Despite being on TV for nearly 30 years, with 28 seasons and over 330 episodes so far, there have been shockingly few video games based on the hit animated television series, South Park. That could be down to the fact that video games take years to make and the average South Park episode only takes a few days, meaning the usual topical pop culture references that fuel the show might feel positively ancient by the time a video game hits shelves. Regardless, a dozen South Park games have managed to buck that trend and actually get released since the show debuted in 1997. Some of them great and some of them..not so great. Here are the best, worst, and weirdest South Park games.
South Park
The first South Park video game ever made was an ambitious one, even if a first-person snowball fighting simulator didn’t exactly make a ton of sense for the brand. But since local multiplayer FPS games like Goldeneye were all the rage on the N64 in 1998, it’s no surprise that South Park got a similar treatment, even if the end result was much sillier. Developer Iguana Entertainment (known mostly for the Turok game series at the time) and publisher Acclaim Entertainment came together to create a solid FPS game packed with South Park references, including a recreation of the show’s theme song, multiple playable characters, and Kenny dying brutally before the title screen even appears. It’s not a great game by any stretch, and seeing the traditionally flat and hand drawn South Park characters as low poly 3D models was an odd fit, but it had enough South Park fan service to make it worth checking out at the time.
South Park: Chef's Luv Shack
A year later South Park: Chef’s Luv Shack arrived, this time with a graphical style much truer to the show’s 2D look. Developed once again by Acclaim, it moved away from first person combat, instead providing a game show-style minigame and trivia collection for Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman to compete in. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to play this game without other human players, so if you were an only child (or just a loser like Butters), you were pretty much out of luck. Additionally, the limited trivia question set led to a lot of repetition, meaning the joke got old pretty fast, and fans were once again left holding a licensed video game letdown.
South Park Rally
The third and final Acclaim Entertainment South Park video game once again delivered an experience that critics disliked and diehard fans merely tolerated, this time attempting to take on the popular kart racing genre with the South Park license slapped on. South Park Rally is a crude and ugly kart racer with unreliable controls and lackluster track design, but hey, you can drive Big Gay Al’s car and throw Mr. Hanky turds at other players, so at least there’s that.
Despite the show’s immense popularity, South Park video games ended up taking a seven year hiatus after this capped off Acclaim's trilogy of games, which probably pleased South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, seeing as they once said during a DVD commentary for an episode of the show: “Oh God, the South Park games were so bad. We were so bummed out on those, because we love playing video games.”
South Park 10: The Game
In 2007, South Park celebrated its 10th season on the air less than spectacularly by releasing a bare bones, Europe exclusive mobile game that referenced key moments from the show. South Park 10: The Game is a short and very no-frills platformer that looks like a fan made flash game. Aside from collecting hidden Cheesy Poofs in each level, there’s not much to do or see once you roll credits in under an hour. Still, it was nice to see somebody utilizing the license again, even if the final product was totally average. But you could play as a cow nearly two decades before Mario Kart World let you, so hey, there’s that.
South Park: Let's Go Tower Defense Play!
Two years later, Xbox Live Arcade got its own South Park tower defense game, pitting its main characters against waves of ginger kids, hippies, cows, and more as they tried to save their idyllic and weird little town. The 2D art direction, official voices and sound effects, and iconic humor elevated a pretty bog standard tower defense outing into an actually solid South Park video game.
South Park Mega Millionaire
Once again revisiting the game show setting for reasons that are unclear, 2009’s South Park Mega Millionaire - hot off the heels of 2008’s hit film, Slumdog Millionaire - was a mobile game that decided it was a good idea to strap roller skates to the South Park kids and put them in precarious platforming situations in front of a live studio audience. It’s not a great game by any stretch, but it does have one of the best South Park video game jokes of all time, as the kids survive a Japanese game show in hopes to win a ten thousand yen prize; unbeknownst to them, ten thousand yen equates to roughly sixty three dollars.
South Park: Tenorman's Revenge
2012's Tenorman’s Revenge is another Xbox exclusive South Park game, this time revisiting Scott Tenorman, a character from the infamous South Park episode where Cartman makes Scott eat chili made from the bodies of Scott’s own dead parents. Well, Scott Tenorman has returned to get revenge in video game form in this brief and mediocre platforming game which is only briefly improved by the occasional boss fight and its central plot device, which focuses on the kids having to recover a stolen Xbox 360 hard drive along with all of their precious game save files.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
As you can probably tell by now, the first 16 years of South Park games left a lot to be desired. Everything changed in 2014 with South Park: The Stick of Truth, a genuinely great RPG that, unlike previous South Park games, was made with direct input from the show’s creators. Known for their previous work on franchises like Fallout and Star Wars, developer Obsidian Entertainment built a fantastic and hilarious 2.5D role playing game that looked and felt almost exactly like an episode of the show. It’s not just one of the best licensed games ever made, it's also a fantastic turn-based RPG in its own right, and definitely the only game in the genre where you have to shrink down your character small enough to explore a human anus so you can disarm a bomb. Take that, Final Fantasy.
South Park: Pinball
Zen Studios, creators of the excellent digital pinball franchise Zen Pinball, created a set of South Park pinball tables that totally understood the assignment, mixing rock solid gameplay and hilarious show references to excellent results. There’s even a dedicated Butters pinball table, as well as Mr. Hanky inspired brown pinballs, in case you ever wanted to knock a bunch of pellet-shaped turds around to compete for high scores.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole
2017’s sequel to The Stick of Truth was The Fractured But Whole, which was probably/possibly legally as close as they could get to putting the word “butthole” in a video game title. Fractured But Whole is another fantastic and funny RPG, this time satirizing the superhero movie genre more than just role playing games in general, and once again looking exactly like an episode of the show. This time around the battle system takes place on a grid complete with environmental hazards like LEGO bricks that can injure characters when stepped on, and features levels like the Peppermint Hippo, a strip club complete with a lapdance minigame sequence, just in case you were worried that South Park would lose its edge in a Ubisoft published video game.
South Park: Phone Destroyer
That same year, South Park: Phone Destroyer was - you guessed it - a mobile game, which just so happens to be the only South Park mobile game you can still download and play on your phone today. Phone Destroyer is a free-to-play card battling game that does a surprisingly good job of playing to the strengths of its platform. You’ll receive believable calls and texts from Cartman, and you can unlock multiple endings based on how much real money players spend on premium microtransactions, even shaming you and telling you to seek help with addiction if you spend too much. More mobile games should do that. The world would be a better place.
South Park: Snow Day!
The latest (but hopefully not the last) South Park video game is South Park: Snow Day, a sloppy action adventure roguelike that simultaneously attempts to complete the story established in Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole, while also returning to the original South Park game’s snowball fighting roots. It’s a shame that Snow Day doesn’t even come close to being fun or funny, with IGN’s own review calling it “thoroughly unenjoyable,” and “uncharacteristicly toothless and unfunny.”
It’s been a weird, windy road for South Park games, but with the recent Fortnite collaboration and megadeal renewal of the show, something tells me we’re just getting started and that hopefully, more South Park games are on the way.
So what’s your favorite South Park video game ever made? What’s your dream South Park game idea that you’d love to see someday? Go on down to the comments section and leave your woes behind. And if you want more about video game tie-ins to highly successful animated sitcoms that have been on TV for decades, go check out my video about the best, worst, and weirdest Simpsons video games.
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