699 - Punch-Out!!

Best Games - Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!! only exists because of a mistake.

By 1984 Nintendo had already released three Donkey Kong titles and one Mario Bros. game. I don’t know if you heard, but the Donkey Kong and Mario games did quite well. Well, most of them did. I don’t believe Stanley from Donkey Kong 3 is really a household name. I wonder how that one sold.

In any event, Nintendo had purchased more monitors than they needed, and rather than have them sit in a warehouse waiting for a game that would sell as well as the first Donkey Kong, they decided to try something radical.

Why not make a game that needed two monitors?

They could sell these advanced cabinets for a bit more and clear out old inventory. At two birds one stone… or one cabinet two monitors, type situation. After all, this sort of tactic had worked out for them a few years earlier when they had a bunch of Radar Scope cabinets that weren’t selling and rather than take a hit on them, they filled them full of Donkey Kong boards and sold an absolute boatload of them. Couldn’t hurt to try it again.

They took a swipe at making a racing game, but processors at the time were just not up to the task of drawing fast racing action across two screens. Genyo Takeda ultimately decided on a boxing game, where the bottom screen contained the action and the top screen contained the clock, fighter banners, score, and stamina bars. All information you might only need once or twice a match and can easily be gathered in a glance.

The characters and action on the bottom screen were big and bold in a way that you didn’t see in games back then. Large cartoony boxers designed by Shigeru Miyamoto filled the screen and a green wireframe representation of your fighter faced them down. Add digitized speech and sound clips, and you had one of the more eye catching arcade cabinets of it’s time.

In the arcade, Punch-Out!! did fine. Not Donkey Kong sales, but fine.

When they significantly downgraded the game for a port to the single screen, much lower powered, NES, that’s when it really took off.

At first it launched as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, but it was later rereleased simply as Punch Out!! when the license for Mike Tyson’s name and likeness ran out. The man’s many legal and abuse issues probably helped convince Nintendo it was better to part ways. A cartoon version of Piston Honda or Soda Popinski might be slightly off-putting cultural stereotypes, but they were never going to assault their spouses, so that was probably a good business decision.

The NES version of Punch-Out!! plays very similarly to the arcade game. It isn’t really a game about boxing. It’s a sort of rhythm, pattern recognition game, where you have to watch for specific openings and tells and then punch, dodge, or block accordingly. When people say that From Soft took a page out of the Punch-Out!! book for their boss fights, they aren’t wrong. Dark Souls has sort of a freeform Punch-Out!! thing going for it.

Maybe you could have designed a real simulation of boxing on the NES. Maybe that would have been possible. But I doubt it. The gameplay of Punch-Out!! on the other hand, has absolutely stood the test of time. You could pick up and play Punch-Out!!, especially the NES version, right now and the gameplay would challenge and surprise you. You would have a pretty easy time with the first few fights, and then the next batch would give you trouble. But you would learn them. You would get better, and learn to anticipate each fighters set of attacks.

You would have fun playing the game.

Punch-Out!! went on to have sequels and reimaginings. Each one of them is compelling and fun, but anytime someone talks about Punch-Out!! it’s that NES version that they are likely talking about.

Maybe someone would have come up with a game like Punch-Out!! on their own, with no external pressures. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in the world where, because Nintendo over-ordered a certain monitor, they needed a way to justify putting two of them in one cabinet. Punch-Out!! is the end result of that pressure. And it is absolutely one of the Best Games.