"There shall be a man born, many years anon, a warrior unlike any our world has birthed. Hundreds of thousands shall congregate to witness his destructive deeds; he shall breath wonderful new life into the stout-hearted, beef-caked art of fisticuffs; and he shall entertain and enthrall, even as years later he confuses and alarms. He shall bear the name 'Ty-son,' and in the vernacular of the Future-Man: he shall kicketh monumental ass."
Mike Tyson was the supercharged, larger-than-life heavyweight knockout machine the boxing world had been looking for since the late 1970s. The sport's top prize had splintered then, and the heavyweight championships (plural) had become a revolving-door spectacle of loose chins and loose decisions. Tyson debuted in 1985 and won twenty-seven straight fights, railroading sixteen of his opponents in the first round.
Then he KO'ed Trevor Berbick in November 1986 to become the youngest heavyweight champion in history, at age 20.
Now Tyson was a household name. His monikers, "Iron" and "Kid Dynamite," graced billboards. His face was plastered on magazine covers. He appeared on TV touting Diet Pepsi as "the undisputed champion," accompanied in print ads by a real catchphrase for the ages: "While heavyweight champ Mike Tyson doesn't mind sharing his title...don't ask him to share his Diet Pepsi."
And, of course, he lent his name to one of the Nintendo Entertainment System's seminal game cartridges.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, with its exclamation points, its million-dollar endorsement, and its own 8-bit version of Iron Mike as the final boss, would have sold scores of copies even if it had been a complete travesty from title screen to end screen. Lucky for us, the game wasn't a catastrophe like so many other NES sports titles. (Some would say there are too many to count; I'd say there are eleven — Ring King, Slalom, Winter Games, John Elway's Quarterback, Dance Aerobics, Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball, Championship Bowling, Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf, World Class Track Meet, Skate or Die, and Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble.)
In fact, Punch-Out!! isn't just okay. It isn't merely good compared to the average NES sports title. It's a bonafide, guaranteed, one-hundred percent, no-buts-about-it, wham-bam-thank-you-Sam C-L-A-S-S-I-C, one of the greatest 8-bit games ever released, and one of the few NES games that can still turn the average adult gamer into a sweating, trembling, cursing pile of spent childhood dreams and leftover testosterone.
It's no surprise many still consider it the quintessential boxing game.
The above television ad (viewable on YouTube here, here, and here) is one of the more memorable from Nintendo's "Playing with Power" era, featuring the Baddest Man on the Planet secluded in a darkened game room with a wall of TV screens and an NES hookup. Tyson has always been a bit of a nutcase — the years since his knockout of Trevor Berbick have proven that pretty conclusively, I reckon — but I never knew he was such a TV fanatic. Watching one television set apparently doesn't cut it; he's got to watch thirty-six of them. (I wonder what his bathroom looks like?)
Anyway, the spot ends with a voiceover promising kids a shot at the coveted heavyweight title, at which point Tyson swivels into view and bursts into a fit of maniacal laughter in a voice that is most definitely not his own.
Incidentally, we wouldn't see a shot of Tyson acting this normal on TV again for at least another ten or eleven years.
No comments:
Post a Comment