The Venture Bros: Shop and Destroy (lost multiplayer Flash game based on Adult Swim animated series; 2005)

The splash screen for the game.

Status: Lost

The Venture Bros: Shop and Destroy is a Flash game based off the Season 1 episode "Tag Sale - You're It!" of The Venture Bros.. It was supposedly released on December 12, 2005 on the Games section of the Adult Swim website, and a bumper to promote it was aired on Adult Swim at an unknown time, which was then found and uploaded on January 27, 2022 by YouTube user Blast Processing. The bumper contains three screenshots of the game: the splash screen, the character select screen, and a screenshot representing gameplay.

Art from the game posted to Andre Moore's blog.

Some character art was posted by artist Andre Moore to his personal blog on December 8, 2005, announcing the game's existence and his work on it. The post doesn't specify the name of the game; while there are two other known and found Flash games based off The Venture Bros. (Rough Justice and Flight Of The Monarch), the post's connection to Shop and Destroy is given by the character designs shown in the attached image, which are present in the screenshots of the game. The blog post links to the Games index on the Adult Swim website with a "?CN_sortBy=MULTIPLAYER" tag at the end, meaning the game had multiplayer functions. The site cannot be properly accessed through the Wayback Machine due to the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player. Later captures of the site, starting April 6, 2007 , show that Shop and Destroy is not listed in the Games catalogue, but the other two aforementioned Venture Bros. games are.

Gameplay

The character select screen, as seen in the bumper advertising the game.

The goal of the game is unknown. The character select screen gives the player the choice of playing as either Brock Samson, the Monarch, Baron Ünderbheit (who is highlighted) and Dr. Orpheus, though it also states that "it does not matter who you choose. They all do the same things". At the top of the screen, two mirrored meters can be seen with a timer marking ":15" between them. The meters have text that cannot be made out from the screenshot and two circles with pink skulls in them.

The gameplay screenshot from the bumper.

In the gameplay screenshot, the first meter displays the Monarch's head and the second one shows Dr. Orpheus' head in their respective circles, with text next to them that seems to read "TEST" and "TEST2" (possibly spaces where the names of the two players controlling the characters could be inputted). The two character portraits are in circles of different colors to further distinguish the two players, and the timer now reads ":30". The Monarch and Dr. Orpheus are shown at the tag sale, in a field with what seems like metal parts of different shapes and colors scattered across it. The Monarch is holding up an orange orb, which can be seen added to player one's meter.

A post on the Venture Bros. subreddit, made on May 19, 2021 by u/CruxVitux, talks about playing this Flash game back when it was still on the Adult Swim site, describing it as "a really wacky, fun multiplayer online game where you did something like bid for crazy venture bros items at their tag sale and then use them against each other in battle; I seem to recall that there were set bonuses, like getting all the pieces of the robotic armor.". The user also mentioned a "multiplayer server" being required to play it, possibly making the game unplayable even if it were to be found.