Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 228: Console Launch Lineups

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

By patron request, Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey revisit the topic of classic console launch lineups from Atari 2600 to Super NES with Chris Kohler and Steve Lin. How did these first games speak to their systems—and to the state of gaming at the time?

This week in Retronauts, we're talking about Windows, but not the Microsoft kind. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this latest episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. and we're going to talk about video games this week, if you can believe that. And here with me this week, to talk about video games, we have lots of cool people, including... Hey, it's Bob Mackey. And... Hi, it's Chris Kohler, features editor at Kotaku. And finally.

Steve Lynn from Discord and the Video Game History Foundation. All right. It's experts on video games, and we are going to... I don't know, how deep and chewy do you think this is going to be? I feel like, I feel like this has the potential to get really nitty-gritty, but maybe it's just going to be kind of light and breezy. I'm going to say buckle in, listeners. Oh, my goodness. I think it maybe depends on your asses.

Four hours. No, as a matter of fact, not. Yeah, so this episode, we're going to be talking about console launches and launch window games. And this episode comes to us as a request from patron Jeff Vlasic who wanted us to talk about this topic. We kind of sort of talked about this topic in the very first Retronauts episode from the Kickstarter relaunch. It was like beginnings, basically. Wasn't that, wasn't that correct? Yeah, that was the first one.

Yeah. So now we're just repeating every episode. Yeah, basically we're rebooting. Ooh, like it to do Wario Land again next. This is, yeah, this is Retronauts episode one. We all sound much older, the Retronauts. The Retronauts, yes. It's like the Tomb Raider reboot.

There's going to be more QTEs in this episode. The acoustics are better this. time. Yes, that's right. No, so, and sadly no, Ray here this time. But, no, I think we're going to take a slightly different approach. For one thing, we're going to talk about a lot more systems and dig a lot deeper, I think, this time. And we're also going to talk not so much about the games.

We'll talk about the games, but really what the console launches represent for, you know, for that console. And also what they say about the context of when those games were released, when those consoles were released. were released, like the, what they tell us about the times and what the games industry was like, what people expected from games at that time, man, I'm having some trouble today. So I'm going to rely on you guys to prop me up because apparently I have no ability to speak words anymore. It's really bad. We're here for you. Yes, man.

Appreciate it. All right, so, you know, to put this episode together, you know, various wikis like Wikipedia and games wikis, as well as other articles on game launches, and just as many resources as I could find to kind of come up with the definitive game launch, like system launch title release lists. And some of this was actually kind of difficult to do. Steve actually stepped in and helped out with a few of these. But, you know, there's some systems I wanted to include, like the Fairchild Channel F and the MSX,

and there's just no way to know exactly which games were. available on those systems on launch day because, you know, the industry wasn't an industry back then for a lot of these things. Some of these systems were only available in Japan where they were actually documented better than the ones in America. But, you know, everything was just kind of muzzly and fuzzy and nebulous. And so we kind of have to, you know, just say, sorry Fairchild Channel F. We think you are neat and we respect you, but we don't know enough about you to give a

definitive treatise on your launch window list? Well, I think that's the one thing with, like, especially these systems from the 70s, you know, it's not like today where everything drops on the same day because of distribution and everything else. Like, you know, being where I was in Ohio, we might, it might have been weeks before we saw some of these things actually appear in the store. Right. Right.

I mean, you know, nobody was reading magazines, you know, waiting for the latest releases for the Atari 2600 in 1777. Nobody was putting down pre-orders. There was no such thing as a console. And that's, I mean, so that's probably what's really interesting about these very early console launches is that they didn't really know what it was they were making at that time. Because with the 2,600, it was like, well, okay, I mean, we might put this thing out and it might sell for one holiday season, maybe two before we have to replace it with a new video game machine. So we're, they're probably thinking the launch window, the launch titles for the 2600, I mean, it was possible that those might be the only games. that ever came out for it.

Right, yeah. And certainly there have been systems in history that only ever got the games that appeared at launch. Like you mentioned before the podcast, the Super Graphics. I'm pretty sure all of those were available like right at the beginning,

all five of those games. I don't know if that's the case. I'm not sure. That's a very short window. Yeah, I mean, even Virtual Boy with its 20-odd games, that was all, you know, in Japan within six months and in the U.S., just a little longer, like eight months. Yeah.

Like some, you know, by some definitions, a launch window could be six months. So, you know, that's it for that system. It's all gone. Same with, you know, we just recently did an episode on the epic game pocket computer. That was five games. And one of those was released like the following year. But that's pretty much it.

But, you know, something like the MSX, which was a computer and had a much broader spectrum of games across multiple formats, right? There was like disc and cartridge. Yeah. Yeah. Even laser disk. Yeah. So, like, how do you judge those? How do you track those?

It's just not possible. So we kind of had to, you know, fudge things a little bit or just abandon some important systems in history. And I think someday we should have a proper MSX episode. We had one looking at the Konami games on MSX last year. But there's much more to say about that platform. But for the moment, we're just going to go with the stuff that we can really lock down rock solid. And that begins with the Atari 2,600. It's hooray.

You guys have heard of the Atari 2,600, right? You might know it as the video console system. No. Nobody calls it that. Well, video computer system. Oh, video computer. That's right. It wasn't console yet.

It was a, when did the term console come into play? Oh, geez. Who knows? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, I mean, the term originally referred to, well, not originally originally, but like, you know, you had like a console television set or something like that, right? Right.

Yeah, it's sort of like the wood panel, like. Well, the Atari 2600 was wood paneled. It's true. And I'm sure it fit right in with the decor of the time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It did. I remember those big TVs that sat on the floor and they had like a big cloth speaker on one

side. And when you turned them off, a little pinhole stuck there for at least 20 minutes. The brownest living rooms you've seen. Oh, yeah. It was all earth tones back then. But not real wood. No, no. No, no. Only stickers. Wood decals. No, I mean, some of those televisions were wood and you did not move those by yourself. Right. Right. It was like a, you know, like a hope chest or something. Except one that if you open it up, it would shock you and kill you. Right. So don't do that. Anyway. If you opened up my hope chest, it would shock you and kill you. It's a totally different conversation. Yeah, so this is the context in which the Atari 2,600, launched into the world.

Indeed. As we were saying, like, we didn't know how long this thing was going to stick around. I certainly didn't know. I was two years old at the time. So what the hell did I know about anything? And who would even ask you? Right. No.

They weren't like, hey, Jeremy Parrish, future video game expert. What do you think about this new game system? It was more like, Jeremy, stopped peeling off the wood paneling off the walls. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. No, it was eating the paint off the walls. Right. Which had lead made with lead. Right.

Yes, yes. Chewing the chords. Yes, good times. And that gave us retronauts. Yes. If you are interested in learning about the Atari 2,600 lineup in chronological order beginning with the launch, I highly recommend Kevin Bunch's Atari Archives series, which is very similar to the Game Boy Works, Virtual Boy Works series that I publish, which, of course, are totally ripped off from Dr. Sparkle's Cron Tendo series.

It's just one big incestuous family. but Kevin's done a great deal of research into these games. I didn't get to watch through all these videos before this episode, so I can't give you someone else's encyclopedic knowledge of video games, but you can certainly enjoy it for yourself on YouTube, so check those out. But anyway, Atari 2,600 launched in September, 1977 with, what is this? 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 games.

Wow, just like the count. So what do you guys think of these launch titles? What do they say to you? Well, I mean, some of them. Maybe we should name the game. Yeah, yeah, maybe we should talk about it. Go ahead. All right.

So, let's rattle them off. Go combat. Air, Sea, Battle, Video Olympics, Indy 500, Street Racer, Starship. It's two words, by the way. Blackjack, one word, basic math, and surround. This strikes me as like two of every kind of video game. It's like a Noah's Ark of launch lineups. You got combat and air sea battle.

You have video Olympics and, I don't know, what we need to do with Indy 500. Street Racer. Oh, no, I guess. No, Street Racer and E500. Starship and Surround was Surround a, uh, a shooting type game? Uh, you know, I looked it up and I totally, I totally blanked out on what it is. Surround, I think, is the one that's sort of like you're in the cockpit. of the spaceship

Or maybe that starts Then you have like table games Like Blackjack and Basic Math So it really is This is sort of like This might be all the games We ever make for this So here you go

It's something for everybody It'll do math I love how basic these names are I mean besides basic math Like it's not like Casino Knights or something It's Blackjack It's not you know

Like the forgotten war It's combat Yeah It's not you know Amazing Race adventures. It's just Indy 500. Here's the one about racing. Here's the one about a spaceship. It's one about Pong. Also, it's like

the primordial ooze of every video game because surround is snake. Okay, that's what I thought, yeah. It's like here is every video game experience we could possibly think of in 1977. It's all 10 video games that existed at that time. Except Pong. There's no Pong. Video Olympics. Oh. Yeah. It's like a

bunch of Pong clones. You got Pong, you got hockey, the volleyball. Yeah. I mean, Indy 500 is based off the arcade game, I think like Indy 800 and like Sprint at the time and use the driving controller. Right, but they didn't have that at the

Atari launch, did they? The driving controller? It came with 8500 when you bought it. Oh, yeah. Okay, and well the Atari the VCS came with the joystick. It came with the tennis paddles. Yeah. But then the driving paddles, yes, came with Indy 500 and the difference was

that the driving paddles could be rotated indefinitely. Like the tennis one stopped you know to keep it on the screen, but the driving paddles, you just turn it, turn it, turn it, yeah. It's kind of like the wheel, right? We're just like with the wheel and just keep spinning around. Yeah, tell us more about your car, Chris. Oh, it's really something.

It's one of those Teslas, just keeps spinning and spinning. Yep, yep. Yeah, so, I mean, that is pretty much the basics here. Like, this is, you know, video games in their rawest form. I mean, I think if you looked at systems that came before this, like Odyssey 2 and Fairchild Channel F, you have even more basic type games, but actually I think Odyssey 2 had a little more like fanciful titles, something less functional in combat. Right.

Well, I think you have a lot of, I guess, for the time, graphical variety between these games. Because, yeah, everyone's seen Pong, but then, you know, combat, you have the giant planes flying around and, you know, Indy 500 is a racetrack. So I think it would, if you are looking at the back of the box, not the, the, the, fronts. You can see, oh, there's a lot more sophistication here than maybe what I'm used to seeing with just the dedicated pong clones or something. Yeah, Starship is the one I'm not familiar with here. Is that just like a shooter, basically? I think that one's the cockpit one I was thinking about. Okay. Okay. So that's kind of a first-person view, which is brave for the, you know, the very beginning of the Atari 2,600. That's challenging. Yeah. And I think, well, something that shows up in Kevin Bunch's videos about this is a lot of times. times this was the first game by the programmers, right?

Like, hey, make a game. So this is all the first try for a lot of people. Yeah, there were a lot of tricks that programmers discovered about Atari 2600 and making those games function and good. And they weren't quite there yet for the launch. But on the other hand, you know, hey, I was controlling things on my television. How wild was that? It wasn't just, you know, Ted Cople talking at me. It was me playing Olympics with little blocks. Yeah, for this, it was like Nobody was doing any of the fancy David Crane stuff where, like, you know, they're using the elements of the 2600 in ways that they weren't meant to be used. This was all using those elements in the way that they were definitely meant to be used. So we jump ahead five years.

We're going to stick with just the Atari family here. And we get to the Atari 5200, which is twice as mini as the 2,600. But actually has nothing to do with the 2,600, which is kind of weird. But I think, you know, you look at the lineup, the very small lineup of games for the 50s. which I think might also be a problem, just that there were so few games. But you have a very different selection of games. You have three games. You have Galaxian, Space Invaders, and Super Breakout.

What do all these games have in common? Arcade. That's right. Good job. Go to the front of the class. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are all ports of arcade games, which is strangely lacking in the original

2600 lineup, I think. Steve, you said Indy 500 was more or less a port of... Yeah, well, there was an indie... I think it's Indy 800, which was an eight-player. It's sort of like a table, and everybody was standing around, and then Sprint was like two-player, so it's pretty much like arcade ports. Right. Was 5,200-883?

82. 82. I feel like 80-82 were like super pivotal arcade years, like all the definitive mega arcade games came out around that time, so I can see why, and even more so with the next console. Although, interestingly, all of these arcade games... Kid games are from the late 70s. Yeah.

But, yeah, at the time, it was post Pac-Man. It was post-Dawkey Kong. It was, you know, the idea, there was definitely got to be such thing as a video game console now because the Atari 2,600 had lasted for five years at that point. It was still, you know, very, very successful. So at this point, they were probably looking to really make a splash. But, I mean, it was like the franchises were being born. So it wasn't about, they didn't have to have a Pong game on the 5200 anymore.

They didn't have to have a math game. What they needed was recognizable names of games to launch their system with the cell. Because what were people looking for? They were saying, I want the system that is going to give me the arcade perfect versions of my favorite arcade games. Calico Vision was pushing that very hard. 5200 was the answer to the Calico Vision. And they were like, we got here's space invaders, here's super breakout, whatever. I guess people select it.

And Galaxian was the other one? Yeah, I mean, that's like, compare, dare to compare. Look at the 5200. Look at the arcade. We're matching the arcade. You know, this is the super system that you need. Like, Super Breakout's the pack-in, right? And it's probably out of the three the best pack-in because of the analog controller.

Oh, God, that thing. It's a terrible controller, right? Worst. I think, like, out of those three games, I mean, you're probably going to have the better experience with breakout than anything else. Well, also, Super Breakout is an Atari game. It is the only one in this lineup that is an Atari game. And the interesting thing is that the other two games on this list are Japanese developed games. I mean, they were developed by Atari.

Ported by Atari. But they originated from Japan. Yeah. At the time that the Atari 2,600 launched, that wasn't a thing. Like, no one cared about Japanese games. No one even in America, I don't think there was any recognition that, I mean, I can't speak for myself. But, you know, my impression is certainly that, you know, video games were Atari. And, you know, whatever companies were coming out of Chicago.

In 77, all anybody was doing in Japan was just bootlegging Atari games. Yeah. NAMCO was like bootlegging breakout. Yeah. I mean, Space Invaders was 78. Galaxane was 79. And, you know, those were two kind of the watershed games for Japanese development. So I think it's pretty significant that they show up on Atari system at launch. Because, you know, Atari went to the trouble of licensing those games in.

Yeah. And I don't, also, you know, they didn't have the relationship with Namco, but not with Taito. The thing is those were games, and I believe that Galaxian is also the case, where Atari licensed it exclusively. So you could not play Space Invaders on Kaliko Vision. Like 5200 would eventually have, wait, no, 5200 didn't have Donkey Kong, did it? Mario Brothers. But like Kaliko Vision had Donkey Kong. So Kaliko got that.

And then Kaliko made the Atari 2,600 version, right? But then 5,200 Atari, there was a land grab going on. Atari got Space Invaders, Calico got Donkey Kong. Well, it wasn't just a land grab. It was also a way for each platform to define itself for, you know, to say, like, hey, we've got this one. Yeah, I think it's very important that licensing is now a big deal at this point in time. And it's not just the experience. It's also the name.

Like, they could have easily launched this with their version of Space Invaders called, like, Alien Attack or something. But they knew, like, if it's as good as Space Invaders, it won't matter because it needs the name Space Invaders. That's what people play. Right. And also Space Invaders specifically gave them a point of reference against the 2600 because that was on the 2600 and was kind of a very high-selling game, if I'm not mistaken. It's kind of, you know, one of those, it's a very iconic version because it has all the weird, like you throw the dip switches on the console and you get like invisible aliens or like moving shield or things like that. So there's all these different variations. Whereas this, I don't know if this had all the variations. I didn't look into that. But it definitely. looks a lot better. It looks a lot more like the arcade version. The $2,600 version, not so flickery. Not so much.

I mean, just the shapes of the aliens themselves, which are so iconic, they were like, what are those? Is that an ice cream cone? Is that a hamburger? What is that? And so, yes, to correct myself, well, not correct myself really quickly, but I, yes, Atari

developed a version of Galaxian for the Kaliko Vision, which was released under their Atari soft banner. The big orange boxes, right? Right. Yeah. Yep, yep. They did centipede and all that. Yeah. Hmm. Cool.

Not much came out for the Atari 5200. No. No, there were under 100 games. Yeah, it's like 80 something. Uh-huh. Yeah. Got to get that Bounty Bob strikes back. Yeah.

Probably lowering in price every year for a cartridge copy. What's the deal with Bounty Bob strikes back? Just very low print run. It's the 5200 game that's the hardest to find. And is it actually hard to find or just somewhat hard? It is pretty hard to find. I mean, you can always find one. somewhere for sale if you want, but it's just a really tough one.

Okay, so yeah, sticking with Atari, we jump ahead to 1986 in the Atari 7800, which is 50% more than the 5200. Right. But actually much, it really is like three times the 2,600, because unlike the 5200, it is backward compatible with the 2,600. Yes. The problem with poor Atari 7800 is that it was supposed to have debuted, I believe, in 1984. And the games industry went, right. And Atari was like, well, we can't do that now. Well, 84 was when the Tramyels came in, right?

And they wanted to make Atari into a computer, personal computer company primarily to compete with their former company, Commodore, I think. And so then they were just like, we're not doing video games anymore. And then the NES got really popular. And they were like, we're doing video games again. Get those. Good thing we have one just sitting in the warehouse. Literally just have them sitting around. I believe that's what happened.

Yeah. But it's really true. So now they're trying to compete with the NES with literally a thing they made a night and Yeah, it's really a shame because I, you know, if this system had launched in 1984, I think it would have done really well for itself, you know, aside from the fact that the market was kind of indulgems, but maybe, you know, a console of this quality would have turned things around. Maybe people would have been like, oh, hey, this is, this is pretty good. I like this stuff. It's also a backward compatible. Yeah. Right. Like, all of a sudden, you know, you can use all your cartridges that you bought for $2,600. That's great. And this is a really strong lineup of arcade games for 1984.

For 1986, maybe not so much. I mean, some of these games came out later on NES, but it's not like that was what the NES was hanging its hopes on. I mean, I think we're probably all in agreement in this room that, like, the video game industry would have revived itself anyway. Like, the crash did not last for that long. It was really only kind of, like, bottomed for like a couple of years. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like people would have started buying and playing home video games. Nintendo came in at the right time to really succeed.

And, yeah, so they get a lot of credit for being canny. just, I guess, being lucky, dumb luck. Yep. But, yeah, at any case, 7,800, not so dumb luck. It, yeah, it, I feel like it should have done better. But, but, yeah, this lineup of games would have been just, like, jaw-dropping in 1984. Dig-Dug, Gallagher, Ms. Pac-Man, pole position two, and Zevius. These are some damn good games.

There's quite a bit of Namco representation. Actually, it's entirely Namco representation in here. 100% It's all Namco But by this point His pole position was Yeah NAMCO

Yeah Yeah yeah yeah I mean Yeah Miss Pacman was actually I guess midway If you want to be technical But yeah

But yeah I mean That's something Well Atari and Namco Had that Relationship thing going on They did It's so hard to

Like for me to explain It's like Anything involving Atari and other companies Like Midway I don't know why I just have the hardest time like wrapping my head around it because they just had, they were so incestuous.

That's incestuous. They were so promiscuous. And a few, you know, in a few years later, they'd be, you know, kind of teeming up on Tengen, basically, to try to unseat Nintendo. I forget what the marketing for the 5200 was like. When we looked at the commercials for this last year when we did an episode about console marketing, I believe this was the one where all the commercials were the kid was like in the arcade. And it was like, take the arcade home with you. was all very focused on, you know, this is the arcade experience.

I think this is also the one where they had the, they were on the beach and they plugged the game system into, like, it's basically like it's projected over the, over the ocean. It was kind of like Sandra Bullock in the net. Yeah, I could order pizza with it. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, 5200, I mean, I remember when a friend got it and it, like, Pac-Man looked great, but it was also, we were just like, these controllers are weird. Also, I can reset the thing from my controller. What the hell's going on here? Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then also, of course, the 7800 controllers were absolute garbage. They weren't as bad as a 5200 controller. No, but that's damning them with faint praise. I mean, like, they were just actively painful to hold. Yeah. That, like, ball on top is like a rollo or something, right? I miss this whole evolution.

My first console was the VCS or 2,600, because they were just everywhere and extremely cheap when I was a kid, and then I went from that to the NES, and I missed everything in between, like, hands-on experience. But honestly, it happened to a lot of people. Yeah. I think the 2,600 was incredibly popular, but, like, we look at all of these other consoles that came out, and it's important to remember that, like, all, none of those consoles even touched the 2600's sales.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But the 7800 is interesting. Like, looking at this lineup, all of these games except Pole Position 2, came out on NES, like a couple of years later, either 87 or 88. I guess Digdugg didn't actually come out in the U.S. did it. It was Digduck 2 that came here.

Yeah. So you had better versions, I would say, than some of the NES versions of those games. Yeah. Like the 7800 was pretty strong. And unfortunately, I just feel like these were the wrong games in 1986. The console market was beginning to strengthen and arcade games had come a long way since Zevius and Pulpositive. too. Right.

Well, plus it was still using VCS audio hardware, right? And so, I mean, it was, hey, that was made, not great, nine years before the system actually was launched. They looked old. Even the games, too. I mean, you know, it just looks old. Even anything on 70-100, it just, it kind of like has that Atari design and look to it. And it just, you're comparing this stuff to Super Mario Brothers at the time.

And it just didn't compare. Yeah, so that's kind of the Atari trilogy of launches. I mean, we could talk about the Jaguar, but why? Yeah, just like missed opportunities, it feels like after the 7, the 2,600, like, things could have gone better and should have gone better, but history just didn't work out that way. You don't want to do some LSD and talk about cyromorph? Is Trevor McFer? I can see the people waving to me. It's amazing.

Trevor McFur, is that part of the lineup, or did I have to wait for that? I don't believe, I think you had to wait for that. Come pat the cat. Compat the cat. Yeah, so Atari's main competitor, back in the golden era, shortly before the crash or during the crash of the U.S. gaming market, we had Mattel with Intellivision, which was a, you know, it was kind of the first volleys in the console wars.

Like, hey, our hardware is better and cooler. We've got George Burnton telling you about how lifelike our stick figures are versus Atari's stick figures. He was leading the charge. He was. And his very tweety jacket. He seemed like such a nice guy. and yet here he was, leading us down to use Netflame Wars. He was trustworthy.

He seemed it anyway. Yeah. So the Intellivision was, in my opinion, it's like a smaller scale version of the 2600 launch. It's kind of the same thing where you've got just like basic games across a variety of genres. Whereas Atari had like two of each. This was not the Noah's Ark. This was the Parthenogenic version of Noah's Ark. These console games will reproduce on their own.

There's math. You've got to have, you can't launch a console in the 1970s without math. This is a licensed math game. They got the electric company license, which was all the hotness. So, Spider-Man's there. The Bloodhound game. Well, so that was definitely what Mattel with its resources, and really not only resources, but like being an established player in the space, they already had relationships with a lot of these licensers. So they could go and say, okay, it's going to be, it's going to be.

It's going to be, hey, A-B-P-A-B-P-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B-A. That's right, the American Back-Gam and Players Association, baby. The number, number one name, possibly number two name in Back-Gam and Player Associations. And so they got the licenses for everything they could. It was like it was licensed. It was MLB baseball. It was whatever soccer group, I don't think it was FIFA soccer, but it was like whatever. N-A-S-L probably soccer, you know what I mean?

any license they could get and indeed the electric company math fun right well i think there's a couple things with this launch lineup that you can see is uh they're really leaning into the keypad right um because we're like hey we've got this because it had a keypad right hey we have something that that isn't on the Atari unless you buy star Raiders yeah um and i think the other thing you mentioned it's metel uh they test marketed this for a long time oh really i think it was a couple months at least in like a couple markets because it was i mean that was how Mattel, I think, operated with a lot of their toys, right? It's like, yeah, let's put it on a couple shelves and see what happens. So you see a lot of that, like, test hardware, like the

computer keyboard and the cable and all that other stuff. It's because they had the resources to do that. So you jump ahead a year or two? What year was that? Oh, no, three years to the Colico Vision. And to me, this is a proper console launch, as opposed to everything else before this. I mean, 5200, no, that was before this, but are around the same time. time, 7,800 biz later, but there's a ton of games here. What is this? Two, four, six, six, eight, ten, twelve, a dozen games, some of which are highly recognizable arcade titles, some of which are obscure arcade titles, and some of which

are original, and also some of which are based on toy properties, I think, you know, like Cabbage Patch. Oh, no, not Cabbage Patch, but Smurf. Yeah. Like, I guess that wasn't technically a toy, but it was, you know. It was a multimedia juggerna, to me, it speaks to Colico's core strength. which was toys. Yep.

And something that they would definitely leverage, you know, for future game releases. And I actually have a copy of, whenever I think about this, this has nothing to do with anything. But Colico did. Killio, of course, would do Smurfs games for other consoles. And they did one for, they did this game, Rescue Gargamel's Castle for the Atari 2600, too. And then also, I have a copy, and this is the weirdest thing. It is Le Strumf, right? The Smurfs.

For the Atari 2,600, it's from. France and it's not even pal it's CCAM. It's for the CCAM television format. You don't hear about that very often. No, you do not. It's my only CCAM game. Yeah. But I did, we definitely did the get Smurfet to take her close off

trick which you may or may not know about. I know it. It's when you like, kneel down. No, yeah, it's just when you get to Smurfette if you instead, instead of rescuing her, leave the screen from the left, a weird graphical glitch happens, and her white dress is replaced with mostly blue pixels. It's not an Easter egg.

It's literally just like a glitch that nobody found because why would you leave the victory room? And then people are like, oh, if you, the programmers put it in that if you leave the room instead of rescuing Smurfette, she takes off all her clothes in an effort

to get you to come back. The original hot coffee or something. Right, yes, exactly, exactly. And then they had to rate the game. I mean, she is French. Yeah, it's faithful to the Original comics. It's true. Yeah.

Yeah. That, what, like not like a hot smurfberry juice or something. Yeah, yeah. My goodness. You know, the other interest, we talked about this earlier, like the console exclusives or licensing. Like, these are, there's a lot of like Exitie and Universal games in here. And, you know, the box art for ColicoVision. I've had like the arcade machine.

The photo of the arcade machine. Yeah, it's like, whoa, hey, this is the game I'm getting. And it's a, these are sort of like the B tier, like arcade games, right? They're not the sort of mega-eons. I mean, Xaxon. Well, yeah, so, yeah, the Sega stuff, like Xaxon and Turbo, right, are on there. But I think the other stuff is, like, I don't think I ever saw Cosmic Adventure in the arcade growing up, but I love that game on Calico Vision.

Well, again, I think that Colico at that time was only able to go out and get the B-tier stuff, you know, because people were exclusively, they were getting exclusive licenses to the arcade games, right? So, like, Atari got Space Invaders. Atari got Pac-Man. So Calico had to go in and kind of get the... the B stuff. And they were able to, I mean, really foresight get the Donkey Kong deal. Although, again, that lasted

for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., but they did not get Mario Brothers. Or Donkey Kong 3. Or Donkey Kong. No Stanley the Bugman for you, Calico Vision users. It's such a Calico kind of name too. But still, it's a killer, killer launch lineup, for sure.

And when you consider that, again, the Calico Vision games really, it was a great, really powerful system. The games looked like the arcade versions, you know, it was pretty good. That's what we thought at the time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the Calico Vision graphically can almost give the NES a run for its money.

Yeah. And some of those games look really good. Like, I played a lot of Zaxon back in the day. We had a Colico, Clego Adam. And the Zaxon port, obviously not arcade perfect, but it got those isometric visuals in there. And, you know, once I figured out that you press up to go down, the game was a lot of fun. And, you know, I would play through and get blown up by Zaxon at the end. And it was great.

But I love that Space Panic is on here. I forgot that that ever came to a home console, but that's, you know, that's like the precursor to load runner right there. It's a very sort of formative proto-platformer that has largely been forgotten, but there was on Colico Vision. Yeah, you should actually, if people go back and watch a video or play it, the sound effects on Space Panic are hilarious where he's like digging the hole and then filling in the hole. It's like this real, like, farty sound. Oh, nice. I wonder what he's filling it with Yeah

So besides obviously Donkey Kong and Zaxon There are some interesting games here Like yeah Like you said you know They're kind of beat here But I still remember Ladybug and Mousetrapping the arcades And you know Both use the keypad right

I don't know I never played those on Coligo Vision I just remember the arcade games Caligo Vision Well certainly the arcade game ports Didn't really need to use the keypad Yeah it was like select your game mode With the keypad

And then you never touched it again And we use those stupid spongy buttons on the side of the controller. Yeah. I think Ladybug or Mousetrap, where you have to open the gates and then there's... I think that's Mousetrap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all these controllers were designed around the joystick, right?

You had to have a joystick on your controller. So it was like, well, how do we make this more comfortable? But, you know, it would be a little while until they rethought that. I think the buttons on the Kalecovision controller could have been okay if they hadn't had that spring-loaded element. Yeah. They were so mushy. Even as a kid, I didn't like them. So we have turbo on here.

Does that mean expansion module 3 came out at the same time as the system? Possible. I think so. And I think the expansion, I think they were all supposed to, like all the expansion modules were supposed to come out at launch. Oh. But there was the kerfuffle over the Atari backward compatibility module. Was that number two? No, that was one.

One. Atari was one. And then the driving was two. Oh, right. And the expansion module 3 turned it into an atom. Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

Oh, no, no, no. The two was the triangle, right, with the steering wheel and the gun in it? No, no, no. That was the Calico Telstar. Oh, that's right. Two was just the racing wheel. Yeah, and it had a little... And you're right, it came with turbo.

Right. So entirely possible that they launched them all at the same time. Could that be true? It might be just because, like, they were probably thinking, like, okay, well, the Adam came later. We need people to... Oh, yeah, the Adam came later, but the first two. Might have been the same time. Who knows?

I mean, really, it's like... They needed to convince people to not give up their Atari 2,600 because people were like, oh, but I've invested so much into this library. They're like, okay, fine, you can play your Atari games on the Kaliko Vision. And they got sued, and they lost. I remember a Christmas where I got the roller controller and it came with Slither. Yeah. And so that was probably 83, I'm guessing. So, yeah.

Sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a great lineup for Kalikovision. Yeah. I mean, it's an impressive system and an impressive start. It's too bad. the, you know, the entire market collapsed underneath it because it probably could have done a lot better.

Yeah, and then Calico collapsed and then, yeah, it was just done. At least they had cabbage patch deline on for a while. That was, I mean, it was basically pitfall, right, for, but it had a cabbage patch kid in it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just mean, like, the company had the cabbage patch franchise to lean on for a couple of years. Right, right, right. Otherwise, it had been really rough for them. Yeah, I know, Mattel had all these toy licenses.

And then meanwhile, poor Colico's like, we got Smurfs, we got cabbage patch kids. Hope cabbage patch kids never go out of style Yeah We can go back to our leather roots or something Yes I'm the less said about Cabbage Patch Kids Pretings together

Who says Speaking of 1983, there's also this little game over or this little system over in Japan called the family computer. Sounds like jump. It had a huge lineup of, oh, wait, three games. So they were all Nintendo games, though. They were all kind of cool.

Oh, that's good. We've talked about this. I've talked about this. I'm going to let someone else talk about it. Oh, okay. Well, the Famicom launched with Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye, which I think I was on like a bit mob podcast back in the day and won a trivia contest for knowing those things.

But yes, those are the three launch titles for the Nintendo Famicom. And again, very similar to the Atari 5200 and really the Kaliko Vision, it was like, this is the system that will replicate these arcade games that you love in your home and they are, you know, as arcade perfect as you're going to get, here you go. And, you know, it was basically the hardware was literally designed around Donkey Kong. Yeah. And even then, Donkey Kong didn't have enough memory on the cartridge to get the entire game in there. But three stages that were almost arcade perfect was pretty good, better than anyone alt had.

Right. And really, they weren't like arcade. It was, it was, they had to reformat them for the horizontally oriented television, essentially. Right, but they compacted it just like a few pixels, and Donkey Kong's head is like brushing the top of the screen. Yeah, yeah, you get the idea. Good job of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's pretty consistent.

Yeah, I think you're right, Popeye is the one that suffered the most. In fact, I never had them, like, next to each other, but once I, like, had looked at the arcade game next to the NES game, I was like, wow, I didn't realize it was this different. Yeah, Popeye and the arcade ran on this really, I don't know if it was the hardware that was weird, but the graphics of this system were really strange

because the backgrounds are really chunky and low-resolution like Atari 2,600 resolution. They're just like blocky, simplistic outlines of like a village or a ship or something. But then the sprites are like super high-res. They're really large and they're very detailed. They're like, they look. It's odd looking. Yeah, we just did that New Super Mario Brothers podcast.

And you were complaining about like New Super Mario Brothers You where you have Polygon Mario looking bland in front of like the super detailed Vincent Van Gogh inspired backdrops. It's kind of the same thing. It's like these, these, like, 2,600 blocky background with, like, you know, next generation, super detailed characters with, like, black outlines and large sprites and pretty good animation. They just could not get those sprites on the NES. The backgrounds look very consistent. They're blocky. But the characters are tiny and they don't have the outlines and they're, they just don't have the detail.

So it kind of, it does suffer a lot. But Donkey Kong, that way. Well, fortunately, nobody really wanted to play Popeye on this. thing anyway. Yeah, Popeye. I had Popeye on Kaliko Vision and I loved it. Yeah. I had these sort of rose-colored glasses because, like, you, Bob, I kind of went back and

like, well, this looks nothing like the arcade game, but when I was playing it as a kid, I'm like, oh, it doesn't matter that Popeye is just like a white blob that's running around the screen. But Donkey Kong Jr. had all the stages. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah, it didn't make a lot of compromises in terms of visuals either. It's not quite as nice looking as the arcade, but it's pretty close.

Do we like this game? I just want to know in the room. I can't. I can't, I tried it again on Switch and I safe stayed my way through it and I just, I don't like it. Yeah, I played it again at Midwest Gaming Classic at the arcade and I give a chance. Popeye? No, Donkey Kong Jr. No, it's weird. Like I gave it a pretty downbeat review on NES works, my video, and I get comments, you know, once every month or so from someone who's like, this game is great. I love this game. It's so much better than the original Donkey Kong. I don't know what your problem is.

So it has its fans It probably has my favorite arcade art of that era Oh yeah But the cabinet art is not the same thing as the game Also evil evil whip Mario Yeah right right Two Mario's I like stage two

I really like where you have to unlock When you push the keys up The stage up is pretty good Oh yeah I think it depends on Oh I guess it depends on which cycle you're playing Yeah I guess and which region's version And what the dip switches are said to

Yeah I guess they made minor changes Like some of the quote unquote cut scenes are missing from Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., like minor snips. Like the helicopter and everything. Yeah, and like you don't see the two Evil Whip Mario's carrying away Donkey Kong or whatever. Or the cutscene where they just beat the shit out of him for like 30 seconds. It's a QTE. I guess, what, the last thing on the Famicom.

This was the Square Button launch, right? Right. Which only lasted about a year, if that. If not, not even that. Yeah. I think they recalled it by the end of the year, didn't they? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So. Yeah. So, you know, the, if you want to count the long. launch window of Famicom there were what nine games released in 1983 two of which were rehashes of Donkey Kong and Popeye like turning them

into math and education. Oh yeah. Oh those were English. Sorry. Yeah. Math in English. Yes. And again that's like let's have a gorilla teach people math and let's have Papa

teach people proper English. Yeah, exactly. Generation of Japanese kids grew up thinking it was spelled Spanish was spelled with a K. Finich. I know.

I can play to the finnitch. Yeah. Anyway. Well, no, we can get another five minutes of material out of this. Probably so. Well, it is interesting because within this launch lineup

or the launch window, the first year of the Famicom, you do have a canceled game that was announced and shown off in commercials and then never materialized the Donkey Kong music game. Oh, yeah.

I still would love to know what happened with that. how much of what we've seen of the screenshots were just like fake mock-ups and how much of it actually existed. I'm going to go with, they were like, oh, yeah, we're totally going to make a music game. And then they were like, wait a minute, what are we going to do? Like, how do you make a music game? And they probably got to a point where it probably wasn't fun or probably didn't have

enough interactive elements or it was too hard or something. I think they just, they probably got themselves in the weeds thinking, oh, yeah, we're totally going to do a music game. And we're like, wait, this is like really hard. I feel like Nintendo's internal teams were stretched really thin at the beginning. which is why you started seeing, you know, companies like Hal and Paxofnika step in to, you know, develop these games for them. Yeah. So, yeah, they probably just got, like you said, into the weeds.

They got it over their heads and were like, what are we do? What is this game going to be? Yeah. But I do like that the sprites survived into Famicom Basic. Like some of those weird sprites of like Pauline and whatever, they showed up again. I like Donkey Kong behind the drum set. That's a cool one. You know, yeah, so it was only just recently that this flyer.

that had the screenshots of Donkey Kong's fun with music and, like, descriptions of it, which, you know, because Japanese people don't scan things, it was not on the Internet for anybody to actually read. And then one of them finally came up. Steve generously spends whatever $200 by the piece of paper, gets it over to Frank Sefaldi, who scans it, gets it over to me, who translates it. So now we know some of the songs that we're supposed to be in there. Are they like public domain stuff?

Yeah, it was public domain stuff. And it was, there was one song that I believe was called, I think it was called Policeman Dog. And I went and listened to this to like a recording of a children's song in Japan. And the melody turns out to be the melody they used for the beginning of Frogger. So if you know like the Frogger, so that was going to be in there. Yeah. Interesting. All right.

Well, that's a lot of information about games that didn't actually come out. And there is a policeman dog in Animal Crossing. Yeah, yeah. That's the connection. I think that is the connection. I think it is. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Or I think that's why the Animal Crossing character is a dog. I wonder if there's any like Conda stuff. Anyway, so kind of related to the Famicom, although three years later was the Famicom Disc System, which had a larger launch lineup. It had, what is that, seven games at launch. The thing is, though, almost all of these games were just rehashes of very early Famicom games that were put out, you know, basically like for a fraction of the cost on diskette. Right.

And so that's not a very exciting start for the Famicom Disc System. Why would anyone want this system? Wait a minute. Why would anyone want the system? Anyone? Let's see. What are the games here? Baseball, golf, mahjong, soccer.

Super Mario Brothers, that's pretty good. But, you know, 1986. It was already six months old at that point. It did have a revised minus world, though. Oh, yeah? Come to System version. Yeah, because they knew the minus world was in there, so they replaced it with something that they actually made. Yeah.

Oh, and tennis, that was a pretty good, you know. It's all right. Yeah. Oh, wait, what's this? Wait a minute. The legend of Zelda. The Hyrule fantasy? The Hyrule fantasy.

I enjoy that game. Yeah, so it's an interesting value proposition. Like, hey, you can play these old games for cheap. And also, here's a revolutionary video game that's basically world changing and like nothing you've ever played before. Right, right, right. I wonder which game most people bought at launch for the time. Oh, probably Mahjong. I mean, the idea was, I mean, you know, really Zelda was the launch lineup and then the rest of it was kind of like, okay, but, you know, if you buy this thing, you can, you know, take your, you can take your Zelda disc once you're finished playing it, take it to the store, and they'll overwrite Zelda with golf and Mahjong on either side for 500 yen each.

Wow, what a deal. All right. I don't need that Zelda game. Yep. I think this was the beginning of a 10-year period of the. of Nintendo packing the reason to buy the system with the system. Now it's like, you will wait 18 months for Mario or Zelda. Although

Switch was a outlier, but that's because it was inheriting another systems game. I mean, you didn't buy a Wii U for Nintendo Land? I bought it for Arkham City, the old port of it. No, I didn't. You'd throw boomerite. I bought it for Mass Effect 3. I just wanted to start

with Mass Effect. Yeah, I feel like I heard good things about this series, so I should just jump in with a third one. Yep. Yep. Okay, so also in 1983 Actually, no, let's wrap up the Nintendo thing and then we'll take a break and switch over to Sega. So, yeah, the NES, the American version of the Famicom had a much bigger library, although, you know,

since it launched in America two and a half years later, yeah, you can understand that they could kind of pick and choose. There were like 50 games available for them to pick from in Japan at that point. Including third-party games. Yeah. So you got two of those. I don't think I've told the story on Retronauts before,

but this is something I found out last year interviewing Tozai Games. I can't remember the guy's name. Sorry, it just totally blinked on me, but the guy who runs Tozai worked with IREM in the early 80s. He has been in the industry this long, and he ran IREM's arcade division and worked on some of their Famicom stuff.

So, Nintendo was like, hey, we want to take Kung Fu over and 10-yard fight over to the NES, the Famicom. And they were like, no, we want to do these ports internally and like launched these as our first Famicom games. And apparently Yamauchi went over his head to the boss of Irim

and was like, we want to do these games. And so he like he found out about this indirectly from the people who were working on the ports at Nintendo. Like Miyamoto worked on Kung Fu. And they were like, oh, we're really sorry about this. And

basically you know, because Yamauchi did like pull the shenan He was kind of pissed off, and he was like, this isn't cool. And so they decided to do some make goods. That's why these games are on the NES launch lineup, because Nintendo was like, we're going to publish these in America for you also. And also, as another make good, if you've ever seen a Japanese IRM Famicom cart, you

know that they are very distinctive. They're white. They have this triangle at the top. And in the middle of the triangle is this LED. And when you plug it into your console and turn on the power, the LED lights up because there's no LED on the cartridge on the console itself with the Famicom cartridge. Right. That was the make good.

Like, Nintendo was like, we'll make your cards special. Yeah, they were like, we'll do these special cars for you. That's why IREM is the only company that has those unique Famicom cards. It's because Nintendo's president went over IRIM's head to the boss, the company that owned IREM, and was like, we want to put these games on Famicom. We want to develop them ourselves. And now everything you plug in as an LED on it. Yeah.

There will never be darkness again. Yeah, ever since Pink Floyd's Pulse came out. Wow. So, anyway, that's a really interesting little anecdote that I learned last year. I was like, I can't believe I'm hearing this history. This is crazy and wild, and I love it. Anyway, so, yeah, those were the two third-party games published by Nintendo, but IREM's 10-yard fight, a football game, makes sense,

and Kung Fu, which was definitely the second best-looking and best-playing game on the launch lineup for NES, right after this little thing called Super Mario Bros. Which, to be fair, we really don't know if Super Mario Brothers was there on last day or not, but it's still, it's a launch game. It was within weeks, if not. Indeed. And the whole, the whole NES launch was just kind of like a, hey, here's a store that has this brand new video game system in its entire library. So go to this one store in New York City and you can buy it. So it's kind of a little fuzzy.

But the lineup is, I don't know, I've spent a lot of time of these games in the past few years. You've got a book on these games? Yeah, I do. And a video series? Yes. Baseball, which was very dated, even in 1985. Clu-Clu-Land, which I think is misunderstood. There are the light gun games.

What's so funny about that? They should have localized. It's probably true. It is true. They should have localized the Onomatopoeia. They should have. I'm going to say. Kudu-Koo.

Rolling land or something. They just brought Klu-Klu-Land to switch online, and they had to, somebody had to write a whole paragraph about what the story of Klu-Clu-Lan. was and what you're doing and I'm just like... Nintendo's first female character. You plays bubbles, right? Bubbles the fish. Yeah, bubbles and something.

I don't know what she is. Like, this thing has a plot? One of my favorites... She spins around poles and eats coins. I don't know. Gold in bars. Yes. One of my favorite things is I had a copy of CluCloo Land where someone had written in

marker on the manual excite bike, like, because that was the game they really want. Oh, that's so heartbreaking. Okay. So, uh, there was. excite bike. There were also three light gun games, Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley and Wild Gunman. And then there were

two robot games. The complete lineup. Really for, yeah, the complete lineup of robot games for Rob the Robot Operating Buddy, really developed for a launch in the U.S. They showed up in Japan first, but it was basically like a we got to sell this as a toy instead of a game console to get

buyers to be interested in America. So you got gyramite, which is actually pretty fun if you play it the right way. challenging and interesting. You can also cheese it and it's very boring. And then there's stack up, which is not actually a game and is not complete, in my opinion. Do you guys think they finished the game? It feels like they, yeah, it feels like they didn't actually bother to give you any real goals or methodology. Well, they even like localize the game. Yeah, it's robot block, right? Yep, yep, yep. It's too much of a toy without a purpose, right? Yeah.

Like, it's neat that you can make Rob do stuff, but there's no way to track your actions within the game. So it's like, did you win? Did you say you won? Okay, congratulations. Good job. It's sort of like, I mean, it doesn't play anything like this, but it reminds me of those VCR light gun games where it's like you're playing by the honor systems. Like, write down your score. It's like golf for one.

Yeah. Let's see what else was there. Oh, golf, which is actually a really good and influential golf game. Ice climber, which I actually hate, but a lot of people really love. Kung Fu, I mentioned, pinball, which was co-developed by Satoro Iwada. He did the programming on it, I believe. Soccer. There's some ambiguity about that.

Nintendo lists soccer as a 1987 release. It's really strange. Like, all their official documentation has the game as 1987. But it's pretty well documented externally that it was released at the launch. So I don't know if it was, like, released in limited quantities and then they held it back for a year until the system is. You know, it's entirely, yeah, so sure, it's entirely possible that, yes, they had a few copies at launch. And then they were like, okay, this thing is doing really well. We have to order copies from Japan.

Maybe we won't order more copies of soccer. Maybe we'll, you know, concentrate on ordering copies of, like, Super Mario Brothers and stuff that people actually want to buy. And so, yeah, maybe they waited, maybe they waited because they couldn't get, you know, the product mix that they wanted and that soccer. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's been very vexing for me because I try to do. the NES works series, you know, as accurately as possible. And I use Nintendo's official documentation as my starting point.

And so I put, you know, soccer in the 1987 lineup, but people have been very critical of that and very vocal about being critical. But, I mean, I don't know. Nintendo says 87, so what are you going to do? Like, they're not always totally accurate. For instance, there is no Pac-Man released in 1987 on their official list or Gauntlet or what's the other one? RBI Baseball. Yes, RBI Baseball. Those games didn't exist, apparently.

There's also like a Jalico game that they just took off the list. Really? It's like, yeah. Which one was that? Cyberball, maybe. It's like if you get, oh, no. Yes. Yes.

So it was an Atari was like a Tengen game that was licensed by Jalico and published. Jalika or Minescape? Jalico. Oh. Jalico. Because Minescape did a bunch of those Tendian games. Right. And so those games are on the list.

It's weird because, yes. So like if you look at the official Nintendo list, they took off. the Tengen games out of spite, and then they took off, I think they took off the Jalico game that was an Atari slash Tengen game, too, possibly out of spite. But then by the time the Minescape Tengen stuff came up, they left that on the list. So it's like, yeah, it's really weird. So petty. Yep.

Let's see, there was also Tennis and then the final Mario, or the other Mario game, Recking Crew. But the thing is, like we said, this launch lineup was extremely limited in, availability. And the system didn't really go nationwide until the following summer. That was the point at which you could actually, you know, go into, you know, a Meyer and Sheboygan and be like, oh, hey, it's a Nintendo system. What's that? But, you know, what's not on here, Donkey Kong is not here yet. Donkey Kong Jr. is not here yet. So it seems like Nintendo didn't, for some reason, didn't really want to rest on the strength. I mean, obviously the Super Mario Brothers. But I don't know. It's like they, rather than do Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong,

Junior, probably honestly, because those games represented the video game culture of, like, in 1981, 1982, and I think they really wanted to make that break because Donkey Kong and D.K. Jr. were just oversaturated at that point. Popeye. And when those did come out a little bit later, they had them as like, the original or the classics. Yeah, they have like a special silver label on them. Mario Brothers also.

But the thing is, by the time the system went nationwide in June of 86, those games were available. Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, Urban Champion was one of them, Gumshu, did we say Mario Brothers? You did, we did not, okay. Well, anyway, and then balloon fight. I believe that was, oh, and Mock Rider. Yeah, volleyball. Oh, and Donkey Kong Jr. Math.

No, volleyball was 87. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was actually like about 25 games by the time, or 26 games, by the time the system was widely available. And I remember the first time I saw an NES in the store, it was a wall of games all in that consistent black box branding with some variations in it. So you got the idea like, oh, these games are different than the others. But it was really impressive. Like I saw it.

It was kind of overwhelming. I was like, man, I want that. And what do I even buy? There's so many games. Right. That's an impressive launch lineup. Do you know what year that was when you first saw it? I probably saw it in 86.

I was like 10-ish around there. I think it's when I first had my first NES encounter. It was like some relative. It's very foggy, but it had to be like 86, and it was Kung Fu. Me seeing Kung Fu. Yeah, that was the first game that I saw in action. It was on demo at like a federated or something. But the first time I saw like a wall of games was at a, I don't know, service merchandise or something, some other department store.

But they just had, you know, like the camera section glass counter and then behind it was just a wall of black with pixel art. Very, very impressive. I had seen the Famicom in Taiwan before the U.S. release, and then once I saw the games in, yeah, this is 86, I'm like, oh, it's that thing. It's just red and white. It's this gray thing. Yeah, I mean, the Klico Vision had a great launch, but the NES was the first, like, let's go for it. And, you know, that two-year delay really worked in their bit of it. They had so much to pull from, and they could just launch with a huge catalog of games and lots of variety.

you wanted a kind of game in there, you could probably find it. We're going to be able to Thank you. And good news, Retronauts fans. We're finally talking about Sega. That's right. We pushed them to the back half because we're biased. But here we are.

We're going to talk about some Sega launches. And we're going to begin at the beginning on the same day as the Famicom launch. Oh, yeah. On 15th, 1983, Sega launched its very first console, the SG-1000, which was basically a Kaliko-Vision. I'm going to say, though, that its launch lineup was not as good as the Kaliko-Vision lineup. But there are 10 games here as opposed to... As opposed to... Well, as opposed to...

Three for the Famicom. That's true. There were more... games, but none of them were Donkey Kong or Popeye. You got Congo I mean, you got Starjacker. What the hell is that? Starjacker? That's the Heidi Fly story.

That joke is about 25 years too out of date. I apologize. That's okay. This is retronauts. Yeah, it's true. You can put that joke in a time capsule. Yeah, Congo Bongo was like the, I'm not going to say the poor man's Donkey Kong, but it was definitely the sassy retort to Donkey Kong.

It's very charming, but I can't play it. I try to play it because I see it. Really hard. Did you know there's more than just the first screen to Congo Bongo? It turns out there were actually multiple stages. I looked it up on YouTube. There are hippos that are in that game. It's crazy.

I've never made it that far because that game's really hard. I was recently playing it. I don't know why I would do this to myself. I was playing the Commodore 64 version of Congo Bongo with a keyboard. And I made it all the way up to the point where you had to like jump over the river. And I'm just sitting there going, how the hell am I going to do this? And I'm like, press the key, immediately fall in the water.

I'm like, yeah, that was... My problem is I don't even know what you're supposed to do when you get to the top. I'm like, do I attack the monkey? Oh, no. No. Oh, you die. Yeah, it's a strange game, but there's a lot of history there. And I'm pretty sure it was made as a screw you to Nintendo by Ikegami Sushinky.

They were like, hey, we're going to team up with your enemies at Sega and make a game that's a big rip off of yours because you ripped us off. Anyway, champion golf, I will say, is a pretty important golf game. It was one of the... Go ahead, Chris. Oh, no. Oh, you just had this, like, smirk on your face. I'm just still laughing. I'm just still laughing at Heidi Fleiss.

Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a joke that I'm... Yes, anyway, champion golf was actually kind of the template for basically all golf games. You know, Nintendo's golf was probably more influential, but was very similar to champion golf. Is that a power meter based? Yeah. Oh, I love stopping meters. Yep.

Oh, they're so good. I'm not even kidding. That's how I know I'm a great athlete. Yeah. So just for the benefit of people who aren't currently looking at the Google Doc that we're all looking at. What does their problem? Borderline, safari hunting, N-sub, Mahjong, champion golf, Citi Zawa-Hatidama Hachydan Nozumé Shogi, Kango Bango, Yamato, Champion Tennis, and Starjacker.

Not a whole lot of games that I quite frankly remember. I mean, I remember when Madonna sang about borderline, it was one of her hits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was the only, that's the only other one besides Congo, Bongo, and Starjacker that really made a blip in history. Every Christmas, I just wished for a Shogi game to be under the tree. Yeah, no. Sorry, man. They just don't come to America that often.

You do not get the host. Has there ever been a Shogi game released in the U.S.? There must have been, but. Yeah, like Game Boy or something. Oh, no. There'd be some PlayStation 1, 2, something in that. Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe on PC. On Steam, there's got to be one showy. Yeah, of course, yeah. It's like, so I bet you that. Anime strip shogi. I bet you that when Sega released the master system a few years later, it was, the little launch lineup was a lot better than this. Yeah, it was great.

It was, uh, oh, September, 1986. You got hang on. Hang on. You've got Teddy Boy Blues. And you've got hang on with Safari Hunt. Okay, so in, in the master systems defense, I will say that within a couple of months, the library expanded considerably and like within a month

I think actually you got a lot more games but yeah it was kind of a very slight start I mean hang on is you know a pretty good motorcycle racing game

although it's not as good as super hang on and Teddy Boy Blues was like a very slight brawler based on a song yeah I was going to ask if that is a license game or a game tied into an actual performer I believe so, yeah, I believe this was the height of idol, you know, pop idol licensed video games where you had stuff like, you know, the wavejack series on Famicom Disc System and a tape cassette coming with Athena.

Yes, it was Yoko Ishino, who was the pop idol who sung Teddy Boy Blues. Yeah, the theme to the game, the theme music was based on her pop song. So this is, I mean, there was that blackjack game with a dude's name in it. Is this, like, the first celebrity-based launch game, like, of an actual, like, entertainment celebrity? I mean, how much of a celebrity was she? I assume... Idols tended to be kind of, like, minor sensations at best. But, I mean, being a pop musician is more notable than being a blackjack celebrity, I think.

That's true. You know, there is a game missing from the Master System launch line. Which one is that? Snail game. Oh, yeah. It was built in. Yeah. It's launch title.

It's there, day one. Okay, I will say, however, that when you go ahead a generation and Sega finally hits its stride with the Mega Drive Genesis, it was a lot better. And, well, in Japan, they just had two games. They had Super Thunderblade and Space Harrier 2, which are basically kind of the same game. It's, you know, the super scaler behind the ship shooters flying into the screen, although Space Harrier, it's a dude, not a ship. But it's still the same thing. Not a lot of variety there But you look over in the U.S.

You don't get Super Thunderblade But you do get Hey, it's a celebrity Tommy Las Sort of baseball Star of Slim Fast commercials But this was before Slim Fast This was when he was just eating pasta And sitting on the bench He's still hanging in there as of this recording

Oh yeah, that's great He's about a thousand years old to pray for him Last battle Okay, not really that big a deal Thunder Force 2 which is pretty cool. Altered Beast, which was impressive looking, if not actually that great.

Alex Kid in the Enchanted Castle and Sega's own internally developed version of Goals and Ghost, which is insanely hard. That's a hard game that they made even harder by making some very unfriendly programming choices. But it looked

goddamn amazing. That was the trend for the Goals and Ghost series, the console version would be harder. I guess until the Super Nintendo kind of interpretation because slowdown made the game slightly easier. Sort of, yeah. I don't think that was a deliberate choice. No, no.

That was just, hey, we're programming in C rather than assembly. It was on your side, though. Right. So, yeah, the Mega Drive, Genesis had a much better lineup. I mean, I don't necessarily want to play Alex Kidd, but some of those other games, like, they're still pretty fun and playable these days. Yeah. Yeah.

The Genesis sizzle reel that they had running, just everything looked great, right? Like, less sort of baseball had the ball, like get really big as it went up in the air and all that other stuff. And, like, last battle, even though it's not a great game, like, kind of like Altered Beasts, the Sprites are really big, right? So, yeah. Yeah, so it was a showcase for, you know, like, hey, it's the arcade experience at home. And, you know, it was something.

Again. Thunder Force 2 was not originally an arcade game, right? It was like a computer game, I think. Oh, me. But, you know, it had, like, arcade speed and, you know, kind of set the tone for Sega Genesis as a home to really great, shooter games, shoot em-ups. Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a pattern here.

I mean, we're looking at like hardcore, you know, shoot-em-up, arcade-type games, Thunderblade, Thunder Force, you know, Space Harrier, Goals and Ghosts, Altered Beats, like, you know. And then sports. Yeah, and then Alex kid. But they're definitely going, I think they're going for an older crowd. Mm-hmm. Yep. And it's like they don't feel the need to have, like, they have baseball, but they don't feel the need to have, you know, fill in all of the holes.

They're not, they're not, it's like, oh, we need to have a this type of game. that type of game. It's like they're just pretty much going for like, like, let's play up our strengths. Exciting arcade games. Yeah, to really differentiate themselves from what the Famicom could do. Shocking lack of educational games here. Interesting. Yeah. Where's Alex Kidd teaches you phonics? Right, exactly.

I think it was, you know, at least in the U.S., right, the box art, the black with like the grid and things like that. Yep. Yeah, they were like, it's the master system, but in reverse. But in reverse. Oh, my God. Yeah. So what? Contemporary would be PC engine turbographics at that time? Yeah, so, you know, PC Engine actually launched before the Genesis, the Mega Drive in Japan by like a full year.

1987, I mean, Nintendo was just barely getting traction in the U.S. at that point. But over in Japan, they were like, hey, it's something that's better than the Famicom. Look at this thing with Shanghai. Well, okay. I like Shanghai, but it's not exactly, you know, a world beater. The Kung Fu. I see you said that's three weeks later and Katow Chan and Kinchan

three days after the Kung Fu I think the Kung Fu is China Warrior right? That was what it was really says in the US Yeah but it was actually a Kung Fu sequel Oh sure of course And Bikuraman Oh Bikuriamen World Which that's based is that based on like the

The like the candy I'm not sure what sort of thing Bikurieman is. It's like a candy, isn't it? It's like there's all these little characters and like there's a toy or something inside of each of them? I don't know. Well, the game itself is basically a port of Wonder Boy. Yeah, right.

Wonder Boy and Monster Lion. So that's the second game. Which was pretty contemporary at the time. I think that was a 1987 game. This is 1987. Yeah. But yeah, Bikhrieman, I'm surprised you don't know what Bikhrieman is. They are a line of wafer snacks.

But they're all shaped like characters, right? And they included bonus stickers. Okay. Yes. And they started in the 70s. So it's translated as Surprise Man. So there you go. The surprise is that you bite into a sticker.

It's like I thought I had a wafer here, but it's a little, a little chewy. So yeah, wafer, wafers, the video game. Waiper the video game. So that's kind of a weird, it's an adaptation of an existing game. that had been through the ringer in terms of licenses, and it's tied to a snack. Yeah. This is the weirdest launch lineup.

This is the one. Every other launch lineup, we can kind of say, oh, okay, I kind of see what they're going for with this. You can kind of see the thought process here. This is literally just like, I don't know. Waivers? Well, Shanghai is, you know, like they take mahjong tiles and then turn it into a matching game.

So you don't have to know mahjong rules. It's just like match the tiles along the edges and try to clear all away. It's based on a, you know, a Macintosh game developed by a guy named Brody Lockard several years before. So here's like an American game, essentially, coming into Japan.

Right. Right. Yeah. Katochan and Kynchon is a goofy, Bobby, you can probably talk about it better than I can. We went into the history of these comedians in their game in our television games episode, games based on TV episodes.

But, yeah, they were Japanese comedians who had their own television show with lots of sketches and stuff like that. They were actually the originators of the concept behind America's Funniestone videos. That was a segment on their channel because Japan took to camcorders before Americans did. So they had a segment where you send in your funny videos. And I think they are credited in America's Funniestone videos still.

Oh, really? Someone from that production team is credited with the concept. But, yeah, and I believe one of them, just some weird trivia, one of them, either Katowchan or Kenchan, they were in an improv group that opened for the Beatles when they performed in Japan for that famous concert. So, and everybody hated it. They did not come to see comedy. They came to see the Beatles. But you can learn all about them. And you can see a lot of sketches for their show on YouTube because people like Leslie

Nielsen would go to Japan and be on it at Robin Williams and Freddie Kruger. And it was the place to go in the 80s if you were a celebrity. Yeah. Hocking or movie in Japan, you assume that no one would ever see these segments. This is almost the Intellivision thought process here, if anything, of go and get famous licenses for our games. Yeah, but this comedy team turned into like a, it's a co-op platformer, right? Like two-player at the same time? I don't think it is.

I think it's, um, single player, yeah. It's been a while. Depending on the person you choose, the other one will be in stages kind of messing with you. Oh, that's right. That's right, yeah. Yep. So in the show, did they fart a lot? Because that's like the attack.

I think there was a lot of like toilet humor and it was like really broad, slapsticky stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's a Japanese comedy show. So, yeah. Right. So this, yeah, this game had, uh, lots of, There was a lot of poop in it. Yeah. Great deal.

Which they removed a lot of for the U.S. release, JJ and Jeff. Right. Which, of course, removed the characters, too. And so it just didn't actually make any sense anymore. It's actually very Adventure Island-y. Like, it has the same sort of ideas behind the level of design and just how you play it. Right. Which was a very big thing at the time.

So Adventure Island is basically Wonderboy. So effectively, you got two games kind of in the same mulch. Why not? Well, I mean, the thing I think maybe with the celebrity part, here is the heads were big enough that you had actually recognized the person. That's right. Right. Yeah. That's why they were designed like they were designed because you can get a really nice

caricature of that person. Yeah. Yeah, there's a YouTube video maker by the name of Guy Gigilionaire, Guy Gijillionaire, guy gillianair, who did a big long thing on who are Katoshan and Ken Chan and did the Beatles stuff. I think that's where... Yeah, I think

it's where I got all this information from, actually. He does some great videos. He also did a whole thing about Um, what, you know, because dokey, dokey panic was, uh, dream factory, dokey, dokey panic. It's like, what is dream factory? Did a big thing all about what that was. And yeah, good videos, recommendation. Yeah. Stamp of approval.

Yes. Uh, so when the PC engine came over to the U.S. two years later as the TurboGraphic 16, it also had four games, but they were very different. Uh, and I would say probably more compelling for the most part. I mean, Alien Crush. Oh. That is a great pinball game. Fantastic.

Keith Courage, okay, that's not so great. Keith Courage was based on an anime, but they stripped the license from that one, too. Happens a lot. Yeah, that was the pack-in. Kind of a weird choice. Had the little comic book that told you the story. Yeah, lots of weird choices with the TurboGraphic 16, and it all starts right here. Legendary Axe, which, that's a guitar game, right?

It's about. Yes. And Victory Run, which is a racing game. And it's a pretty decent racing game. Paris to Dakar. Yeah. So it's, yeah, you've got a pretty diverse lineup here. Legendary Axes is like a brawler, right?

It's golden axe. Yeah. Side scrolling, you have your powered up axe. So pinball, platform shooter, brawler, and racing game. That's, you know, kind of like Sega Genesis. It's very, like, focused on core gamers, I guess, which we're developing at this point. Like, they were getting a sense of who owns video games now, or they were forcing the market down into just boys.

But, you know, they kind of hit all the notes here with just four games. So that's not bad. Now, what's really fascinating is the Japanese launch of the PC Engine CD-ROM, which came on, checks notes, December 4th, 1988. And the, and had two launch, 1988. CD-ROMs in 1988. We did a whole CD-ROM episode and talked about this. Yeah, two launch titles.

Noriko, which was a dating sim, very early dating sim, based on. a Japanese idol, where you would, like, go on dates with her and stuff like that. And then Fighting Street, which was just Street Fighter I won. That's not familiar. Oh, that's what it was. Yeah. Still to this day. Now, first of all, it was also called Fighting Street in Japan. Still to this day, have no idea why they changed it from Street Fighter to Fighting Street.

I've never read anything that talks about why they changed the name, but they did. I don't know. But those were the two launch titles. And so, I mean, importantly, so you probably mentioned on this CD-ROM episode that these were the first two CD-ROM games ever on any platform, any system, and were in fact quite early. And, like, you know, besides PC Engine CD-ROM, like, there was a CD version of the Manhole that the Cyan World's game, but they came out in, like, 89, and that is, like, incredibly rare. You know, nobody owned CD-ROM devices on their computer or anything like that. And I think the connective thread between these two games is voice acting because Noriko made extensive use of voice. Fighting Street actually had a lot of voice samples in it because the guys talked to you before you beat me and challenge someone else.

Try again, kid. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, try again kid. That was it. And I think that is the connective tissue between those two games because what were you? They came up with the idea of let's do games on CD-ROM before they came up with the idea. idea of, and what are we going to do with the CD-ROM? Because games are very small.

Both of these games are probably extremely small. They just filled up the CD with really, really nice music and as much voice samples as you wanted to do, because that's what you could do with a CD-ROM very easily. Yeah. If you watch the turbographic video that they would play in stores at the end of it, it's the one where the two dudes are sitting on the couch and they act all goofy and the system like shocks to them. Yeah.

So at the end of that video, they say, hey, here's something. some things that are for PC engine, you know, that might be coming to the turbographics. And one of the things they show is actually the title screen for Noriko and then like a scene from the game, which is weird because when you look at it, I mean, everything Japanese seemed cool at the time, but it's like, what am I looking at? Right, right, right. Well, I mean, like, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of CD-ROM content. Even if you look at the PC Engine CD-ROM and look at like the first like year of stuff for it in

in Japan, there was, there were not a lot of games because, like, who was going to create this content? What are we going to do with it? And what are you going to do on a CD-ROM that is so much better that you wouldn't just put it on a cartridge and sell it to more people, right? So, but, yeah, I mean, I could see them, like, taking a serious look at Noriko and being like, so should we bring this out here? Do America? So as it turns out, Americans would not want to date Japanese idols for at least another 10 years.

Eventually, that eventually would do really well. Yeah. Well, I think a U.S. TurboGraphic City were Monster Lair and Fighting Street. And they were in the white box to show they were different. So we're right back on our Wonder Boy bullshit, basically. Yep, yep. There's no escape.

All right, so let's jump over to the world of portable gaming. We've got a couple of portable systems here. First of all is a little thing I like to call Game Boy, because that's what it's actually called. Not that you would know anything about that. So the Game Boy launched with four games in Japan, and five, I believe, in the U.S. a little later. April 21st, 1989 in Japan, shipped with Alleyway, which was breakout, but with Mario

into Mario inside the paddle. But you don't know that until you, it's a game over, and then he escapes from the paddle before it explodes. It's like, oh, there was Mario. I killed Mario. You have to lose to be able to enjoy Mario's presence. Well, you see them in the ship in the box, right? Yeah, in the box, but that's not part of the game experience.

If you're emulating, you'd never know. And also, I mean, that's really, if you think about it, that's dark because Alliway is set in space. So instead of blowing up in his ship, he decides to jump into the vacuum of space. Maybe he's like Princess Leia and he uses the forest. I think he does because otherwise it doesn't make any sense. There's a lot about this game that doesn't make any sense. In space, no one can hear you. So Allieway, phenomenal choice, I think, just because it's, well, it's, it's, it's,

It's, you know, it's more like Arkanoid, right? You know, it has the power-ups and things like that. No, it doesn't. Oh, it doesn't? No. Oh, geez. Yeah, it's a breakout. It's a rose-colored glasses.

I mean, it does have, like, some stages where things are, you know, scrolling across a screen as opposed to static. And it has, you know, bonus stages that are in the shape of, like, and, you know. Mario and a fireflower. Yeah. And a bloomer and things like that. But, yeah, it's actually kind of a step back from Arconoid. But remember, this was portable gaming was new. and what did people have before this?

No one bought the Epic Game Pocket Computer. So they had Game and Watch. So, like, this is definitely a step above game and watch. It's much more fluid, better animation, but also very simple, accessible pick-up and play. It was a good choice for Game Boy Launch, but it's not something most people want to go back to and, you know, play again because it's pretty basic.

Well, I like that write-up in the, I think it's the first issue of video games in computer entertainment. there's an article on the Game Boy. Like, hey, this thing's coming out. You can swap out cartridges. You're like, whoa, what the hell is that? So, you know, I thought I bought golf on launch day, but you might have. I'm not as clear on the NES or the Game Boy US launch as I am Japan because I've been focusing on the Japanese lineup.

But it also launched with baseball, which really sucks. But it was important because it was a linked game. It was a game that two people could play on their own Game Boys with a link cable. and each player would see their perspective on the field. If you were batting, you were behind the plate. If you were pitching, you were behind the pitcher. Baseball is like that it seems to be the game that connects so many launch lineups that we've been talking about. There's no Tommy Lassordia, but there was a fat Italian Mario.

Mario and Luigi could be playable characters in the American team, not in the Japanese team. I think that's by Sega pick Tommy Lassorta. Yeah, he's our own Mario He's got a cap on and everything Ron Jeremy didn't play baseball that we know of And also a game called Super Mario Land Which we've talked about quite a bit And is pretty cool and weird

And very simplistic compared to other Mario games But you know For the launch of Game Boy It was pretty impressive that hey Here was a pretty reasonable facsimile Of Super Mario Brothers is that I can play in a system that fits in my pocket. I can play it in the car or wherever I want,

especially if I have, you know, like a flashlight to hold. And then Yakuman, which is a, what, Mahjong game? Sure is. Yes, that's right. That one didn't come to the U.S. The other three did. But then also at the U.S. launch, you had Tennis, which shipped about a month after launch in Japan,

and that was a much better use of the link cable. And Tetris, which was the American Pack-in. which made even better use of the link cable, in some people's opinion. And Steve, it may have had golf as well. So that might have been six games. But, you know, basically it was pretty much the Japanese lineup minus Yakkaman plus a few games that had come out in Japan since the launch. But there was only like a three or four month, like a four month difference between the Japanese and American launch, which was much faster than I think any other system to date.

Usually there was like, you know, a year, two years. Three years. Right. And then following that came a flood of puzzle games. So many puzzle games. So many boxes to push. Yep. So many.

So many. Oh, my God. About a month, actually less than a month after the American Game Boy launch, there was the Atari Links, which shipped with only four games, all of which were very impressive looking, but maybe didn't hold up as well as something like Allieway or Supermarly. Well, Nintendo looked at the game. They said, okay, this is going to be a portable system. We need some simple games. It needs to be, you know, things that are very easy to see on this sort of, like, tiny screen. We want to appeal to adults because we want adults to take this on an airplane with them. So we want to have things like, yeah, alleyway, Tetris, baseball, tennis, like stuff that golf,

the stuff that, you know, people can really, you know, sink these long hours into. When Atari was just like, arcade games. Well, California Games is a port of Epic's, you know, popular computer series. although I was like five years old at this point. I hate every version of this game. Yeah, I mean, this was inevitable because the Links was developed by Epix originally and then sort of strong-armed away by Atari.

So, of course, like Epic's biggest hit would be on Links at day, you know, launch day. Blue Lightning was, yeah, it's pretty much a tech demo. It's not a very fun game to play, but it looks so amazing because you've got like jet planes flying around and the horizon is tilting and you're launching missiles at guys and there's a lot happening on the screen. It's not fun to play, but it's so cool.

Yeah. Such a great demo game. Yeah, you're just like, hey, I'm playing afterburner. Yeah, pretty much. But much worse. Yep. Yes. There's Electrocop, which is...

We can't talk about that. Sorry, the batteries just ran out. Time to get another six AAAs and shove them in there. Six double A's. I've got the $20 power adapter. now. So we can talk about Gates of Zindekon, which is a shooter. So there was a behind the cockpit, or behind the plane shooter, a gates of Zindekon is side scrolling. Side, yeah.

Shooter. Electrocop is kind of like a platform shooter and then California games. Yep. So kind of a limited scope of games here, but they all looked really cool compared to the Game Boy. But did you really want to play off-brand Robocop versus actual brand Mario? Hmm. No. And did you want to play these, you know, these very kind of colorful shooter games on this very small screen that was pretty blurry?

Also, probably not the best experience. I mean, the screen wasn't that tiny. Yeah. But it sure seemed it because the system was so many. Right. Yeah. All right. Let's move into the final phase here and talk about, let's talk about the NeoGeo. We never really talk about NeoGeo on Richard or not.

So that's because I have almost no experience with the system. Only what I played in the arcades. I was not a rich kid. So I did not get to own one of these. But the AES was the arcade system, right? Or was that the MVS? NVS is the arcade. AES is the home.

Well, this is the AES because that's, yeah, that's more comparable. It's the home system that launched in 1991. That's later than I remember. That's right. The NeoGeo launched in 1989 in arcades, right? The MVS, but then it came home a couple years later. Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, it actually was like a rental system first, where you could rent it with a couple games and then they actually

Kind of like drink-cast. Yeah. Then they came out with like the retail packaging, like the gold and silver, like one came with, like, it was like Cyberlipper Magician Lord. Right. And then they didn't come with a game. I think they assumed that no one would actually want to buy it because they were just like, well, if you were to buy it, it would cost you like a thousand dollars and then $200 a game. Like nobody would actually want that. We'll just make it rental.

People were like, oh, no, we want to buy this. Right. Take my money. Like, okay. All right. Well, I think they even ran like an ad campaign in like the UAE and all these like wealthy areas. who else is going to spend $1,000 on this game system. Nice.

So for all the oil barons, the consul choice. So the NeoGeo AES launched in America with cyber. Oh, no, this is in Japan. Cyberlip, Majong Kiyo Ritzin, Nam, 1975, Joy Joy Kid, riding hero, the super spy, top players golf, Magician Lord, and Mina San no Okhaseama des. Which is A? Rishi Mahjong.

That's right. To Mahjong games. I like the idea of buying this to play Mahjong. Could be fair, a lot of people did, a lot of like Salary Man, whatever, would go, you know, in sit in arcades after work and smoke and play Mahjong games in the arcades. That actually does make sense. Yeah. There is actually a Mahjong controller as well for the AES.

Oh, my God. Yeah, for the home system. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. And, you know, Ritchie Mahjong versus the other type of Mahjong, whatever it's called, they are different games. I feel like they could have put both versions of the game. within one cartridge, but then they couldn't, you know, sell you $400 worth of Mahjong games.

Right. Yeah. Anyway, there's some cool stuff on the AES. I mean, like, you know, NOM 75, whatever you may think of the theme, is a really cool sort of, it's like a devastators type game, right? Caball. Yeah, cabal, yeah. But, you know, like arcade quality graphics at home, the Super Spy is kind of in the Rolling Thunder vein. What was Joy, Joy, Joy, Kid?

I have no idea. Magician Lord was like kind of, I don't know, sort of altered beastish, shadow of the beastish. It's like side-scrolling. You had like ladders and stuff. Yeah, there was like platforming. Joy Joy Kid was a falling block puzzle game. Oh, of course. That's what I want to spend $200 on.

$250. Well, again, it was like they weren't really even, they were developing this stuff for the arcades. They brought out the home system because they could. They weren't really thinking about, like, oh, we have to develop games that will make you want to spend $1,000. in the system. It's just like, they were almost like just overtaken by events that people wanted to buy this stuff. They're like, okay, I guess, here you go.

Right. I mean, if you think, I think the margins on the games are actually relatively low. They're really expensive because the memory was really expensive at the time. Right, right. So... Yeah, it's not like they were just stiffing people. Like, they made these ridiculously huge cartridges with massive

memory capacity, which was very expensive back then. Yes. Yeah. And then the, yeah, Yeah, the MVS kits for operators were like double the price, right? Yep. And which is weird now because the MVS kits are probably cheaper. Yeah, they're like super cheap compared to the AES aftermarket. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't really have a lot to say about the NeoGeo AES because, again, this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Between the system and the games, about $3,000 worth of software.

So that's rough. But some of these are available on, you know, virtual console or on arcade archives. I know Super Spy is out on Arcade Archives. Magician Lord came out. And I think Cyberlip also came out. And NOM 75, I think, on virtual console. So, you know, these have been republished for like seven bucks. Yeah.

They also have the NeoGeo Mini and then also the NeoGeoX, right? That's right. Yeah, the NeoGeoX. No. All right. Well, we need to wrap up. And conveniently, we are actually at the end of the list. We did it.

We got through an entire. There's one more at the end. I know. We're at the end of the list. I thought you were giving me a fistball. Damn. That was like celebratory. I see how it is.

Okay, leave me hanging. We made it. That's the Super Famicom, Super NES. We're not talking about the European launches on these because it's so hard to actually track release dates in Europe. So we're just not bothering. Somewhere there is a European version of

retronauts that is much more inclusive, but I'm sorry, that's not us. Anyway, in Japan, the Super Famicom launched at the end of 1990 with two games, no, two games, just two games, only two, but wow, what were those two games? F0 and Super Mario World, that's a pretty strong for showing. If you're going to launch with two games, those are two good games to launch with. I mean, F0 is a little slight because it's a single player racing game, but it's really cool, like, you know, these raster effects and stuff. I'm not really a huge fan, but it does look very cool. Even now, it's a very fast game.

Yeah. Like when I was recording for Super EniS Works, that footage is just like so blazing fast. It's such a deceptive kind of game because Super NES games were generally not very fast. It's like, how do they do this? They got it right in this one, and everything else was so slow.

Yeah, I love the soundtrack for F0. Oh, yeah. Just like having the music going, so. That's why Miyamoto played the F0 soundtrack at the E3 We Music press conference when he came out and did the solo. Wow.

It's good music. All right. In the U.S., we got those two games, plus we got Pilot Wings, which shipped like a month later in Japan. And that is a flight sim based on the Mode 7 technology, rotating, scaling, et cetera, et cetera.

Sim City, which we've had an entire episode on. Yeah. The Nintendo developed replacement for the NES version that never came out. I'm so glad they change platforms because this game barely functions on the S&S. Like when you start your city, it takes like a minute or two for the game to catch up with everything that's happening on the screen. Dr. Wright's like, please be patient. Please understand.

Great music, a lot of personality. My favorite version of that game for sure. And it was like showing it's like, well, here are two sort of PC style experiences for your home console, like a flight simulator game and in a straight up port of a PC game. And finally, the last game we're going to touch on here is Gradius 3, which now actually runs at full speed and is much harder. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, this was kind of, this was one of the games that, sorry. This was one of the games that kind of was a black eye, I think, for the Super NES,

because there was so much slowdown. I mean, even the arcade version of Gratius 3 had some slowdown, but the Super NES port was just like, it's like, you know, anytime there's bullets on screen, everything just wheezes. Yeah. It actually makes the game easier in some places, but then when you get to like the speed zone where nothing's shooting at you and you're just flying, like all of a sudden it gets really hard because you're not used to the game running that fast.

Right. Well, that was the thing. I mean, I think the game was, they knew it would slow down, right? So, I mean, they were like, oh, okay, well, it's going to slow down for people. So we'll just, you know, put a lot of stuff on the screen. It'll slow down. So it'll make it easier. Yeah, I guess.

Wasn't intended. But yeah, Gradius 3 definitely, that was one of the main. contributors to, I think, the Super NES' early reputation as being bad, or, you know, as being not as good as the Genesis are slow or handicapped in that way. Thunder Force 2, and it's night and day. Yeah. Yeah. Not flattering.

The Super NES, you know, we all look back on it. It's like, the greatest console ever. But, like, when that thing came out, like, there was a lot of negative press around it because it was like, oh, you know, Final Fight doesn't have two players. You know, Grady's three has slowdown. Bill Ambier's Combat Basketball has Bill Ambier. Right, right, right. One player sprite.

Yeah, it was definitely a little bit. Yeah, but interestingly enough, someone has taken one of the latter-day Super NES advanced mapper chips, the SA-1, that was used to power Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Super Mario RPG, and they've reconfigured, like, Gradius 3, to run on the SA-1. And now you can, like, put that on to an Everdriver. or something and play Gradius 3, and there's no slowdown. And I haven't tried this myself yet. It just came out like a couple of weeks ago as of this recording. But by all accounts, it's really hard because all of a sudden, like, all the slowdown that you were able to use to kind of dodge it in bullets, it's not there anymore.

And there's these like screaming projectiles flying through the air. And it's just like, how can anyone play this? It's a super hard game made even harder. Even though actually playing this game would show off some of the weaknesses of the Super Nintendo, they would often, the screenshot I remember them using a lot as the one with all the bubbles. Yeah, I'd see that a lot. Like, look at all the bubbles.

It's transparency and also a lot of things on the screen at once. Well, that's definitely, I think, the running theme behind the Super Famicom's launch lineup is showing off the hardware capabilities of the Super Nintendo. So, I mean, Pilot Wings is a Mode 7 showcase. F0 is a Mode 7 showcase. Super Mario World is definitely a graphical effect showcase of translucent water and Mode 7 stuff.

And, yeah, SimCity is not a showcase of any of that, but they were making it. So, yeah. I still remember there was a used game store, and the first Super Nintendo game to get traded in was Braddice 3. Oh, no. They had a whole section, and that was the one game. Yeah. I got my act razor very early on because somebody had sold it back to a local video game store.

They didn't get it. They just didn't get it. Yep, I got it. I got it. Yeah, I remember pretty early on in the Super NES era. Like, it was easy to find stuff like Final Fantasy 2 used and, you know, cheap. Well, because you finished it, right? And then...

Yeah, or people played and were like, uh, uh, oh, no, this isn't what I expected. I think that, yes, I think that a lot of people... I thought this was about the two guys punching through the city, final, final fantasy. Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, I think that's as far as we want to go with this. Someday we could, you know, revisit some of the later consoles, like in 64, Dreamcast. We could have the Dreamcast versus GameCube rivalry. that Chris loves so much. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he's a big fan. But for now, that's it. We're done with this episode. And I don't know how good a job we did, contextualizing game launch lineups, but at least it was fun to talk trash about some old video games and some old systems

and share weird trivia and things like that. So thanks, guys, for coming in. Thanks, Jeff Lossack for recommending or requesting this topic, even though it is some one that we've done before. I think this was a different take on the topic. And if not, I apologize. I've forgotten what that episode, how it exactly went.

So that's my fault for being senile. Anyway, guys, thanks for coming in. Tell us about yourselves and where we can find you on the internet. Steve Lynn, VP of Office of Discord, and part of the Video Game History Foundation. I'm on Twitter at Stephen P. Lin. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler. I'm still on Twitter at Kobunheat, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T, as I will be until the end of time. And, geez, I mean, you know, if you like Retronauts, you should probably watch this video series

that I'm doing at Kotaku, which is called Complete In Box, in which we take one, maybe two, maybe three classic games and actually have the game in the box, the instructions, and it's all there. We talk about the game, and then also sort of through the lens of all the stuff that it originally came with to show you, like, how that changes how you should look at some of these games.

And we actually just went out to the Strong Museum, and we're there for three episodes, and we look at an original mystery house from Roberta Williams. Interesting. Take a look at some of Verberra Williams. design documents which are on legal pads in pencil for King's Quest and

look at Hercules. Those weren't included in the game though, were they? I wish they were packed in but unfortunately they were not. But we're going to take that opportunity to do it anyway. I play fast and loose with the definition of this show. We checked out Hercules, the world's biggest pinball machine also there. I saw that at

Magfest this year. Oh really? It's so big. It's very big. It's stupid. It's big and dumb. Yep. It's the pinball machine that everybody wants to play once. and that's about it. And yeah, so, you know, complete inbox is what it's called. Check it out, please. Bob.

Hey, it's Bob Mackie. I'm on Twitter. As Bob Servo, I also have other podcasts. If you like listening to me talk about old video games, I talk about old cartoons and some new ones, at the Talking Simpsons Network at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Two podcasts. That's Talking Simpsons. And what a cartoon, an exploration of a different cartoon every week.

And those are available anywhere else in the podcast. But if you go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can find all kinds of bonus stuff including a limited series. We just wrapped up Talking of the Hill, our first season exploration of King of the Hill. It's been a lot of fun.

So check out my other podcast there. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on the internet. Go looking for me on Twitter as GameSpite or at Retronauts.com or other places. You can check me out on YouTube where I have created video retrospectives on a lot of the games we talked about today

under the NES Works, Game Boy Works, Super NES Works, et cetera, banner. That's cool. That's fun. Retronauts itself, this podcast you're listening to, you can find on many platforms. We can't say iTunes anymore because it's dead, but it's on other things by Apple and other companies.

If you can download a podcast there, you can probably download us. We might even be on Spotify by the time you hear this. And you can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com, but if you really want to be cool and really love Retronauts, what you can do is go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for $3 a month, you can get access to each episode a week before it goes public, and you'll get it in a higher bit rate, which means the cool interstitial music we use sounds a lot better. And also we sound a lot better. And there's no ads. So that helps support us and helps you have a better podcast experience, which is kind of that mutualism that works so well in nature. So I highly recommend it. Anyway, thanks for listening. We'll be back probably in a few days with a bonus episode and definitely next Monday with a full one. So look forward to my thing. Thank you.