The Ludonarrative Dissonance of the Late, Late, Late Show

Stellar Games are by and large one of the great also-rans of the gaming industry, putting out a few products which have gained some attention but with none of their game lines ever quite catching fire to the extent necessary to sustain them in the long term. You may have heard about their Nightlife RPG, which rolled out the whole “vampires and wizards and werewoofles kicking about in the modern day” concept before Vampire: the Masquerade and its kin did, but not in any way which really captured people’s imaginations. (I don’t see people getting anywhere near as excited about that game’s setting lore as I do about the finer points of the Camarilla vs. Sabbat feud, for instance.)

Out of the whole Stellar Games roster, the game which seems to have prompted the most discussion over the years – not much, at least in the Anglosphere (apparently the Japanese translation was a minor hit over there), but at least it’s been namedropped here and there – is It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show. This came out in 1989, the same year that saw the nationwide cable debut of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and there must have been something in the water at the time promoting geekdom’s already well-ingrained love of cheesy movies – for Late, Late, Late Show is an RPG of playing through crappy Z-movies.