Speaking of Foreman Spike, it is just wild that THIS guy gets to star in the upcoming Mario movie, even though he’s not been featured in any game in a prominent role since 2001’s Mobile Golf for Game Boy Color.
I never played Wrecking Crew on the NES, first experienced it as part of NES Remix on the Wii U. Now I play it on Switch Online still occasionally. It really holds up.
I thought it was odd that you would be revisiting Wrecking Crew and Spartan-X, which each already got their own dedicated 10+ minute episodes back in the day. But I gotta admit, the additional information and context was really interesting, especially the corporate drama behind Spartan-X's licensing and the additional context regarding the dev team members. I'd heard the name Toshihiko Nakago before, but I don't think I really knew who he was in the same way I know Yokoi or Kondo for example. Great stuff!
I don’t think Foreman Spike would have ever been Donkey Kong, even if Nintendo had the technical capacity to do so, given that Spike was meant to replace the missing rival player and co-op/competitive hybrid nature of the original arcade version. So he had to look close enough to Mario in terms of features.
The golfer in NES Golf is known as Ossan. NOA stated it was Mario in the 1991 Mario Mania guide, but it was later clarified as Ossan in a Japanese Nintendo Wii game. When I first played NES Golf in 1985, I figured it was just a random mustachioed fat guy and thought it was strange that NOA tried to pass him off as Mario since he didn't look very much like him at all.
@@ginormousaurus8394 Hey! I never thought of that. You may be onto something there. Now I want to know more about the entire Mario family! Mario Mario, Luigi Mario, and Ossan Mario, AKA "The Dad". :)
One of the best aspects of this Famicom retrospective series is how much context it truly adds to all of these releases. Always a delight to learn more about its history. Wrecking Crew, much like Ice Climber, feels like something just shy of greatness. I know of '98, but a more modern (still 2D) twist on the game could be a really cool thing to see.
And once again, Jeremy shows that Game and Watch Works would be a good idea. Good to see new context for this trip of games that would be familiar to NES fans. Soon, the world would definitely know Koji Kondo's tunes too. Spartan-X is a good start for Kondo though.
Wrecking Crew's place among Mario's lineage makes much more sense when you take its original 1984 arcade release, Vs Wrecking Crew, into account. It's one of those dual-screen games that got changed a lot in its NES conversion (like Punch Out) and completely embodies the "simultaneously cooperative and competitive" spirit of Mario Bros before it, with Mario and Luigi interfering with each other directly from opposite sides of the stage rather than Spike. How much do I gotta drop on Patreon to get you to do a deep dive on the Vs System, Jeremy?
Great work as always Jeremy. I've noted before I consider you to be a true historian of video gaming. In Australia your videos go live between 12 and 1 am. Despite being a history and English teacher and union delegate, I often watch them before I go to sleep.
Irem were probably like: "Shigeru Miyamoto? More like Shigeru Meabully!" And coming up with all sorts of insults for every Nintendo employee who had anything to do with the game.
Kung-Fu is so good! Easy to pick up and play, and a full loop doesn't take very long and so I often find myself playing it multiple times back to back. I'd like to put more time into Wrecking Crew. Always looked fun.
Ah, Wrecking Crew. The game I only really knew because of the Ambassador Program on the Nintendo 3DS. Very OK game. Edit: also how can the coins in Mario still look so good. Damn.
Just started reading the Go Straight book that talks about the history of fighting games and, of course, the first one listed was Kung Fu Master, so it's nice to see it mentioned at the same time in this video. :)
Never thought of Wrecking Crew as being a Lode Runner-like before but that makes total sense! It's kinda outside your purview, but it'd be cool to see a video about what gaming was like in Japan before the Famicom and SG-1000. I imagine it was just arcade and some computer stuff.
There's a smoothness to NES Kung Fu that even the arcade game is lacking. Nintendo probably made the right move designing the game internally, although one does wonder how the game would have turned out in different hands.
To this day, the game over sound for Hyper Olympic is still one of the few fears in my life that I haven't gotten over. It sounds way too ominous for a game about sports.
Great episode. I somehow missed out on Wrecking Crew back in the day, but Kung Fu was one of the first games I ever played on the NES. It was thrilling and impressive at the time.
Wrecking Crew is one of my favorite NES games. It's such a charming little game that is still fun to play today. Of the early black box games not called Super Mario Bros, this game stands out as one of the best As for Kung Fu, that game is a classic on the NES.
The HyperShot worked with three games: Hyper Olympic, Hyper Sport (the sequel to Hyper Olympic), and Hyper Olympic Genteiban. I was a bit disappointed when it didn't work with Konamic Sports in Seoul since it's "Track & Field II"... Genteiban is pretty interesting as it was the result of a comedy show using Hyper Olympic in a skit, putting one of their characters into the game. The response was pretty big, so Konami made a second version of Hyper Olympic that replaced the player sprite with that character. According to my reference books, the HyperShot is the earliest third party controller specifically for the Famicom that can be confirmed. Hudson released a couple of controllers around the same time, though no one is completely sure when they were released; contemporaneously with Star Force is the most likely timing since Hudson promoted the joystick alongside the game. There was also a third party keyboard for a Sharp BASIC cartridge that is unusual and insanely rare as it was an add on to the Sharp Famicom TV that was released in 1984. Since that peripheral was a pack-in for the TV, most people don't count it. One more thing about Spartan X: it was released in Japan as Kung Fu. It was for a later re-release so copies that say "Kung Fu" instead of "Spartan X" are pretty rare and a bit of a holy grail for Famicom collectors.
@@JeremyParish It doesn't help that Konami mashed them together for the western release. A lot of sources not as put together or as devilishly handsome as you have a tendency to say Hyper Olympic is the same game as Track & Field.
Kung-Fu is a Spartan X game in the same sense Blazing Lazers is a Gunhed game. They clearly had a game and had a license and figured...eh, close enough.
Interestingly Wrecking Crew was originally going to be the first of 6 Village People games each designed around each member. Unfortunately when their popularity declined Nintendo decided to change tack.
Its incredible to think how much SRD contributed as a whole to Nintendo's entire software library when they technically weren't fully owned by Nintendo until recently.
Was that Urusei Yatsura in the intro? Seeing those Wrecking Crew clips reminded me of Lode Runner even before you mentioned it. That bit about it saving to the Data Recorder (and not the Disk System) is news to me. The pseudo-sequel Wrecking Crew '98 was even more blatant about Mario as the protagonist, but by then, the ship had long since sailed with the Mario-verse being surrogates in almost every smaller release.
According to this site, several other games could potentially have included it. The author claims to have found one in a Pinball cart: classicgamesblog.com/2012/01/09/nes-games-with-famicom-converters-inside/
I always found it strange that nobody has ever acknowledged the NES Track & Field as a combo cart like Donkey Kong classics. It's basically both the FamiCom Hyper Olympic and Hyper Sports combined with an event select.
I’m surprised no mention of Hyper Olympic Bakatono Edition? Seems like something you would cover in this episode. Especially since it has relation to other video games through the character’s actor.
This version allows you to play as a character Bakatono (silly lord) created by comedian Ken Shimura also known from Kato Chan and Ken Chan aka JJ and Jeff
The 2600 port of Track and Field in North America also came with its own version of the Hyper Shot made by Atari themselves. Otherwise you would need to waggle the hell out of the standard Atari stick left and right, which is not a pleasant thought.
I was just talking to Mike Mika st Digital Eclipse about that yesterday. I’d never seen that controller before, and he has one in his office. Definitely will get a note in the Hyper Sports episode.
i’m going to be honest, i have no idea what the Gaiden series has different than the OG? Is it just going over the game by japanese release? The increased production quality is cool tho, and i’m always a fan of more quality content
Yeah, an episode like this one is only different in terms of context from NES Works, but the episode that went up on Patreon today covered three games that didn't come to NES. The overall idea is to plot out what was happening on Famicom leading up to the NES, so you can see just how expansive the JP library was by the time the system reached the U.S.
@@JeremyParish you prefer it more in the afternoon or late evening? Noted. Despite your subject matter in this video, your content is tremendous and appreciated. Thank you sir.
@@JeremyParish noted. Caffeine allows for you to appreciate a mild, in jest poke using a not entirely innocuous old stereotypical jab at a popular video game characters fictional heritage. What time zone are you?
@3:57 i think you credited the wrong youtube channel. the footage is from Grooveraider, and Grooveraider is in this footage too.he is the guy with the baseball cap behind Yokoi and get little later a poster singed by Yokoi. here the orginal video th-cam.com/video/vGw2dyN6AFY/w-d-xo.html
No, I credited the channel I took the footage from. It's entirely possible that channel may have reposted it from a different channel without credit. My intention is definitely not to deny anyone their credit, but unfortunately it's not realistically possible for me to be able to vet something like this. I'll be mindful of your note if I need to revisit this material in the future. (Since it's pretty much the only decent footage of Yokoi online, that seems likely.)
"An Italian from Japan gentrifing a neighborhood of eggplants" is a review I didn't see coming.
Modern capitalism is wild
Konami came up with the Divekick controller 30 years before it was made
I loved "Kung Fu" on NES and had no idea it was called Spartan-X or any of the fascinating story behind its genesis and release. Very cool.
Jeremy Parish, do you know Super NES released in Europe isn't released in September 1992 and Europe release April 1992?
Spartan X is the Japanese title of the Jackie Chan movie "Wheels on Meals".
@@Megared82 had no idea the movie had a game. Still have some of the japanese soundtrack on my mp3 player.
Speaking of Foreman Spike, it is just wild that THIS guy gets to star in the upcoming Mario movie, even though he’s not been featured in any game in a prominent role since 2001’s Mobile Golf for Game Boy Color.
Maybe the movie will confirm the theory that Foreman Spike and Wario are the same person.
I never played Wrecking Crew on the NES, first experienced it as part of NES Remix on the Wii U. Now I play it on Switch Online still occasionally. It really holds up.
I thought it was odd that you would be revisiting Wrecking Crew and Spartan-X, which each already got their own dedicated 10+ minute episodes back in the day. But I gotta admit, the additional information and context was really interesting, especially the corporate drama behind Spartan-X's licensing and the additional context regarding the dev team members. I'd heard the name Toshihiko Nakago before, but I don't think I really knew who he was in the same way I know Yokoi or Kondo for example. Great stuff!
I don’t think Foreman Spike would have ever been Donkey Kong, even if Nintendo had the technical capacity to do so, given that Spike was meant to replace the missing rival player and co-op/competitive hybrid nature of the original arcade version. So he had to look close enough to Mario in terms of features.
The golfer in NES Golf is known as Ossan. NOA stated it was Mario in the 1991 Mario Mania guide, but it was later clarified as Ossan in a Japanese Nintendo Wii game. When I first played NES Golf in 1985, I figured it was just a random mustachioed fat guy and thought it was strange that NOA tried to pass him off as Mario since he didn't look very much like him at all.
Maybe Ossan is Mario and Luigi's dad.
@@ginormousaurus8394 Hey! I never thought of that. You may be onto something there. Now I want to know more about the entire Mario family! Mario Mario, Luigi Mario, and Ossan Mario, AKA "The Dad". :)
One of the best aspects of this Famicom retrospective series is how much context it truly adds to all of these releases. Always a delight to learn more about its history.
Wrecking Crew, much like Ice Climber, feels like something just shy of greatness. I know of '98, but a more modern (still 2D) twist on the game could be a really cool thing to see.
And once again, Jeremy shows that Game and Watch Works would be a good idea. Good to see new context for this trip of games that would be familiar to NES fans. Soon, the world would definitely know Koji Kondo's tunes too. Spartan-X is a good start for Kondo though.
It'd be worth it just to see him capture up close micro-cam footage of those tiny displays before feeding it all though a VHS deck. 😛
Wrecking Crew was one of the few games my dad would actually play with us as kids. Ill always have a soft spot for it
Wrecking Crew's place among Mario's lineage makes much more sense when you take its original 1984 arcade release, Vs Wrecking Crew, into account. It's one of those dual-screen games that got changed a lot in its NES conversion (like Punch Out) and completely embodies the "simultaneously cooperative and competitive" spirit of Mario Bros before it, with Mario and Luigi interfering with each other directly from opposite sides of the stage rather than Spike.
How much do I gotta drop on Patreon to get you to do a deep dive on the Vs System, Jeremy?
My frothing demand for Wrecking Crew '98 to be given a release outside of Japan increases.
Maybe as a tie-in with the Mario movie, which will feature Foreman Spike for some damn reason
The kids love Foreman Spike! Apparently!
no need now its done
I love this game Wrecking Crew, great memories of the late 80s
Great work as always Jeremy. I've noted before I consider you to be a true historian of video gaming. In Australia your videos go live between 12 and 1 am. Despite being a history and English teacher and union delegate, I often watch them before I go to sleep.
Irem were probably like: "Shigeru Miyamoto? More like Shigeru Meabully!" And coming up with all sorts of insults for every Nintendo employee who had anything to do with the game.
Kung-Fu is so good! Easy to pick up and play, and a full loop doesn't take very long and so I often find myself playing it multiple times back to back. I'd like to put more time into Wrecking Crew. Always looked fun.
I really enjoyed Wrecking Crew - It had some great puzzles. I never understood why it wasn’t better known.
Ah, Wrecking Crew. The game I only really knew because of the Ambassador Program on the Nintendo 3DS. Very OK game.
Edit: also how can the coins in Mario still look so good. Damn.
I edited my comment to fix a typo and lost my heart. Rip. 🪦💔
Lesson for life: Sometimes you just have to accept that you are loved despite your flaws
@@JeremyParish I will take that to heart
From all things, I didn't anticipate Dream Hunter Rem in the intro... the true classic :v
Found a new channel to binge. Thank you!
I never noticed how much the digitized laugh in Kung Fu/Spartan X sounds like "Seven Nation Army"
Just started reading the Go Straight book that talks about the history of fighting games and, of course, the first one listed was Kung Fu Master, so it's nice to see it mentioned at the same time in this video. :)
Never thought of Wrecking Crew as being a Lode Runner-like before but that makes total sense!
It's kinda outside your purview, but it'd be cool to see a video about what gaming was like in Japan before the Famicom and SG-1000. I imagine it was just arcade and some computer stuff.
Will you settle for a series on Epoch Cassette Vision and Super Cassette Vision?
There's a smoothness to NES Kung Fu that even the arcade game is lacking. Nintendo probably made the right move designing the game internally, although one does wonder how the game would have turned out in different hands.
To this day, the game over sound for Hyper Olympic is still one of the few fears in my life that I haven't gotten over. It sounds way too ominous for a game about sports.
Great episode. I somehow missed out on Wrecking Crew back in the day, but Kung Fu was one of the first games I ever played on the NES. It was thrilling and impressive at the time.
Wrecking Crew is one of my favorite NES games. It's such a charming little game that is still fun to play today.
Of the early black box games not called Super Mario Bros, this game stands out as one of the best
As for Kung Fu, that game is a classic on the NES.
The HyperShot worked with three games: Hyper Olympic, Hyper Sport (the sequel to Hyper Olympic), and Hyper Olympic Genteiban. I was a bit disappointed when it didn't work with Konamic Sports in Seoul since it's "Track & Field II"...
Genteiban is pretty interesting as it was the result of a comedy show using Hyper Olympic in a skit, putting one of their characters into the game. The response was pretty big, so Konami made a second version of Hyper Olympic that replaced the player sprite with that character.
According to my reference books, the HyperShot is the earliest third party controller specifically for the Famicom that can be confirmed. Hudson released a couple of controllers around the same time, though no one is completely sure when they were released; contemporaneously with Star Force is the most likely timing since Hudson promoted the joystick alongside the game. There was also a third party keyboard for a Sharp BASIC cartridge that is unusual and insanely rare as it was an add on to the Sharp Famicom TV that was released in 1984. Since that peripheral was a pack-in for the TV, most people don't count it.
One more thing about Spartan X: it was released in Japan as Kung Fu. It was for a later re-release so copies that say "Kung Fu" instead of "Spartan X" are pretty rare and a bit of a holy grail for Famicom collectors.
Thanks for the clarification! I'm still mentally untangling the T&F series' web of releases in Japan.
@@JeremyParish It doesn't help that Konami mashed them together for the western release. A lot of sources not as put together or as devilishly handsome as you have a tendency to say Hyper Olympic is the same game as Track & Field.
Kung-Fu is a Spartan X game in the same sense Blazing Lazers is a Gunhed game. They clearly had a game and had a license and figured...eh, close enough.
That's basically every 8-bit licensed game
Interestingly Wrecking Crew was originally going to be the first of 6 Village People games each designed around each member. Unfortunately when their popularity declined Nintendo decided to change tack.
Its incredible to think how much SRD contributed as a whole to Nintendo's entire software library when they technically weren't fully owned by Nintendo until recently.
Great script but wow amazing b-roll work.
Was that Urusei Yatsura in the intro?
Seeing those Wrecking Crew clips reminded me of Lode Runner even before you mentioned it. That bit about it saving to the Data Recorder (and not the Disk System) is news to me. The pseudo-sequel Wrecking Crew '98 was even more blatant about Mario as the protagonist, but by then, the ship had long since sailed with the Mario-verse being surrogates in almost every smaller release.
jeremy - if you haven't seen it, there are also amazing fights in the movie
Dragons Forever
Thank you!
Amazing!!! Nintendo history in video game industry is just complex and so interesting. Nothing come close not even sega nor sony
was wrecking crew one of those games that was just a famicom board stuck into an adapter and stuffed into an NES shell?
I'm fairly sure only the two R.O.B games, Gyromite and Stack Up, are like that. Not sure though!
According to this site, several other games could potentially have included it. The author claims to have found one in a Pinball cart: classicgamesblog.com/2012/01/09/nes-games-with-famicom-converters-inside/
@@JeremyParish Okay, that proves me totally wrong! I had no clue!
I'm just curious to ask, but what is the name of the anime shown in the clip from the intro?
I always found it strange that nobody has ever acknowledged the NES Track & Field as a combo cart like Donkey Kong classics. It's basically both the FamiCom Hyper Olympic and Hyper Sports combined with an event select.
good work jeremy, keep it up man!
I will, thanks!
dream hunter rem!!!
Nice eye
I’m surprised no mention of Hyper Olympic Bakatono Edition? Seems like something you would cover in this episode. Especially since it has relation to other video games through the character’s actor.
Man, I’ve never even heard of this. Track & Field is bewildering.
This version allows you to play as a character Bakatono (silly lord) created by comedian Ken Shimura also known from Kato Chan and Ken Chan aka JJ and Jeff
The 2600 port of Track and Field in North America also came with its own version of the Hyper Shot made by Atari themselves. Otherwise you would need to waggle the hell out of the standard Atari stick left and right, which is not a pleasant thought.
I was just talking to Mike Mika st Digital Eclipse about that yesterday. I’d never seen that controller before, and he has one in his office. Definitely will get a note in the Hyper Sports episode.
Wrecking Crew is excellent. 😀👍🎮
plot twist: foreman spike is the father of wario
I like the wrecking crew artwork
It's keen
I give it a week until someone beats Dark Souls using the Hypershot.
i wish nintendo would port wrecking crew 98 to nso. i had a lot of fun playing it as a kid
i’m going to be honest, i have no idea what the Gaiden series has different than the OG? Is it just going over the game by japanese release? The increased production quality is cool tho, and i’m always a fan of more quality content
It's covering the Famicom rather than the NES, most of which is games that didn't release outside of Japan, like Antarctic Adventure, say.
Yeah, an episode like this one is only different in terms of context from NES Works, but the episode that went up on Patreon today covered three games that didn't come to NES. The overall idea is to plot out what was happening on Famicom leading up to the NES, so you can see just how expansive the JP library was by the time the system reached the U.S.
@@JeremyParish cool! thanks for the explanation
Hello i would like a video about Cobra Triangle, NES game. thank you!
Ef that spaghetti bender Mario and his brother
Did not expect to encounter casual anti-Italian racism quite so early this morning.
@@JeremyParish you prefer it more in the afternoon or late evening? Noted.
Despite your subject matter in this video, your content is tremendous and appreciated. Thank you sir.
No, I'm just better prepared to mentally deal with racism after I've had my coffee.
@@JeremyParish noted. Caffeine allows for you to appreciate a mild, in jest poke using a not entirely innocuous old stereotypical jab at a popular video game characters fictional heritage. What time zone are you?
Lode-like 👍🏽
@3:57 i think you credited the wrong youtube channel. the footage is from Grooveraider, and Grooveraider is in this footage too.he is the guy with the baseball cap behind Yokoi and get little later a poster singed by Yokoi.
here the orginal video
th-cam.com/video/vGw2dyN6AFY/w-d-xo.html
No, I credited the channel I took the footage from. It's entirely possible that channel may have reposted it from a different channel without credit. My intention is definitely not to deny anyone their credit, but unfortunately it's not realistically possible for me to be able to vet something like this. I'll be mindful of your note if I need to revisit this material in the future. (Since it's pretty much the only decent footage of Yokoi online, that seems likely.)
@@JeremyParish PlanetVB has credited Grooveraider