Obscusion B-Side: PC (& Arcade) Classics in Your Pocket! The Game Boy's Japan-Only Ports of 1984 Gaming Icons

In terms of the history of video games, the year 1984 is a rather notable one & could possibly be one of the most important years, in some regards. While the North American market was still in the midst of the video game crash, there were still some true console classics in the form of titles like Pitfall 2: Lost Caverns, & H.E.R.O., while over in Japan 1984 was the first full calendar year for both Nintendo's Famicom & Sega's SG-1000. However the real scenes of note for gaming in 1984 were over in the arcades & on PCs, as this year saw the debut of titles like Punch-Out!!, Karate Champ, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, 1942, Kung-Fu Master, Cobra Command/Thunder Storm, Marble Madness, & Pac-Land in arcades, while over on computer saw the likes of Boulder Dash, Jet Set Willy, Hydlide, King's Quest, Impossible Mission, & Spy vs. Spy. 1984 was the year that established the building blocks of genres like fighting games, beat-em-ups, platformers, action RPGs, & (at least from a "modern" perspective) graphic adventure games. In essence, 1984 was the year in which a lot of what people tend to associate "video games" with to varying extents, & in the way we tend to think of & see them, were arguably first showcased, as iconic & influential franchises like Street Fighter, Double Dragon, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., & countless others wouldn't really exist as we know them today without the influence of the games that first appeared in 1984.

Examples of 1984 gaming classics that were ported to the Game Boy...
However, none of these will be covered in this B-Side.

On April 21, 1989 Nintendo released the Game Boy in Japan, and while it was by no means the first handheld gaming console with swappable game cartridges it was arguably the first truly successful one. It was also more or less a success from the very start, selling around 720,000 units & 1.9 million games by that August, despite there only being seven games out by then in Japan, & only five in North America, where it had launched in July; Europe wouldn't get the Game Boy until September 1990. Simply put, game publishers wanted in on the Game Boy's instant success & that meant putting whatever they could on the handheld... including ports of iconic games of the past. And this is where the year 1984 would rear its head again, as over the course of the life of the Game Boy (& its initial successor, the Game Boy Color) there would be various ports of iconic classics from 1984 to Nintendo's handheld console, a number of which saw release internationally. Games like Yie Ar Kung Fu, 1942, Marble Madness, Boulder Dash, & Spy vs. Spy would all see Game Boy (Color) ports that saw release both in Japan & abroad (or, at least, Europe), while other games like Kung Fu Master at least saw unique entries on the hardware, allowing people to experience these influential classics in some way on the go; hell, Marble Madness got two different ports! However, there were also some Game Boy ports of 1984 icons that stayed exclusive to Japan, and for this entry of Obscusion B-Side I want to go over four of them, plus a fifth game that's technically its own unique entry but is related to one of said 1984 icons. Did these games transition over well to Game Boy, & did we miss out on something really good, or was Gunpei Yokoi's purposefully underpowered handheld unable to keep up with games released on hardware that (even for 1984) were well beyond its capabilities?

Obscusion B-Side: Super Pitfall (PC-88): Reject Cartridges, Embrace 5.25" Floppy Disks!

The concept of a certain intellectual property from one country (& culture) being reinterpreted by another country has been around for centuries, if not millennia, and the same is true when it comes to video games. When it comes to the execution, however, the results can be very much mixed & also often dependent on which direction the interpretation is going to & from. For example, there have been good & enjoyable examples of Japanese IPs being interpreted by American or European developers, but for every Splatterhouse 2010 (I liked it, at least) or Silent Hill 2 remake there is seemingly always an Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, Warriors: Legends of Troy, or DmC: Devil May Cry that sours the field a bit... but that's not to say that the other way around is perfect either, though. There have been plenty of examples where a Japanese developer just didn't really "get" the appeal or style of a Western gaming IP, with the end result being more than a bit disappointing, if not outright terrible. One of the most infamous examples released on the NES actually turns 40 years old in 2026, but nowhere near as well known is a version of the game that was only released in Japan, on hardware that (outside of an early, failed, attempt) was never really sold abroad.

Twelve years after its founding in 1966, Japanese media company Pony Canyon decided to enter the video game business in 1982, and for the first few years it exclusively released PC games for the main computers of the era, i.e. the NEC PC-88, the Fujitsu FM-7, the Sharp X1, & the MSX line. Though it had its own original titles, Pony Canyon's main focus came in two forms: Licensed IP & Western games. For the former the company's earlier releases included games based on properties like Spy Daisakusen (the Japanese name for Mission: Impossible), The Cannonball Run II, Genma Taisen (a.k.a. Harmageddon), Xabungle, Golgo 13, Locke the Superman, & Back to the Future; over time they'd focus less on this, however. In comparison, the latter is what would truly define Pony Canyon as a game developer/publisher as in 1984 they started releasing MSX ports of various games from Activision, while in later years they'd also release ports of games from series like Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Test Drive, Ballblazer, & Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Activision partnership was especially notable, in particular, as while Pony Canyon more or less stopped making ports after 1988 (Space Shuttle for the MSX looks to be the last one) they would still occasionally act as the Japanese publisher for Activision games all the way through the 90s, mostly notably for entries in the iconic Pitfall series... and that's where one of those infamous NES games I brought up comes into play.

In 1984 Pony Canyon released an MSX port of Pitfall! & in 1985 this was followed up with an MSX port of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Now, to be fair, some of these MSX ports also saw release outside of Japan (the line did see some success in Europe & South America), so those ports may not have originated in Japan, but for Pony Canyon's next Pitfall release there was no doubt that it was 100% a Japanese interpretation of a Western IP. Released on September 5, 1986 for the Nintendo Famicom, Super Pitfall was a brand new entry in Activision's platformer-defining franchise, and was the first entry to have not been designed & developed by creator David Crane. Instead, Pony Canyon hired Micronics to develop the game... and the end result was a mess, with even Family Computer Magazine (a.k.a. Famimaga, not to be confused with Famicom Tsushin, i.e. Famitsu) scoring it a mere 17.06/40. Activision would later release Super Pitfall for the NES in North America in November of 1987, where it would gain even more infamy for its poor quality.... well, everything. The visuals were glitchy, the hit detection was inconsistent, the music was repetitive, and the gameplay was simultaneously buggy & way too cryptic for its own good. There would later be a port of the game to the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 3 by Steve & Monique Bjork of SRB Software in 1988 which, despite a lower frame rate & a reduced gameplay window, looks to be the superior version in all ways. There was also the fan made Super Pitfall': 30th Anniversary Edition by Mário "nesrocks" Azevedo in 2016 that's just a straight-up, massively improved remake. Activision had even planned on releasing Sunsoft's Atlantis no Nazo internationally as "Super Pitfall II", though the release was cancelled; a prototype ROM for Super Pitfall II would surface in 2010.

But there's one final version of Super Pitfall out there that never left Japan. In November of 1986, only two months after the original Famicom release in Japan, Pony Canyon released Super Pitfall for the PC-88mkII SR. While it's similar in concept to what Micronics made for Nintendo's hardware, the PC-88 game is a wholly unique version, one seemingly developed in-house at Pony Canyon & designed by Makoto Ichinoseki, so let's see if this Japan-only take might possibly be capable of redeeming the name "Super Pitfall" in any way.

Maze☆The Mega-Burst Space (Ogeretsu-ban): A "Vulgar" Display of Power?

On "October 3, 1996 at 25:15", i.e. October 4, 1996 at 1:15 am, TV Tokyo aired the first episode of Those Who Hunt Elves, marking the start of what I love to (semi-jokingly) call the "modern day late-night anime infomercial". I call it that because the very reason TWHE aired in that kind of time slot was seemingly purely for marketing reasons. In short (read what I wrote earlier this month for the long version), the end of the OVA boom in the early 90s due to the Bubble Economy bursting resulted in anime production shrinking for a few years, & eventually it was decided that if otaku were listening to late-night anime-themed radio shows then maybe they would just watch anime on TV during that time, which in turn could double as advertising, i.e. the anime was, in essence, an infomercial; also, the time slot was sold to the production by the network... just like an infomercial. Anyway, Those Who Hunt Elves did well enough to keep the experiment going & after that came the first Eat-Man anime (as well as a batched re-run of Neon Genesis Evangelion, to hype up the Death & Rebirth movie), so TV Tokyo decided to expand its late-night offerings starting in April 1997. Instead of offering only one new anime in late-night the network would now offer four, and two of those new offerings would debut on "April 2" (i.e. post-midnight April 3) one after the other, effectively creating the first late-night anime block. I've previously covered what aired at "25:45" back in 2016 when I reviewed Haunted Junction, so I think it's only right to start my year-long look at early examples of the modern day late-night anime infomercial by looking at what is, chronologically, the third ever example...

Our story begins in 1986, when a young mangaka named Kia Asamiya (real name Michitaka Kikuchi, and he'd swap between the two throughout his career) made his professional debut in manga with the series Shinseiki Vagrants over in Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Comic Comp magazine. During that same year, though, Asamiya would also draw a 16-page short in Tairiku Shobo's Comic JAM magazine titled Ijikuu Gyo Kitan OZ/OZ: A Bizarre Story from Strange Spacetime, appearing in Issues #1 & #3 specifically; it later got reprinted in 1996 via the book Colors Side-A (which you can find over at the Internet Archive, actually). Then, in 1990, Asamiya returned to the concept of that one-shot with the manga Jikuu Kitan OZ/Mysterious Spacetime Story OZ, which he co-created with writer Satoru Akahori & ran in Hobby Japan's RPG Magazine for six issues before it went on indefinite hiatus, never to be continued. While Asamiya seemingly had no interest in continuing this concept, though, Akahori still wanted to do so, & in 1993 teamed with Eiji Suganuma (normally an animator, & now director, but was also a talented artist) to debut Maze☆Bakunetsu Jikuu/The Mega-Burst Space as a light novel in the pages of Kadokawa Shoten's magazine The Sneaker. Apparently Akahori more or less just took the same exact story that he & Asamiya had made with the second OZ manga & changed the names around in order to make Maze, but since he co-created the unfinished manga I guess he technically had every right to do so. In the end Maze would handily outlive its predecessor, running in The Sneaker until 1998 & totaling 14 books, with nine telling the main story, two telling side stories, & the remaining three simply telling bonus stories. I have no idea how Kia Asamiya felt about Satoru Akahori effectively co-opting a concept that he had first created on his own, but I guess that's just how the house falls from the sky sometimes.

Maze would also receive two different manga adaptations, one by Rei Omishi (who co-created Sorcerer Hunters with Akahori) that ran in Monthly Comic Dragon from 1995 to 1999 across six volumes & another by Suganuma himself in Comic Newtype in 1996 that only ran for a single volume. Also in mid-1996 was an OVA adaptation of Maze, a two-episode affair produced by Kadokawa, Victor Entertainment/JVC, & J.C. Staff that seemingly did well enough to prompt a second anime adaptation. This time around, however, it'd be a two-cour TV anime that aired in late-night, though it was produced by the same companies & even featured more or less the same exact major staff & cast reprising their respective roles from the OVA. The only main difference looks to be that the OVA was technically based on Rei Omishi's manga, crediting them with "Original Characters", where the TV anime was based on the light novel drawn by Eiji Suganuma (though Suganuma also did the character designs for the OVA). Central Park Media would license both Maze anime productions, first releasing them on VHS in 2000 before later re-releasing both on dual-audio DVD... but that's not what I'll be covering here. You see, CPM seemingly kind of got screwed over when it licensed Maze TV because what they released in North America was simply the original TV version, which is what came out in Japan on VHS.

However, over on Laserdisc Japan received an alternate version of Maze TV. Known over there as the "Ogeretsu-ban", or "Vulgar Edition", the LD release was an uncensored version of the show, featuring altered cuts of scenes that were apparently just too hot for even late-night TV in 1998. Not just that, but CPM's release was also missing a bonus 26th episode that has stayed exclusive to Japan to this very day, one that was released on VHS in Japan (& maybe also LD?), but only as a mail-in "proof of purchase" deal. So, sorry, no coverage of CPM's dub this time around as we start off my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial by checking out the "Vulgar Edition" of Maze☆The Mega-Burst Space!

An Overview the Early Years of the "Modern Day Late-Night Anime Infomercial": 1996 & 1997

While not technically the first anime to be made for TV broadcast, 1963's Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy (based on Osamu Tezuka's most iconic manga) was the first anime to air on TV as a "proper" 30-minute (including commercials), long-form serialized program, similar to how other TV programming tends to work; any TV anime prior to this were all either short-form (i.e. only a few minutes long) or were short-run (one to three episodes). When Atom first debuted on Fuji TV it initially aired Tuesdays from 18:15-18:45, i.e. 6:15-6:45 pm, before later being moved over to Saturdays from 19:00-19:30, i.e. 7:00-7:30 pm, the latter time slot being the start of what Japan calls "Golden Time", or what is usually referred to worldwide as simply "prime time". While the exact time frame may differ depending on the country (Japan goes with 7-11 pm, while the US goes with 8-11 pm EST), the idea of prime time (or sometimes "peak time") is that those hours of the day would be the most ideal time to air new, hot, or "prestige" programming that would attract the potential largest audience possible, hence why it's considered "Golden" in Japan. After all, kids are home from school (& adults from work) by then & it's after most people's dinner time, while simultaneously it's also not yet too late that most people would be going to sleep. As the concept of TV anime grew more popular it became standardized for those shows to air in "Golden Time", though eventually weekend mornings also became a regular time frame for certain programming, usually for more children-focused shows, while prime time became the time for something the whole family could watch, or at least older children & teenagers.

However, even in that first year of "traditional" TV anime programming a different type of time slot was attempted for anime... though it would take 33 years for it to truly see its potential realized, for better or worse.

The early late-night anime that crawled so that
the "modern" productions for the past 30 years could walk.

While Tetsuwan Atom debuted on January 1, 1963, later that same year on September 4 (& also on Fuji TV) saw the debut of Sennin Buraku, an anime adaptation of the 4-panel manga by the late Ko Kojima that would run from 1956 to 2014 in Weekly Asahi Geino (a tabloid magazine, not a traditional manga magazine), & this would make history by being the first anime to ever air in a late-night time slot, in this case 23:40-23:55, i.e. just before midnight. Now, to be fair, only the first eight episodes of Sennin Buraku would actually air in late-night, as the remaining 15 episodes were pulled back an hour & ran from 22:30-22:45, i.e. the tail end of Golden Time, but it still introduced the idea of airing a TV anime in a time slot that was very much only going to be watched by adults who stayed up late. However, the idea of "late-night anime" would be only done on rare occasion for the next few decades, as 1969 would see Roppo Yabure-kun (loosely based on Sen Saga's book Introduction to Civil Law: How to Avoid Failure with Money & Women) on Nagoya TV (now branded as Mētele), followed by a 17-year hiatus that would only end in 1986 with Heart Cocktail (based on the "urban love story" manga by Seizo Watase) on Nippon TV (a.k.a. NTV), a series that actually saw an anime revival with 2023's Heart Cocktail Colorful. Late-night anime would become a little more semi-consistent at that point, as 1987 saw Fuji TV air both Slippy Dandy (which only lasted four two-minute episodes) & Lemon Angel (a spin-off of hentai anime pioneer Cream Lemon), 1988 had Dr. Chichibuyama (based on the vulgar 4-panel manga by Keiichi Tanaka) on Fuji TV as part of its live All Night Fuji programming block, & 1989 saw both Yomiuri TV air Seishun no Shokutaku (based on the cooking manga by Miriko Takeda, with animation by Madhouse) as part of its variety show 11 PM & Mainichi Broadcasting System/MBS air Sakyo Komatsu's Anime Theater (which adapted short stories by the titular sci-fi writer, & featured animation by Gainax). Something that remained the same with all of these shows, though, was that none of them were a "full-length" program, i.e. taking up its own 30-minute time slot, but rather were all shorter works, if not part of a larger late-night variety show.

That would start to change, though, as after 1990 saw a late-night re-run of the original Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA on TV Tokyo 1992 would see the debut of Super Zugan (based on the mahjong manga by Masayuki Katayama) on Fuji TV & Yo-Yo no Neko Tsumami (an original work) on NTV, with Super Zugan being the first "full-length" late-night anime, i.e. its episodes were "standard" length (~24 minutes, minus commercials), followed by 1995 seeing The Ping Pong Club on Tokyo Broadcasting System/TBS, based on the manga by Minoru Furuya. Apparently Furuya did not appreciate the anime self-censoring the more extreme & crude moments seen in his manga, due to the producers hoping to re-run it on more traditional time slots, but that's just how things worked back then. Up to this point it's easy to see what kind of anime was being produced in rare quantities for late-night, as they were all very specifically aimed at adults by focusing on very adult themes, i.e. sex, debauchery, late-night cravings, mahjong, or simply more esoteric subject matter; also, some "traditional" anime were apparently re-run in late-night slots every now & up to this point, likely just to fill time. However, all of that would change in late 1996 due in large part to something that happened a few years prior: The End of Japan's "Bubble Economy".

The economic bubble Japan had in the second half of the 80s & the very start of the 90s would come to a crash in early 1992, and one thing that actually got hurt badly by this was the OVA market for anime, which had gone through a massive boom during that time; in essence, anyone with an idea & money was putting out straight-to-video anime, for better or worse. After the bubble burst OVAs would still see release, but they were mostly relegated to being related to something that was already successful, or a massive franchise like Gundam; original OVAs still happened, but nowhere near as often as before. Beyond that, anime was mostly back to being reliant on either being produced as a movie for theatrical release (which cost a lot) or being appealing to TV networks that aired anime in either a morning or prime time slot, i.e. options were once again highly limited. For example, back in 1992 the anime studio Group TAC had wanted to produce a TV anime adaptation of 70s Shonen Jump baseball manga Team Astro, even creating both a proper pitch document and two drawings made to show what it would look like, but no network was interested in airing it due to the failure of 1989-1990's Miracle Giants Dome-kun, which itself was conceived in an attempt to revitalize children's interest in baseball, which had waned; there wouldn't be a new baseball TV anime until H2 in mid-1995. If the economic bubble hadn't burst then maybe Group TAC could have made Team Astro into an OVA series, but by that point they were reliant on network support; Team Astro wouldn't get a TV adaptation until a live-action series in 2005.

But wait... there's more!!

LIVE: Trapped in Purgatory, A Human Object... Alive

It's been a good while since I last had a piece ready for Christmas Day, 2016's Demo Disc for Geisters: Fractions of the Earth to be exact, but I'm in the mood for doing one this year. The reason for that is because exactly 10 years ago, for Christmas 2015, I put out a review for Hareluya, the 1992 Shonen Jump manga by Haruto Umezawa (his first manga under his real name, as he previously used the pen name Masato Umezawa) that wound up only lasting 10 chapters before being quickly axed. However, said axing was seemingly because while the initial "Son of God" angle didn't appeal to readers the manga actually did start to find an audience once it transitioned into being more of a standard delinquent manga. Therefore, so as to not have the deific elements potentially cause problems later on down the line, Umezawa would end Hareluya early (though still giving it a proper finale) & instead reboot it as a pure delinquent manga later that same year, with the end result being (Hareluya II) BØY, a series that would reimagine the titular Hareluya Hibino as simply a (nigh-indestructible) human high schooler, while the friends "God Hareluya" made in the first manga would be reimagined as "BØY Hareluya's" friends. BØY would run all the way until early 1999 & last 296 chapters (including the initial one-shot, which is effectively Chapter 0) across 33 volumes, making it the seventh longest-running manga to debut during Jump's "Golden Age" (after JoJo Parts 1-5, Dragon Ball, Rokudenashi Blues, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, City Hunter, & Sakigake!! Otoko Juku, all of which were 300+ chapters), & the 27th longest-running manga in Jump's entire history (also the second-longest sub-300 chapter manga in Jump, after The Gutsy Frog, by only a single chapter). It was also one of the magazine's most popular manga of the 90s, with it being a consistent presence in the "Top 3 to 4" spots in most issues of Shonen Jump between 1993 & 1997, often seen alongside the likes of Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, & Rurouni Kenshin.

Like many other iconic mangaka in Jump, though, Haruto Umezawa would have trouble trying to maintain anything remotely as successful in the magazine following BØY's finale. His follow-up series, 2000's Bremen (about a group of friends who want to become "rock gods"), would last a respectable 82 chapters across nine volumes before coming to an end in late 2001, but then 2002's Sword Breaker (a fantasy series with isekai/reincarnation elements) would last only a mere 17 chapters (including the original one-shot) before getting cancelled. Amusingly enough, Umezawa recently did return to the world of Sword Breaker when his 2021 manga Even in Another World Our Protagonist Isn't Afraid of Being Him!!! revealed late into its run that the lead was actually the reincarnation of Sword Breaker's hero; a clever way to revive a cancelled manga, in a sense. Anyway, after Sword Breaker's cancellation Umezawa would take a year off from making manga, seemingly to figure out what to do next, before returning in Issue #3 of Shonen Jump in 2004 with his next serialized manga for the magazine, LIVE (pronounced "Laiv", not "Liv"), which actually saw Umezawa sort of return to what he had done with the original Hareluya 12 years prior, only now the Son of God was replaced with a demon from Hell.

Unfortunately, LIVE would actually wind up lasting the same exact number of chapters as Hareluya did, a mere 10, before getting cancelled & ending in Issue #14, and this would actually mark the end of Haruto Umezawa's run with Shonen Jump, after 14 years (dating back to 1990's Shuten☆Doji, as Masato Umezawa). By the end of 2004 Umezawa would debut his next series, the Lamborghini-focused car manga Countach (technically pronounced "koon-tosh", but in Japanese is pronounced "cown-tahk"), in Issue #41 of Weekly Young Jump & it would wind up being Umezawa's second-longest serialization, running until Issue #41 of 2012 across 28 volumes; since then Umezawa hasn't had a serialization run longer than three volumes, max. So, to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of my Christmas Day review of Hareluya (i.e. the "start" of "Haruto" Umezawa's time in Shonen Jump), let's see how LIVE (i.e. the end of Haruto Umezawa's time in Shonen Jump) came out & if it's still worth reading today, as I feel that Hareluya is honestly an early cancellation that holds up rather well with time.