Golfer's Gallery

An Ode to the Art of Character Creation

There is a lot to be said about video games and the custom avatar options granted to us players. I'd presume that untold amounts of hours go into the creation of every individual piece of clothing, hairdo, eye textures, skin textures, facial structure algorithms, and animation suites.

All of this dedicated to two purposes:

Perhaps these two goals oppose each other, on a philosophical level. To truly allow a player to express themselves is to forsake all standards of Art Direction. One never knows when a player's expression demands, say, inhuman skin colors, disproportinately large (or small) body parts, or - in the case of Soulcalibur VI or Street Fighter 6, the ability to present oneself as a giant apple or wicker basket, obscuring one's form entirely.

That is all to preface that, here, things are once again going to get Weird.

Table of Contents:

Original Characters

(Do not... well, what do I care, steal them if you want.)

Ruby, the Recurring (and Rational)

(Everybody's Golf, PlayStation 4 [among others])

Antonia Justine "Ruby" Travaglia is sort of my "default" character, whenever I get to make a character in a video game. She is plain, unendowed, red-haired and grumpy. She might be the most sensible and normal-looking of anything that's going to appear on this page.

Done on commission by 0tacat. Kindly provided by Draayder.
Done on commission by Duelit. Kindly provided by The_Gunheart.

In other games, she has been a journalist, a mercenary, a gambler, a bare-knuckle brawler, an investigator, a Warrior of Light. But is she ready for her greatest challenge yet: This Guy?

She certainly looks ready enough. She has no idea who that shadowy character is, in front of that explosion, but she wants that man DEAD.

Dr. Quartzon

(Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, PlayStation 3)

I suppose it's tradition for character menus to include a Randomize button, for those folks who just don't care what they look like. But, thus far, only the Tiger Woods games have offered such a wide range of Randomize buttons, to cater to those who want to look normal, versus players who want to create hideous monsters.

I clicked Randomize exactly once and it gave me this man, who looks like he would have been a recurring villain on The Superfriends. I swear I changed nothing about him. He intends to win the PGA Tour by... I don't know, shrinking the other golfers, or deploying the spider drones, or... something.
Side note: PGA Tour 10 also has a bafflingly wide array of gimmick costumes for your golfers. It was made on the same graphics engine as Dead Space, after all, so it cost them nothing to port over the Isaac model, but the bunny suit is... a look.

And the moment they've been waiting for: Wide Jeremy

(Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, Mac OS X)

He's not overweight - he's just at the wrong aspect ratio. Wide Jeremy was another result from a randomize button, in a game that didn't have an Extreme All button. He mostly exists in this form because I enjoyed his facial expression so much, and the fact that the parting of his hair and the mustache kind of makes him look like the son of the Pringles guy.

This man wants to sell me some potato crisps. But it's primarily his dopey grin that makes him such a winner.

This man is just so psyched to be golfing. He just whacks that ball as hard as he can, and he doesn't even care where it went or how far. He's just happy to send it sailing into the wild blue yonder.

...as long as he doesn't throw out his back in the process.

Dent Compoundfracture: The Confusing Monster

(PGA Tour 2K21, Windows)

His hair colors are not consistent with anything genetically possible, let alone with themselves. It is biologically unclear exactly why his eyes look like that. His brow is more solid than the armor plating on an Abrams tank. We don't know why he plays golf, because Lord knows he's not very good at it. He speaks to nobody. Rumor has it he doesn't even travel to the course; he just climbs out of the hole on the 14th green every morning at 7 o'clock. The only thing we know for sure about him is what's on his clubhouse card: Dent Compoundfracture.

Oh, and he's a hat size MMXX-Large.

Cameron

(Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, XBox 360)

Cameron is a man for whom nothing seems to be going right. I did name him for his unintentional resemblence to Alan Ruck's character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I do note the coincidence of him also very much needing a day off. And not to golf.

Cameron heads off towards his next shot, roughly 20 yards away from his previous one. Cameron scores one of his only two pars this entire round. The rest are double, quadruple, and quintuple bogeys.

Golf has treated him extra poorly in the roughly half an hour he has lived. He bears numerous facial scars, for unclear reasons; the top half of his body doesn't seem to match the bottom half at all, and he is perpetually stuck in Big Head Mode regardless of whether a cheat code was entered for that or not. (Do games still have big head mode cheats? It's been ages since I've checked...

Casually reading the green: "Yup. That's a green." It's an uphill battle in more ways than one.
"My God, why have you forsaken me?" Looking like a lifeguard that just missed a beachgoer getting carried off by a giant seagull.

Life in itself is suffering, for Cameron. And perhaps one day he, too, will find his Ferris, and learn how to take control of his own destiny. And learn to smile. ...And learn to putt.

Duckman

(Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: Masters, XBox 360)

I could not think of a proper name to give this man; in-game, he simply goes by first name "Weasel," last name "N/A." But the more I look at him and his heavily pursed lips, and his flattened nose that barely reaches half their length, the more I'm convinced that this is a mutant half-man, half-duck. A kind of... Duckman.

Duckman from the front. This shot emphasizes his extremely tall head, with appropriately sized EA Sports ballcap giving him a remarkably Elmer Fudd-like silhouette. Duckman in profile, mid-blink. he might as well not even have a nose; he probably can't breathe through it with his lips stuck that way.
One aspect of Duckman that is not particularly duck-like at all: his Popeye arms. I'm not sure if Duckman actually has a caddie of his own, or if this man in the "N/A" vest just shows up and provides ad hoc advice to random golfers, like a modern-day Bagger Vance.

Golf cannot be Duckman's one and only specialty. Is he a private investigator? A product tester for some water-based chemical company? Are those his real lips, or did he get some kind of lip implants? Or perhaps he's just comically allergic to bees in some catastrophic yet non-lethal way? This information eludes me.

Beebis

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 (XBox 360)

Heheheh. Hey Rumphead, check this out.

Huhuhuh. We're totally gonna get sued, Beebis.

His name, according to the game, is TwoPoint Schmoe, a sort of sequel to my earlier Schmoe (see below in Costumes). But his design - this time not a production of the Extreme Random button - was supposed to be one of those anime delinquent motorcycle gangster types, with the enormous pompadour and all that. He kind of came out looking more like a bootleg Beavis. So yeah, yeah, Beebis.

Costumes

(Diet OCs.)

Yes, sometimes, a golf game might not let you design an entire golfer from scratch, but rather, play dress-up with them. More often this is a technical limitation than anything else, as a design team may not want to go to the trouble of ensuring all of the moving parts work together correctly. But there's still some interest to be had.

Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2

And actively rebelling against gender roles

The second of two Hot Shots Golf games released for PSP (well, not counting the absurdly expensive Coca-Cola edition), Open Tee 2 gradually rewards you with articles of clothing for doing well at the tournaments. And my personal favorite aspect of this is that, unlike some video games, Open Tee 2 is unafraid to give you access to every item of clothing on every character, regardless of gender.

Canon character Luke, wearing a very non-canon school uniform.

I do wonder if this game served somebody as an awakening to their own identity, but speaking as Literally Just Some Guy myself, perhaps it isn't my place to probe that deeply into it.

Schmoe

ProStroke Golf: World Tour 2007

The PS2/XBox game of ProStroke Golf doesn't offer much in the way of customizable characters. At best, you choose from one of five or six pre-made golfer models, and may then also change what color of shirt and hat they're wearing. That said, even a pre-made golfer has some value to me, because I'm the sort of person who makes my own fun about things like that. So, my color-changed golfer, Schmoe, at least gets some space of dubious honor in the Golfer's Gallery.

Every time he's looking towards the camera, without fail, he looks like he's found a sick kitten on the course. His appearance ought to be backed with sad violins. It's not in any way related to my already being 1 stroke over par by hole 3. He looked like that when he showed up to play this morning.

Course Design

Landscaping for Non-Landscapers

I have never bothered to go to the effort of designing an entire golf course. But I have occasionally made a point of at least goofing around with course design tools in the games that offer them, just to see what is possible with them. There might be communities around some of these, but I've never looked; I've got so much damn golf on my shelf that I'm probably never going to run out of courses to play. That said...

Jack Nicklaus Golf and Course Design - Signature Edition

This DOS-based game from Accolade includes a very intuitive little course-design tool, offering you pre-built landscapes, on which you simply draw from point A to point B to generate your holes around existing terrain features. Afterwards, defining fairways, roughs, greens, and tee boxes is as easy as using a paintbrush tool, as is placing trees literally anywhere you want - including on the green, if you are a jerk.

I happen to be such a jerk. The hole is in there somewhere... Make Jack Nicklaus say anything you want about each hole. I am told Foone does know about this game, by the way.

ProStroke Golf: World Tour 2007

Yes, this game gets to be on this page twice. It might not offer full-bore golfer design, but it does have a course designer. On a console game! In the age of still saving things to memory cards!

One stroke off the tee, Schmoe must stand by and marvel at the absolute nonsense on the horizon. The green is not just protected, but fortified, by several bunkers and clubhouses of various sizes.
As if that's not enough, the green itself is a veritable minefield. Schmoe, undeterred - or perhaps too distracted by his inner turmoil - presses onwards.

SimGolf (1996)

You know what, the image is already on the server, but I'm still not going to embed it directly on the page. Just know that somebody has already done the inevitable, that somebody was me, and that the result is not safe for work. To be clear: that is a penis. I have very much drawn a penis. Even I am not above puerile nonsense. Not all the time, anyway.