(originally published July 17, 2009)
With the recent release of Punch Out!! for the Wii, I became nostalgic and, after blowing off the dust, I popped in my old Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! cartridge.
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! was probably the fourth Nintendo game I ever played, after Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros. and Contra. It was one of the games that all the kids had back then. That was kind of the beauty of owning a NES around 1988. There were only so many games to be had. Every once in a while you’d run into the kid whose parents would buy him a new game every weekend, but mostly everybody had the same core collection. It was a great way to bond with other 8 year olds. You could just say “You got Contra?” and a lifelong friendship was born. Gaming is so fractured today that this is unlikely to be the case any longer.
There are two things that I remember very clearly about Punch Out!! The first is how excited I was when I finally figured out how to beat King Hippo. This was a pretty monumental triumph for me. I was in our living room one summer afternoon and lunch was ready. I begged my mom to let me play just a few minutes longer. Then, somehow, I solved the puzzle. It was so easy. I played until I beat King Hippo and then I ate my grilled cheese.
The second thing I remember about the game is the code to get to Mike Tyson. I think everybody who owned this game probably still knows the code. Sometimes I wish it could be my phone number. When I was a kid, I was never able to get to Mike Tyson on my own, much less defeat him using the code. It took me until after I graduated from college to finally take down Tyson. By that time the feat left me feeling satisfied but a little sad that I had no real reason to pick up the game again.
Until this week. The game is as good as I remember it being and it has held up very well to the test of time (the same can’t be said about Ring King). I started to wonder why this game was so good. Part of it is the graphics, yes. But a bigger part is that, despite the outward appearance, it is not really a game about boxing.
Sports games are notoriously difficult to get right. There’s a careful balance that must be struck between realism and what will actually be fun to play. The problem is that, as gamers, we all want different things. Some of us would forgo all realism to make what we feel is a game that is more fun (Baseball Simulator 1000, for example). On the other hand, some people find that realism is the fun. This is less of a problem in other genres such as First Person Shooters. The truth can be stretched a little more here because few gamers have actually fought in WWII. But with sports games, there’s a good chance the player has, in fact, picked up a bat and glove.
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! cleverly avoids this problem by only pretending to be a boxing game. In reality, it’s better to compare Punch Out!! to Guitar Hero than to Ring King. Punch Out!! is all about reflexes and reacting to stimuli. There is little strategy involved beyond learning what signal your opponent is going to give you, then knowing the one absolute right move to execute. In the Madden games (or for an earlier comparison, Tecmo Bowl), what strategy you choose is very important, but how you execute is just as critical. Multiple strategies can lead to victory, and each one requires different degrees of executional perfection (meaning that there are certainly better strategies, but in the end a well-executed bad strategy can still win the day if the level of execution is high enough). In Punch Out!! there is no room to choose a strategy. In most cases, there is one right way to go about fighting your opponent, and the entire outcome is determined by the execution of this strategy.
For a specific example of this, look at Tecmo Bowl. If you are the Raiders, giving the ball to Bo Jackson to run is the best play. You can still win by passing, but why would you want to? Even though passing is an option, the easiest way to win is to have Bo rush the ball every play. Punch Out!! rarely gives you such a choice. There are not two ways to beat King Hippo, there is only one. Your success or failure is determined by how well you execute this single, inflexible strategy.
So all of this being said, why is this game so good? For me, part of it is the big, bright characters. But mostly it is what a tense, nerve-wracking game it can be. You have to carefully look for signals of what is about to happen and reflexively, with perfect timing, react. Beating Mike Tyson is not really about figuring out where his weaknesses lie, or being smarter, or your hand eye coordination. It’s all about reaction. It’s easy to know that you have to get out of the way, and it’s easy to see the punches coming, but it’s hard to actually hit that left button, followed by up and B. It’s very much like Guitar Hero.
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! was destined to go down as one of those games that became part of the shared heritage of males born between 1977 and 1982. We can spout the code. We still know the moves. Now, with its release on the Wii, I hope a whole new generation will get the chance to know the joy of finally knocking down King Hippo, then eating a grilled cheese sandwich.
