Developed/Published by: Mylstar Electronics
Released: 05/1984
Completed: 29/01/2026
Completion: Rescued Curly’s bride, Cora. It’s just the same thing again for the other two brides!
As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this first excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.
I’ve never been a huge fan of The Three Stooges. I remember once watching what’s generally considered a peak Stooges short, A Plumbing We Will Go, absolutely stone-faced as Will Sloan, editor of the Journal of Stoogealogical Studies, and fellow Stooge fan Justin Decloux sat next to me, crying with laughter. But I never grew up with The Three Stooges–in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing them at all on TV in the UK, while I do have strong memories of Laurel and Hardy shorts playing on BBC2. When I finally encountered The Three Stooges I viewed them as, at best, poor imitators of the best of the slapstick form. Some cursory research shows that this reflects an Atlantic divide: bolstered, perhaps, by Stan Laurel being English, and that Laurel and Hardy toured British music halls post WWII, Laurel and Hardy remained popular in the UK, with their shorts staying in rotation, whereas in the US, The Three Stooges continued to grind away into the 70s, a hegemon led by cheap syndication and desperation.
But I have warmed to the Stooges. I’ve actually got Will and Justin to thank for that. I was invited to Justin’s bachelor party where we watched a 16mm of one of their later, recycled-footage filled shorts Husbands Beware, and the sight of these old men hurting each other… if you’ll forgive me for recycling my Letterboxd review: if the old adage goes “comedy is tragedy plus time” the sight of the Stooges,ravaged by time, stumbling through a cheap lazy remake was genuinely tragic. So very, very funny!
But it’s not purely an ironic appreciation; there’s a charm to their underdog tenacity; a tenacity that ensured their brand would endure into the video game age. It may seem surprising, but The Three Stooges license has been used several times for video games, starting with Mylstar Electronics’s arcade game The Three Stooges, and I don’t think only because it was cheap and accessible–I think because the people making them genuinely were fond of the Stooges.
Released in May 1984, The Three Stooges is a product–and victim of–the legendary video game crash of 1983. Mylstar Electronics’ route to developing a Three Stooges video game began in 1976, when Columbia Pictures–owner of the majority of The Three Stooges output–purchased Gottlieb, then purely a maker of pinball machines. (It’s interesting to note there is no record of an attempt to make a Three Stooges pinball machine after this purchase, though Gottlieb would make several pinball machines based on Columbia properties in the era, such as Charlie’s Angels and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.)
Gottlieb would have some success with arcade machines in the early 1980s with, most famously, Q*Bert, and in 1983–a year after the Coca-Cola company acquired Columbia–Gottlieb was renamed MylStar Electronics (somewhat controversially.) Mylstar Electronics would last mere months, releasing a handful of games before being shuttered in the continued aftermath of the crash. In fact, it’s believed that there were only a few hundred Three Stooges machines produced as a result, and due to poor reception, most of these machines were repurposed by arcade operators into other games, leaving–reputedly–as few as fifteen machines surviving today.
Mylstar’s The Three Stooges is poorly remembered as a result, with no retrospectives and even few contemporary sources. Electronic Games Hotline (July 29th, 1984) has the closest thing to an announcement, claiming that the game was released in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Three Stooges (signed, as they were, by Columbia in 1934.) The game’s most notable developers are Jeff Lee–who did the graphics for Q*Bert–and David Zabriskie, a long-time creator of audio for pinball machines, with programmer Sam Russo and designer Tom Malinowski with little else to their names.
The Three Stooges sets the tone for the Stooges in video games in some ways, most notably that it sticks to the original Columbia trio, Larry, Curly and Moe (sorry, Shemp fans.) But the most interesting thing it does is that it portrays itself as a new Stooges short: “The Three Stooges In Brides Is Brides.”
Although the game isn’t referred to as such anywhere except the title screen, it does imply that this machine did not just have the license slapped onto it–the developers had to have some interest in making the game offer a “true” Three Stooges experience, with a story (The Three Stooges must rescue their fiances from the evil Dr. “I.M.Acad M.D.”1) a genuine attempt to recreate the Stooges in pixel art from and lots of digitised speech.
Unfortunately, they made a very optimistic decision: the game is made for three simultaneous players, one playing each Stooge, and the game is absolutely terrible if you don’t play it that way.
Now, it’s entirely possible that it’s still terrible if you do play it that way–not that I expect to have much chance to find out–but the game is clearly fully designed around a group of three players working together. A single screen game, on each screen the players must attempt to destroy all the furniture to find three keys to open the door to the next screen, and they do this by picking up one of two hammers that spawn on screen. While this is going on, the police are attempting to capture The Three Stooges, while civilians get in the way–both of which can be halted by chucking pies at them, which sit around the screen on indestructible tables. But the civilians can also pick up and throw pies, complicating things further!
It’s obvious that The Three Stooges is meant to be a raucous, silly arcade game for three; the design intentionally only places two hammers on the stage so that one player is left out to either play defence (by throwing pies at enemies) or spoiler (by throwing pies at the other players so they can get the hammer.) Sadly, played solo, the game’s deficiencies are blaring. Enemies seem to move about completely randomly, and when the other two Stooges are computer controlled they become just as dangerous, making the game (I suspect) significantly harder as they cost you lives by walking into you with a hammer. The game also suffers rough, unforgiving collision detection where you’ll find yourself stuck on furniture or killed by things you thought you avoided.
The game also massively outstays its welcome. I only played up to the point where I was able to rescue the first fiancee, but it took forever, and every stage is exactly the same bar the one unique stage that has you throwing pies at singers, avoiding the notes they create (this is by far the most frustrating level, as the notes are almost impossible to avoid.) On each level you beeline to the hammer, destroy the furniture, grab the keys then leave. Without other players, there’s very little play (I do wonder, if the company had not been rapidly closed, a revision might have seen the hammer and furniture placement change more across levels.)
And the thing that should be the most charming about it–real Stooge voices–becomes insanely annoying about 30 seconds in. Every time a Stooge collides with anything, they’ll say the same stock phrase; prepare to hear “Oh a wise guy, huh?” more times in a single playthrough than the Stooges ever said during their entire Columbia Pictures run (no, really.)
The Three Stooges is an interesting curio, and one that I do believe was made with the best of intentions by people who were on some level fans. It’s certainly possible that it’s worth playing if you ever have two other Stooge fanatics to hand–I guess I should have given Sloan and Decloux a call–but I suspect that even the most hardcore group of Stoogeaholics would never have the patience to get that far.
Will I ever play it again? Sure, if I see a real machine and Will Sloan and Justin Decloux happen to be standing next to me.
Final Thought: The game features a few comedic interstitials (almost certainly inspired by Pac-Man) but the funniest thing in the entire game is that once all fiances are rescued, before the game loops, it announces “now it’s on to reruns.” Probably the most accurate representation of The Three Stooges in the entire game.
- I don’t grasp the joke here at all… Oh wait, “I am a cad.” Damn, everyone reading this in print is going to think I’m an idiot. ↩︎
