BONANZA BROS
COP GUARDGREEN RIOT ANGRY COP GUARD DOG BOUNCERSPRITE BOUNCERFLOORED
SEGA REALLY BROUGHT HOME THE GOODS WHEN IT SNUCK SPLIT-SCREEN STEALTH, SLAPSTICK CHARM AND UNIQUE CHARACTERS INTO ARCADES THROUGH THE LOVABLE BONANZA BROS. JOIN US AS WE INVESTIGATE THE CRIMINALLY GOOD COIN-OP GAME, ALONG WITH ITS CONVERSIONS AND SPIN-OFFS
For all their supposed stealth credentials, the Bonanza Bros have a dubious track record of keeping a low profile since their original arcade heist. Take a glance at their prolific police record and you’ll find evidence of Robo and Mobo being present at the scenes of conversions and spin-offs across a litany of consoles and home computers. Those pesky yellow thieves just keep getting away with it.
Labelling the brothers as robbers is perhaps a little unfair though, as their criminal status is somewhat up for debate. The introduction screens of the arcade game depict a mystery client recruiting the pair for a mission to help with “cleaning up Badville once and for all” by gathering evidence from “crooked joints that are run by counterfeiters, thieving bankers and cheating casino operators”. On the other hand, the same sequence on some home ports tells a slightly different backstory of the brothers being “reformed villains” who are asked simply to “test security” at a series of swanky establishments.
Opinions also seem divided about how human the brothers really are. Some versions of the Mega Drive cover artwork portray them as real people, albeit in cartoon form, while in the Master System game alone their sprites are pale-skinned instead of yellow. To add to the
confused intelligence available to us, the Sega Genesis game led US audiences to believe the duo are in fact named Mike and Spike, with the manual describing them as “the most famous investigators around” and not bad guys at all. The title of that version of the game was also extended to become Bonanza Brothers. So just who really are these slippery characters?
What we know for sure is that the duo burst onto the coin-op scene in 1990 with a lovably goofy style that was quite unlike anything that had come before. The game was created by a small team at Sega including the artist and designer Manabu Kusunoki, whose later work includes Panzer Dragoon. The team developed the game for the relatively new Sega System 24 arcade board, which was able to read games from floppy disks and hence allowed arcade operators to swap between games easily (you can read more about it in issue 244). This hardware also afforded the Bonanza
“I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING EASY-GOING AND SILLY, IN CONTRAST TO THE SERIOUS ATMOSPHERE OF MANY GAMES” MANABU KUSUNOKI
Bros developers higherresolution graphics and more colours than they had previously been able to work with, and they made full use of these capabilities, crafting a vibrant cartoon world full of slapstick humour that Kusunoki tells us was partly inspired by one of his favourite childhood comedy series (see Developer Q&A).
“THE TEAM’S GOAL WAS TO CREATE THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE THE DRIFTERS, A JAPANESE COMEDY GROUP” MANABU KUSUNOKI
Kusunoki and the team at Sega were intent on crafting a lighthearted and cheerful experience that offered a contrast to some of the more serious arcade action of the era. They set Bonanza Bros across 12 colourful levels, each one split across several floors of buildings that are ripe targets for robbing, including a bank, a casino, an antique shop and finally a pyramid. The aim of each stage is to sneak past the guards and collect every piece of loot before dashing to the exit and your escape blimp within a three-minute time limit. You can also squish guards behind doors or zap them with your stun gun, but ultimately this won’t achieve anything more harmful than temporarily incapacitating your
pursuers. With no means of wiping anyone out for good, trying your best to snoop around and then swiftly running away once you’ve been spotted are a big part of the gameplay.
Bonanza Bros had an almost 3D look and feel. For all that the visuals were very cartoony, they also had a slightly futuristic, polygonallooking style. The game features foreground and background layers to move between, the latter of which is particularly handy for ducking into to hide behind doorways and furniture. All of this gives the illusion of the game having a greater field of depth.
Comedic animations are another highly memorable part of the game, from slips on banana skins and trips on rakes, to Robo and Mobo taking out a mirror to admire themselves when they finish a level. Catchy music and some digitised speech sounds also add an extra dose of charm, with guards yelping as they attack you and Robo and Mobo cackling gleefully each time you collect treasure. The music for the game was composed by Koichi Namiki, whose other musical credits among many for Sega include Super Hang-on and Galaxy Force.
In an early report back on the coin-op version, CVG reported that Bonanza Bros was “graphically stunning” and “a very different sort of game that taxes your brains rather than your reflexes”. The review also had some