Pico (Newgrounds)
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Pico is a fictional character depicted in a series of Flash based games created by Tom Fulp, founder of Newgrounds. Pico is one of three children created by Fulp, and still features in the Newgrounds GUI and elswhere throughout the site. He is Newgrounds' official mascot. Starting from 2006, Newgrounds celebrate a Pico Day on April 30th. Despite many videos not made by Fulp that use Pico, his appearance is overall the same: Red hair that is perpetually pointing up, a green shirt, brown pants and an inhuman propensity for violence (particularly with automatic weapons).
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[edit] Associated Characters
Pico has a pair of close friends (who it seems are also the only other classmates who survived the massacre in his debut flash):
[edit] Nene
Nene is Asian in appearance (presumably Japanese, due to her yelling "Hari Kari!!!" in one instance), suicidal, and popular at school (at least, before everyone died). She has her own flash by Tom Fulp titled "Nene's Interactive Suicide" [1]. In it, after prolonged kissing with her date the night before prom, she contracts herpes and decides to die with honor. The player can choose from a number of ways for her to end her own life. In "Pico's School" (see below) the three's debut flash, she can't stand the horror of the slaughter and asks Pico to kill her, which is optional to the player.Nene is potrayed as being loose in many submisions, especially those for Pico Day.
[edit] Darnell
Darnell is African-American, a pyromaniac, and a terrorist. Though he doesn't actually make a physical appearance in "Pico's School," he's seen teary eyed on a poster, running for class president with the tagline, "I've only got 5 years to live." Darnell has his own flash animation titled "Darnell's Pyro 101" [2] where he terrorizes the city with explosives while extolling the beauty of fire. The flash draws to an end, however, when a crashed plane he's observing explodes, ironically trapping him under flaming debris as he slowly burns alive. As he meets a figure he assumes to be God off-screen (the screen is white), he asks why God is holding a flamethrower, after which he presumably is set on fire again in the afterlife; the flash closes with a message from the author telling the viewer that it is important "not to mess with God's shit" because "he's a vengeful motherfucka" who "always gets the last laugh."
[edit] Games
[edit] Pico's School
Pico's School is a side-scrolling, shooter, Columbine-esque game created by Tom Fulp in 1999. In the game, several gothic students go berserk, and as Pico, one of the lone survivors of the massacre, spared because the leader of the killers had a crush on him(she is a girl since in pico's cousin2 the alien as two weak spots and said "have you ever dealt with a male) you must find weapons and items to aid you in your quest of escaping the school and ending the killers' threat. Through the course of the game, you battle a psychic with telekinetic powers named Alucard, a self-proclaimed ninja armed with a katana and night vision goggles named Hanzou, and at the end, a giant alien (the leader, Cassandra, whose plan the entire time had been to ultimately take over the world). The game satirizes the Goth sub-culture and teenage angst heavily with many caricatured stereotypes as enemies and with several barbs delivered by the protagonist as he dispatches them. Several of the game's themes, notably severe school violence and marijuana are viewed as positive (it heals you in the game), and were especially controversial given its release in such close timing to the Columbine High School massacre. From a technical standpoint, the game was considered by many to be a landmark in Flash 3 programming due to the extensive work-arounds that Fulp was forced to employ as a result of the language's (at the time) inability to support many routine programming functions. A 3D Fan remake was released on Pico Day, April 30 2006 on Newgrounds.
[edit] Pico vs. the Überkids
Pico vs. the Überkids pits Pico, Nene, and Darnell against three genetically superior clones called the Überkids in a cross between Rock, Paper, Scissors and Russian Roulette. Each time a character loses a match, he or she is forced to pull the trigger on his or herself. The odds are shown in the lower right corner (1 in 6 for the first shot. Every time a player pulls the trigger without the gun going off, another chamber is ruled out as the one having the bullet; while there are six possible chambers for the bullet to be in on the first shot, there are only five possible chambers on the second shot. On the sixth shot, the bullet can only be in the last chamber, and the person who loses the rock paper scissors match loses the round (when the unfortunate character puts the gun in the mouth, a Grim Reaper hovers above his or her head). Should the player win at least two of the three rounds, he or she will see the ending, which features the dead Überkids being dumped into a mass grave to feed the soil. The expressed moral of the story is that "breakthroughs in genomics may be able to prevent disease and retardation, but they can't find a cure for shit-ass luck."
An interesting thing of note in this game is each character pulls the trigger differently - Nene mimics oral sex, Darnell holds his upside-down (a nod to the movie-shown urban gangsta, firing automatic pistols held sideways), and Pico defiantly pulls his trigger twice or even three times each loss.
[edit] Bloodshed in the Big House that Blew
In this third-person shooter, "Bear" from "Bear in the Big Blue House" goes on a rampage, killing children, and Pico is sent to stop him permanently. The game caricatures most of the characters on the show, taking many of their kid-friendly qualities and twisting them, turning the characters into sexual deviants, drug addicts, and victims of mental retardation. The game was very popular, however, on February 7th, 2000, Tom received an e-mail from The Jim Henson Company (the producers of the show) asking him to remove the flash on the grounds that it went beyond fair use and parody [3]. According to Fulp, he believed it was entirely legal parody, but due to the polite manner in which they presented their concerns, he made cosmetic changes to the flash, darkening the bear's shade of brown and adding a combat helmet to distance the flash from its target material.
[edit] Pico 2
Due to the popularity of Pico's School, there was an outpouring of strong desire by the Newgrounds community for a sequel. In response, Tom Fulp started working on Pico 2 in August of 1999. After four months of working on the project, he scrapped it entirely, however, claiming that it "didn't live up to my vision of what the sequel to Pico should be" [4]. He had not abandoned the concept of a sequel though, and two years later, on October 26th 2001, Tom Fulp posted a preview with screenshots of his new attempt at making the sequel. The next month, on November 21st, he also posted several fan-submitted re-designs of the character [5]. He decided to go with Jose Ortiz's (also known as Mindchamber) rendition. Since then, very little information has been given regarding Pico 2, but there has been no indication that the project has been abandoned. For a long time, Fulp was very busy with the development Alien Hominid, a successful console video game based off one of Newgrounds' most popular flash, and cited that as the major reason he has not been able to work on many new flash projects for the site, including Pico 2.
[edit] Resident Pico
During Pico Day 2006, Tom Fulp submitted a mouse-driven shooter game called Resident Pico, where the player must defend himself from zombies with a gun. This game is directly a parody of the popular survival horror game, "Resident Evil".
[edit] Fan games/movies
Due to the extraordinary popularity of Pico in the community, many fan-submitted tributes and sequels have been made with varying degrees of reception.
[edit] Pico's Unloaded
Created by a popular Newgrounds animator named Mindchamber, "Pico's Unloaded" became a popular flash animation featuring this character. This flash animation is a spoof of The Matrix and features the Uber Kids.
"Pico's Unloaded" was also featured on a 2005 Knight Entertainment DVD production of Dr. Shroud, another popular Newgrounds flash animation series.
On April 30 2006, The pico's unloaded game was released. April 30 is also Pico Day and Tom Fulp's birthday.
[edit] Pico's Sweatshop
Help a Pico-lookalike escape from a sweatshop and go to America.
[edit] Pico vs. Zombies, Dusk of the dead
This is probably the goriest Pico tribute ever made. It was created by SickDeathFiend, one of the most bloodthirsty flash artists on Newgrounds and is a spoof on Dawn of the Dead. The movie shows Pico hanging out by a garden tools shop, when suddenly an excessive amount of zombies appear. Pico goes into the shop and kills them with a chainsaw and lawnmower. In this movie Pico is shown as a teenager instead of a child.
[edit] Pico's Cousin
This Pico fan game allows you to take control of Pico's Cousion Otis.
Otis appears be shorter than Pico, has black hair and usually wears blue. The game starts with Otis seeing an advert for the Playstation 2 version of Alien Hominid. Otis decides to go to mall to buy it. When he gets there, he finds a pair of pistols in a bin, takes them, and notices that the mall is being attacked by terrorists.
The game features a mix of puzzle solving and shoot-outs, as in Pico's School. Plus, you can go into the clothes shop and unlock a little dress-up game where you can drag clothes onto Otis. For a bit of humour, you can take Otis's shirt off, but if you try and take his trousers off, a message will pop up saying "NICE TRY, PERV!" (This probably makes fun of the fact that lots of dress up games on Newgrounds have the ability to take the character's clothes off, including their underwear).
[edit] Pico's Cousin 2
The sequel to Pico's Cousin. You play Otis once more, but this time he is going to a retirement home with his father to visit his grandmother. Otis's grandmother and father are kidnapped, however.
The aim of the game is to explore the retirement home and try and find Otis's relatives. The game has more complicated scripting than the previous Pico's Cousin game. An example is the fact that as Otis loses health, he starts to gain cuts and bruises. Another example includes the optional ability to replace the shotgun with an uzi after killing Cyclops' cousin.
Like Pico's Cousin 1, there is a bonus dress up game, however Otis will actually keep the clothes you put on him.
