The Game Dump

Journey back in time to cover the birth and legacy of the Punch-Out!! Nintendo series. The full story behind the creation of this legendary game is brought to life in this week's episode.

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The GameDump takes a light skim over the music behind Sonic the Hedgehog, the catchy pop tunes that filled everyone's favourite faster-than-sound hedgehog in the Nineties.

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A fox, a frog, a bird, a rabbit. A planet of good. A planet of evil. Star-fighters, interstellar war, betrayal and evil scientists. A tale of heroism in the face of eternal tragedy. All of these things combined together in 1993 with the most unusual, but imaginative, rail-shooter imaginable. That game that launched in 1993 was Star Fox, and released in Europe as Starwing. How did a fox take the lead role in a brand new game designed to showcase the Super FX chip, a coprocessor that would allow advanced 3D polygons in Nintendo’s new 16-bit console? There are so many questions, and so many answers, but without a doubt there can be no argument over Star Fox’s entry in the Dump.

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American Ninja, Ninja Terminator, The Ultimate Ninja, Full Metal Ninja, Ninja Strike Force, Teenage Mutant Ninja… Turtles? That's right it's the 1980s and the world has ninja fever and I'm afraid the symptoms are bad, there is no known cure. Everything from lunch boxes to motorbikes has the word ninja slapped on it as droves of people become obsessed with those cunning assassins who are masters of disguise. The word ‘ninja’ is big business so it only made sense that when Sega decided to make a video game to cash in on ninja fever they would use a word that every teenager would recognise: Shinobi.

Let's dig around our dump and look for something a little different. Past the discarded NES consoles, past the buried 2600s, to the section marked Coin-Op. It is here that we find the discarded cabinets of yesteryear. Once these machines would have brought joy to those who played them with a simple coin put into the coin slot. Now they sit dormant. Waiting for the day someone plugs their power leads back in and watches as they glow back into life.

There are quite a few here, their cabinets collecting dust. We wipe off the banner of one - Pac-Man, we move on, Out Run sits there trying to entice us to sit in the driver’s seat one more time, but we decline. Even Rampage can't tempt us, maybe another day, but not today. We're looking for something else, something specific, and then we see it. It sits alone in the corner, isolated from the other cabinets and left to its own devices. We look up, words emblazoned in blue punch out from a background of red and yellows. We pick up the discarded plug that lay next to the cabinet and jam it into a socket. At first, nothing happens but then the arcade cabinet comes to life. Sounds unheard in years ring out through the abandoned hall of the Dump’s arcade. We have resurrected Rolling Thunder…

It’s 1992 and a bottlenose dolphin has just become one of the world’s best-known protagonists of a video game. Not one that has been anthropomorphised like a particular blue hedgehog, but one that lives happily in the ocean with the rest of his pod quietly going about their dolphin business. One that will go on a long quest that will take him back in time, and to the outer reaches of space. A dolphin called Ecco.

For many people in the early nineties, the console was king. It was the only way to game… the only way for the masses to enjoy playing video games in the comfort of their own homes. But there was a fringe contender that was slowly creeping in on the console market’s turf - the home computer.

If you were told that a launch title for a brand new console was going to be a flight simulator, you’d probably laugh. Flight simulators have always had that niche placement in the gaming world. Sure, you could class them as a game, but their drive for accuracy separates them above and apart from what you would usually class as a game. So when Pilotwings made its Japanese debut in 1990 alongside Nintendo’s new Famicom system, gamers were left to wonder, why is this game a launch title?

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Role-playing video games have been with us almost as long as we’ve had computers. From the simple games of the 1970s that ran on Mainframe, to the modern day games we play today, games so detailed that we no longer need to fill in the gaps with our imagination. The RPG genre is a staple of gaming. Some gamers will play nothing else, others take on the following normally akin to a rock star, series like the Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, and Zelda, each entry in the series allows us to travel somewhere else… to travel as someone else.

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