Pitbull Futures 2001

I wear yellow boots. And it’s because of this that the so-called “real” staffers of PC Quinine (A shot in the arm for PC games reporting! (sic)) dragged me down to the Eddy Ave bus station, bought me a ticket for the night bus to Cobar, and forcibly injected me onto the night bus to Cobar so that I would travel, by bus and by night, to Cobar.

Cobar, for the uninitiated, is a town almost but not quite in the exact centre of New South Wales, Australia. Which means it’s very flat. But it does have a vibrant dog-fighting culture and that, according to the crudely drawn map and the crudely expressed game synopsis that had been crudely faxed in to the offices of PC Quinine, was the whole reason I was now standing on the side of the Barrier Highway watching blowflies the size of beer bottle caps line up to electrocute themselves on the faulty neon sign of the Cobar Motor Inn.

How had it come to this? Apparently, somewhere in Cobar, a man was working on a PC game about dogfighting. A dogfighting simulator.

I could have checked in to the Cobar Motor Inn, I suppose. I could have slept there, used the amenities, taken of their food. But by the time the doors of the night bus had wheezed shut behind me, leaving me stranded on that cracked tarmac, gutters snarled with roadmelon, a skinny mongrel yapping somewhere in the distance like a portent, it was practically dawn. By which I mean the pub had opened, or maybe was still open, so I went there instead.

Happily, I ran into Rex Wilted, founder and majority shareholder of Dead Dog Interactive. He was breakfasting on beer and cigarettes and I joined him while a 14-inch CRT overhead blared last night’s racing results and a fat trucker sat at a nearby table singing softly and surprisingly sweetly about having once had “a tiger in me strides.”

“Because,” Rex Wilted said to my obvious opening question, “dog fighting is a legitimate sport. It’s a legitimate sport with a long and storied history, and we think it should be an Olympic sport like ten pin bowling.”

“Ten pin bowling isn’t an Olympic sport,” I said.

“No, but it SHOULD be an Olympic sport. And so should dog fighting.” Rex went on to explain to me, in some detail, the great dog fights he’d officiated over in his time, and why dog fighting, like heavyweight boxing, was subtle and strategic and the most “beautiful” of all sports. And in the same way that heavyweight boxing is in no way just two big dudes beating the snot out of each other when you shove them in a confined space and egg them on, dogfighting is in no way an unconscionably cruel exploitation of a dumb animal’s inherent inability to get along with its own kind when you shove them in a confined space and hit them with electric cattle prods.

“It’s an art,” said Rex Wilted. “Two pitbulls, in the ring, tearing each other’s ears off, going for the throat. It should be an Olympic sport. All those sports should be Olympic. Dog fighting, bear baiting, roo shooting, pig killing, even cockfighting I suppose, though that is a bit cruel on the birds.”

By this stage Rex Wilted and I had walked unsteadily down the backstreets of Cobar to a shed. Rex opened the door of the shed and turned on roughly three hundred overhead fluorescent tubes so the concrete floor was bathed in a harsh electric glow. Which rather nicely set off the two-metre deep concrete pit with the dead dog in the middle.

“Good God!” I heard myself cry. “Is that a dead dog?”

“Well,” said Rex Wilted, “most of one. The missus already roasted up the good parts. That’s just the stuff we don’t want.”

This, I admit, took me somewhat by surprise.

“Roast… you mean you ATE this poor dog?”

Rex Wilted looked at me, frown creasing his already heavily creased face. “Mate, do you actually know anything about dogfighting?”

I admitted, not without some pride, that I did not.

“The winner always gets to eat the loser. It’s a tradition. This little bugger deserved it, he gouged up Princess something terrible.”

I played back the last hour’s slightly drunken conversation.

“I thought you said your dog’s name was Genghis?”

“It is. Princess is me daughter.”

At this point I thought it would probably be more useful to talk about Dead Dog Interactive’s upcoming dogfighting simulator, which the fax - the remains of which I still clutched like a talisman against evil - called Pitbull Futures 2001. I asked Rex about the Futures part.

“Ah,” said Rex, “that’s the clever bit, see. All these simulation games are the big thing now, right? It’s not enough to just have a high-fidelity render of an actual dogfight with ragdoll - or should I say ragdog yeah haha - physics and that. See, in my game, you actually take control of a kennels and breed dogs, yeah? You breed these dogs and keep the most promising bitches on the edge of starvation so they produce little mean bastard pups who you torture into adulthood until they’re perfect killing machines, right? Then you go on the circuit, you do the shows, buy up other kennels, invest and speculate, you get in there and kill everyone you can to dominate the dogfighting scene and eventually you get the ultimate prize. The District Cup!”

“And what is that exactly?” I asked.

“It’s a plastic trophy that the Association ordered in from a shop in Dubbo. Plus a purse of nearly five hundred bucks!”

There was an element of gritty realism to the whole thing, I supposed.

“Nah mate,” said Rex. “I haven’t even told you the best bit. The best bit is the BlueSpeak.”

“Bluespeak?”

“Yeah mate. You know in that game, what’s it called, Oddworld. Abe’s something or other. Doesn’ matter, in that game you use GameSpeak commands to get your little green bastards to do stuff, right? Well this is the same principle, in that you can get your prize dogs to fight even harder and meaner by the use of high level coarse language. Basically you set your dog on the other dog and then hammer the BlueSpeak controls until your dog rips the other dog’s throat out.”

Rex threw back his head and laughed not unlike a complete lunatic. Then he sobered up. Well, in the figurative sense, anyway.

“All this interviewing is making me peckish. Still plenty of roast from last night left over, and you know it’s always better the next morning, right? Especially after a cold one.”

At first I was distracted by the thought that the beers at the Imperial Hotel hadn’t been especially cold, but by then I was staring at that dead dog again, and then I realised what Rex was talking about when he said “roast.” I think my eyes may have gone kind of round.

“You alright mate? Probably faint from hunger right, want a sandwich?”

“No,” I said. “No no no. No I do not. No.”

Rex gave me a sidelong glance as he started pulling terrible, terrible things out of a fridge I’d only just noticed plugged in to one wall of the shed. “I thought you journalism fellers were supposed to be open to anything, collect experiences, all that?”

I admitted, he had me there.

“Mustard?” Rex asked.

“Lots,” I said.

So this was the point in my so-called career where I ate dog. To be honest, I found it pretty gamey.