Sleeping Beauty vs. the World

Deep inside Cinderella's Castle -- Florida's new capital building -- Michael Eisner is hatching a diabolical plan to take over the world. If successful, Disney's New World Order will be led by Walt Disney himself, cryogenically preserved in a secret bunker beneath the Magic Kingdom.

So goes the scenario for Los Disneys, a shoot-'em-up from Jason Huddy, a recent fine arts graduate from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. The object of the game: Find the secret bunker, and pull the plug on Disney before he thaws.

Players must blast their way through crowds of camera-toting tourists, Disney characters, kids, killer clowns, homicidal mechanical pirates, and exploding Eisner clones. All of them produce showers of gore as they're mowed down.

The game is based on Bungie Software's Marathon Infinity, a 1996 alien shooter with tools to help players create their own versions, or patches, of the game. Like Marathon, Los Disneys is available only for the Mac OS.

The game was to have been available as a free download from the Los Disneys' Web site, but Huddy has been unable to cope with the overwhelming number of download requests. So he has taken Los Disneys offline until he can work out a deal with his Internet service provider, which he says is charging him for each download. In the meantime, the Macintosh Gamer's Ledge, a Mac OS gaming site, is offering the game on its Hotline server.

"I've seen better, but it's definitely unique and funny," said Mike Dixon, who runs the Gamer's Ledge. "It's a little cheesy. It's a bit clunky on the graphics, and it's a really big download. People might be a little disappointed. But it's free, and it's fun."

Dixon said Los Disneys reminded him of Barney Blaster, a screensaver that allowed players to waste Barney and his dinosaur friends.

Anne-Marie Schleiner, a writer and curator of a forthcoming online exhibition of game patches, said substituting monsters for children's characters is a common theme. "It pokes fun at the macho, soldier characters that appear in these games," she said.

The product of six months of spare-time work, Huddy said Los Disneys is intended to be cathartic. "Americans are angry," he said. "They come home, and they want to kill the boss. Instead of climbing a bell tower with a sniper rifle, they can play Los Disneys."

Huddy said he has nothing against Walt Disney the man. But Walt Disney the company is a perfect target for parody.

"Los Disneys could not have been done without a certain obscure, bizarre respect for Disney," he said. "After all, Disney was a farm boy who built a multimillion dollar entertainment empire."

It's the company's "cultural contribution, politics, and its money-driven" nature that give Huddy pause. "Disney has its own borders," he said. "The Disney cruise line takes people to the Disney-owned island. The rules change when you enter their property. Where will it stop?"

"It seems like another attempt to have fun at our expense," said Bill Warren, a spokesman for Walt Disney World. "But we will not be taking any action at this point."

After all, Disney gets the game's last laugh: As Walt's cryonic storage tank is shut down, it triggers the Disney Doomsday Device, which dispatches a battery of nuclear missiles to wipe out the world's great cultural centers.

"[Los Disneys] is a pretty comprehensive, near-future, apocalyptic view of Disneyland taking over America," said Schleiner, "but in a lot of ways, that's already happened."

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