impenetrable organic slime, ideally black, blue or dark green in colour.
distinct from lava (harmful substance) and quicksand (impeding substance).
functions as level geometry but reads as an interruption of that geometry, as organic noise that perverts the clean grid and corridor environments of standard videogame usage.
implied to have some kind of negative moral valence - to be some outwards manifestation of sin, like the ooze in ghostbusters 2.
tar is produced by monsters but also produces monsters, in accord with the medieval doctrine of spontaneous generation for flies and rats.
classics of tar:
condemned 2 - this city is so corrupt… the homeless man to cenobite pipeline in condemned 1 has gotten worse under liberal mayors, and the criminals and perps have begun constructing immense tar labyrinths all over the city. these tar mazes give birth to tar men (fast but can be killed in one punch), as well as containing tar eggs (organic sacs hanging from the ceiling that make a tar skeleton jump out at you when triggered). this should’ve been what the death wish sequels were about as well.
every aliens game - the wretched xenomorph loves to sit in piles of its own waste, like a hamster. but i haven’t watched the first one recently enough to know for sure how much of the alien tar iconography was actually invented by the second movie, along with the notion of alien gender. what is the connection between the two? to answer this question you would probably need to watch True Lies, which i have not been able to persuade myself to do.
resident evil vii - ok so it’s “mold” but really tar in all but name, runny and glistening and piled up in big heaps. the tar is sentient and evil and later on you find a Tar Religion (european). there are ambulatory tar men but they seem a bit more durable than the ones in condemned.
plok - is plok “mascot horror”??? it starts out a more straightforward platformer about having to reach the end of the level, to eventually fight the guys who stole your grandpa’s flag (we all of us have a grandpa’s flag). but when you get home after doing this you find the previously pristine world map now covered in mysterious eggs and organic slime (referred to as “flea gunge”). soon plok is trapped in a nightmare world of sprawling puzzle-platform levels, covered in ever increasing heaps of tar, on an endless mission of extermination. when you gaze into the tar it also gazes into ye..
other examples: maybe the end levels of kero blaster to some extent. surely at least one of the contra games had this? outside videogames: the alien in the tng ep “skin of evil” is made of tar, which i guess makes that the titular skin of evil. the gary oldman character in the fifth element and the penguin in batman returns both begin dissolving into black ooze at various points to show their evil qualities. there is a movie called tar and a director called tarr (unrelated?). there are games where you play as slime, like gish and world of goo, but i’m not sure they give the “wandering an endless labyrinth of tar” feeling that i dream of, that i crave…
feel free to talk about tar here or to bring up your favourite examples of tar. there’s tar enough for everybody in the world, if we fight for it, if we try.
as far as i’m concerned the vg graphics arms race has been a device to further the rendering of tar. that said the examples i can think of are decidedly 2d:
tar is an implacable goop that can be destroyed only at specific points. if there’s a ‘tar mother’ in it then it grows slowly but steadily. it’s coming …
does this count if it’s green? maybe not. anyway this time the goop is you. i remember this being much more ‘western 90s console game’ than i was hoping
the goop is also you this time, except you’re an acrobatic tarball; very self-contained by comparison to the archetype. i remember being kind of impressed by the specular lighting
Death Stranding LOVES tar. Required game for tar connoisseurs
I can’t count the number of japanese games that use purple tar as an emanation of corruption coming from the antagonist. The default option for a final dungeon in a JRPG is to have it covered in purple tar
I am currently playing Zelda Echoes of Wisdom which uses purple rifts instead of tar, but they have the same function and you do get floating balls of purple tar which home in on Zelda to then splash off her and create evil purple tar monsters. Great
If Giger Alien is a tar creature than you have a huge subset of Giger Alien ripoff games right off the jump, final stages of most Contras, Dark Seed, Abuse, Scorn, etc etc etc…
Carrion I think should get special mention as the #1 game for providing the feeling of embodying tar
Speaking on filming the scene, Frakes noted, “The black slime. No one, especially present company and Levar [Burton] and [Michael] Dorn, nobody would actually get in this pile of shit. It was 100 gallons of Metamucil dyed with black printer’s ink. The only one in there with me, Wil Thoms; he was our special effects guy.”
Commenting on the production, Spiner quickly addressed Frakes, “There was an upside too. You’ve been completely regular ever since.”
Westmore stated… “It was a combination of printer’s ink and a water-soluble gel, but I don’t know what else was in it because it caused the glue in the costume — very strong shoe glue — to undo itself, and the costume would fall apart so we would need a new costume for the next day.”
Thank you for saying this so I didn’t have to. I will note that they really painted themself into a corner as any of the various tar/mud/gel mothers can at times spawn small breakaway enemies they call “babies”, I checked the official site and they awkwardly stepped around it by shifting the terminology to “tarstuff” whenever it gets a bit hairy.
