Flexing the brevity muscle today with a short post to set the record straight on a weird video game history quirk I spotted online.

For reasons that aren’t important¹, I was looking up an extremely obscure 90s PC game called Team 47 GoMan. Absolutely no one has heard of this game before, which doesn’t seem to be fondly (or at all) remembered, which explains why there wasn’t all that much about it online. (“From the creators of Creep Clash” didn’t sell too many copies.) But I did see something strange. A lot of the search results online had a different title than the one I’d seen. Several of the top results called it Watchy—which I thought was weird, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the game at all. Even weirder, though, several of these sites had screenshots and videos of the game, but none of them used that “Watchy” title. So where did it come from?

The Mobygames page gave me a bit of a hint. It used “Watchy” as the primary title, while specifying that “Team 47 GoMan” was the title in other territories. Vaguely plausible, but at the same time not terribly satisfying. Is this US-developed game really so obscure in the US that the only screenshots and footage are of the alleged European/Japanese release?

I did some searching under the “Watchy” name to see if I could find any copies for sale, and did run into two copies. One is from a Canadian budget publisher, and one seems to be from Europe. Both of them have the Watchy title and what looks like similar characters, but what really caught my eye is the subtitle. The Canadian one calls itself “A Team 47 GoMan Adventure” - which feels like a weird title if this is meant to be “Team 47 GoMan”, isn’t it? The other box is even more telling though. It reads “A Team 47 GoMan Mini Adventure!”, which makes it read a lot less like an alternate title and more like a spinoff.

At this point I did what I should have done in the first place and checked the publisher’s archived webpage. Right there, on the homepage from 1998, I had the evidence I needed—a page for their “GoMan™ 3 Pack”, which included Team 47 GoMan itself along with a screensaver and, of course, Watchy. This, it turns out, is a spinoff like I thought it must have been from the title. It’s described as a 2D arcade action game, and from looking at footage that was linked to me when I was talking about it on Bluesky it’s a much simpler game than the actual GoMan.

But why was part of the internet convinced these were the same game? I think this may have accidentally come from Mobygames or another database like it, since many of the pages with the wrong title have text that seems to be copied and pasted from one place. The Mobygames page was created in 2009, and luckily the Wayback Machine has copies going back to 2009-2010 that show it using the Team 47 GoMan title. By 2013 the title had become Watchy, so someone clearly changed the main title somewhere in between.² Why? I suspect it’s that Canadian box I showed earlier, which comes from the only Amazon.com product listing with “Team 47 GoMan” in it. It sure feels like someone was looking the game up, found the box on Amazon with a different title, and assumed that was the primary game title in the US and so it should be the main game title on Mobygames as well³.

Even though this is correct on Mobygames now, I expect the long tail of this particular mixup to take awhile. The other online references to “Watchy” all seem to be copied from Mobygames, which is a common pattern online; a lot of game history is more or less rumour, copied from site to site without actually going back to check with sources. But these pages also don’t tend to update very often once they’ve been created, which means that even if Mobygames has been corrected I expect it to take a long time for the web to correct itself.

Which is why I’m writing this. If someone online finds one of these abandonware sites and wonders why the page is calling the game they just downloaded “Watchy”, at least they might find this post in a search engine telling them that it’s wrong—and why.