Pro Wrestling was one of the first Master System boxes I ever saw, sitting in the bargain bin of a local retailer in the mid-90's. The artwork remains as confounding to me now as it did then, and borders on Lovecraftian in its "My mind has no way of comprehending this mundane object I'm looking at" way.
Women's wrestling was exponentially more popular in Japan than the US in the 80's, so the change is understandable. What I find more interesting is that they changed one of the teams into the Road Warriors (The guys with face paint). The Road Warriors began touring Japan in mid 85 and started with Jim Crockett Promotions (The precursor to WCW) in early 86. Short turnaround time to choose, but still, they were wildly popular.
I'd wager that the Crush Brothers team are meant to be approximations of Hogan and Flair as well. So this case is at least completely understandable why they'd go with a changed-just-enough-to-not-be-sued mens roster, rather than a licensed female wrestler who was essentially completely unknown outside of Japan pre-internet.
Women's wrestling in America was always considered either a novelty or a joke (and only has evolved in the past 20+ years), mostly because virtually everything about it revolved around one woman, the Fabulous Moolah, who wrestled from the 1950s up until the 2000s. And it wasn't for the better. In the 80s, people started their hand at all-women promotions like the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW), but that promotion largely was built around cheese. Compare this to Japan where the audience has a different approach to how they liked their stuff, and this in turn made the women want to improve their game, although they were often put into weird situations and arbitrary restrictions (like some promotions would force women to retire at 25, for example) because of course it would happen. Also, I should point out that the Road Warriors introduction to Japan was actually when they were in the American Wrestling Association. Verne Gagne, wrestling legend and all-around asshole, filmed a series of vignettes where they would bite the heads off of chickens and drink hot sauce straight from the bottle... which resulted in Hawk and Animal being forced to drink lots of hot sauce upon arriving in Japan.
@@johnnygrind77 Yeah, Animal was pretty much done for a few years due to an insurance policy (Lloyd's of London was, at the time, the only insurance company willing to give wrestlers insurance, with it being an inside joke) after SummerSlam 1992, besides tag team matches where he wouldn't have to do as much (although he would get a singles push in 2001 WCW as a member of the Magnificent Seven and later in 2006 when he had a forgotten heel run on WWE SmackDown), but Hawk still wanted to keep doing stuff.
The shuriken in The Ninja have another advantage that would only surface later. You can actually see them when you're playing on a Game Gear with the Master Gear Converter attached.
I did not anticipate getting an intro to Dump Matsumoto in Segaiden today. Japanese womens wrestlers from that era are not something I know a whole lot about aside from Jumping Bomb Angels from their visit to the WWF in 1987 and Bull Nakano in WWF and WCW in the mid 1990s. Pretty cool!
The other blond would be Stan Hansen, who was massively popular in Japan in the early 80s (along with Terry Funk and Hogan). The bearded longhair is Bruiser Brody who also had a huge presence in Japan. I had a lot of fun playing this game at a sleepover night at a classmate's place.
The Ninja is a fine game and it works as a sequel to Ninja Princess, it's too bad we never got Ninja Princess in the US. And I look forward to when you get to WWF WrestleMania in NES Works 1989 because you cover wrestling games well and yes that art is "What were they thinking?" up there with Mega Man's American box art and the game Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde which I think we'll be seeing in NES Works 1989. Next time, Alex Kidd, oh boy.
Dump pretty much became the pop culture cliche for "big, muscular woman" in Japanese media much like Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair are effectively what the non-fan thinks of when you try to imagine what a wrestler looks like in America. She was that huge, and helped spawn the careers of several other wrestlers, most notably Bull Nakano (a name that should be familiar to American fans).
If the wrestling game had kept its all-women cast for the NA market, it might have been the first video game on a major platform to feature a large woman as the protagonist. It makes me sad to think that bigger girls and/or more athletic ones lost out on this representation.
It was annoying for me as a wrestling fan in the '80s, that the Master System only ever saw one more wrestling game in it's entire library. Especially as the NES had loads.
Before you even said the name, I saw the cover art and said out loud, "Is that Dump and Bull??" Bull Nakano has her own TH-cam channel where she interviews current and former wrestlers and had Dump on there. She's semi-retired from wrestling, even at the age of 62!
It's a good thing they didn't try to de-girl Phantasy Star later on. Also, I always thought it was really weird that that random lady in Megazone 23 was named "Dump," had no idea it was a reference.
As a retro gaming woman myself, it is nice seeing so many people agreeing in the comment section that these changes weren't for the better. Part of me wonders if someone in the homebrew community can bring back these characters in their original forms on the Master System so they can be as they were intended. I would love to play The Ninja as the Ninja Princess on the Sega Master System at some point! However it is good that Sega didn't censor as much in comparison to Nintendo and we still got Phantasy Star and Streets Of Rage with playable badass female characters.
Even to this day, games publishers still persist with their belief that "gamers will never have any interest in _girls_ unless they're standing around in the background in bikinis". Remember when Irrational Games weren't allowed to put Elizabeth on the box cover of Bioshock Infinite because 2K insisted they instead had to put a picture of generic grizzled badass action man Booker DeWitt standing there with a gun, scowling at nothing?
I’m a former pro-wrestler and game journalist, and even shipped 4 wrestling games a dev (soon to be 5). And I never knew SMS Pro Wrestling was a joshi (women’s wrestling) game in Japan! Wild!!
Apparently the Japanese version of The Ninja has a regular dark title screen, different stage layouts, and more stages, and the reason why some of the stages and the continue code was removed in the US/European Master System version is because of the high cost of computer chips at the time, similar to what was done with Enduro Racer's Master System port.
ROM sizes and level amounts were identical between SMS versions - but graphics and a few layouts were Indeed changed. The arcade original however did have some extra stages (that added nothing substantial).
When some smug classist makes the ignorant claim “Only in America would you find people stupid enough to enjoy pro wrestling.” I like showing them footage of 60,000+ Japanese men and women packing the Tokyo Dome to watch Antonio Inoki.
While certainly not EVERY student at my all-girls school had an Atari 2600 in the early 80s (I had a Coleco instead), tons of them did, and not kids who were especially nerdy or anything. It was just a cool family game thing that everyone had if you could afford them. My parents played with us, the teenage girls who babysat were excited to try out our console. My understanding is that during the NES era Nintendo specifically pushed for the "young/teen boys" demographic to be what video games were all about, and advertising started leaning that way. Some of my classmates still had NESes, by the SNES era I was suddenly the only one left playing and boys would be baffled that a GIRL could beat them at F-Zero. (I wasn't even good at it, mind you.) But the advertising thing is just what I've vaguely heard, not something I've researched in depth.
According to the creator of Yars Revenge for the 2600, they focus tested the game with boys, girls, men, and women. The game tested best with women, so of course Atari's executives decided to market the game specifically to boys. For some reason. It really does seem like there was an industry lead push to make video games a "for boys" thing.
It was weird because even as a kid everyone had an NES. It wasn't unusual as a guy to be over at a female friend's house playing Kid Icarus and Ice Climbers. I still remember when I first got an NES and my _mom_ of all people stayed up all night playing Gyromite. It was definitely more family-oriented. But very quickly it started to move more and more in the direction of young boys and by the SNES era that's clearly what had won out.
We were big wrestling fans when the Master System came out, and there weren't many wrestling games at all then so we bought Pro Wrestling and it was fun. Very repetitive but fun. If you beat 10 rounds you also get a nice little animation of a plane landing for the next tournament. The gender swap, which I only discovered in the past few years is sad though, especially as you lose a lot of personality in the process. A lot of the moves look better with more dynamic poses and cute faces from the female wrestlers, while the male versions look stiff and rushed.
Sega not signing the Crush Gals and cashing in on their music is an odd choice. I wonder if the fee was simply too high? It would be like someone looking at the first Wrestlemania card, and only licensing Piper and crew. Sure, it makes sense on some level, but why limit yourself?
Yeah, from what I understand, music licensing in Japan is a massive challenge. By all accounts, JASRAC is not fun to deal with. I can see Sega skipping it altogether.
Why they changed Ninja Princess to The Ninja I'll never understand. I can understand Pro Wrestling though. As a few have said Women's Wrestling in America at the time vs Women's Wrestling in Japan is a night and day difference. Until the 90s with Alundra Blaze a.k.a. Madusa against opponents from Japan such as Bull Nakano Women's Wrestling in America was more or less unchanged since the 40s/50s. I mean, I'm pretty sure The Fabulous Moolah was still Women's Wrestling Champion after almost 30 years undefeated wresting the exact same match she always had been. Men's Wrestling had advanced so much by the 80s compared to the days of Gorgeous George on black and white TV's at the Dawn of televised Wrestling that it's understandable why many, including women, didn't care for Women's Wrestling by comparison. Of course like I said with women like Alundra Blaze things took a turn for the better... until the Diva's era. But it did get better as the last 10 years have shown us. It got there. It just took forever. The only exception was G.L.O.W. Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling but that didn't start until 1986 and it wasn't broadcast everywhere. I have no memory in the 80s of seeing G.L.O.W. on tv in New England (at least *I* don't remember and I was all about Wrestling regardless of Federation or Gender). The first time I saw them was when they made an appearance on Married With Children when the Bundys go to Las Vegas in the season 4 episode "You Gotta Know When To Fold 'Em (Part 2)" in Febuary of 1990 when Al Wrestles Big Bad Mama to try to win money, but is ultimately destroyed mind, body, and soul (what little he had left). However, even if G.LO.W. had been huge with it's start in '86 it still would have been too late to change the sprites to resemble any of them for an American audience. Sadly, I have to agree with Sega's decision to turn it in to an all Male Wrestling game. It made the most sense at the time.
1980s pop culture was mixed when it came to the depiction of women in action roles. There was Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies, Ripley from the Alien movies, and strong women in the Conan and Red Sonja films. Action figures with tie-in cartoons such as Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, and ThunderCats were mainly aimed at boys but included some female characters. She-Ra: Princess of Power was an action-oriented toy line and animated series that was primarily aimed at girls. Samus Aran was revealed to be a woman at the end of the original Metroid. However, the action genre was still male dominated and there was a common belief in the entertainment and toy industries that the main audience for action were males and that they were less interested in female characters. Sometimes an animated series would add token female characters, but those female characters wouldn't get their own action figures in the accompanying toy line.
I watched GLOW on tv as a kid in the 80s.... but only because I had a satellite dish and could pick up some pretty weird programs being distributed for pickup without ads. Pretty sure it was never on my local TV and I lived in a BIG wrestling city. It was the only time I actually kinda got into wrestling.
To answer your question, I think the fallacy began as a result of Nintendo's marketing and advertising policies upon the arrival of the NES in North America. Because they wanted the NES to be a "home entertainment system" and not a "video game console" in an attempt to distance themselves from the 1983 crash, they tried to distribute it in the toy section of stores thanks to things like R.O.B. and the Zapper. Of course, most stores divided up their sections based on "boys" and "girls" interests, with girls apparently being into dolls, dressing up, and cooking, while boys were into action figures, guns and swords, and anything else you can assume was macho. They decided that putting it in boys' sections would help the system more, which helped push the narrative that girls didn't like video games. I assume older people would probably have noticed the lack of effort in convincing females that they should be getting into the NES, which in turn pushed stereotypes. As for why SEGA of America followed similar policies? Well, when Nintendo is dominating the market, as the saying goes, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".
0:51 So I guess this is the first usage of the Revenge of Shinobi / Streets of Rage font. It's funny what sticks out to the eye when you're so much more familiar with later works.
The Ninja was one of 2 game cartridges I had on the Master System (together with Capt. Silver) and a big reason why I started to dislike Sega at an early age. As a kid (and non-English speaking European), I couldn't figure out how to advance in this game. Thanks for enlightening me :D
I didn't touch The Ninja for years because pretty much all the reviews I'd read seemed to suggest it was dire. This was early-mid 90s and I think a lot of mags had concluded that the early MS games were all a waste of time compared to newer, more ambitious stuff. And yeah, Transbot and Pro Wrestling were dire, but The Ninja is a masterpiece that still plays amazingly well, and the second I picked it up it just felt perfect. My personal favourite MS game, still.
Having grown up with Pro Wrestling in my Master System collection as a kid I didn't find out until decades later that it was originally a women's wrestling game. I was exploring all the international SMS releases for Brazil, Europe and Japan when I stumped upon the game and realized, "OMG! That's Pro Wrestling!?" about 5 or 6 years ago. I think aside from licensing issues they probably could have kept the female themed wrestlers. While WCW and WWF were more popular I do remember there was something called The Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling that used to come on sometimes as a kid. But this is definitely NOT a step down from NES wrestling..are you kidding me? It has better graphics, 3 wrestling rings, it's tag team oriented and there's more wrestling moves. The only 8-Bit wrestling game that's better is Tecmo World Wresting.
Luna Vachon was a selectable character in 1994's WWF Raw, but I don't think an American pro wrestling game had multiple female characters until 1999's WWF Attitude.
@@saintrocketIX Warzone had multiple women. You just had to make most of them yourself. But credit is due for going above and beyond in providing the parts to do it. It took a few years for any other western game (in any genre) to catch up to the Acclaim series.
The Ninja used to drive me crazy finding that last scroll. Kind of like the final key for Quartet. I would loop infinitely until frustration caused me to quit.
To the guy on the box, I just want to say that although there are millions of cephalophores that wander through this world, you've got something extra going on, I think you probably know.
Man... Regardless of quality, the Master System had gorgeous games. As someone who never owned or even played on one, this series has been eye-opening in that regard.
don't remember playing The Ninja but it seems like an interesting one. the scrolls mechanic reminds me of gun.smoke NES' wanted posters where the boss doesn't show up unless you have it! Pro Wrestling I remember on NES, but never knew about the Japanese origins (although a couple discords I hang out in, occasionally brought up NJPW stuff, so I have heard of Dump Matsumoto) but I do remember playing Pro Wrestling a fair amount back on SMS.
Nailed it on the head with the Pro Wrestling - > MUSCLE comparison. Couldn't stop thinking that. But as you described the Master System Pro Wrestling more and showed more of what it can do, it does make MUSCLE look like a pile of poo. Pro Wrestling on NES still the GOAT though!
I know the handle "Dump" was supposed to be short for "dump truck" to go along with the construction theme of Bull(dozer) and Crane, but boy is that an unfortunate name from a native English speaker's perspective. Doubly so now that dump truck has a second meaning.
Wow, never knew Dump's stable got their own pro wrestling video game. I knew she was really popular (well accept for those two WWF matches, where IMO Gorilla Monsoon and Lord Alfred Hayes were burying the hell out of her), but that's still an impressive feat. I mean seriously, when was the last time that happened? I mean there's no Bullet Club pro wrestling video game? Right?
th-cam.com/video/V6Dio6wlxe8/w-d-xo.html Here's their match. It's so wacky that Nakano actually had a WWF match in the 80s, but I am unsurprised that Monsoon and Hayes were burying the pair cuz they weren't "lookers". Also, if you ever looked up Joe Gagne's Funtime Arcade (he is still active, but he doesn't post to TH-cam anymore), there's quite a few games that feature wrestling likenesses. Hulk Hogan even got a Kinect game in 2011.
That's how I would picture Majima if he were real and a woman. She even has a pole to beat people with. Imagine she probably dressed as a guy once to confuse her opponents.
I think it’s not just the fact the wrestler on the cover of pro wrestling is headless It’s the fact he appears to be licking the top of his chest… Other than that, it’s still quite an impressive looking if testosterone heavy lineup especially when considering competition in 1986. It’s hard to rack the crevasses of nearly 40 year old memories in my brain, but I just don’t remember seeing anything master system wise like this at the time. (The NES was starting to make its presence known in friend’s homes)
It does look like them, but just a coincidence, since Scott Steiner was an almost completely unknown rookie and Rick was a year away from working Japan in 1986, and the two had never teamed up on TV.
This is a chronological series, so you can look at where it stands now and the release history of Master System games in the U.S. to get a sense of when that will happen.
interestingly enough this is up not long after Kim Justice has posted a video on Dump Matsumoto and her longtime Crush Gals rival Chigusa Nagayo: th-cam.com/video/sHtmFfWZoRA/w-d-xo.html
A pity the changes were made, even if I can understand the wrestling game more than the ninja game- wrestling has licenses and people famous in one market being unknowns in others (unless you're trying to introduce them but I don't know if a Sega Master System game in the 80's was the right channel for that), but The Ninja? You're all just princess-bashing cowards.
![“อ.เบียร์ คนตื่นธรรม” มาตามคำเรียกร้อง แหกศาสตร์ฮวงจุ้ย เตือนสติอย่างมงาย | แฉ 7 พ.ย. 67 [1/3]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/5fc4S3xBNfc/mqdefault.jpg)
Pro Wrestling was one of the first Master System boxes I ever saw, sitting in the bargain bin of a local retailer in the mid-90's. The artwork remains as confounding to me now as it did then, and borders on Lovecraftian in its "My mind has no way of comprehending this mundane object I'm looking at" way.
Women's wrestling was exponentially more popular in Japan than the US in the 80's, so the change is understandable. What I find more interesting is that they changed one of the teams into the Road Warriors (The guys with face paint). The Road Warriors began touring Japan in mid 85 and started with Jim Crockett Promotions (The precursor to WCW) in early 86. Short turnaround time to choose, but still, they were wildly popular.
@@dtester I remember G.L.O.W. (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling). Saw that on TV a lot in the 80's.
I'd wager that the Crush Brothers team are meant to be approximations of Hogan and Flair as well. So this case is at least completely understandable why they'd go with a changed-just-enough-to-not-be-sued mens roster, rather than a licensed female wrestler who was essentially completely unknown outside of Japan pre-internet.
Akira Hokuto's husband, Kensuke Sasaki, was Power Warrior when the Road Warriors would tour Japan. He wore green and black shoulder pads.
Women's wrestling in America was always considered either a novelty or a joke (and only has evolved in the past 20+ years), mostly because virtually everything about it revolved around one woman, the Fabulous Moolah, who wrestled from the 1950s up until the 2000s. And it wasn't for the better. In the 80s, people started their hand at all-women promotions like the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW), but that promotion largely was built around cheese. Compare this to Japan where the audience has a different approach to how they liked their stuff, and this in turn made the women want to improve their game, although they were often put into weird situations and arbitrary restrictions (like some promotions would force women to retire at 25, for example) because of course it would happen.
Also, I should point out that the Road Warriors introduction to Japan was actually when they were in the American Wrestling Association. Verne Gagne, wrestling legend and all-around asshole, filmed a series of vignettes where they would bite the heads off of chickens and drink hot sauce straight from the bottle... which resulted in Hawk and Animal being forced to drink lots of hot sauce upon arriving in Japan.
@@johnnygrind77 Yeah, Animal was pretty much done for a few years due to an insurance policy (Lloyd's of London was, at the time, the only insurance company willing to give wrestlers insurance, with it being an inside joke) after SummerSlam 1992, besides tag team matches where he wouldn't have to do as much (although he would get a singles push in 2001 WCW as a member of the Magnificent Seven and later in 2006 when he had a forgotten heel run on WWE SmackDown), but Hawk still wanted to keep doing stuff.
The shuriken in The Ninja have another advantage that would only surface later. You can actually see them when you're playing on a Game Gear with the Master Gear Converter attached.
I did not anticipate getting an intro to Dump Matsumoto in Segaiden today. Japanese womens wrestlers from that era are not something I know a whole lot about aside from Jumping Bomb Angels from their visit to the WWF in 1987 and Bull Nakano in WWF and WCW in the mid 1990s. Pretty cool!
The other blond would be Stan Hansen, who was massively popular in Japan in the early 80s (along with Terry Funk and Hogan). The bearded longhair is Bruiser Brody who also had a huge presence in Japan. I had a lot of fun playing this game at a sleepover night at a classmate's place.
RIP Rieko Kodama... The world of Sega misses you.
"Sega... Shiro..."
The Ninja is a fine game and it works as a sequel to Ninja Princess, it's too bad we never got Ninja Princess in the US. And I look forward to when you get to WWF WrestleMania in NES Works 1989 because you cover wrestling games well and yes that art is "What were they thinking?" up there with Mega Man's American box art and the game Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde which I think we'll be seeing in NES Works 1989. Next time, Alex Kidd, oh boy.
Didn't think I was ever going to hear the name Megazone 23 again. Cool piece of trivia thanks.
I know nothing about Japanese wrestling, but Dump looks like a damn force of nature to me.
Dump pretty much became the pop culture cliche for "big, muscular woman" in Japanese media much like Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair are effectively what the non-fan thinks of when you try to imagine what a wrestler looks like in America. She was that huge, and helped spawn the careers of several other wrestlers, most notably Bull Nakano (a name that should be familiar to American fans).
If the wrestling game had kept its all-women cast for the NA market, it might have been the first video game on a major platform to feature a large woman as the protagonist. It makes me sad to think that bigger girls and/or more athletic ones lost out on this representation.
It was annoying for me as a wrestling fan in the '80s, that the Master System only ever saw one more wrestling game in it's entire library. Especially as the NES had loads.
Before you even said the name, I saw the cover art and said out loud, "Is that Dump and Bull??" Bull Nakano has her own TH-cam channel where she interviews current and former wrestlers and had Dump on there. She's semi-retired from wrestling, even at the age of 62!
Bull Nakano was my kinda gal. Gorgeous with a big ole caboose.
@@gaylordfocker7990 not anymore, Gay Focker. She's very skinny.
It's a good thing they didn't try to de-girl Phantasy Star later on.
Also, I always thought it was really weird that that random lady in Megazone 23 was named "Dump," had no idea it was a reference.
Male privilege is smooth scrolling.
The glass ceiling means that women have to work twice as hard for 1/8 of the pixel-scrolling resolution.
As a retro gaming woman myself, it is nice seeing so many people agreeing in the comment section that these changes weren't for the better.
Part of me wonders if someone in the homebrew community can bring back these characters in their original forms on the Master System so they can be as they were intended.
I would love to play The Ninja as the Ninja Princess on the Sega Master System at some point!
However it is good that Sega didn't censor as much in comparison to Nintendo and we still got Phantasy Star and Streets Of Rage with playable badass female characters.
I was a huge fan of The Ninja on SMS--a real surprise back in the day. It has a banger soundtrack, too.
Well now I'm gonna try and find as many clips of Japanese women's wrestling from the 80s as I can tonight, haha
Even to this day, games publishers still persist with their belief that "gamers will never have any interest in _girls_ unless they're standing around in the background in bikinis". Remember when Irrational Games weren't allowed to put Elizabeth on the box cover of Bioshock Infinite because 2K insisted they instead had to put a picture of generic grizzled badass action man Booker DeWitt standing there with a gun, scowling at nothing?
I’m a former pro-wrestler and game journalist, and even shipped 4 wrestling games a dev (soon to be 5). And I never knew SMS Pro Wrestling was a joshi (women’s wrestling) game in Japan! Wild!!
Apparently the Japanese version of The Ninja has a regular dark title screen, different stage layouts, and more stages, and the reason why some of the stages and the continue code was removed in the US/European Master System version is because of the high cost of computer chips at the time, similar to what was done with Enduro Racer's Master System port.
ROM sizes and level amounts were identical between SMS versions - but graphics and a few layouts were Indeed changed. The arcade original however did have some extra stages (that added nothing substantial).
I played both versions for this episode but don’t think I made it far enough to get to the point where they diverge.
I would have had a crush on dump if I had seen her back when I was a kid. So badass
I'll never not be a fan of her teammate Bull Nakano, but I really need to go back and watch some of Dump's work.
When some smug classist makes the ignorant claim “Only in America would you find people stupid enough to enjoy pro wrestling.” I like showing them footage of 60,000+ Japanese men and women packing the Tokyo Dome to watch Antonio Inoki.
While certainly not EVERY student at my all-girls school had an Atari 2600 in the early 80s (I had a Coleco instead), tons of them did, and not kids who were especially nerdy or anything. It was just a cool family game thing that everyone had if you could afford them. My parents played with us, the teenage girls who babysat were excited to try out our console. My understanding is that during the NES era Nintendo specifically pushed for the "young/teen boys" demographic to be what video games were all about, and advertising started leaning that way. Some of my classmates still had NESes, by the SNES era I was suddenly the only one left playing and boys would be baffled that a GIRL could beat them at F-Zero. (I wasn't even good at it, mind you.)
But the advertising thing is just what I've vaguely heard, not something I've researched in depth.
According to the creator of Yars Revenge for the 2600, they focus tested the game with boys, girls, men, and women. The game tested best with women, so of course Atari's executives decided to market the game specifically to boys. For some reason.
It really does seem like there was an industry lead push to make video games a "for boys" thing.
It was weird because even as a kid everyone had an NES. It wasn't unusual as a guy to be over at a female friend's house playing Kid Icarus and Ice Climbers. I still remember when I first got an NES and my _mom_ of all people stayed up all night playing Gyromite. It was definitely more family-oriented. But very quickly it started to move more and more in the direction of young boys and by the SNES era that's clearly what had won out.
We were big wrestling fans when the Master System came out, and there weren't many wrestling games at all then so we bought Pro Wrestling and it was fun. Very repetitive but fun. If you beat 10 rounds you also get a nice little animation of a plane landing for the next tournament. The gender swap, which I only discovered in the past few years is sad though, especially as you lose a lot of personality in the process. A lot of the moves look better with more dynamic poses and cute faces from the female wrestlers, while the male versions look stiff and rushed.
A squirrel based power system? Sounds rad 😲
Sega not signing the Crush Gals and cashing in on their music is an odd choice.
I wonder if the fee was simply too high?
It would be like someone looking at the first Wrestlemania card, and only licensing Piper and crew. Sure, it makes sense on some level, but why limit yourself?
Yeah, from what I understand, music licensing in Japan is a massive challenge. By all accounts, JASRAC is not fun to deal with. I can see Sega skipping it altogether.
Why they changed Ninja Princess to The Ninja I'll never understand. I can understand Pro Wrestling though. As a few have said Women's Wrestling in America at the time vs Women's Wrestling in Japan is a night and day difference. Until the 90s with Alundra Blaze a.k.a. Madusa against opponents from Japan such as Bull Nakano Women's Wrestling in America was more or less unchanged since the 40s/50s. I mean, I'm pretty sure The Fabulous Moolah was still Women's Wrestling Champion after almost 30 years undefeated wresting the exact same match she always had been. Men's Wrestling had advanced so much by the 80s compared to the days of Gorgeous George on black and white TV's at the Dawn of televised Wrestling that it's understandable why many, including women, didn't care for Women's Wrestling by comparison. Of course like I said with women like Alundra Blaze things took a turn for the better... until the Diva's era. But it did get better as the last 10 years have shown us. It got there. It just took forever.
The only exception was G.L.O.W. Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling but that didn't start until 1986 and it wasn't broadcast everywhere. I have no memory in the 80s of seeing G.L.O.W. on tv in New England (at least *I* don't remember and I was all about Wrestling regardless of Federation or Gender). The first time I saw them was when they made an appearance on Married With Children when the Bundys go to Las Vegas in the season 4 episode "You Gotta Know When To Fold 'Em (Part 2)" in Febuary of 1990 when Al Wrestles Big Bad Mama to try to win money, but is ultimately destroyed mind, body, and soul (what little he had left). However, even if G.LO.W. had been huge with it's start in '86 it still would have been too late to change the sprites to resemble any of them for an American audience. Sadly, I have to agree with Sega's decision to turn it in to an all Male Wrestling game. It made the most sense at the time.
1980s pop culture was mixed when it came to the depiction of women in action roles. There was Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies, Ripley from the Alien movies, and strong women in the Conan and Red Sonja films. Action figures with tie-in cartoons such as Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, and ThunderCats were mainly aimed at boys but included some female characters. She-Ra: Princess of Power was an action-oriented toy line and animated series that was primarily aimed at girls. Samus Aran was revealed to be a woman at the end of the original Metroid. However, the action genre was still male dominated and there was a common belief in the entertainment and toy industries that the main audience for action were males and that they were less interested in female characters. Sometimes an animated series would add token female characters, but those female characters wouldn't get their own action figures in the accompanying toy line.
I watched GLOW on tv as a kid in the 80s.... but only because I had a satellite dish and could pick up some pretty weird programs being distributed for pickup without ads. Pretty sure it was never on my local TV and I lived in a BIG wrestling city. It was the only time I actually kinda got into wrestling.
To answer your question, I think the fallacy began as a result of Nintendo's marketing and advertising policies upon the arrival of the NES in North America. Because they wanted the NES to be a "home entertainment system" and not a "video game console" in an attempt to distance themselves from the 1983 crash, they tried to distribute it in the toy section of stores thanks to things like R.O.B. and the Zapper. Of course, most stores divided up their sections based on "boys" and "girls" interests, with girls apparently being into dolls, dressing up, and cooking, while boys were into action figures, guns and swords, and anything else you can assume was macho. They decided that putting it in boys' sections would help the system more, which helped push the narrative that girls didn't like video games. I assume older people would probably have noticed the lack of effort in convincing females that they should be getting into the NES, which in turn pushed stereotypes.
As for why SEGA of America followed similar policies? Well, when Nintendo is dominating the market, as the saying goes, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".
0:51 So I guess this is the first usage of the Revenge of Shinobi / Streets of Rage font. It's funny what sticks out to the eye when you're so much more familiar with later works.
More great information about some Master System titles.
The changes in region and why are always interesting to hear.
The Ninja was one of 2 game cartridges I had on the Master System (together with Capt. Silver) and a big reason why I started to dislike Sega at an early age. As a kid (and non-English speaking European), I couldn't figure out how to advance in this game. Thanks for enlightening me :D
I didn't touch The Ninja for years because pretty much all the reviews I'd read seemed to suggest it was dire. This was early-mid 90s and I think a lot of mags had concluded that the early MS games were all a waste of time compared to newer, more ambitious stuff. And yeah, Transbot and Pro Wrestling were dire, but The Ninja is a masterpiece that still plays amazingly well, and the second I picked it up it just felt perfect. My personal favourite MS game, still.
Having grown up with Pro Wrestling in my Master System collection as a kid I didn't find out until decades later that it was originally a women's wrestling game. I was exploring all the international SMS releases for Brazil, Europe and Japan when I stumped upon the game and realized, "OMG! That's Pro Wrestling!?" about 5 or 6 years ago. I think aside from licensing issues they probably could have kept the female themed wrestlers. While WCW and WWF were more popular I do remember there was something called The Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling that used to come on sometimes as a kid. But this is definitely NOT a step down from NES wrestling..are you kidding me? It has better graphics, 3 wrestling rings, it's tag team oriented and there's more wrestling moves. The only 8-Bit wrestling game that's better is Tecmo World Wresting.
I wonder how many years it would be before a US pro wrestling game would include women. Even the early AKI games on N64 didn't include them!
Luna Vachon was a selectable character in 1994's WWF Raw, but I don't think an American pro wrestling game had multiple female characters until 1999's WWF Attitude.
@@saintrocketIX
Warzone had multiple women. You just had to make most of them yourself. But credit is due for going above and beyond in providing the parts to do it. It took a few years for any other western game (in any genre) to catch up to the Acclaim series.
WWF No Mercy had a whopping 14 women in the game.
@@Dwedit yes, once AKI gave us women wrestlers, they went all in.
The Ninja used to drive me crazy finding that last scroll. Kind of like the final key for Quartet. I would loop infinitely until frustration caused me to quit.
To the guy on the box, I just want to say that although there are millions of cephalophores that wander through this world, you've got something extra going on, I think you probably know.
Man... Regardless of quality, the Master System had gorgeous games. As someone who never owned or even played on one, this series has been eye-opening in that regard.
don't remember playing The Ninja but it seems like an interesting one. the scrolls mechanic reminds me of gun.smoke NES' wanted posters where the boss doesn't show up unless you have it! Pro Wrestling I remember on NES, but never knew about the Japanese origins (although a couple discords I hang out in, occasionally brought up NJPW stuff, so I have heard of Dump Matsumoto) but I do remember playing Pro Wrestling a fair amount back on SMS.
Nailed it on the head with the Pro Wrestling - > MUSCLE comparison. Couldn't stop thinking that. But as you described the Master System Pro Wrestling more and showed more of what it can do, it does make MUSCLE look like a pile of poo. Pro Wrestling on NES still the GOAT though!
I saw “Pro Wrestling” at a Toys ‘R Us when I was a kid. My gut reaction was to say, “Eww, sick.”
I think the better comparison would have been MXC to Takeshi’s Castle, not American Ninja Warrior.
I had an SMS when I was a kid. I would have played the heck out of "The Ninja," but nobody I knew had that game.
I think my sister still a gamer, she had a Sega genesis back in the 90's
My introduction of Mortal Kombat(Not a fan of) was from a girl
The Ninja was my favorite game on the Master System, and to be honest, if it was labelled Ninja Princess, I wouldn't have bought it.
I know the handle "Dump" was supposed to be short for "dump truck" to go along with the construction theme of Bull(dozer) and Crane, but boy is that an unfortunate name from a native English speaker's perspective. Doubly so now that dump truck has a second meaning.
Wow, never knew Dump's stable got their own pro wrestling video game. I knew she was really popular (well accept for those two WWF matches, where IMO Gorilla Monsoon and Lord Alfred Hayes were burying the hell out of her), but that's still an impressive feat. I mean seriously, when was the last time that happened? I mean there's no Bullet Club pro wrestling video game? Right?
th-cam.com/video/V6Dio6wlxe8/w-d-xo.html
Here's their match. It's so wacky that Nakano actually had a WWF match in the 80s, but I am unsurprised that Monsoon and Hayes were burying the pair cuz they weren't "lookers".
Also, if you ever looked up Joe Gagne's Funtime Arcade (he is still active, but he doesn't post to TH-cam anymore), there's quite a few games that feature wrestling likenesses. Hulk Hogan even got a Kinect game in 2011.
Fire Pro World in the U.S. was marketed around B.C. and other NJPW stars being included, unlike other Fire Pro Games, but that's about it.
a screen-scroll based powerup system would be sick, pull back down long distances for a powerful attack against bosses
9:41 HOLY SCHMITT
It's merely a manipulation of existing sprites but this simple animation is somehow violent as hell!
It's true as they say, Kasumi is doing the same thing as Ryu Hayabusa but backwards and in high heels
That's how I would picture Majima if he were real and a woman. She even has a pole to beat people with. Imagine she probably dressed as a guy once to confuse her opponents.
I think it’s not just the fact the wrestler on the cover of pro wrestling is headless
It’s the fact he appears to be licking the top of his chest…
Other than that, it’s still quite an impressive looking if testosterone heavy lineup especially when considering competition in 1986. It’s hard to rack the crevasses of nearly 40 year old memories in my brain, but I just don’t remember seeing anything master system wise like this at the time. (The NES was starting to make its presence known in friend’s homes)
Keep up the great work, Jeremy.
Welcome back friend!
The Ninja 🥷 and Pro Wrestling are the good ones. 😀👍🎮
The Orient Express team kinda look like the Steiner Brothers
It does look like them, but just a coincidence, since Scott Steiner was an almost completely unknown rookie and Rick was a year away from working Japan in 1986, and the two had never teamed up on TV.
Once again hoping to sink into bed listening to your run through of Wonderboy 3 soon
This is a chronological series, so you can look at where it stands now and the release history of Master System games in the U.S. to get a sense of when that will happen.
@@JeremyParish Nevertheless!
If only we could’ve wrestled as the ninja princess
The Ninja is one of my all time favorites. Unfortunately even as a pro wrestling fan, the SMS game is … not good.
interestingly enough this is up not long after Kim Justice has posted a video on Dump Matsumoto and her longtime Crush Gals rival Chigusa Nagayo: th-cam.com/video/sHtmFfWZoRA/w-d-xo.html
Honestly I feel like anything I tackle on Master System will have already been covered on Kim’s channel.
The wrestling change isn't all that surprising!!! Womens wrestling just wasn't as popular as mens (GLOW vs WWF/WWE) so that was understandable!!!
Great interesting episode today
I got so good at pro wrestling I could beat it one handed. 1 and 2 buttons only. No d pad.
Nice one dude!!
3:32 never seen a DIAGONAL autoscroller. You can’t even get that on NES without mappers.
Zaxxon, Paperboy…
Woah Appoooh's sprite animation is weird
Someone should do a ROM hack for The Ninja to replace the new guy with Kurumi.
Call me nuts but I like the Master System's crap box art.
A pity the changes were made, even if I can understand the wrestling game more than the ninja game- wrestling has licenses and people famous in one market being unknowns in others (unless you're trying to introduce them but I don't know if a Sega Master System game in the 80's was the right channel for that), but The Ninja? You're all just princess-bashing cowards.