AND STILL THE CHAMPION
30 YEARS LATER, 'MIKE - TYSON'S PUNCH-OUT!!' REMAINS KING OF BOXING VIDEO GAMES
ATT Turk b e ga n each mission with unwarranted optimism, hoping to will desire to fruition. But every time he visited his local Illinois video store, he left empty-handed, learning t hat “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” was checked out again.
So, after two disappointing autumn months in 1987, his parents purchased the popular video game that dominated so many conversations in school, and their son unwrapped the greatest Christmas gift imaginable.
When Turk f inally received the grail, he lifted the door to his Nintendo Entertainment System, slipped in the cartridge, pressed it down and pushed the power button.
The bell rings. The crowd roars. The computerized music — so quintessentially and delightfully ’80s it might have been composed by Teddy Ruxpin and a Cabbage Patch Doll — arrives, and Mike Tyson hits the screen, staring back with a smirk that could be confused with a scowl.
He is the champ. He is undefeated. He is “The Baddest Man on the Planet.” Mike is waiting for your challenge!!
“When you first see that photo of him, it was absolutely just incredible,” said Turk, who years later set world speed records playing the game and still owns his original copy. “This was the definitive fighting game, and it’s a top-10 NES title all-time. If anyone wants to dispute that, they’re nuts. For a lot of people, it’s No. 1.”
Approaching the 30-year anniversary of its release, “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” remains the undisputed champion of boxing video games. As the genre’s bestselling title of all-time, it sold more than three million copies, making it one of the 20 most popular games in the history of the industry-changing console. The iconic game was as beloved by critics as players. Nintendo Power magazine ranked it the sixth greatest NES game ever.
Nostalgia alone is powerful enough to resurrect its memo- ry — Tyson played the game on “The Tonight Show” in October 2014, parodies are often recreated online featuring fighters such as Floyd Mayweather, and unofficial merchandise can be purchased on numerous sites — but its replayability sustains the pulse of the pixels.
OR years, gamers have chased faster times to beat it, with record-setters like Anil Chirayath inconceivably playing blindfolded to audiences, while being live-streamed on the video platform Twitch. One of his runs counts more than 749,000 views on YouTube.
The game is easy to play, and appealed to all ages and interests, but the biggest draw then is the same reason for its lasting appeal — boxing’s biggest star of the past three decades.
“Tyson’s involvement was crucial to the game’s success. The game-play was fantastic, but I think having the world heavyweight champ involved immediately caught the attention of people who might have otherwise ignored the game,” said Chris Hoffman, a longtime senior editor at Nintendo Power. “It was very uncommon for Nintendo to do something like that, so it really made people take notice. One could even argue that there hasn’t been another boxing game in the last 30 years that’s had as much universal appeal.” Or global appeal. “It was huge,” Daniel Lanciana, of Australia, said. “It was one of ‘the’ games growing up.”
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its release, Lanciana spent 18 months creating a comprehensive book about the game, but he wasn’t sure what the market would be for a collector’s item about the grayhaired title.
His Kickstarter campaign, to help with publishing costs, surpassed $28,000 in pledges.
“That was actually surprising,” said Lanciana, who ultimately was prevented from releasing the book because of copyright issues. “I still receive messages like every week checking, ‘What’s the deal with the book?’ ”
Before the legendary cartridge came the less-revered “PunchOut!!” arcade game, released in 1983, and developed by Genyo Takeda, which featured a wireframed protagonist, so players could see their opponents. In the Nintendo version, players control a 17-year-old, 107-pound Bronx fighter named Little Mac, who was made diminutive enough not to obscure the other boxer, and also produced the feeling of being an underdog against a series of much larger heavyweights.
The first Nintendo version of the game didn’t include Tyson — Super Macho Man was the final opponent in the limited-edition giveaway — but Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa became so impressed with the Brooklyn native after watching one of his 1986 bouts that Tyson’s likeness was secured for a threeyear period, for a reported $50,000.
The bargain deal was signed shortly before Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and when the game was then released, the perfect final boss — 31-0 in reality at the time — was in place.
“He was so iconic at the time, and he still is,” said Yankees pitcher/gaming enthusiast CC Sabathia, who recalled playing the game with his mother. “He was just so big, and so fast. It felt impossible to beat him.”
EFORE earning the chance to take down Tyson, you first had to run through an international gauntlet of colorful, and often stereotypically offensive characters, beginning with weak Frenchman Glass Joe, and later the likes of memorable, trash-talking characters like Bald Bull, Soda Popinski and Von Kaiser, among others, with Nintendo mascot Mario serving as referee.
Often described as a puzzle disguised as a sports game, victory depended on fast reflexes, unusual patience, and reading tells.
Every opponent was different, and patterns grew increasingly difficult to decipher.
You watch Piston Honda’s eyebrows. You expose King Hippo’s belly. You wait for Great Tiger’s turban to light.
It looks like Checkers, and plays like Bridge.
“You’d think it would lose some of the replay value, but the programmers were so smart that the patterns will vary, and even if you play it all the time, you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do,” Chirayath, the blind-folded record-setter, said.
“Sometimes you’ll have nostalgia for a movie, and you’ll go back and watch it and it wasn’t really that good, but this game stands the test of time. It may have even gotten better because I understood the nuances the developers put in the game. They could have made it a very simple game, but they put so much effort into these subtleties that are just amazing. They really went above and beyond.”
More than 15 years after the game was released, Turk uncovered a slew of undiscovered paths to victory, which included hitting multiple frame perfect maneuvers — pressing a button on the exact 1/60th of a second required.
Some of these “Easter Eggs” are still first being discovered, with late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealing a secret in 2009, in which a cue from the crowd signals when to throw a knockout punch in one fight. Just last year, another hint was found for the first time.
“The game is very poorly understood, and people go back and try and find new strategies, creating resurgence in popularity,” Lanciana, the Aussie wouldbe author, said. “A lot of old records are still being improved. Not bad for a 30-year-old game.”
If you could complete the 13-match tightrope walk — or use the shortcut code: 007-3735963 — to reach Tyson, you became every boxer to face him in the 1980s.
“Iron Mike” was inches tall, and as fearsome as in the flesh. One punch introduced you to the canvas. A fight could end in seconds, leaving you tumbling down Mount Everest after being 10 feet from the peak.
There was no pattern. There was no rhythm. Power and speed were the only constants.
Nearly everyone left the ring dazed like Trevor Berbick, or stunned like Michael Spinks. Few ever won, and most who did lied.
“They ramp up the di ff i - culty very steadily throughout the game, and I think they do a great job of that, but then there’s kind of like this big leap where Tyson is just on a different level,” Chirayath said. “The developers made it so that he doesn’t have a fixed pattern, per se. He has variable delays between his punches, and it comes out so quick that you have to have those fast reflexes.
“He punches you once, and you’re on the canvas, and you’re like, ‘What?’ ”
hen came Tokyo, 1990.
After Buster Douglas, Tyson was no longer invincible.
His title was gone. His aura had evaporated.
When Tyson’s licensing deal expired shortly afterward, Nintendo opted against renewing it, instead releasing a new version later that year called “Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream.” The final character was turned into a white, fictional champion, who mimicked Tyson’s moves, and couldn’t come close to replicating the fervor that “Kid Dynamite” inspired.
“They are, indeed, otherwise identical games, but Mike Tyson is a real-life legend, and saying you can defeat him, even in a video game, is worthy of a brag,” Hoffman, the Nintendo Power editor, said. “It was his star power that helped turn it into a mega-hit. And the fact that Nintendo acts like the Mike Tyson version doesn’t exist, and that facing Mr. Dream is the ultimate fantasy match — when we know it’s not — somehow only makes the Tyson version more appealing.”
There would be other incarnations of “Punch-Out!!,” but Tyson would never be featured again, and thus, the series would never matter as much again.
So, people turn to eBay, where old cartridges can be bought. Others download ROMs, and play on emulators online, seeking out the gracefully aging title that can’t match the graphics or gameplay of games today, yet feels like an old friend you catch up with like no time has passed.
No boxing game ever permeated the culture so greatly, and given the state of the sport, it may never happen again. But in an alternate and accessible universe, Tyson will always be 21 and invincible.
“A lot of classic games have been re-released over the years, but guess which one has never been? ‘Mike Tyson’s P unchOut!!’ ” Turk said. “It makes the game pretty unique. It’s special because it’s the only one.”