When you want to laugh your head off while having absolutely no idea what you're actually playing, you've come to the right place. Spit Wad Willy is something that looks like a school game from the era when educational software could bore your brain to tears without even trying.
It's a very unconventional piece from 1993, where you find yourself in the role of a boy playing with papers he tears up and spits out. Yes, you read that right – the goal is to throw paper balls (spit wads) at various targets on the screen. PCs of that time could barely handle it, DOS was in full swing, and the creators thought that this was absolutely the best way to entertain schoolkids with some fun.
The game works on a very simple principle – you aim and release your spitwad into the world. The physics are basic, the graphics are cheap at the level where the artist was thinking "well, it should have some content," and the sounds are these retro squeaks that'll stick in your head for a thousand years. There's no complex strategy here, just a cycle: you see a target, you throw, you hear a sound, you see the score. The fun factor here is about as varied as the lunch menu options.
This type of game was a specific category in the nineties – software that was supposed to teach kids something or keep them occupied, but it all just turned into one giant mess of incomprehensibility and boredom. Spit Wad Willy retains a certain naive authenticity of those years, when people thought every activity was fun if it had a score.
Playing it today is more like archaeological research than actual enjoyment. If you're curious about what educational entertainment looked like on computers in the early nineties – unsophisticated, straightforward logic, and tedium as part of the design – you can fire it up in your browser. It'll be a moment spent in a time that no longer exists, but it won't be a moment spent having fun.
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