Urban Yeti!

“Ahh, the Smell. The Unmistakable Musk of Another Yeti.”

“YETI MOBILE ALERT!!
There is an unknown yeti touching me. Dispatch the saucer immediately.”

Extraterrestrial art by @EmilyHammersley.

What do you get when you combine a mock cult, Dolemite, surfboarding, and multiple failed distribution deals? Why, a Game Boy Advance cartridge about cryptids, obviously!

As illogical as that concoction may sound – and for as disconnected as those elements might all feel from one another – it’s unlikely that any other recipe could have resulted in 2002’s release of Urban Yeti! Since hailed as one of the strangest entries in the GBA library, it is a game which delights in jumping between genres and generally defying standard categorization. Though I’ve often seen it described as similar to the classic style of Grand Theft Auto titles (1, 2, and so forth), this comparison falls apart past the shared top-down perspective and urban environments. It’s perhaps more accurately categorized as a minigame collection, tied together by treks across loosely-contained hub worlds? But these definitions can’t begin to account for what must’ve originally been even wilder design ambitions, which the game’s creators were surely forced to rein in and compromise.

To tell the story behind Urban Yeti!‘s development is to recount the convoluted history of its developer, Cave+Barn Studios: Born from the ashes of a former video production company turned software house [and record label], and doomed to flame out in comparative fashion. At the core of both short-lived labels was a mostly consistent collective of creatives; who seemed to reject the structure of the conventional video game, in favor of experimental multimedia and unfocused genre mash-ups. Urban Yeti! is perhaps the pinnacle of this disjointed design philosophy — even if only by default, considering the studios’ unfortunate penchant for cancelled releases. For as oddball as this yeti adventure may well be, you’ll soon find it downright tame compared to some of its creators’ other canned game concepts. Frankly, it’s probably something of a miracle that Urban Yeti! managed to see the light of day itself.

With all this in mind, this article will attempt three objectives: To document the history of Cave+Barn Studios (and their former incarnation RUNANDGUN!), to review the contents of the Urban Yeti! cartridge, and to determine once and for all if ‘Bigfoot’ is real or not. And while that last part sounds like it might be tough, let me assure you: It may well turn out to be the easiest task of the three, after all is said and done. So goes it here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame: Where it’s not just enough to describe why a game is considered “bad”; and where we must do excruciating research into the histories of parody religions, failed FMV games, noise rock records, ill-advised distribution deals, and so much more surrounding context.

“Now. Get ready to Yeti!”

“When It Comes Down to Video Games Baby, I’m the Best!”

J. R. “Bob” Dobbs — the figurehead of the Church of the SubGenius.

In the immortal words of Big Baby Jesus: “Let’s take it back to ‘79.”[♫] For it was in this year that a pamphlet began to circulate in Dallas, Texas, extolling the virtues of the newly-established ‘Church of the SubGenius.’ According to their gospel, near every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard in your life is true, and we should all aspire to quit our jobs and become full-time slackers — the true height of enlightenment. Oh, and did you know that all true believers of the faith (‘SubGenii’) are descended from yetis? If all that should sound somehow ridiculous to you – oh ye of little faith – perhaps consider some of the Church’s celebrity members: Where DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh serves as an acting Reverend, and among whom Paul “Pee-wee” Reubens and the Talking Heads’ David Byrne are card-carrying members. If you can’t put your trust in celebrity endorsements, what can you trust in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours?

To be clear – and before you go writing these followers off as kooks cut from the same cloth as Scientologists – we’re not actually describing a genuinely-practiced / legitimately observed religion here: The Church of the SubGenius is consistently categorized as a “parody religion,” in much the same vein as ‘Pastafarianism’ or ‘Zone Theory.’ Perhaps more accurately though, I’d describe it as a counterculture collective — a group of avant-garde creatives who decided on the SubGenius branding as their shared call sign. But perhaps what made the Church so unique – what they were able to harness more effectively than their contemporaries – was their embracing of the early Internet to spread their mock testament, and to digitally connect members across the globe. In this way, the Church of the SubGenius has continued to persist and expand into the modern day.

Likely the height of their recognition was reached as result of “commercials” aired on MTV in 1991: A boon which came about as result of the network approaching Church founder Reverend Ivan Stang, and pitching to him the opportunity to produce an interstitial segment that the channel could air between music videos. The only criteria was that the spot had to include the MTV logo in some form or fashion. With effectively free rein to do whatever the hell else they pleased, the Church produced a sixty-second promotional spot to air country-wide — consisting of the most wild rhetoric and visuals they could muster on a meager $15K budget. The success of this campaign would not only expand the Church’s presence, but also embolden the organization to pursue further video production endeavors. And so for their next major project, they would plan to step away from the world of television, and focus on a newly-emerging medium: Full-motion video CD-ROM games.

“Church of the SubGenius” MTV interstitial. Directed by Rev. Ivan Stang.

Enter the production company RUNANDGUN! — alternatively stylized as anything between ‘Run and Gun’ and ‘RunnyFun!,’ depending on the project. Established in 1993, the Chicago studio was founded by three graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design: Grady Sain, Tony “Gold” Grossman, and Sandra Desmond. Setting up shop in what the Chicago Tribune described as “a huge, crumbling loft a block south of the bombed out Lexington Hotel on a stretch of Michigan Avenue that doesn’t get mentioned in the tourist guides,” they established themselves by specializing in computer animation work for ad agencies and television networks; the likes of which included MTV, Nickelodeon, and Warner Brothers — as well as the odd music video, such as this one for the Foo Fighters. Before long, though, they found themselves adapting to and incorporating a new venture in their offerings: Developing computer games.

While the bulk of RUNANDGUN!’s developed software is largely not documented or preserved, there’s at least enough clues floating around to establish something like a loose timeline for their output. Seemingly their earliest contributions were to another Chicago company VREAM Inc., whose focus lay in early virtual reality. To that end, RUNANDGUN! were tasked with designing “demo worlds” and other tech showcases that made the rounds at VR-centric conferences. They quickly took advantage of this newfound skillset in order to produce virtual experiences (I hesitate to use the word “games” here) for another VR company – VictorMaxx Technologies – who would pack in copies of RUNANDGUN!’s [public] debut title Bung-Ho!: Virtual Bungie Jump with units of their VictorMaxx Stuntmaster VR headsets. Try as I might, I could not for the life of me find so much as a single screenshot or still frame of this supposed game in action. But given that reviews of the Stuntmaster have historically been pretty unkind, let’s go ahead and assume that neither company’s offerings were quite ready for prime time.

By this point though (circa 1994), RUNANDGUN! actually seemed to be doing surprisingly well for themselves — well enough to expand their operations, bringing on new employees and dabbling in yet more new enterprises. One of those new hires was a man by the name of Randy Wilson, who brought with him his talents as a musician and part-time designer. This ultimately led RUNANDGUN! to expand into music production, where they would go on to provide mixing and recording space for some independent artists in the state of Illinois. By this point, their office space was quick becoming a hang-out spot for all manner of Chicago creatives; and their reputation as pioneers in “cyberspace” was beginning to net them valuable, flattering mainstream media coverage.

“It’s a combination computer animation studio, art gallery and hippie commune. The place is wired to the ceiling with screens, monitors and beeping and flashing boxes. About a dozen people are wandering about wearing Digi-Tech telephone headsets and looking aggressively cool. The main room is an obstacle course of abandoned film props, castoff furniture and oddball artifacts. There’s a full kitchen and several sleeping areas. All three principals have lived there at different times, and it’s not unusual for people to crash for a night or a week when deadlines are looming.” ~ Robert Sharoff, Chicago Tribune

It’s presumed that at some point during this pre-1995 period, the RUNANDGUN! team had made contact with the Church of the SubGenius — if the crew hadn’t already considered themselves card-carrying Genii prior to founding their studio, that is. In either case, it’s at this point that RUNANDGUN! would begin work on a new game intended for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer (as well as for PCs of the era): A title intending to leverage full-motion video, with a seemingly lavish budget allocated to filming scenes with a cast of recognizable actors, celebrities, and a number of Church of the SubGenius cameos. In fact, no less than the Rev. Ivan Stang himself was set to feature in a prominent role, and would advertise his involvement with the proclaimed “group of SubGenius filmakers [sic]” in a blog post on the SubGenius website:

“I was being an actor in a CD-ROM interactive video game called DUELIN’ FIREMEN being produced for the 3D0 system by a group of SubGenius filmakers and computer animator/vr programmers called Runandgun. It’s a combination of multiple-choice filmed scenarios and v.r. game situations, all taking place in Chicago while the entire city burns to the ground. I have played two roles in it so far — first an evil Man-In-Black and second, Cagliostro the evil 1,000-year old Mason whose spells started the fire. […] The real stars are the animation, fx and sets. It’s like a LIVING-SURREAL CARTOON from the mind of a CRAZY MAN (in this case, director Grady Sein). The Runandgun crew are like this commune of crazed hillbilly technoids. I had the time of my life. The game won’t be finished till July ’95, though.” ~ Rev. Ivan Stang

While Duelin’ Firemen! would not be the first video game to see some involvement by / recognition of the Church of the SubGenius (that credit would seem to go to 1991’s Floor 13 on DOS and Amiga), it certainly marked a more significant collaboration between developer and organization — seeming to effectively serve as an officially-unofficial “Church of the SubGenius video game.” To rattle off just a handful of the known Genii slated to feature in the game [aside from Stang]; there was Mark Mothersbaugh, Timothy Leary (yes, that Timothy Leary), Terence McKenna, and no less than King Buzzo himself — described by the RUNANDGUN! team as the only other person whose creative output they admired (and “no one else”). In addition, there were several other celebrity roles locked down; including the incomparable Rudy Ray Moore in a starring role, a brief cameo by Tony Hawk (evidently filmed in just 5 minutes time), musicians Steve Albini and David Yow, and Japanese noise rock legends Boredoms. On top of that, members and friends of RUNANDGUN! themselves would fill out much of the rest of the cast, all directed by one Grady Sain.

The premise for the game centers around a second Great Chicago Fire occurring in the future year 1995, after a space shuttle and Air Force One simultaneously collide into the Sears Tower. While it would’ve been revealed later in the game that the disaster was coordinated by Ivan Stang’s “Cagliostro the Renegade Freemason” character – you actually wouldn’t spend too much of your time in the business of putting out the city-wide fire. Rather, in your role as a supposed fireman (selecting either John Los’ ‘Chief Cap’m’ or Rudy’s ‘Chief Crispy’), your only goal is to entertain citizens trapped inside a small handful of safehouses. On why you’re apparently content to let the fires just keep on burning, Grady explains: “The entire city is on fire and there’s nothing that can be done. The people in the safehouses could die or they could not; you’re not really concerned with that. You’re a duelin’ fireman, you’re a lunatic, everyone’s insane. The people who are gathered in these places aren’t huddled around, crying and scared; they’re partying. It’s Armageddon and everyone is getting blasted and freaking out.”

What is evidently more important than attempting to save lives is a premise involving “choreographing your smoke jumpers in psycho-billy bluegrass numbers to entertain the masses, leading up to a fiery climax at the Chicago Board of Trade, where representatives of Japan’s biggest record label (presumably portrayed by the members of Boredoms — Cass) are prepared to sign the band that scores the most points with the crowd.” In this way, the game was intended to serve as a titular “duel” between the “firemen” — where selecting one of the two characters puts you in competition with the other, in what also served as a way of incorporating a two-player game mode. The game itself would play out as “about sixty percent interactive video and about forty percent standard video game sequences” — effectively translating into a choose-your-own adventure style delivery system for the FMV bits, interspersed with minigames to gain score before the game’s conclusion and final point tally.

“If lovin’ this heat is wrong, I don’t
wanna be right.”

Promotional image for Duelin’ Firemen!

Where a decent chunk of the recorded video footage is available (more on that later), far less is known about the minigame portions — to where our best glimpses come in exceedingly short proof-of-concept clips seen in prototype footage and mock-ups. You can at least gather that there were meant to be 3D driving segments as you traveled by firetruck between the game’s safehouses, rhythm game sections where you dance to the beat of the soundtrack, what looks like a possible rail-shooter segment (?), and potentially a bit of beat ‘em up gameplay by way of an ‘Action Captain’ minigame. But ultimately, these gameplay sections all feel like an after-thought: The clear focus was on producing the live-action segments, and on the game’s irreverent comedy stylings. But with the game’s originally planned Fall 1994 July 1995 release date, this would’ve placed Duelin’ Firemen! toward the bitter end of the “interactive movie” genre trend — the point at which exorbitant production costs and comparatively small returns saw most publishers moving away from the format. Perhaps that explains what happened next.

While the game was promoted at 3DO’s booth space at the Summer 1994 Consumer Electronics Show (conveniently hosted in Chicago, Illinois), and where RUNANDGUN! had already pressed and released a promotional vinyl featuring the game’s theme song “Epic Epileptic Apocalypse” [performed by Randy Wilson and David Yow];[♫] that July 1995 release date came and went, and with it went any further updates on the project over much of the next several years. Where one might look to blame the imminent discontinuation of the 3DO / dwindling support from The 3DO Company as a potential cause for this: There’s the fact that RUNANDGUN! were set to publish and fund the project with their own money, as well as the planned releases for Windows and Mac still being a viable option past the 3DO’s discontinuation. It seems as though all the live-action footage was already in the can come the end of 1994, too — so it didn’t seem to be a matter of too many missing scenes holding up production. For lack of any definitive explanation as to why the game ultimately never materialized, all we can do is hypothesize.

My best guess? I figure that the gameplay elements were probably shaping up to be a hot mess: As in broken, ill-conceived, or perhaps just too ambitious — untenable to an extent that RUNANDGUN! couldn’t foresee a way to assemble it all into anything cohesive. When the very premise of your game is as scattershot and random as the nature of Duelin’ Firemen!’s was designed to be, it’s only natural that the actual gameplay elements fell into a similar trapping, and intended to somehow meld a number of various different genres together into one. Stapling together software like that is particularly hard work, especially when your studio doesn’t have any real experience in the games industry. Maybe the team saw how much longer they would need to fully assemble the gameplay portions, figured out how much money it would cost to finish their work, and ultimately decided to ditch it while they still had cash in their coffers? Whatever the reason may be, Duelin’ Firemen! would never release as a playable product, and RUNANDGUN! would promptly re-focus on other projects.

Photo taken of Duelin’ Firemen! display at 3DO’s Summer CES ’94 booth space.
Photo credit of David Birdwell.

To provide a conclusion for this Duelin’ Firemen! tangent — even as it doesn’t necessarily directly relate to RUNANDGUN! past 1995: Grady Sain continued to sit on the live-action footage, until finally making something of it in the year 2000. It’s at this point that he registered DuelinFiremen.com (long-since defunct), edited together a 7-minute rough cut of the game’s FMV footage (jokingly referred to as the “Sundance Trailer,” despite never screening there), and posted it online for folk to finally see for themselves. Before long, the video was making its way onto various content aggregators of the day, and generating buzz as the oddity that it was. It’s presumed that Grady at this point intended to either release the rest of the footage as a sort of short film, or to otherwise revive the game in some capacity. Unfortunately, in September 2001, a certain incident on US soil involving two planes crashing into buildings occurred; and suddenly, the game’s own premise of the Sears Tower being similarly destroyed was no longer a laughing matter. According to a MetaFilter user ‘eatyourlunch’ who had contact with Grady: “Planes+WTC and Space Shuttle+Sears Tower were too close for their comfort so, barring a rewrite and reshoot, this is all we’re ever going to see of Duelin’ Firemen.”

Returning back to the mid-90s: RUNANDGUN! may have dropped their most potentially noteworthy project in development, but they were far from out of the games industry. While Grady would contribute to and appear in 1996’s Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol – marking something like another SubGenius-endorsed video game – the rest of the company were still handling some amount of broadcast work and web-based projects, in addition to developing their next intended video game releases. At some point, the company “slowly moved towards just videogame development” (as per the company’s history on their website), with focus on one title in particular: Wild Ride! for Windows computers. Initially released in 1996, the game was marketed as “the only 3D surfing game for the PC,” and tasks players with catching waves and scoring points across rounds of a surfing contest. A navigable 3D beachfront allows you to select your character, buy gear, and access other options before entering the surfing gameplay. From there, it’s all about maintaining balance, nailing tricks, and doing your best not to wipe out.

Despite now owning a proper copy of Wild Ride! on CD-ROM for myself, it’s here where I must admit to not being able to get the game to actually run — at least not in anything resembling a functional fashion. Where the front cover advertises the game as requiring Windows 95 or 98 specifically, they clearly mean it: It’s no small challenge to get the game to so much as launch on my Windows XP machine, let alone play it at its intended speed. One of those quirks of early DirectX, I reckon. In any event: RUNANDGUN! first distributed the game through a shareware model, listing a ‘Limited Version’ on their website for download with a minimum of available features. From there, they released a further ‘Limited Edition Version’ and sold it through their own website, offering an online order form to prospective consumers. What followed were a small handful of moderately-positive reviews, only one of which I could actually find properly archived. In it, Joe McCloud for PCGames.com commended the game for “scrapping good looks for a really basic (but solid) game,” and as providing a “nice simple game that can be played to relax after a day of deathmatches and keyboard twitching.”

At some point in the first quarter of 1999 – after a handful of patches released for Wild Ride!, and seemingly nothing else in the way of other games released by RUNANDGUN! – the company ran into a stroke of seemingly good luck: Publisher Interplay would pick up the game for distribution, and begin to sell it through proper retail channels as part of their ‘Value Products Division!’ This meant that RUNANDGUN! would no longer be selling the game through their website, as well as having to make a handful of changes in order to provide a “politically correct version” to their new publishing partner. What those changes may have entailed, I have no idea; but what it meant for RUNANDGUN! was a presumed big break into the bigger games industry, with the potential for larger publishers to help fund and handle distribution for their upcoming titles. And so, the company quickly set to work on their next title: Wicked Surfing for the Game Boy Color, to also be published by Interplay. Finally, RUNANDGUN! were poised to break into the games mainstream, where their talents and off-beat humor would finally be appreciated by the gaming public at large.

Promotional screenshots for Wicked Surfing!
(Interplay / RUNANDGUN!, unreleased)

… And then Interplay suddenly stopped paying their bills, and production on Wicked Surfing was abruptly cancelled. Oh boy, where to start with this troubling development? So, Interplay in 1998 was already struggling financially, between bankruptcy court and a failed entry into the stock market. By 1999, their only way forward was an initial $25 million dollar line of investment in the company by Titus Software, as well as a 49.9% ownership stake in Virgin Interactive allowing for expanded games distribution for both companies. Soon though, Titus’ stakes in Interplay would grow into majority control, and ultimately to a restructuring of their business which saw Interplay’s functions as a game publisher reduced. At some point during all this corporate re-shuffling, Interplay was no longer equipped to pay RUNANDGUN! for their services, and Wicked Surfing was eventually written off as a corporate casualty.

At a different point in the year 2000, RUNANDGUN! had managed to release at least one game: Animorphs on the Game Boy Color, as published by Ubi Soft. Where they had assumed the more kid-friendly pseudonym ‘Runnyfun’ in developing this tie-in to the Scholastic franchise, the team consisted of many of the familiar credits: Art by Grady Sain, music by Randy Wilson, and production by Tony Grossman. Additional names appearing as part of the team included programmers Christopher Locke and Jeremy Evers, who would stay on with the crew in the next several years to come. As for the game itself, it’s a fairly transparent Pokémon clone, where the gimmick is the ability to morph into the animals you encounter over the course of the game [by means of collecting their DNA]. Ultimately, it wasn’t a particularly well-received title; with IGN’s Marc Nix noting [in a 3.0 / 10.0 review] that “It’s pa[r]t and boring, but also silly in difficulty at times since there’s little guiding your path and no real clue to the strategy.”

By now, RUNANDGUN! had endured just about as much as it could bear. With the changing of the year into 2001, their once-spectacularly tacky website changed to a stark “BACK SOON” message on a black background, indicating that the company was effectively closing up shop. Between their name being attached to a string of failed projects and likely tied up in Interplay’s restructuring, it’s no wonder that the players involved decided to ditch the branding, and move on to new ventures. But they had no intention of splitting the team up just yet (save for the exit of Sandra), or quitting the video game business. Instead, founding a new studio would be their next move — having already established ‘Cave+Barn Studios’ at some point in 2000, and beginning anew with a relatively clean slate. One of the first fruits borne of this new endeavor was a surrealist animation piece by the name of ‘Banjo Gyro!’, which would make the rounds online in a similar fashion to the Duelin’ Firemen! trailer. Directed by Grady Sain, and “mastered at CaveBarn Studios”; the special thanks would additionally include a credit for ‘RUNANDGUN! Inc.,’ indicating that the project likely began as part of that previous studio.

Animorphs for Game Boy Color (Ubi Soft / RUNANDGUN!, 2000)

From here, the newly-established company returned to their previous work in game development. Come 2001, they debuted with their first title for the new Game Boy Advance: A tie-in cartridge to the direct-to-video movie Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring, published by NewKidCo. The Magic Ring plays out as a sort of beat ‘em up title, where you alternate control over Tom and Jerry and fend off swarms of malicious animals after you and the titular ring — primarily through the use of impromptu weapons scattered across the stages, as a sort of homage to the household slapstick of the cartoon series. While it’s entirely playable and at least a novel take on a game aimed primarily at a younger audience, the game would receive the expected “mostly middling” review treatment; with GameZone’s Michael Lafferty determining (alongside a 7.8 / 10 score) that “This game is certainly not the best ever made, but it is delightful, and gives old friends another opportunity to shine.” Unfortunately, the Cave+Barn gang had only gone and hitched themselves to the wrong horse again in NewKidCo, who encountered their own money troubles in 2002 (as previously detailed in our ‘Other E.T. Games Round-up’ article) and just as quickly ditched Cave+Barn.

But Cave+Barn weren’t done with the GBA just yet. Earlier in 2001, the studio had secured a further publishing deal with the enigmatic Telegames, Inc.: A company with a noted history of supporting discontinued consoles well past their end-of-life dates. In example, they took up re-publishing a number of Atari 2600 and ColecoVision games well into the 80s, past the point of both consoles’ falling out of broader circulation. They further took up publishing on the Atari Jaguar past 1996, and all the way well into 1998 — two years after the console had been discontinued. By 2001, their attention had shifted to the still very-much contemporary GBA, and in releasing conversions of older computer titles; including 1998’s BackTrack (originally released for Windows), and 1993’s Soccer Kid (originally on Amiga). But the company wasn’t necessarily against publishing new titles either, and soon reached an agreement with Cave+Barn to publish their upcoming title for Nintendo’s then-current handheld.

The first whisperings of Urban Yeti! were publicly uttered on September 10th, 2001. IGN were the first to announce the game’s planned 2002 release, while oddly referring to Cave+Barn as a “UK developer” attached to it. What’s most interesting about this early reveal, however, is the inclusion of a 48-second “video of Urban Yeti in action” — an impossibly hi-fidelity vision for the overworld portions of the gameplay, complete with 3D character models and full lighting / shadow effects. While it would’ve been fairly obvious to most that the GBA wasn’t capable of these levels of graphics processing, and that the footage was more meant to serve as a proof-of-concept; the brief sampling of prospective open world navigation is surprisingly representative of the final product, with regards to how it would ultimately task players and allow them to interact with the environment. The reincarnation of RUNANDGUN! seemed to have learned their lesson about gameplay not being an afterthought.

Unfortunately, some habits die harder than others. After promising an April release date in January, that month would come and go with no further yeti sightings. Instead, the end of April came with the last-minute promise of a “mid to late July” launch, which similarly passed and failed to provide compelling proof for the existence of digital sasquatches. For anyone privy to the team’s previous history, this may well have seemed like cause for proper concern — a sign that Urban Yeti! might well never see the light of day. For what it was worth, the screenshots and further video clips that had been provided in April all seemed to indicate a version of the game close to completion: The assets on display would match those in the final product, the four advertised minigames were seemingly already implemented, and IGN’s claims were that they had been provided “the near-final version of the game” at the time of their posting. So, what was holding Urban Yeti! up now?

Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring for Game Boy Advance
(NewKidCo / Cave+Barn Studios, 2001)

Well, as it turns out, there was nothing holding it up: The game did, in fact, release at some unspecified point in August — having been delayed just one more month. As proof of its release, Nintendo Power would have their review for Urban Yeti! ready for their August 2002 issue (the score / contents of which I’ll be reserving for later). But after that, it doesn’t look like the game was ever mentioned or advertised within those pages again, as far as I can tell? Which indicates the larger problem here: Telegames seemed to have absolutely botched their end of the bargain in actually bothering to promote the game’s release, when it finally came time for it. Not only that, but it seemed to lack any tangible presence on retail shelves either, likely owing to a bare minimum production run of cartridges pressed. This further meant that most review outlets didn’t get hands on copies in time to coincide with the game’s release — where most would be made to wait until September to render verdict, or otherwise delay their reviews well into the next year.

Which leaves us with one last bit of business to attend to before we finally get to reviewing the game for ourselves: Cave+Barn weren’t content to let their game languish in obscurity. After all the work that had gone into it – after all the trials and tribulations of the past years – an outcome where Urban Yeti! would go unnoticed by the public at large was unacceptable to them. If they couldn’t count on their publisher to get their game stocked on shelves in sufficient supply, they’d just have to take their game directly to the people. And so – in or around October 2002 – Cave+Barn returned to their video production roots once more, in order to film a suitably surreal television commercial fit for their latest software offering — primarily targeting West coast viewers of FOX, UPN and WB affiliates. But instead of sending consumers running to their local game shops, they took a different approach to distribution: The option to order the game directly from them, by means of toll-free telephone number (1-877-GET-YETI) or through the www.UrbanYeti.com website.

Cave+Barn had truly returned to their roots for this one: The commercial itself revels in the same sort of over-the-top oddball charm as Duelin’ Firemen! had meant to capture; depicting a boy playing the game on a bench, being swarmed by a raucous crowd of curious kids, and ultimately letting out his own primal roar and partially transforming into a yeti himself — finally demanding that the shocked onlookers (and viewers at home) “GET YOUR OWN” copies of the game to gawk at. Selling copies direct to consumers was a move that harkened back to their scrappy DIY days, and to the likes of Wild Ride! before it. And prominently noting the game’s trademarks as property of ‘RUNANDGUN!, Inc.’ should’ve served as no less than a statement of intent — a declaration that Urban Yeti! represented the sort of game they had intended to make for all those years, but had been unable to see through to completion before. There was nothing left standing in their way this time: For just $29.99, consumers could get a taste of what Cave+Barn were cooking, and decide for themselves whether it was worth all that time spent simmering.

Actually, “kook” is a fortuitous choice of word here, as SubGenii celebrate notorious kooks for their formulating / spreading of conspiracies. Among those revered includes Stanisław Szukalski — who [in]famously espoused his belief that humankind is locked in an eternal struggle with a race of Yeti-human hybrids known as the “Sons of Yeti.”
The first announced release date for Duelin’ Firemen! was forecast in the liner notes for the game’s 1994 promotional vinyl; which is written to promote “the full length Duelin’ Firemen! soundtrack from EZ Prey Records (on CD this summer), followed by the GAME (this fall).” In effect, the more well-established “July 1995” launch projection represents the result of an initial delay period; though most folk would have no idea of that fact, given the obscure nature of the vinyl’s release.
Geez, we really can’t get away from September 11th in this article, can we? Well, as long as I have you reminiscing on the subject, allow me to torture you with this absolute earworm by self-proclaimed “conspiracy musician” Martin Noakes: The aptly-titled “9/11 Building 7”, complete with goofy chroma-keyed music video. Content warning for generally wild conspiracy theory bullshit, but I’m sorry — this track is a bona fide banger. Leave a comment on the article if you actually read these footnotes, and if you can’t get this damn song out of your head thanks to me.
For my best guess at what wires got crossed here: While Cave+Barn were now operating out of Canada, and Telegames themselves were headquartered in Texas; the latter company did host a “sister operation” in England. I’d have to guess that IGN somehow conflated Cave+Barn with Telegames’ UK branch in terms of where they were stationed? At a certain point, they’d have been better off just not guessing at / mentioning the country of origin at all here.

“Serving Up Good Food and Good Times.”

“You’ve got raw sewage matted into your fur!”
North American box art.

Humor, for a moment, the possibility that yetis exist and live among us. In eluding our best attempts to confirm their existence, perhaps they have integrated themselves so seamlessly into our society that we simply fail to recognize or discern them? And if this is the case – if this ruse has been kept up for long enough – perhaps our human tendencies have managed to rub off on them some over the course of the years? Seeing them engage in some of our distinct behaviors and most cherished pastimes — perhaps even going so far as to “crave the comforts of home and family.” What lengths might a city-dwelling yeti go to in order to achieve that dream? Naturally, Urban Yeti! serves to posit just such a scenario.

The declared objective of the game is to help our titular ‘Urban Yeti’ (that’s the best we’re gonna get in terms of a character name) find a “suitable mate” within the city limits, and to overcome all obstacles in the way of this instinctive pursuit. Between rival yetis, trigger-happy police, and toll booth attendants; Yeti must rely on his beastly brawn to persevere, and on players to assist in navigating between the strange occurrences that comprise his quest. One minute you’ll be working as a waiter for tips, before getting picked up by a UFO and deposited at a local discus tournament. Soon enough, you’ll be impressing the love of your life by demonstrating your natural knack for the poultry business. All in a day’s work for this city-living sasquatch.

So, having had a minute now to absorb all that, I’m sure we’ll all agree that the plot here is pretty goofy. More accurately: There’s not really much of a “plot” at all, and more just a series of disconnected events / minigames to motivate your navigating Urban Yeti!’s frustrating city hubs. Where the bulk of gameplay will be spent top-down in the urban sprawl – attempting to follow an intermittently-appearing overhead arrow toward your next waypoints – this might honestly serve as the least novel portion of the playtime? That being said, the seeming lack of rules and structure within these “open world” segments are clearly what have come to define the image of the game in most folks’ minds — inviting the common Grand Theft Auto comparisons, and making the game out to be an exercise in anarchic chaos. Of course, as we proceed to break it all down, the standard set of video game conventions and constraints will make themselves apparent.

First things first: We’ve gotta familiarize ourselves with our loveable Yeti. In the open world segments, you can move him around in eight directions with the D-pad, while the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons alternate right and left punches respectively. Then there’s the ‘R’ button; which either lets you jump off the sides of building, or allows you to hop atop moving cars and ride them for a distance — a nearly useless function that you’ll only use a couple of times over the course of the game. The ‘L’ button will unleash your Yeti’s yell, which attempts [but usually fails] to clear the screen of surrounding hostiles at the cost of 15 health points. And finally, the ‘Select’ button lets you use boomboxes that you can pick up while exploring, and subsequently trigger a dance party involving every character on-screen — ultimately knocking them all out, and restoring some of your health in the process.

It’s important to note that range of functions nice and early, because it clues you in to how limited your means of interacting with the world actually are. You’ll quickly realize that Yeti’s only meaningful functions involve attacking, where nearly every character and vehicle that reside inside the maps exist for the sole purpose of doing harm to you. There’s no reasoning with them, method for disguising yourself, or dark shadows where you can hide Yeti away until the coast is clear. It’s just you against the world, in a world where there are no places for a yeti to hide or option to “go stealth and avoid detection altogether” (as the back of the box deceptively implies). And so, in actual practice, Urban Yeti! isn’t quite the sandbox romp it’s made out to be: It’s a game of pure survival, plain and simple. At the very least, it is genuinely chaotic.

When I said “it’s you against the world,” I really did mean the entire world: Every passerby, driver, stray animal and bird flying overhead is out to kill you — to say nothing of the trigger-happy police who fire on sight, unmotivated by any sort of ‘wanted level’ or other escalation mechanic. For as much fuss is made about yetis in this universe managing to blend in successfully with society, it becomes quickly clear that’s far from the case, and that the public at large is quite hostile to large hairy creatures. You are susceptible to taking damage from every punch, bite, bullet and aerial droppings that may come your way; and so your dwindling health serves as your most precious resource to be conserved. Get brought down to zero, and be forced to restart from your last checkpoint. Restart from a checkpoint three times, and be forced to use a password if you want to continue the game. Or better yet: Do your best to avoid damage, and avoid having to deal with game overs at all!

So, what else can be done to stave off death? Well, between your constant bouts against the game’s population, you could attempt to replenish health by dumpster diving — punching trash receptacles in the hopes that a hot dog might fall out, and provide some single-digit refill of your HP. Of course, you’re also just as liable to stir ornery folk sleeping inside of given dumpsters, which runs the risk of them jumping out and dealing damage to you in excess of what you might stand to gain. In this way, the most basic of game mechanics is warped into an uneven risk-reward scenario, where your best option is to not take the gamble at all. Aside from that, your only other hopes are to track down the hidden boomboxes – out-of-your-way rarities that are likely more trouble than they’re worth to track down – or to hold out until the next level, where you’re replenished back to full health. Squatchin’ ain’t easy.

You’ll wind up wanting to spend as little time as possible within the game’s three city hubs — to navigate directly to your given objective, and encounter as few hazards as possible along the way. To this end, you’ll see a large red arrow appear briefly on-screen every 15 seconds, to help point you toward your destination. Just a few problems with this mechanic: You are rarely told explicitly what your objectives are, or given indication as to precisely what object / location you’ll need to interact with to progress. As such, you’ll often find yourself walking right past your intended goal — overshooting your mark, and having to wait until the arrow reappears in the opposite direction you’re headed. This issue is only compounded when your objectives happen to be mobile, like a car driving circles around the whole perimeter of the map. In these instances, you’re effectively left to run around in circles yourself — unsure of whether you should be going clockwise or counter, and generally feeling as if you’re several steps behind at all times.

It’s unfortunate that the oft-hidden arrow is so vital to finding your way around the cities, and that you can’t just easily navigate by learned landmarks or map screen (as there is none). Buildings are all largely interchangeable with one another, seeing as you’re unable to enter into any of them or otherwise have them serve any utility. With little in the way of signposts or novel scenery to give you any sense of place, it’s difficult to tell the difference between any two streets or alleys. All this is further exacerbated by limited screen real estate; where Yeti can only see roughly two or three bodies-lengths ahead [vertically or horizontally] on ground level, and where he can fill out nearly a quarter of the display as he travels across rooftops. Attempts to layer the maps with underground train tracks and upper levels only aid in confusing the game’s already-dicey camera, and in obscuring Yeti from your view. What I’m getting at is, 240×160 pixels is hardly a resolution fit for framing large urban sprawls, especially when said space is allocated and utilized poorly.

As result of all this, one of the most obnoxious hazards you’ll find yourself running into are incoming cars, set to collide with Yeti just as quickly as they seem to spontaneously appear on-screen. On the rare occasion that they may actually deign to honk before hitting you, those sounds will often just get lost in the chaotic sound mix — buried beneath so many layers of indistinct yelling, animal cries, and an admittedly rockin’ soundtrack. In effect, walking on roads and crossing the street become some of the riskiest stunts you can pull, for as absolutely necessary as they often are. And just in case you thought jumping on top of them might somehow save you / allow you to steer them, no dice: You can only safely hop stop cars at a complete stop (and even then, it’s a pretty wonky / risky deal to get that close), and you’ll still have no control over them. Hell, half the time, they won’t even start moving again — as if to say “I’m not shifting out of park until this yeti gets off my car.”

All this leaves for you to do is to head directly [on-foot] to whatever objective you may have at a given moment, and do your best to avoid damage along the way. Of course, the other thing about objectives in Urban Yeti! is that they are rarely (if ever) as simple as they first appear. In example: The first objective the game gives you is to cross a bridge over to the next city hub, which would sure make the first map seem like a waste of time to have spent the time designing? Of course, there’s a complication: Crossing the bridge requires paying a $4.00 toll, and you’re currently plum broke. And seeing as money isn’t an actual stat or item that the game tracks – let alone something that you might be able to beat down pedestrians for à la GTA – this logically means that your next step is finding a part-time job.

To do that, you need to find a newspaper blowing in the wind, which will inform you about an opening at a soup kitchen you’ve likely already passed by at this point. From there, it’s a matter of waiting for the in-game clock to strike 7:30, at which point the building will allow you entry and ask you to work a shift. Cue your first minigame: A Tapper-inspired ode to the food service industry, wherein you’ll serve a perpetual queue of quickly-approaching customers their requested orders. Match one of the food trays on the left side of the screen to the food they’re imagining in their thought bubbles, slide it down one of the four long tables, and quickly collect their 40¢ tip from the spot on the line where they picked it up. Wait too long, and one of the other incoming customers will steal the tip as they walk past it. Miss an order, and your upset customer will punch / briefly stun you, causing you to get further backed up (and probably eat more punches). You get two minutes on the clock to earn your bridge fare, or be forced to try again from the top.

So, here’s the thing: The minigame is actually kind of fun! Not particularly depthful or polished, but not especially tedious or unwelcome. It’s just a shame that you only get two minutes to play within it, and that it never re-appears again over the course of the game. You can imagine its place in a proper open world game; where it might open up as an activity that you can return to, in order to make some relatively safe and clean money between more dangerous heist-type missions. But again: Urban Yeti! isn’t that kind of game. All four minigames are one-and-done affairs, which serve as fleetingly brief distractions from the more monotonous city-walking. And so, just as quickly as you manage to break free from the concrete jungle, you’re tossed right back in — following that omnipotent arrow once again. In this case, with four bucks in your proverbial pocket (God only knows where Yeti stows his valuables), you can cross that bridge and acclimate to a new map — very similar in appearance to the one you just left, as it turns out. Yeah, don’t expect any significant changes in scenery as the game progresses.

It’s shortly after crossing when you’ll be treated to another of the game’s frequent intertitles — text informing you of your next objectives, cast upon a green-tinted background with an uncomfortable close-up of Yeti’s mean mug. They’re only occasionally practical, but they’re the best you’re gonna get. From here, you hone in on the scent of another yeti; who turns out not to be the love of your life, but rather another male yeti presumably on the prowl. Naturally, you beat the hell out of him, and he vows on the spot to “whoop you good” at a ‘Yeti Discus Tournament.’ A brief in-engine cutscene shows him hitching a ride on a car, ostensibly in the direction of the arena. A reasonable assumption you might make as a player is that your arrow should now point you in the direction of the tourney location. Unfortunately, it’s at this point where all sense of reason has been abandoned by the developers, and where you must similarly ditch such straightforward logic.

Without any further clues – and an arrow which now seems to point in random directions at any given moment in time – you are left to intuit that it’s not actually a building that you have to locate. Instead, you have to locate the same make and model of car which you so briefly saw in that cutscene, be lucky enough to catch up to it, and similarly ride the top of it. At this point, a UFO will descend from the sky in order to beam you up, and escort you to the discus tournament. To be clear: The UFO isn’t previously established in that cutscene, or explained anywhere else thereafter. You have to figure out on your own that the cutscene was attempting to convey the need to grab hold of a specific car — a car which is in near-constant transit, and which drives your objective arrow absolutely crazy. I’d bet this is a point where some number of inattentive (or simply otherwise confused) players give up on Urban Yeti!, unable to figure out how to further proceed. I can’t honestly blame them.

What really sucks is that the discus tourney is another pretty fun little minigame, gated behind a completely obtuse bit of progression. Again, it’s another relatively simple diversion: Skate around an ice rink, toss your discus at other yetis on the playing field to temporarily knock them down, and be the only one currently standing in order to win a given round. Ten rounds in total require you to survive them each without Yeti giving up three hits, or it’s back to the beginning for you. How the other yetis get away with not following this rule, I do not know. I’ve seen some folk complain that this particular minigame is somewhat unfair, and recall having difficulty with it. Personally, I’ve managed multiple times to endure the whole tourney without getting walloped — usually able to end rounds within the first 3 or 10 seconds (depending on whether there are one or three other yetis to deal with). In either case, you only have to manage the feat of winning once, before you’re taken back to the city — never to throw a metal frisbee again.

On leaving the tournament venue, you’ll find a note attached to a chicken, informing you that a lady yeti watched your performance on the ice and was quite impressed by it. She beckons you to meet her in the suburbs the next city over, so that you might gauge your compatibility. This poses a slight problem, though: How to get there? It’s at this point that the game leaves you guessing as to what to do next again, as the arrow doesn’t seem to point toward any bridge or vehicle in particular. It seems to center near a group of people standing together, which isn’t an entirely uncommon occurrence to come upon during general navigation. As it turns out, this is a crowd of protestors who you’re meant to disperse the huddle with your fists, which will prompt them to announce aloud their escaping to the suburbs from whence they came. This convenient coincidence lets you know that the subway runs service from your current location to the next… as well as the fact the subway is currently out of commission.

What to do, what to do? Well, it falls on Yeti to turn the power back on. But when you first head to the fence surrounding the power switch, you realize it’s electric, and are forced to take damage in the discovery. Without a suggestion as to a solution, you’re left once more to your own devices, though you may not like the answer you discover. See, there are cats constantly running around the game world — cats that you can pick up and toss. There’s even a hidden mechanic where you can toss cats at stray dogs in order to divert their attacks and further distract them, but your intent in this instance is probably a measure more sinister: You have to toss a cat over the fence and hit the electrified switch on the other side — presumably frying the poor kitty in the process. That was a fun little puzzle to figure out for myself. If you can stomach that task; you can turn the subway back on, spend minutes doing laps around the track underground, find the subway car, and hop aboard for a free ride.

Unfortunately, the subway can only get you part of the way there (for some reason). For the rest of the distance, you’ll need to travel by sewer — the most sensible route. To this end, Yeti will procure an innertube, and paddle his way through the crocodile-infested muck. Cue another minigame! This time, the inspiration is something like Atari / Midway’s Toobin’, with your voyage down a treacherous narrow channel broken up intermittently by power-ups. This winds up making for the most challenging minigame by far, as exacerbated by an egregious length of track and instantly-sinking hazards. One could also argue that the musical accompaniment – the affectionately nicknamed “Trombone Disaster” (by the community) – is an additional hazard unto itself. In any case, this ‘Lazy Sewer O’ Fun’ minigame is by far the game’s worst, and overstays its welcome in a fashion quite unlike the rest of the assortment. Between the challenge, duration, and atonal background tune; you get the impression that the developers deliberately made it all as frustrating as possible. The icing on the cake? A comically-sized full health restore for your inner tube placed immediately before the end of the minigame — blatantly serving as a gag.

The game’s final act opens with you tracking down children playing with a hose who can spray the stench of sewer off of Yeti, before you go to introduce yourself to your mate-to-be. With that sorted, you can make your appearance, and be quickly sent away on a chore: Her chickens have gotten loose, and it’s up to you to find them scattered across the map. Naturally, this task requires following the arrow and tracking down a total of eight, who you’ll have to pick up and carry back one by one. It’s also at this point that the game decides you need to walk across a ton of rooftops; causing the camera and your sprites to break in some exciting ways, and generally proving difficult to reliably navigate. If you manage to do your duty (and avoid getting shot to death by a myriad of policemen on patrol), your new lady friend will ask just one more thing of you: To prove your ability to handle your poultry, by lending her a hand in her “Yeti Brand Chicken Dogs” business.

Thus begins the final minigame, which requires you to pick up chickens and toss them directly into a meat processor — tasking you with slaughtering thirty in just three minutes’ time. At least this activity is actually kind of fun, unlike the previous one: Chickens emerge from a hole on the left side of the screen, while the grinder stands on the right. The game gives you a throw meter in case you wanna try for some three-pointers from one side of the pen to the other, but it’s easier to just dunk those soon-to-be nuggets in from the minimum distance. Roosters work to intercept you across the width of the screen, and attack you if you should miss your tosses into the death machine (you’d think they’d be more upset about successfully grinding up their gal pals?). Ultimately, it’s likely that you’ll manage to prevail if you’ve already made it this far in the game, and you’ll finally win the love and respect of your mate. Cue a hilarious still of your girlfiend lounging as sexily as a CG render of a sasquatch can manage, before they call for a “group mega dance” (🔊) — a final flyover of the three cities you’ve conquered, as the population is all moved to groove. Funny how they’ve gone from fearing and attacking you over the past couple of hours, and are now happy to celebrate your imminent mating and reproduction. And thus ends Urban Yeti!, after having likely clocked somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours’ playtime.

So, where the hell to start with analyzing the game from a critical perspective? I guess I could start with the fact that it’s not nearly as wild and outrageous as it’s made out to be: If you can put aside the premise and loosely-defined objectives, it all makes for a pretty straightforward top-down action game, broken up by a scant handful of minigames. The majority city-roaming segments leave much to be desired in the way of interaction and variety, and the minigames only cumulatively comprise about fifteen minutes’ worth of your total playtime. If you ask me, that ratio is way off, for as quickly as the charm and novelties of the traversal wear thin. Past a certain point, the game would’ve been better off including a wider variety of minigames, and de-emphasizing the cities despite the technical proficiency they may demonstrate on Cave+Barn’s part. What good is cramming an “open world” into a GBA cartridge if the world isn’t truly open? Which is where I start to speculate, and to hypothesize as to what Cave+Barn’s intentions were with designing them in the first place.

In my mind, I can clearly visualize what an original design document for Urban Yeti! might’ve looked like: A game where you do genuinely have the option to blend in to your surroundings, and to try and live out a sort of “human” life. You can pick up part-time work at restaurants or meat-processing facilities, play discus with your yeti buddies for fun, and travel by either subway or innertube to neighboring cities. Alternatively, you could decide to rampage as you imagine an angry bigfoot would — mauling civilians for their money, dodging the cops on your tail, and generally asserting your abominable dominance. In other words: It could’ve very well been intended to be the sort of Grand Theft Auto send-up that it’s expected to be, with the interesting angle of playing as a genuine monster rather than the spree-killing metaphorical sort. The systems are largely all in place for it already — right down to a general public who fight or flight at the mere sight of you! So, what kept the developers from committing to it?

Oh, right: It’s probably the fact that Grand Theft Auto III had come out the year before, been deemed immediately controversial, and practically guaranteed that any game attempting to emulate its formula for the years to come would be written off as similarly violent and gratuitous. Not that it stopped other developers from pushing forward with their own copycat titles, or kept Grand Theft Auto Advance from releasing just a couple years later either — let alone do anything to deter the mainline franchise from continuing to break sales records with each new release. So, maybe it just came down to a lack of know-how on Cave+Barn’s side in how to efficiently stitch all the elements of a proper open world game together, or a realization that it wasn’t coming together the way they had planned for it? I mean, who’s to say that ripping off GTA was actually even their intention in the first place? All I can say for sure is, that direction seems to be the one that most folk wish the game had gone in, and which many still try to contend it most closely resembles.

If Urban Yeti! truly were an open world game, it’d probably manage to stretch out its thin bag of tricks for a while longer — at least a couple hours more worth of playtime on top of its currently paltry two. As I’ve said before on this site, I’m not much for the “value proposition based on playtime” argument, but you can’t debate that a fair share of consumers do perceive games in that way. And as mentioned previously in this review, the minigames clearly serve as the most entertaining parts of the game (Toobin’ homages aside), and opportunities to replay them at increasing levels of difficulty / with degrees of variation would likely be welcome by most. But I get the impression that Cave+Barn weren’t particularly interested in padding out their game’s length, or in building their more gimmicky ideas into more fully fleshed-out concepts: I think they were more amused by the prospect of surprising players over the course of a singular playthrough, and leaving them with an interactive experience that lingered longer in the memory than in the cartridge slot.

Sure, the team do the bare minimum in providing post-playthrough content: A password revealed within the credits (‘TONYGOLD’) unlocks a ‘Secret Menu,’ which allows you to start from any level / minigame, as well as adjust the difficulty and access sound test options. In this way, you can pretend to play the city sections as open world or some sort of survival challenge (except for the fact that you can no longer lose health or die), or to play the minigames on demand if you should so please. But it’s obvious that this feature exists more for the fact that it was “easy enough to toss in,” rather than as anything substantive to boost replay value. It’s the same way that I imagine Duelin Firemen! before it might’ve turned out had it come to fruition: RUNANDGUN! probably pictured that game from the start as something that would be fun to play once – to experience all the wacky FMVs and be surprised by the sudden genre shifts – and to just as quickly be put back in its jewel case and take up residence on a shelf. Cave+Barn similarly seemed to intend Urban Yeti! to be there for a good time — not a long time.

At least Cave+Barn seemed to be doing their best to impress with what short time they gave, even if they didn’t necessarily stick the landing on it. If you take the game as a sort of tech demonstration (the likes of which they once specialized in producing for VR), it does look fairly smooth in action: Framerate is passable given the amount of activity on-screen, sprite-scaling and 3D effects [mostly] function well, and the art direction and animation are both fairly impressive. It’s hard to call any of it “ground-breaking,” but it certainly demonstrates the abilities of a highly competent team and serviceable little game engine. Granted, it’s not without a few potentially game-breaking faults: In my time playing it, I experienced some issues with Yeti’s coordinate-mapping breaking, as well as a full-blown crash bringing me back to the title screen. From watching others play the game, there are evidently spots where the game is liable to soft-lock on you; where scripting fails, collision catches on something, or where you’re otherwise left to sit and wait to see if the game can somehow fix itself and give you back control. Does that count as “open world jank” if the game isn’t actually open world?

Look, a handful of bugs left lingering in the code (as significant as they may be) isn’t really what I’m trying to focus in on here: I wanna stress the fact that Cave+Barn were clearly passionate about their vision for the game, and that they did as good as they could in committing to and making a playable product of it. The “issue” here – if you can call it that – is that their visions rarely aligned with broader consumer tastes and interests over the course of the years. Urban Yeti! is the ultimate realization of design concepts that had been kicking around in their collective heads since as early as 1994, and it is singularly proud of what it is. I have to imagine that everyone involved got exactly what they wanted out of it, and showcased their individual talents as pure concentrate: Tony conveys his outrageous premise and oddball humor, Grady gets to put his eye-catching art on display, and Randy is given freedom to wreak musical havok in full effect. Everybody wins, right?

Of course, there’s more to selling games as a retail product than just pleasing yourselves as developers. Ultimately, you’re selling your work with a price tag attached, and with a consumer expectation to find entertainment in it. And in this particular regard, Urban Yeti! fails to fully connect with much of its audience. Where many might well appreciate the game’s unpredictable nature and comedy stylings, the gameplay can serve as a barrier preventing players ever getting to experience it in full. On the other hand, folk who don’t jive with the game’s tone and aesthetic have little will no doubt be similarly unsatisfied by the underlying mechanics. For those who go in with the expectation of an open world game, it can be difficult to see Urban Yeti! as little more than a smattering of disparate, unconnected ideas duct-taped together — being “passed off” as something it isn’t. And in that regard, it’s hard to convince most folk that Urban Yeti! is worth playing through in full for themselves. Certainly not nowadays, where folk can just watch a speedrun of it and vicariously experience all the craziest moments contained within.

Where it comes to the subject of “improving” the game from my comfy armchair, I can’t help but revisit the same point I’ve made multiple times already: It really should’ve just committed to being an open world game. It’d tie all the minigames together in a far more accessible way, give more purpose and depth to the city gameplay, and generally allow the elements that are already present to shine that much brighter under a more sensible structure. It doesn’t mean having to abandon the narrative or even revamping it in any major ways: It just means allowing players to approach those story beats at their leisure, and providing ways for them to entertain themselves during those intermissions. Populate the world with shops to spend your money at, food stands to help replenish your health, and NPCs whose behavior extends beyond randomly walking in circles and running from you. Give players incentives to keep a low profile, and a satisfying challenge if they choose to go on a rampage.

Of course, the prospect of adding more minigames to the assortment is also an appealing one — activities which could play up the “bigfoot” lore, involving you avoiding detection or working to naturalize yourself more within human society. Have a minigame where you need to take photographs of other cryptids and unexplainable phenomena, or one where you perform as a “costumed” dancer collecting tips on the streets. If they found a way to let players control cars while mounted on the top of them, that opens up a whole world of vehicle-based challenges; between races, assisting firetrucks and ambulances, or even organizing some Burnout-style pile-ups. I could spitball ideas for these all day! At the very least, repurposing the existing minigames in a further variety of ways (with different set-dressing, layers of complexity, and changing objectives) could’ve gone a long way on its own.

Ultimately though, it’s as I said before: Cave+Barn probably made more or less the game they set out to make, and would just do it all again the same way if given the choice. As it stands, Urban Yeti! represents the culmination of years worth of planning and workshopping — the encapsulation of a studio’s design philosophies and creative ideas. And who are we to deny them that? Some developers never get the opportunity to go all-in on such a wild idea, for fear of negative reaction and reception leading to potential ruination. But Cave+Barn knew the risks, and went full throttle in the face of them all. I, for one, find their commitment admirable — spectacularly messy as the crash site may be. One thing’s for sure: I certainly won’t be forgetting about Urban Yeti! any time soon, for as brief as its time in my life may have been… ignoring the fact that I’ve additionally gone and spent further days researching and writing 10,000+ words about it, of course.

Yes, this is a very narrow view of what video games are meant to serve as, and stands in the face of my own personal beliefs as to what games can express and impart on players. I’m only writing that line from the perspective of a “casual consumer,” and / or the perspective of folk whose business is to achieve mass appeal.

“Meet Me at the Yeti Discus Tournament and I’ll Whoop You Good!”

“Real motion-captured Yeti!”
North American back of box.

With Nintendo Power being the first to review the game before its official release, their panel’s average score of 2.2 (out of 5) stars would set the precedent for criticisms to come. According to their uncredited blurb writer, they recognize that “the game prides itself on zany situations, but the kookiness gets hairy since the objectives tend to be fuzzy and the graphics and controls are sloppy.” Still, they acquiesce that “Telegames deserves a big hand for its bigfoot game because it’s so wildly bizarre that you can’t help but crack a smile.” Ultimately, Nintendo’s rating here would be one of the lowest of the whole lot; where most other publications actually saw fit to score the game more generously! Sure, none of them would go on to grade it any higher than a grade school ‘B’ (85%), but the number of critics who settled close to around that ceiling might well surprise you.

IGN’s Craig Harris – who had overseen reporting on the game since its first announcement – was given the task of reviewing it for the website. Before awarding the game a 7 out of 10, he provided a bit of pointed criticism: “Urban Yeti! just doesn’t feel “professional” enough for a professionaly-produced game…ending up feeling like a B-title game released during the Shareware game explosion. […] With that said, I love the concept, and I love the minigames. I just think the Cave Barn guys need to work on wrapping up their ideas a little bit more tightly.” GameZone’s Scott ‘Tha Wiz’ Kuvin (no relation to Scott the Woz, presumably) rated the game a 7.5 on their site’s 10-point scale, noting that “If you’re going to pick this up, be prepared for one of the most bizarre and fun titles out there, with some funny as heck moments and cool mini games which will get you cracking up as well, but also know that it may not last in the long run.” Generally speaking, review writers of the era all seemed amused enough by the game’s oddball charms, but docked points for short length and lack of structure.

With the “successful” release of Urban Yeti! now under their belts, there was only one way for Cave+Barn to celebrate: Back to the ol’ grind, and churning out another GBA game as quickly as they could before the end of the year while they were still riding that momentum! By which I mean to say, the team likely had multiple different projects in progress while Urban Yeti! was still in development, and managed to finish up one more before the new year. That game would be BattleBots: Beyond the Battlebox, published by Majesco. In its capacity as a tie-in to the popular robot combat television show, you manage your own little death machine in competition against opposing soon-to-be scrap heaps, upgrading it with ever-deadlier components along the way. Unfortunately, it comes together in a pretty mediocre affair, owing mostly to clumsy control and highly repetitive combat. Unlike with Urban Yeti!, critics struggled to find a single nice thing to write about it, and a 2003 ““sequel”” titled BattleBots: Design & Destroy literally served as a way for Majesco to just re-release what is effectively the same exact game for a second year in a row — to similar critical and consumer disinterest.

BattleBots: Beyond the Battlebox for Game Boy Advance
(Majesco / Cave+Barn Studios, 2002)

Putting all that aside. Cave+Barn’s plans for 2003 seemed hopeful, with two more GBA games already in the works. The first would be ‘Ultimate Book of Spells’ — another bit of licensed fare, based on an animated series airing in Europe and Canada. This title would’ve actually first been announced back in September of 2001 (around the same time as Urban Yeti!), but production had evidently taken its sweet time between the studio’s other projects in the works. The other cartridge in development would’ve probably been the more interesting bit of software: An original IP named ‘Black Rodeo,’ leveraging the same engine that had powered Urban Yeti! News on this one first broke on August 16th, 2002, where none other than Craig Harris served up the scoop on IGN. Eleven accompanying images demonstrated the game in action — though mostly comprising just contextless photos that had been taken with the presumed intent of serving as intertitles in the final product. From these, you could gleam that the game would’ve have a sort of Western theming, with “radioactive horses and demented clowns” and the like spicing things up a bit. Just one question, then: Why am I talking about the game as if it never came out?

It’s here where I have to break a bit of bad news again: Neither ‘Ultimate Book of Spells’ or ‘Black Rodeo!’ would ever get the chance to see the light of day, as Cave+Barn Studios weren’t much longer for the industry themselves. For a while in 2001, they had been picking up work as a support studio for other GBA games; providing a handful of minigames for Pipedream Interactive’s M&M’s Blast!, as well as a music and sound design gig for the Spider-Man movie tie-in cartridge. But that revenue stream seemed to dry up / get cut off in around 2002, and left them to focus full-time on their own titles. And then ‘Ultimate Book of Spells’ got dropped from production at some point toward the end of 2002 with no explanation as to why, and so went the potential earnings to be made from it. Perhaps Cave+Barn had bitten off more than they could chew, and weren’t hitting their deadlines? Or maybe it was the fact that the show had already ended earlier in that year [after just one season], and the demand simply wasn’t there for a tie-in to a now cancelled cartoon. In either case, it seemed to leave Cave+Barn with a decided shortage of cash — evidently not enough to get Black Rodeo! past the finish line.

After 2003 came and went with no updates or new releases from the studio, the domain to their website would lapse in September of 2004. That’s rarely a particularly good sign for a studio ostensibly still in business. But as it turned out, Cave+Barn hadn’t been in business since as early as June 2003 — as gleaned from the LinkedIn profiles of the studio’s former employees. One is left to assume that underwhelming Urban Yeti! sales weren’t capable of bankrolling the company’s continued work past a certain point, and that publishers weren’t particularly compelled by their sporadic track record / oft-delayed production times by that point. In any case, the dream was dead, and the assembled team would finally decide to go their separate ways. You get the impression that they all had plenty of fun working together, but that things seemed to rarely pan out or get done with the way they had structured themselves (or rather, failed to).

Ultimately, over the course of a decade-long run (between RUNANDGUN!’s establishment in 1993 and Cave+Barn’s closure in 2003), the team had only managed to release a grand total of five titles under their own studio labels, with at least four games of theirs failing to materialize. That’s something like a 50% success rate for games announced by them managing the feat of getting finished and released. Needless to say, it’s hard to keep a company sustainable on those sorts of odds, let alone a smaller studio living contract-to-contract. Whether these cancelled games were the fault of unreliable publishers or Cave+Barn’s own internal mismanagement, the end result still meant lost profits and wasted investments. Frankly, it’s surprising they even lasted for as long as they managed — re-brand aside, of course.

Promotional screenshots for Black Rodeo! (Cave+Barn Studios, unreleased)

Several who were left to leave Cave+Barn continued to ply their trades in game development: Christopher Locke served stints at the likes of Groove Games, ZAPiT, Capcom Interactive, Blammo and Glu Mobile over the course of the next twelve years, and is currently employed as part of PopReach Corporation. Jeremy Evers took a job at Backbone Entertainment and eventually landed at United Front, before settling into independent development and publishing in the past several years. Others still returned to production work: Tony Gold has taken his services to companies including Reel Story Productions, Arc Worldwide, Leo Burnett and The Marketing Arm, before establishing his own company in ‘TonyTone and Co.’ Grady Sain, for his part, has served in directorial roles across several “creative studio”-type companies, including Obscura Digital and Positive Fields — the latter serving as a non-profit tech education center situated in Mountville, GA. Between these principals and a number of the studio’s other supporting players, most seemed to land on their feet with ease, and find brighter futures in working with decidedly more functional companies.

Urban Yeti! stands as perhaps the most emblematic testament to Cave+Barn and RUNANDGUN!’s legacy: Representing the game that most embodied their sentiments as game developers, and serving as what was undoubtedly their most personal project [to actually see release]. For its small production run and limited distribution, it has become one of the pricier rarities for those looking to complete their Game Boy Advance collections; setting highs of $62.49 for loose cartridges, and with sealed box copies going for as much as $300. And for its oddity and outlandishness, it’s become a staple of “bad games” discusso, and a fan favorite of the Awesome Games Done Quick ‘Awful Block.’ As dubious a distinction as that may sound, it demonstrates that there’s an audience who can appreciate the game for its eccentricities — who find themselves compelled by it despite its clunkiness and brevity. In the words of speedrunner PeteDorr: “The reason why I love this game so much is, this is a time where developers were still making wacky, weird games like this for the fun of it. […] This was, like, developers really having fun and just not caring at all, and this is the product of it.”

For my part, I’m glad to have played and experienced Urban Yeti! for myself. It won me over with its audaciousness, and felt to me like a personal message from its creators — a declaration of their intent as a collective, with a note at the end reading something like “We hope you’ll come along for the ride.” In a perfect world, Cave+Barn could’ve continued to make their imperfect games, and their continued evolution may well have led to even stranger and more surreal game concepts being submitted for public approval. God knows I’d have absolutely dug on the likes of Black Rodeo! if it had managed to make it to shelves. And where the indie games scene has taken up the mantle as a channel for experimental software in the years since, it’s still novel to see more established companies and publishers take risks as wild as what Cave+Barn and RUNANDGUN! were so readily willing to wager their futures on. In that way, Urban Yeti! really does read like a product of a bygone era in game development, if not already a relic in its own time.

One last bit of business: At the beginning of this article, I made a promise to prove whether or not Bigfoot is real. And here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, I try to keep my promises. With that, it is my duty to inform you dear readers of the truth: Yetis are out there. They really do walk among us — hidden in plain sight, and continuing to propagate through means of human cross-breeding. And worst of all, these ‘Yetinsyny’ still harbor wicked intent: A wish to return to the days of old, where they may return to their comfortable roles of masters and conquerors! In our eternal struggle against these surviving yeti-human hybrids, we must take heed to never bend the knee, for there will be no mercy taken on us. We must always be vigilant of the threat that surrounds us, and ready to defend ourselves and our country at a moment’s notice. We will fight them in the forests. We will fight them in the mountains. And if it comes down to it, we will fight them in our cities. Always be “ready to yeti,” and JHVH-1 help us all.

“Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke.” ~ Rev. Ivan Stang, Church of the SubGenius

♫ “Epic Epileptic Apocalypse” by Randy Wilson & David Yow. (🔊)


Solomon, Dan. “The Church of the SubGenius Finally Plays it Straight.” Texas Monthly. November 2, 2017. Web.
‘Rev. Ivan Stang.’ “Rev. Ivan Stang at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.” SubGenius.com. July 22, 1995. Web. (Transcript)
b c Sharoff, Robert. “Voyagers in Cyberspace.” Chicago Tribune. April 2, 1995. Web.
Stang, Ivan. “Stang’s Internet Diary – Run-n-Gun! filming.” Church of the SubGenius. December 21, 1994. Web.
b “Previews – Duelin’ Firemen!” Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine, Issue 69. LFP. October, 1994. Print. (Scan available)
McCloud, Joe. “Review – Wild Ride!” PCGames.com. Circa 1997. Web. (Archived)
Halfacree, Gareth. “Brian Fargo investigates Interplay acquisition.” bit-tech. September 18, 2018. Web.
Huffstutter, P.J. “Investment in Interplay.” Los Angeles Times. May 13, 1999. Web. (Archived)
Nix, Marc. “Review – Animorphs.” IGN. November 17, 2000. Web.
Lafferty, Michael. “Game Boy Advance Game Reviews – Tom & Jerry […].” GameZone. January 18, 2001. Web. (Archived)
Harris, Craig. “Yeti Crossing.” IGN. September 10, 2001. Web.
Harris, Craig. “New Shots of the Yeti.” IGN. January 29, 2002. Web.
Harris, Craig. “Urban Yeti.” IGN. April 30, 2002. Web.
b “Now Playing – Urban Yeti!” Nintendo Power. August, 2002. Print. (Scan available)
Harris, Craig. “Howlin’ Yeti Ads.” IGN. October 25, 2002. Web.
Harris, Craig. “Review – Urban Yeti!” IGN. August 23, 2002. Web.
Kuvin, Scott. “Urban Yeti Review.” GameZone. September 28, 2002. Web. (Archived)
Johnson, Chris. “ BKN and TDK ink video game deal.” C21Media. September 7, 2001. Web. (Archived)
Harris, Craig. “Black Rodeo!” IGN. August 16, 2002. Web.

Cassidy is the curator of a bad video game hall of fame. Whether you interpret that as "a hall of fame dedicated to bad video games" or as "a sub-par hall of fame for video games" is entirely up to you. Goes by "They / Them" pronouns.

Genuine cowpoke.

Contact: E-mail | Twitter

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DiscountLeeches

I want “Trombone Disaster” to play at my wedding. Not even slightly joking

Noel

What first seemed to be a quick cash grab game turned out to be a personal project of genuinely passionate artists. Glad to know the people behind this managed to find themselves in a brighter spot 🙂

Marie

Extremely well-written

Darkman425

Even in the year 2021, are we truly ready to yeti in this day and age?

Man, it’s been nearly 20 years and I still have that Urban Yeti! commercial in my head ever since watching Saturday morning cartoons way back when.

Kieran Callahan

Please do Balan Wonderworld on Bad Game Hall of Fame.