deal we did on how these things were going to be licensed and sold," explained Al Bloom, then co-owner of Caballero Control Corporation. "A guy that lived in Hong Kong, an American—I don't remember his name—he and his wife were producing the Atari games in China, and he wanted to use the name 'Swedish Erotica' on his adult games. So he approached Al Tapper, the owner of CPLC, a distribution company back then, and Al put this whole deal together. It was a threeway deal: the guy from China, Tapper and Caballero all went in together on this venture, and we licensed them and agreed to sell them in the States. 'Swedish Erotica' is our trademark, and we even licensed it to Susan Colvin for her company that she had before starting CalExotic. We'd throw it on some of the more bookstore-type items, because those guys all know 'Swedish Erotica,' so we'd throw the logo on there for two reasons: For the familiarity, and to keep the trademark alive. "When we first released the games—there were two of them besides Custer: Bachelor Party and Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em—there was a whole thing on the news media. Some Native American group went crazy when they saw Custer's Revenge. We had news media all over our place down on Alabama Avenue, and we were all, 'No comment! No comment!' That kind of stuff. It kind of blew over really quickly, and the damned games didn't sell anyway and we ended up with a whole warehouse full of the things, and Caballero never got paid, so we sued the guy in Hong Kong, and he turned around and sued us for a bunch of reasons, but they were a stiff; the games were terrible. So we had that publicity, and we thought, 'Boy,  these things are gonna take off,' but they didn't, and we ended up with a warehouse full of these things." In the end, because the Chinese courts were even less friendly to American interests than they are today, Caballero lost its suit and had to pay an undisclosed amount to the game creators. "So we ended up paying for them anyway, and sending all those games to the dump," Bloom recalled. "But I still have a set of those fucking games, still sealed in the box. I have one of each." Be that as it may, Reason is having a "Game Night" tonight, beginning at 6:30 at their Los Angeles headquarters, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230. More information can be found here.