Can Haz Parody: Eat Lead Takes on All Things Gaming in Upcoming Shooter

One sign of a healthy medium is its willingness to poke fun at itself. This summer film fans got a shot of that fun with "Tropic Thunder." Early next year, gamers will get their turn with Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a third-person shooter that cuts up game genres, game culture and the industry itself.

The loving satire of games began when D3, Hazard's publisher, put up a mock fansite chronicling the history of a fictional franchise based around a gun-toting, carnage-loving Duke Nukem-style character.

The site, located at www.doyouremember matthazard.com is a not-so-carefully crafted play on early '90s craptastic web design, complete with hideous animated .gifs, fake broken images, and metal-plate wallpaper. There's even the requisite 'dead link,' which promises a preview of the script of an ill-fated Hazard movie adaptation but that sends visitors to a generic URL squatting site instead.

Hazard's gameography goes back to 1983, when he debuted in The Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land, which the site says Concerned Parents Magazine decried as "one of the [sic] unnecessarily bloody games ever made." Later installments include A Fistful of Hazard, wherein fictional developer Marathon software "added vehicles to boost sales"; Matt Hazard 3D, which became the National PTA's "digital public enemy #1"; You Only live 1317 Times, a parody of Rare's classic GoldenEye 007; Matt and Dexter, a riff on Naughty Dog's Jakk and Daxter; and Haz-Matt Carts.

Eat Lead, the only actual game of the bunch, will put Hazard back in action as he returns to prove himself the king of shooters. In addition to sharp satire, the shooter will feature "strategic cover" and upgradeable weapons. It will also include a "hack effects" system that transforms the environment during gameplay as Hazard's antagonist swaps game code on the fly.

Sam Guilloud, the mind behind Matt Hazard's marketing, including the faux fansite, told Gamespot that

The content of the game has definitely given us a lot of creative inspiration for our campaign. It's doubtful we'd be doing something like this were we promoting an emotionally compelling, fantasy-stylized RPG. We knew going into both the design for the game and the marketing that gamers have a great sense of humor and are hungry for content with well-executed comedy. Games with any level of humor injected in them have been few-and-far-between lately, and practically none that are self-referential to the industry. We don't want to give too much away yet, but if you've been a fan of what you've seen so far, then you won't be disappointed. And if not, there are still more surprises to come when we pull back the curtain all the way.

The curtain will fall in the first quarter of 2009.

[via Gamasutra]