Jimmy Hopkins lives a sorry existence. He’s been thrown out of every school he’s ever attended, and now he has t༒o put up with loa♌ds of posh pricks in Bullworth Academy while his mum jets off on her fifth honeymoon - for an entire year!
To put it plainly, Rockstar doesn’t miss. Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t click with me, personally, but I’ll be damned if I can’t admit how spectacular it is. I don’t play GTA Online anymore, but there’s a concrete reason as to why revamping it for next-gen co🐬nsoles seven years after launch is not just a viable option, but an inevitable one.
For all the cowboys and mobsters we’ve grown to problematically love, though💝, there’s only one Jimmy Hopkins - and I honestly believe that Rockstar’s most memorable setting to date was the schoolyard.
Bully launched for PS2 back in 2006 and tasked us with navigating the vast and varied labyrinth of contemporary high school in order to bully the bullies until they stopped bullying people. From beefheaded j෴ocks to sweater-vested teacher’s pets, it presented a caricature of adolescence - but an oddly tasteful one. It was a game about rebellion against bureaucracy and elitism, both in the classroom and in society at large. And it was wild - just look at the original trailer.
“You want me to steal your stuff back from a bloodthirsty mob of angry greaseballs?” That line pretty much sums up Bully… and yet it doesn’t. On one hand it’s a game centred on teenage delinquency, but it’s also far more nuanced than that. And I don’t mean “nuance” in the sense that it’s refined or snobbish - on the contrary, it leans into its inherent absurdity and insurrection to say, “Yeah man, fuck the teachers.” It might seem like a silly comparison, but Bully is not too contextually dissimilar to the likes of Ned’s Declassified: School Survival Guide or The Suite Life of Zack and Cody - except i🎃nstead of maintaining the family friendly “one use of darn per season,” Bully allows you to mill an egg at some twat’s stupid mug.
We rarely get stories set in this era of adolescence unless they’re emphatically aimed at pre-adolescents - Bully looked you in the eye when you were 12 years old and said, “I’m not going to talk down to you.” Ten years later, ꩵit’s easy to go back and enjoy the experience even more, not out of nostalgia for the game, but for a part of your life that it uniquely respects. That’s not just because of egging prefects, mind. Rockstar’s famous wit is as present here as it is in casinos or around campfires - and, as always, uselessly bureaucratic authority figures are the punchline.
In a world of GTAs and Red Deads - which is admittedly quite a fortunate world to live in - I really wish Rockstar would carve out a place for Bullworth Academy. Right now, it seems as if it’s fallen by the wayside - sure, it was reღ-released for PS4 in 2016, but the character models still looked as if they were carved out of a stone slab with a bread knife, and the things you could do - impressive as they might have been 14 years ago - felt pretty dated.
That’s why I reckon we should be given the opportunity to check out Bullworth Academy again now. We could play as someone new - maybe the school is trying to rest💃ore its pristine reputation after Jimmy Hopkins threw it down the shitter, and it’s up to us to make sure the stench stays stinky.