Boy, growing up in the 80s/90s, as I did, if you asked where girls lived, you'd often get the response, "The mall!" because people just thought teenage girls lived and died at the mall. And while I did visit the mall a lot as an adolescent, I assure you it wasn't to take advantage of THESE GREAT LOW PRICED DEALS! It was more to either buy a book now and then, or escape my family, and often much more the second than the first. It wasn't about social interaction or spending money, it was about having the chance to actually get out of the house and away from the people who constantly wanted to hurt me. So to make a board game based on a mall, something that, these days, seems to sort of be in its death throes, is a pretty great concept that I'm all for. Even as much of a stereotype as "girls love the mall" might have become, let me tell you, as someone who was once a teenage girl, it's 100% true. See a stereotype is a stereotype often because they're based somewhat in reality, same as why a cliche is a cliche, because it's something that's been thrown at the wall so many times that it's stuck, it's proven it works. Teenage girls went to the mall in droves, in roving gangs, and I witnessed it firsthand. So is it a hurtful stereotype? No. Not unless you also believe women only enjoy shopping or are vapid braindead sexual objects who like wasting their "mans" money. Then yeah, you're probably the kind of person to think it's a bad stereotype.
But I'm here, as a woman, to tell you why I loved the mall and why I love Electronic Mall Madness, despite never having actually played it myself. You may notice a particular ongoing trend at this blog by this point, and that is that a lot of the games that I have tremendous overwhelming respect for are games that I, quite frankly, never played. That's because, despite growing up in a fairly well off family economically, my parents refused to buy things like expensive board games. They'd much rather put that money towards my college fund. Pffft. That went well. Not only did I not attend college, but they took and used that money for themselves anyway after they divorced, so jokes on you guys. And also on me, a little, I guess. So sadly, because of this, while I grew up with a closet full of board games, I also grew up with a closet full of fairly generic and cheap board games. Sorry, Trouble, Monopoly. The brand name classics. I never got to experience anything weird and out there like Fireball Island or Electronic Mall Madness. These great 3D hulking beasts that really forced you to question just how engaging and interactive a board game could be when rivaling other forms of entertainment geared towards the same market audience.
Electronic Mall Madness falls into the same area as the aforementioned Fireball Island or Haunted House. It's a 3D board game, with a full fledged set, not just a jumbled mess on a piece of well preserved and brightly colored cardboard. Released originally in 1988, and then re-released as Electronic Mall Madness in 1989 by Milton Bradley, the entire game takes place in, you guessed it you big brained genius you, a mall. A three dimensional field representing a mall with two stories, to be exact. Sadly I have never been to a mall in the third dimension, but if I had been, I like to imagine it would've been something like this but maybe with more monsters. The bank is located at the center, along with an escalator that must be used to reach certain shops only available to access on the second floor.
One of the coolest aspects, at least to me, of Electronic Mall Madness, which I will be calling EMM from now on because typing out the actual name is just too damn much and I'm an American and we're lazy as sin and like to abbreviate everything under the sun, is its money. The game actually came with, and as far as I know is maybe the only game that has ever come with, two components of currency; paper cash and a credit card. And while everyone loves cash money, I find the credit card to be a phenomenal concept that could only work in this game. I suppose at some point in the future, with the ever growing economic downfall that lower class people like myself must face, that maybe Payday will eventually institute a Food Stamps card that can be declined, but that's a discussion for another day I guess. These two forms of money were used together to accomplish the games overall goal; be the first player to purchase six items on your shopping list and return to the parking lot. Honestly, the fact that this game doesn't have a built on parking garage to it that you can get lost in while searching for your car is the only thing that keeps it from being the most realistic mall game ever. 7/10 for the lack of endless parking garage void.
But even better than the credit card names are the names of the shops, which include, but are not limited to, places such as 2 Left Feet Shoes, Scratchy's Records, Frumps Fashion Boutique, Sweaty's Sports, Dingalong Phones - genuinely angry this was never a real phone company, actually - and the most appropriate one of all, really, M.T. Wallet's Department Store.
Also, the most expensive thing you can buy in the mall is apparently a exotic parrot which would cost you 200 bones. Pretty fair price, actually, for an exotic parrot, I feel. Those nowadays would cost you upwards over a thousand, and that's on the cheaper end of the scale. Another neat aspect is the fact that the computer in the game, which keeps track of gameplay, might occasionally refuse a sale outright, or refuse to dispense more cash. It will also sometimes randomly instruct the player to either the ATM, the arcade, the restrooms or to various stores even if you didn't want to visit any of those. Might be the only board game I've ever heard of where the game itself is outright trying to fuck the player over, and I love it.
All in all, Electronic Mall Madness - I'm sorry, EMM - is a really novel game that's actually still being produced today, with a newly redesigned version having come out just this year! Impressive, considering the aforementioned death throes of the mall, but I suppose if nothing else the game may serve as a period piece of sorts down the road. And sure, it's not exactly the same, but it's still available to purchase and I think that's fantastic. Most of these 3D board games have gone the way of the dinosaur, and that's super sad because they offer a really unique board game experience you likely won't get with anything else, and I think variety is important, especially in a medium that's often so flush with monotony and terminal sameness.
Either way, Electronic Mall Madness, er, EMM, is a truly one of a kind that deserves all the praise and recognition it gets, and even if I wasn't a woman, or had never been a teenage girl, and instead awoke one morning as a monstrous bug like creature ala Kafka's Metamorphosis, I'd still enjoy it, because bugs like food and the mall has a food court, so really it has something for everyone!
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