... along with 10 other tormentable celebrities who were slipped into games without their knowledge
Zac Efron is... the most charismatic stick figure ever We promised you Zac Efron, and by God, we're going to give you Zac Efron. The teen heartthrob and High School Musical star is already being adapted into a cartoony, digital form in the upcoming High School Musical: Sing It!, but that doesn't count as far as we're concerned: this article is about celebrity ripoffs, not licensed appearances. No, if you want to see Efron in a game, there's only one place to look: Pitfall.
Now, you might find it strange that the Atari 2600 classic Pitfall would have the foresight to make Efron its hero five years before he was even born. You might also be inspired to healthy skepticism by the fact that Pitfall Harry is a tiny white stick figure that possesses neither blond hair nor ripped abs. But think about it for a second: both Pitfall Harry and Efron are essentially vapid, dead-eyed blank slates with no real personality or charm aside from what their fans project onto them. They've both mastered walking in a straight line, and we want to feed them both to cobras. They're both completely uninteresting when removed from their natural surroundings (monster-filled jungles for Harry, musical theater for Efron), and they both possess questionable gator-jumping skills.
With that in mind, can there be any question that Pitfall Harry wasn't meant to resemble Efron? Or Paris Hilton? Or Tom Cruise? Or whatever vacant-eyed, featherbrained celebrity is popular at any given time? Of course not. That's why the simplest games are sometimes the best.
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After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.
