Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

In 1985, Nintendo releases a game called Super Mario Bros. that completely revitalizes the flagging fortunes of the game industry, and it instantly becomes synonymous with their brand. Naturally, a sequel is out within a year: Super Mario Bros. 2, a kind of extra-difficult level pack running in the original game engine.

The only problem is, Nintendo feels like this new game is too difficult for the plodding, feeble-minded likes of their Western audience, and they refuse to release the game outside of Japan. This doesn’t become an issue until 1998, when the marketing juggernaught that is Super Mario Bros. 3 begins making itself known. Obviously, the Western audience needs some kind of “Mario 2” to fill in that gap, right? What’s a corporation to do?!

In this moment of desperation, Nintendo gropes around in its back catalog and comes back out with a quirky Japan-only gem called Doki Doki Panic. They proceed to shamelessly slap the Mario license onto Panic and shove it out the door to fend for itself in North America, doing little to cover up the drastic shift in gameplay mechanics and the bizarre new cast of enemies.

The neglected SMB2 would only ever be released in the West much later as part of the Super Mario Bros. All-Stars compilation for the SNES, under the title Super Mario Bros. – The Lost Levels Until then, we were stuck playing Doki Doki Panic, made hapless patsies by Nintendo’s devilish bait-and-switch! Shame, Nintendo! The light of pop culture history condemns you!!

I’m none too keen on this version of events. It’s catchy and it’s dramatic, but as we’ve seen in the case of Pokemon Green, the truth behind these weird localization snags is often weirder, more convoluted, and (I think) more interesting than it initially seems.

So firstly – Super Mario Bros. 2 is not really a unique game. I don’t mean this as a value judgment on the game’s originality (although, yeah, it’s basically an early form of a Kaizo hack, with stunning innovations like “maybe the squids are on land in this one?!”). There were actually other Japan-only “expansions” for Super Mario Bros., for instance the ultra-difficult Arcade version Vs. Super Mario Bros.. There was also the exquisitely bizarre All Night Nippon Super Mario Bros., featured above, a promotional tie-in with a popular radio station that swapped out stage enemies with pixelated idols and DJs. These games all came out in ’85 and ’86. Essentially, these were just extensions of the original Super Mario Bros. They represent Nintendo wringing all money they can from an existing chunk of technology before moving on to something new.

Secondly – if you compare the credits of Doki Doki Panic to those of Super Mario Bros. 2, you are going to see almost the exact same list of names. Like, almost to a man. As a matter of fact, the only big name on Doki Doki Panic that you wouldn’t recognize from the typical Mario crew is that of Kensuke Tanabe… but, hey, he was the game’s director, and evidently Doki was his brainchild. Hmm, I wonder where he came up with all these crazy, left-field ideas that would later be so carelessly repackaged as part of the Mario series…

Oh, right! He made them for a prototype of Super Mario Bros. 2. WHAT.

Tanabe’s Mario prototype was a cooperative vertically scrolling platformer, sort of like Ice Climber. The famous throwing mechanic was intended to allow players to build ladders and stairs to upper levels using objects from the environment. Miyamoto thought it needed more work, so it got put on the back burner and retooled to be a little more like the established side-scrolling formula.

Around the same time, Fuji TV was partnering with Nintendo for a media expo called Yume Kōjō. Tanabe was handed a set of Arabian Nights lookin’ mascot dudes and told to make a promo game about them. So he killed two Dokis with one Panic and shamelessly slapped this new brand over top of his new Mario game!

It’s hard to say how much the rebranding actually changed the nascent Panic‘s development. It’s pretty likely we would never have had Toad and the Princess in our SMB2 had Tanabe not been handed a sheet of four characters. The floating move the Princess was originally supposed to be a flying carpet, and there’s a certain storybook aesthetic that remained a part of the game. But the gameplay, and every single character apart from the four principles, were all Mario team originals that very well may have been intended to be part of the Mario series.

So if Doki Doki Panic easily has enough Mario-cred to rival the true Super Mario Bros. 2, why does it seem like the black sheep of the family?

I think it’s important to remember that before Super Mario Bros., the Mario character had been known primarily for dodging giant apes and punching large crabs. Nobody had any idea what the next game in a projected “Mario series” was going to look like! Super Mario Bros. 2 represented a hewing to what was already popular, and Super Mario Bros. 3 finally calcified that formula into a recognizable franchise. Doki Doki Panic represents the very short window during which the series could have gone in any number of directions – and there’s something kind of cool about that.

Today, most of the cast of Doki Doki Panic has migrated over to the main dynasty of Mario Bros. games, and – as the four-character setup of Super Mario 3D World demonstrates – Nintendo is still in the debt of Tanabe’s wacky prototype. Doki might always be the frayed, incoherent uncle of the family, but it’s good to know that it still has a place at the table.

– CC

Old Genesis games have kind of a weird vibe, don’t they? Something about how they look and feel makes them impossible to confuse with SNES games of the same time, despite the two consoles being pretty evenly powered. I think you can trace this back to some specific limitations developers faced on the Genesis. The color palette, which was a fraction of the size of the Super Nintendo’s, forced developers to work with flat, saturated colors. Then there was the sound chip, which had a hard time with any music that wasn’t twangy, hard-hitting electronica.

Many Genesis games – even the very good ones! – come down to us seeming kind of ugly and dated because of this. But there were a select couple of developers, like Treasure and the Sonic Team, who could wring aesthetics out of this thing that are still amazing today.

Evidently Game Freak was one of them. Before they became Nintendo’s personal Pokemon factory, they crafted this eye-catching, dynamic, and thoroughly weird platformer for the ol’ Mega Drive.

Pulseman‘s premise is a little like Tron, if Tron had involved Flynn traveling into his computer to cyber up a program he wrote, fathering a half-computer hero baby, and finally turning evil and battling his son for control of the Earth/cyberspace. Also if all that was just the opening cutscene and the actual game was about a pointy Sentai cyborg bouncing between two worlds and blowing things up all Megaman style.

The giant sprites and elaborate cutscenes are pretty remarkable for the time, but what I think is neat is how well the game’s goofy VR premise meshes with the console’s strengths. Bright primary colors and lo-fi electronic sound? Of course that’s what it’s like to be inside a computer!

Some of the mechanics were pretty creative, too. You need to run around and generate static electricity to fuel your moves, including the famous “VOLT TACKLE”, which lets you bounce around in a sphere of electricity. There’s a great kinetic dimension to this move that reminds me a bit of Ristar, another fantastic and underrated Genesis classic. Plus, your lil’ guy shouts “VOLTECCER” in a garbled Genesis sound clip voice every time you use the move, and that’s kind of adorable.

Outside of Japan, Pulseman was only made released on Sega’s proto-download service the Sega Channel, a bit of technology as futuristic and bizarre as Pulseman himself. This more or less damned our poor, pointy-headed hero to utter obscurity. If you’ve heard about him at all, it’s probably because of all the Pulseman in-jokes Game Freak throws into its Pokemon games. EXAMPLE: the electric ghost Pokemon Rotom totally ghosts Pulseman’s style, and Pikachu’s been rocking the Volt Tackle in Smash Bros. and the main series alike.

Luckily, the game got a semi-decent release in the form of a Wii Virtual Console download a few years back. If you’re a fan of classic platformers, definitely consider picking it up!

And so, as Julius Cesar once spoke, I say unto you: Veni, Vidi, VOLTECCER.

-CC

Today’s Lost Classics post is all about the Warcraft series. As such, it may require a bit of foreknowledge – particularly if you’re too young to remember a time before the name Warcraft referred to anything besides Verne Troyer’s favorite MMORPG.

Blizzard’s original mid-90’s Warcraft games were massively successful strategy epics, set in a darkly humorous fantasy world. They tended to involve a lot of scenarios in which green-skinned warriors with Yoda voices (known as The Orcs) engaged in bloody warfare with a bunch of armor-clad psuedo-Englishmen (known as The Humans). These were landmarks in the RTS genre, and the direct ancestors of games like Starcraft, DOTA, and League of Legends. (And yes, they would eventually inspire the most profitable game ever released. More on that later.)

My cousin introduced me to the early Warcraft games when I was about 7, at a time when my half-formed nervous system lacked the capacity for any strategy, realtime or no. Despite this, I loved the series; not because I could make it through a single map without resorting to cheat codes, but because I found the setting completely engrossing. Each race and faction had its own texture and history, detailed in hefty instruction manuals penned by legendary designers like Bill Roper and Chris Metzen. In retrospect, some of their ideas may have been somewhat derivative, but the attention to detail and the sheer volume of story that came with these games is still something that seems pretty special. My cousin and I spent a lot of time poring over these stories, dreaming of what it would be like to assume Orcish identities and travel through the World Of lands of Warcraft.

Point being: you can forgive me for getting really, really excited for this…

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No games have inspired more blatant misinformation, perhaps, than Pokemon Red & Blue. The games hit North American shelves back in ’98, right at the dawn of near-ubiquitous internet access. This was long before the average user could tell the difference between an Authoritative Source and some random jerk’s gif-strewn Geocities page. Random jerks with gif-strewn Geocities pages tended to make use of this fact.

What’s more, the games had already been out in Japan for 2 years at this point… meaning there was a vast body of unexplained images from the TV series, the card game, and other tie-ins that the aforementioned jerks could pore over and misinterpret. An early glimpse of unremarkable Water-type Pokemon Marril from the first Pokemon movie took on new life in the fandom as Pikablu, mightiest of the Pokegods, whose azure thunder might someday shake all Kanto to its core.

Naturally, when evidence of Pokemon Green came to light, people got to talking. What was this strange Japan-only release? Could the game be the key we needed to unlock the mysterious Mew? The secret to puzzling out that Hellraiser Rubik’s cube they called Missingno.?!

The truth is pretty common knowledge now: Red & Green were just the original Japanese titles for Red & Blue! The Japanese Blue version was a spin-off produced a little later, featuring updated art, new monster arrangements, and a new version of famed Mewtwo hangout “The Unknown Dungeon”. The NA release of Red & Blue combined the casts of Pokemon from the original two games with all the updated features found in Blue. So, one could say that we got all 3 games, in a mere 2 packages.

But wait – if you think about it, what this really means is that we didn’t get ANY of the original Japanese Pokemon games! Since the Pokemon games we grew up playing were modded versions of Pokemon Blue, English-speaking fans will never get to see the original Unknown Dungeon, the Blue version’s alternate Pokemon selection, or – most tragically – the art that Game Freak originally devised for the series back in ’96.

Enjoy, dear readers, the following sample… of what may have been:

– CC