Mangia

Every once in a while, a game comes along that is so bizarre that it leaves players scratching their heads. If you can find it, one of the games is called Mangia. It was published in 1983 for the Atari 2600, and the gameplay is distinctly odd.

The player is in control of a little child who must consume spaghetti dishes that his mother has put in front of him. She will keep feeding him till his tummy bursts on the screen. The player can toss it to the dog that walks across the bottom of the screen and the cat that occasionally appears at the window to stop this from happening. However, the mother brings three times as much spaghetti the following time she comes home if she observes the pasta being thrown to the dog or cat.

The player is controlled by the joystick; pushing right allows the boy to pick up a plate of pasta, pressing left causes him to eat it, and either up or down causes him toss the pasta to either the cat (in the manual, named Frankie) or the dog (in the manual, named Sergio). The mother returns with more pasta to "punish" the player if the cat and dog are not around when the meal is thrown to them. Not being used is the firing button.

The spaghetti will build up on the table until it breaks if the player does not eat it or feed it to the animals. This results in the player losing a turn. The boy's tummy will enlarge if he tries to eat all the spaghetti without sharing any with the cat or dog, and it will eventually explode in a jumble of chunky blue pixels after shifting hues from blue to yellow to red.

A copy of the game fetched $1,000 on eBay back in 2012. Only a few copies were known to exist everywhere at the time. These days, they can be purchased for anywhere from $370 to $760, but only one or two are sold annually.