Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 045: Tennis and Tetris for Game Boy

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

Bryan Ochalla joins in again for another in-depth dissection of the Game Boy library. This time we look at Nintendo's Tennis and the system's 800-lb. gorilla. Not, not Donkey Kong (DK's an ape, not a gorilla!) — I mean Tetris. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts Micro, and this week, I'm, or this month, or this month, or whatever, I'm kind of going back to the well. Last time, I published a long-dormant episode of a Game Boy-themed podcast that ties in with my Game Boy World Video Project, and that sat on my hard drive for like, I want to say about 10 months before I finally said, oh, I should just put that out as a Retronauts. And I wasn't sure what people would think of it, especially since it was much longer than the usual Retronaut's micro-length file. And the response to that was overwhelmingly positive.

And in fact, we've had a lot of people say, you should do more of those. And that includes Bob, who said, hey, you should do more of those. So I'm doing more of those. And with me here again this week is... Ryan O'Halla. Oh, it's O'Hala.

Oh, I feel bad because I was saying O'Challa. Everybody does. It doesn't matter. So it's like the bread. Yes. Okay. Now I understand. So Brian, just a quick intro for yourself.

Who are you? Why are you talking about Game Boy with me? Well, I have run a blog of my own for, I don't even know how long at this point, seven, eight years, maybe longer. It's called The Gay Gamer. I write about a lot of random, basically just anything gaming related that interests me. And a lot of what interests me are old Japanese games. systems, the Game Boy being one of them. So I guess we both have a shared interest in the Game Boy. Right. And as I mentioned last time, the previous episode, I didn't really get to play a lot of

Game Boy games back when it was a viable system. So my kind of relationship is more one of discovery, whereas yours is more someone who was there on the ground at the time, right? Yep. Yep. I watched the launch and had one at launch, everything like that. So, yeah, basically the idea here is, you know, Game Boy World is a chronological survey of Game Boy games based on the game's original release date in any territory. So if a game came out first in Japan, we go by the Japanese release date.

If it came out first in the U.S. or somehow, if it came out first in Europe, which almost never happened, then we go by those dates instead. And it's all a little bit loose because there aren't very specific date records for U.S. in European releases. In fact, most European releases are just the year. Like, it came out in 1991. No one knows when exactly in 91. So for the most part, we're going with Japanese releases. But anyway, you know, I do the videos kind of on my own, play the games, come to some conclusions, do some research, and post the videos and the accompanying text piece. This is an opportunity to kind of go back and look at some games and get some different perspectives on things.

you know, the videos that I do wouldn't work necessarily that well as audio files. So this is more of a conversation and works better as a podcast. And this is not the only kind of Retronauts Micro Podcast I will be doing going forward. So if you hate Game Boy, don't think, oh, God, I just have to listen to Game Boy once every four weeks. That's not going to be the case. But I will be doing it on a fairly regular basis because it's something that I sink a lot of time into and have a lot to say about. and, you know, aside from my video series and, you know, blogs like Brian's, Game Boy's not really that well-known or well-explored a corner of video game history.

So I hope to rectify that. So, anyway, last episode, we talked about the Japanese launch of Game Boy, which had four games accompanying it, Alleyway, Super Mario Land, baseball, and Yakuman. This week, we're going to look at the next two or three games. I, we're going to kind of see how it goes in terms of time. But the next two games to follow came about, let's see, Game Boy's launch was April 21st, 1989. The first game came about a month later at the end of May. And the next game after that came at the middle of June.

So kind of still launch window, but no one used the word launch window back then because marketing hadn't devoured our souls at that point. We were still innocent and pure. but you know that's kind of the idea these launch window games the first of which was tennis and the second of which was Tetris which is probably an episode unto itself

which is why we may not get further than Tetris if we do make it pass then the third game will be Shanghai by Howe but maybe we'll do that next time So, Brian, first we should talk about tennis. What do you know about this game? What do you think about it? Well, for me, it was one of the games. I know we're not talking about the Japanese launch,

but I picked it up alongside my Game Boy when it launched in North America. Well, we're not necessarily talking about the Japanese launch. We're just talking about the games in that sequence, but that doesn't mean we have to just talk about Japan's launch right now. That's totally fine. Okay. Well, then in North America, the U.S., it was launched alongside the system, and like I said, I picked it up. Although I feel like I'm kind of a strange case because I've always been a fan of the sports. So, of course, it appealed to me.

I'm not sure if it had, you know, the same broad appeal to the mainstream audience. But I picked it up because, you know, it certainly looked better than NES tennis. It seemed, you know, it had better graphics. It allowed two-player play using the link cable for the Game Boy. So off the bat, it appealed to me. I've always kind of liked it, even though it's pretty limited. in what it offers. I mean, you can play a computer opponent at four different levels of difficulty, or you can play a human opponent using the link cable, and that's pretty much it.

It doesn't have, you know, a tournament mode or a bunch of bells and whistles. You only have a couple strokes, you know, a forehand and a backhand and a serve and an overhead. But, I mean, I would guess for me, given when it was released, it was an acceptable enough product. I mean, it's certainly stacked up well compared to Game Boy Baseball or some of the other titles. So I don't know. I think it's a quality enough tennis game for the time period. Yeah, I mean, having gone back and played NES tennis quite a bit since having started my Game Boy project, I appreciate how nice a job they did with Game Boy tennis.

And actually, Famicom, NES tennis was actually not that. bad. For the time especially, it was pretty darn good. The biggest limitation, I guess, was that it was a single player game unless you played doubles. But there was no one versus one, player versus player. You either played cooperative doubles or you played against the computer. And that was down to the perspective on the court. Nintendo went with that sort of behind the player view. So the four court was large and the back court was very, small, and it would have been unfair to, you know, the second player in the back court to have to run around with that diminished space. There's kind of some weird perspective trickery

happening there. Yeah. And yeah, it's not that good. Not that, not that, not that, not really that playable. But of course, Game Boy gets rid of that, that limitation by putting the four court for each player on their own respective screens. So each player has a different perspective on the court than the other. So you see the game from behind your player and your opponent sees the game from behind their players. Since the system had two separate screens, that was entirely possible. And it's a great example of, you know, them kind of taking this old idea, you know, a five-year-old tennis game and just making that one small change enabled by the difference in technology and coming out with a winner, I think.

So what do you think of like the physics and stuff in the game? I don't really play sports games, so I don't have that much of a basis for a comparison with tennis. But I feel like, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, game was kind of, um, pretty remarkable for its time in that it used, uh, like, perspective, uh, on, on the tennis ball, like, based on where the ball is relative to the viewer, it changes size. And it has a shadow underneath it, which was something. that other tennis games hadn't really done to that point. So it made the game more playable. But, you know, that's 1984 standards. I can't really speak to how realistically or how effectively the ball controls and handles because I don't really have genre experience.

Yeah. I mean, it definitely continued, you know, it had a, I think it had a better perspective game boy tennis in terms of it was a little bit more of an over like a bird's eye view not totally but higher up so it wasn't so skewed of a perspective it still has the kind of depth with the ball to me I just feel like game boy tennis feels better than nes tennis like one problem I've always had with nes tennis is it feels very rigid and sometimes it's hard to understand where exactly you have to be positioning the player to hit the ball. Even now when I play it, I swing and miss a lot. But with Game Boy Tennis, I feel like it's pretty easy to sense where you should be.

It feels very smooth, you know, to swing the racket and hit the ball. I think the only actual problem I have with the game, well, other than the limited, like, options, would just be, it seems like everything works except for the players are always a little bit slower than you think they should be. So the computer opponent often beats you just because you can't actually get across the court to get to a ball. And it can be frustrating.

But other than that, it actually feels really good to me. And it's fun to play. Do you think that's a product of the perspective? Because, again, you know, there's the difference in perspective. The back court is a little smaller than the forecourt. Do you think the computer benefits from that? They didn't, like, stop to take. that into consideration like oh he has less pixel space to cover but he still moves at the same

speed as the player i hadn't really noticed this but i'm wondering if it's uh if it's an issue like that's where it comes from i honestly don't know i've never really i've only ever assumed that it was just a way to kind of increase the difficulty uh perhaps artificially just to you know there's only four technically there's only four opponents you play in the game because there's four levels of difficulty um each one of them gets harder i've just always the same assumed it was like they didn't want it to be too easy so they slowed things down a little bit but that's totally my opinion I have no idea honestly it could be what you said like definitely moving forward into the court is slow as well perhaps even slower than

moving left and right I don't know it's an interesting idea okay well I just thought I'd put that out there I don't really know I don't know if there's there are any credits available for this game online. Like a lot of old Nintendo games, it's just kind of like, some people made this. Let me check back through my notes. Let's see. No, there are no credits. We know that it was made by Nintendo R&D1, and Intelligence Systems website does not list it as one of

their projects. They did work on a lot of games for Game Boy, and it. including baseball, and all of those are credited on IS's website. So this must have been done either internally at Nintendo or by some sort of mystery ghost studio that they're not speaking about. So, yeah, do you have anything else to say about tennis? I mean, it's pretty much what it says on the label. It's tennis.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those games, especially from early on in the Game Boy's lifetime that I'm not sure. you would say ages particularly well. I mean, it ages better than NES tennis, but I don't know how many people are clamoring to pull out the cartridge and play it over and over again nowadays when there are so many better options. But, you know, I still think it's one of those things

that for the time it was definitely appealing, I think, at least to a certain audience. And, you know, it was a well-made product. Kind of, I think you've said this before. It just, it even perhaps looks better than the other launch-era game. in terms of its design, it's not as simplistic, and those sprites are larger. So I think even just for that, it's kind of noteworthy.

Yeah, the top-down perspective that you mentioned, it definitely makes a difference in how it plays and how it looks and how it holds up. So the next game on the Game Boy docket is the big one, it's Tetris. In Japan, that came out about two months after the Gameboy launch. But in America, of course, it was a pack-in. Japan doesn't really believe in pack-ins, but America does, because Americans are cheapskates, and we want free stuff with our game consoles. So Nintendo realized that and said, here's the best game we could possibly put inside the box,

and it sold millions. So obviously, having bought a Game Boy pretty early on, you had Tetris right away, right? Yes. Were you a total Tetris addict, or was it one that you were like, I don't get this. Oh, no. I mean, I guess there were probably people who weren't... I don't know if I would say it as an addict,

but I definitely played it quite a bit. It's kind of hard not to once you start playing it, right? I mean... Yeah, I had someone comment on one of my videos. Like, am I the only person who doesn't like Tetris? All I could say was like, yes. I mean, it's one of those games that it's so simple and you look at screens of it

and you're like, eh, what? Who cares? I remember Nintendo Power really pushing the game when the NES version came out. And I read reports on it and saw screenshots

and they're, you know, their breathless excitement in the articles. And it's just, all I could think was, I'm not seeing it. What is the appeal of this game? But then you play it.

And, oh, yes, it's so good. Yes. And it's like one of those games that you say I'll play for five minutes, I'm going to walk away from it, and then you say, just one more try. I want to do better than I did the last time. And then, you know, a half hour, hour, hour and a half later, you're finally turning it off. Right. So. But on the plus side, I mean, if you do just have five minutes to play a game, Tetris is a really good one because you can just pick it up, play it. And, you know, unless you're just really on a roll, it's not too

painful to just switch the system off. It's kind of a time killer. It's what we have, you know, mobile apps for these days. Yep. More or less. And it, you know, it definitely makes use of the hardware and the limitations of the system. I think just the way the game is set up in the graphics, having everything be in four colors doesn't hold it back.

In fact, you know, it seems to still work out just fine if you ask me. Yeah, this is actually the first Game Boy game of Mini that we see that is based on a much more primitive PC game from years before. And this actually becomes kind of a prevailing theme in Game Boy software. But but to this point, you know, the first first four or five games for the system were all kind of based on NES games. You know, you had pretty much the direct conversion of baseball or tennis, which, you know, kind of took some liberties, or Super Mario Land, which is a different game than Super Mario Brothers, but still very much in that style. And even Yakuman is pretty much drawn from a previous Nintendo handheld and from, you know, Mahjong and four-person Mahjong that they published for Famicom in the very early days.

but Tetris is not based on a console game. It is based on a computer game from 1984, 85 that basically was one step, like the computer itself didn't have graphical displays. So it was pretty much one step removed from teletype. It was pretty pretty primitive and simplistic. And I think that works really well for Game Boy because, you know, the fundamental gameplay had to be simple and therefore communicate clearly in monochrome. which isn't always the case for Game Boy Puzzlers and just Game Boy games in general.

But Tetris, you know, you have seven different shapes, different arrangements of four blocks each. And just their silhouettes are strong enough that you immediately see it and spot it and know kind of how to react out of the corner of your eye. The console versions have color, and that helps a little bit. But you really don't need it. Any anecdotes or thoughts? I don't know other than obviously this is yet another

Game Boy title early Game Boy title that used the link cable Although I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I've never played the game using the link cable Which I don't know how you know how shocking that is for anyone But I know it was a selling point for a lot of people But I've never played it that way Actually I don't know if I've played Game Boy Tetris with the link cable either I've definitely played head-to-head Tetris Tetris, but maybe not on Game Boy.

But, you know, that was, I feel like, unlike baseball, you didn't need another player to be able to enjoy Tetris. It's a good, fun, solo game, as opposed to baseball, which is, like, horrible if you play it alone versus the CPU, but okay if you play it against another person. Yeah. Because you're both sort of, like, hobbled by the same limitations. Yeah. And it also, it just seems like kind of that typical.

you know, game where you would spot someone sitting in a hall, a school hallway or something like that huddled in a corner with their game boy playing it alone. I mean, it doesn't necessarily seem like something that needs social interaction or assistance or anything like that. Yeah, it's the kind of game that you hear people say, oh yeah, my 80-year-old grandmother still plays that every day. Like she's played it every single day for the past 25 years. This is the kind of game that that provokes that sort of sustained interest, I think. Yep. Like if you get it and you're hooked on it, then yeah, there you go.

Of course, its appearance on Game Boy was a huge coup for Nintendo. There's a really complex and convoluted history for this game. I don't know how much we want to go into detail on that. But, yeah, I don't know. Like, how much have you read about the history of Tetris? Because it's kind of a doozy. Yeah, I mean, I certainly remember it from back in the day in the years since. I wouldn't say I am any kind of historian on it, though, other than, you know, some of the drama

involving licensing and Nintendo securing the rights to it early on. But that's about all I remember, honestly. Yeah, so kind of the big deal about this game was that it was from Russia with fun. It was a video game created behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Russia, which didn't really happen that often because there just weren't a lot of opportunities for Soviets to to create video games. Which isn't to say that, you know, Soviets didn't enjoy video games. There's a Famicom, NES clone, called the Dendi,

that's basically synonymous with video games in Russia. Like, maybe not so much now, but back in, like, the 90s. And when you talked about video games, you were referring to Dendi, the Famicom clone. But this was created by a mathematician named Alex E Pazetnov. and eventually the game started to kind of make its way beyond just his what it was a Elorg Technica computer or whatever it was called oh no that wasn't I can't remember what his computer was called but anyway yeah so eventually you know people started kind of competing for

their rights to it and Atari thought they had them and it turned out they only had them I think to the arcade machine and maybe PCs, but not for game consoles. And Nintendo kind of figured this out, and in large part, thanks to a man named Hank Rogers, who had kind of built a reputation for himself in Japan by being the creator of the first breakout RPG in Japan, the Black Onyx, which was based on wizardry. Even though he was a Dutch guy and didn't really initially speak all that much Japanese, he created like an RPG that became a huge hit in Japan and became kind of Japan's first homegrown RPG anyway

so that's kind of his background and he just sort of became like this business facilitator moving around helping different companies and he helped Nintendo lock down the rights to Tetris for consoles which Atari had sold to its Tengen division or offshoot and so Tingen started producing Tetris for NES and Nintendo came in and said, no, sorry, you can't do that, which must have been, you know, very satisfying to them because Tengen was making unlicensed NES games and Nintendo couldn't

really do anything about it, but they could do something about Tetris because they did have the rights to it and Tengen did not, even though Tengen thought they did. So Tengen had to recall its unlicensed Tetris games. Nintendo brought out their own console game and then immediately started working with developer Bulletproof software to port it to Game Boy. And this is a, on Game Boy, it's a collaborative effort between Bulletproof and Nintendo R&D1, so it has like, you know, hip Tanaka music and so forth. But it's kind of a collaborative effort.

And for a lot of people, it's the definitive Tetris. I would agree. Especially, it's interesting to me how even though the NES Tetris produced by Nintendo is a quality product, people don't really talk about it or write about it at all, especially compared to how much Game Boy Tetris is revered at this point, I think. Yeah, I think, you know, NES Tetris had the disadvantage of being preceded by Tengen's Tetris, which was kind of ugly, but despite its ugliness, it had a multiplayer mode, which the NES game did not. yeah um so basically all the nes game had going for it was some pretty good music and some really bright

kind of candy like graphics jolly candy like graphics and uh game boy did not have those but it did have the multiplayer and its music was also very good so um plus it was portable and it's you know just a perfect fit for the platform yeah so yeah this is oh go ahead nope i was just going to say i agree and that it's it's amazing how much being portable benefits a game like this. It's like you said, it's a game that a lot of people want to just put a few minutes into, and it's easier to do that when you have the Game Boy already in your pocket in your bag, as opposed to having to go downstairs, turn on your NES computer or your monitor, etc. Right.

Yeah, it's very much a pick-up and play kind of experience and really works for the system. I think it's interesting that when Nintendo finally launched a Game Boy successor, nine years later in 1998 with the Game Boy Color, the big launch title that they had for that system was also Tetris, but again, people don't seem to like that version as much as Game Boy Tetris. What are your thoughts on Tetris DX? I don't know. I've just always found it kind of garish for some reason.

It just never appealed to me, even though you would think at the time especially people would have enjoyed a colorized version of this, you know, kind of antiquated game. But like I said, it just almost seemed garish and too much compared to the simplicity of the original that I think it's, maybe it's because the game was not associated with amazing graphics. I mean, they were completely workable. They benefited the gameplay, but you don't play Game Boy Tetris for its brilliant visuals. so maybe it just didn't need to be updated in that way. I don't know. Yeah, you mentioned it's garish,

and that's kind of... I can't disagree. Like, there's something about the Game Boy Color, I don't know if it's the palette or just the way developers used it. But there are very few attractive Game Boy Color games. There's a few. Like, Metal Gear Solid looked good,

but for the most part the games either looked like badly colorized black and white games or just they were straight up hideous and I don't know why but it was always like really gross shades of yellow like mustard yellow and horrible fuchsias

and like these dull grotesque greens and I know that the Game Boy color screen is not that great but when you look at these games on like 3DS virtual console or on emulators They still look butt-ugly. Yeah. Like, yeah, so I don't know what it was about Game Boy Color, but yeah, it definitely kind of took Tetris down with it.

It's, you know, even though it came out nine years later, I think it really didn't offer anything better than the original Tetris. So, yeah, Tetris is no longer available to buy on like the virtual console for 3DS because of licensing by the Tetris company. I think Ubisoft owns the rights to Tetris now. so Nintendo can't publish its own Tetris games anymore. It was available, I think, for a while on virtual console. So if you have it, you have it, but it's been delisted.

But the good thing about Tetris is that because it sold millions of copies and came packed in with most, you know, with Game Boy hardware in several regions, it's not an expensive game. It's very easy and very cheap. And it's definitely one of those that's worth picking up. I agree. potentially one of the best pickups you can get for the system. Every once in a while you see a system and a pack-in game that's just perfect.

Nintendo usually has had a pretty good streak with that. Like Super Mario Brothers, Tetris, what else, Wii Sports. Like sometimes, you know, they just nail it. And this is one of those cases where they just nailed it. Like, I really think the Game Boy would have been a success without Tetris, but shipping it with Tetris. I'm sure Nintendo, you know, could have made a lot more money off of the system by selling the two things separately like they did in Japan.

But I think ultimately they made more money because people checked out demos of Tetris and said, I need to own this and ended up buying systems. And then, you know, the install base was huge and people bought more software. So it's a great example of, you know, how kind of taking a little bit of a loss at the beginning, you know, may not be such a bad idea in the long term. Yeah. And also, like you said earlier, you suggested, certainly of the games released in it, the first number of years for the Game Boy, it helped expand the audience to people beyond just

children, right? Right. Grandma's, parents, just straight up adults. If it hadn't been released, it would be interesting to see if what other game would have ever done that. I mean, as popular as Pokemon is and became, I kind of doubt, you know, we don't usually talk about grandmas today playing old school Game Boy systems in Pokemon. So clearly Tetris had that going for it too. Yeah, I mean, there was Dr. Mario, maybe a few other games, but this was kind of the one to push the system beyond the core Nintendo audience of the time.

And, you know, one of Nintendo's first commercials for Game Boy featured sort of like a, a businessman, uh, sort of struggling through his work-a-day world. Everything's all clockwork and he's, you know, uh, not having fun, stepping in line to the airplane and so forth. But then he takes out a game boy and plays Tetris and everything's wonderful. So, so Nintendo knew right away, like, this is not just a game for kids. Like this is a device that's going to be popular with older people. And that was, you know, kind of where the, uh, Nintendo's original entry, entry into handheld gaming came from, Game and Watch was, you know, inspired by a board salaryman on the train tinkering with a digital watch. I made Gunpei Yokoi say, huh, you know, maybe I could do

something with that. And Game Boy was kind of the ultimate evolution of that concept. And I think Game Boy was, you know, proof of concept right there. All right. So that's, we've been going half an hour. I feel like that's more than enough for a game. Game Boy Microepisode. So we'll save Shanghai and whatever comes after that for next time. Kind of the beginning of Game Boy's third party extravaganza. Although, did we really consider Hal Laboratory, the third party? Well, I guess at the time they were considered third party.

I just am so used to thinking of them as second party or even, you know, internal that. But I think at the time, they were fairly second, second third party. Yeah, they actually developed the game for Activision. But I guess we can talk about that next time. So until next time, tell us where we can find you on the internet, Brian. My blog is called The Gay Gamer, Thegaygamer.com. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Humbler, wherever you can possibly find a person these days, I think. And I'm, of course, you know, here with Retronauts.

retronauts.com and usgamer.net. And you can find me on Twitter as Gamesbite. You can find Retronuts on Twitter as Retronauts. How about that? And of course, all sorts of social media with the name Retronauts on it. We're there. It's awesome. The show is supported by Patreon.

So if you like to hear people talking about Game Boy games or want to hear people talking about something other than Game Boy games, please feel free to help support the show. We'll be back next week with a full-length podcast episode, not about Game Boy, and that'll be Bob, so look forward to it. Thanks, Brian. Thank you. Thank you.