Funfact: This is actually something that happened a lot here in Brazil at the time of TecToy with the Master System and Mega Drive/Sega Genesis. For example, all the games in the Wonder Boy series became Turma da Monica (Monica and Friends/Monica's Gang) games here in Brazil, the Sega Genesis one was even re-released on cartridge in 2017 in celebration of the re-launch of the Mega Drive that took place here in 2017 and we even had people from Sega of America and Sega of Japan to celebrate the launch here. Other games from the Master System era were also rebranded here in Brazil to be more successful, such as the game "As Aventuras da TV Colosso" which was actually just an Asterix and Obelix game. I think you can understand why Sega was huge here in Brazil in the 90s. (Another interesting fact, Phantasy Star was basically the first game we had in Brazilian Portuguese here in an era in which basically no game was in our language)
I got the rerelease of Turma da Mônica na Terra dos Monstros alongside the Mega Drive rerelease xD But yeah, that thing was super common in the 80s and 90s, lots of games got rebranding as some popular franchise or even rerelease as original things when the licence expired/was not available in the country. The channel Big Ole Words has a video on NES games that lost their pop culture licences and had to be released as something else xD
Character Soft is by far the most underrated publisher for the Famicom. They got their start on the console in 1990 around the same time when the Super Famicom launched and they're whole thing was to release Famicom Sanrio games for a budget price. They tended to also take existing games and either make something similar or outright take an existing game and reskin it to Sanrio characters. I'd highly reccomend checking out the Famidaily episodes of these games by RndStranger, he's covered all of these Sanrio Famicom games in detail on top of the rest of the Famicom library.
Nintendo and Pax Softnica also quietly developed Snoopy Concert, but it was published by Mitsui Fudosan, Dentsu. The copyright for Snoopy Concert was shared by United Feature Syndicate, Inc., Nintendo (1995), The Harry Fox Agency, Inc., Derry Music Company, GRP Records, Inc. Dentsu were the ones to initiate Kaettekita Mario Bros. too (that FDS re-write only game that was a collaboration between Nintendo and Nagatanien to advertise Nagatanien's food products). Hello Kitty World is also attributed to Mario Company (shares are split between Dentsu and Nintendo), while published by Character Soft. Sanrio Carnival 2; another Character Soft game, also has a Mario Company notice but it appears Nintendo had no involvement. Hello Kitty's Bead Factory is a Yoshi's Cookie-like game. No Nintendo staff are in the credits, but the game has a (C)1999 Nintendo/Imagineer notice.
Here's something semi-related but definitely not a classic; A Series of Unfortunate Events on GBA is just a reskin of Home Alone on SNES EDIT: It appears I was wrong about this, but I'm 100% sure I was thinking of something very similar if so, if anyone manages to find the GBA game in question that'd be fun, whatever it was it definitely lifted the entire engine and simply replaced the sprites. Good luck.
Sort of related but Nicktoons Freeze Frame Frenzy on GBA is pretty much Gekisha Boy for the PC Engine. I say sort of related because it's not technically a reskin but it's own game that rips off pretty much all of the gameplay of that game.
I love a good Balloon Fight. Excellent video, Jon! I recall in the early days of flash games online, somebody made a Balloon Fight game where you leveled up as you defeated enemies and could customize your balloon fighter's appearance, and I sunk several hours into it! Good times...
9:48 I just discovered a couple of weeks ago that an arcade version of Balloon Fight exists called Ballon Fight VS. I played on an original machine and that game also has 4 players and goes for more vertical level design
Similar examples of reskins like that are also the Wonder Boy series in Brazil that got “Turma da Mônica” license attached (Brazilian comic series) and the Crazy Castle series, which each game got a different license for different countries.
You should have mentioned that not only did they reuse the World Championships song in the bonus stage, but the intro to the original song has a Mario tune that was modified into a garbled sounding mess for Hello Kitty World to hide the Mario music!
Releasing a game in another platform with a different skin is pretty much what the Wonder Boy series is known for. An arcade and Master System game published by SEGA got ported to the NES as "Adventure Island" and the other games of the franchise also got ported to Famicom and TurboGrafx 16 each one if a different name
Adventure Island was Hudson noticing a hole in SEGA's rights for Wonder Boy stating SEGA only owns the name and characters and making use of it. Which is probably how the Monster Boy indie game got away with using Wonder Boy songs and enemies.
@@Mari_Izu not exactly. Weston (the developers) owned the source code while SEGA owned everything else. Weston sold the code to Hudson and they ported the game as Adventure Island. SEGA was ok with that, they were also ported some of their games to the NES (like Fantasy Zone) and TurboGrafx (like Golden axe) so it wasn't a big deal, and that's also why it happened with the other Wonder Boy games after the first one
People are so obsessed with Super Mario Bros. 2 Being a Yume Kojo Doki Doki Panic reskin (when it's more than that) that they forgot this shit happened all the time in the 80s and 90s.
There was an awesome flash game I played in the early 2000s that was basically Balloon Fight. It has character customizations, 1v1 battle mode, weapons, & cool environmental effects. It was called Balloon Duel & it was on Newgrounds.
It'd be cool if someone created a mod of Hello Kitty World that replaces the main character sprites with those of Alice, Jim, and Samm from Balloon Kid, modifies the blimp to read "FIGHT," modifies the title screen to read "BALLOON KID," and modifies the backgrounds to look more like Pencilvania from the original game.
Check out the Game Boy game Bamse, a.k.a. Baby T-Rex, a.k.a. Agro Soar, a.k.a. We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. Same game with different skins. Bamse was the version exclusive to my home country Sweden.
in your collection, you're missing one! Balloon Fight on e-Reader and Animal Crossing! I also have this lovely rom hack of the original done in memory of Iwata, replacing the balloon fighter with a sprite of him.
A Famicom game in the 2000's era!? And it's a Hello Kitty reskin of the Japanese Balloon Kid!? Nintendo was real adamant about not letting the Famicom or SFC die! Also, on the topic of Tingle Balloon Fight, I'm genuinely surprised that they never did a Balloon Fight game with Donkey Kong Country characters, specifically Diddy and Dixie Kong... just some weird thought I had in the back of my mind.
yeah I think my favorite easter egg in HKW is the bonus round music they ported over from the NWC1990 carts! some of the hello kitty games were actually kinda fun, and this one's definitely no exception. this one's on my list for when I do get around to collecting famicom stuff!
Definitely look at the Crazy Castle series, it's insane. Originally a Roger Rabbit game, they were reskinned into Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Garfield, Woody Woodpecker, Ghostbusters, and some others.
here's another fun one, Elevator Action Ex for the GBC (not released in NA I think) got reskinned as Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage (for the GBC in NA)
I have a lot of nostalgia for BK, it was one of the first Gameboy games I bought and even played it with link cable as my friend also had it. Love the balloon inflation noise! I just had a sneaky go on the hello kitty version, yeah it's the same but as Jon says, bouncing off the walls makes the mini game much easier!
This is an awesome video. Great job Jon! I also love that they didn’t dumb down the game just to make it easier because it would be a “girl’s game”. Games that are geared toward any audience should still be quality games.
Balloon fight is so weird, Nintendo just attaches this balloon mechanic on any character they want like tingle or the villager from animal crossing as if it's a skill every Nintendo character has from nature
Really awesome to hear you cover Balloon Kid and the rest of the series! I played Balloon kid on analogue pocket for the first time this year and loved it. Next you should cover another underrated Gameboy game (that I also played this year): Kid Icarus Of Myths and Monsters. This game also never released in Japan 😮 (until the 3DS VC release)
Jon, if you're still craving more Balloon Fight there is one more game that's not quite official but very much worth a try! It's an old Flash game from XGen Studios called Balloon Duel. I played it for hours when I was a kid. It's more of a 1v1 duel mode against CPUs that get more and more difficult, and you have equipment you can upgrade with the money you earn from your wins.
You still need the official Japanese PC ports by Hudson and also the Game & Watch, also if you haven’t played the arcade version it’s on Switch. Vs. Balloon Fight is actually very different to the NES game despite using basically the same sprites
Have the famicom cartridge, got it in a bulk lot, because it says 'hello kitty' never bothered to play it. After watching this video I am searching for it now 😅
Fake Balloon Fight fan!! Come back when you have VS. Balloon Fight on Switch, Balloon Fight on Sharp X1, the Balloon Fight Game & Watch, the unreleased Famicom Disk System port, the Balloon Trip minigame in WarioWare: Smooth Moves and the Tuner Fight minigame in the Nintendo DSi Metronome /j (I would totally be down to collab on an entire video about all the Balloon Fight games and minigames)
The original Hello Kitty Island Adventure! I _do_ hope that Nintendo's eventually able to put this up on NSO; it'd certainly be a better Nintendo-published licensed game than Quest for Camelot... though, I'm also fully aware that we'll probably just get Balloon Kid.
Reskinning and porting a game to an outdated console with a completely different IP is something I would think a Chinese bootlegger would do, not Nintendo themselves, haha.
I have Balloon Fight NES on 3DS i probably got for free. Never got into that game. I did enjoy that Nintendo Land game a little bit tho. I guess another obvious thing about ballon fight series that no one needs to mention is the fact that you keep going left... Speaking of reskin, I know it is super well known and maybe somebody discussed it before, but is it time to talk about (again?) the SMS Blackbelt aka localized version of Fist of North Star? Its an awesome game that is reskined very nicely, no worse than this hello kitty or smb2 (usa)
It happens a surprising amount back in the day. One of the Final Fantasy games on Game Boy was actually the first entry in what would become the Mana series.
![Gucci Mane & Sexyy Red - You Don't Love Me [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/j7IBqyFKT4c/mqdefault.jpg)
![Megan Thee Stallion - Mamushi (Remix) [feat. TWICE] [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/5c0_u9PsrsQ/mqdefault.jpg)
You’re missing the Game & Watch Balloon Fight (which is actually yet another take on Balloon Trip) and the Vs. Arcade version (it’s on Switch)!
Yoshi Cookie had a game boy color version that is also Hello Kitty themed.
I think we all should start calling Jon, "The Balloon Fight Guy"
No because I am
Funfact: This is actually something that happened a lot here in Brazil at the time of TecToy with the Master System and Mega Drive/Sega Genesis.
For example, all the games in the Wonder Boy series became Turma da Monica (Monica and Friends/Monica's Gang) games here in Brazil, the Sega Genesis one was even re-released on cartridge in 2017 in celebration of the re-launch of the Mega Drive that took place here in 2017 and we even had people from Sega of America and Sega of Japan to celebrate the launch here.
Other games from the Master System era were also rebranded here in Brazil to be more successful, such as the game "As Aventuras da TV Colosso" which was actually just an Asterix and Obelix game.
I think you can understand why Sega was huge here in Brazil in the 90s. (Another interesting fact, Phantasy Star was basically the first game we had in Brazilian Portuguese here in an era in which basically no game was in our language)
I got the rerelease of Turma da Mônica na Terra dos Monstros alongside the Mega Drive rerelease xD
But yeah, that thing was super common in the 80s and 90s, lots of games got rebranding as some popular franchise or even rerelease as original things when the licence expired/was not available in the country.
The channel Big Ole Words has a video on NES games that lost their pop culture licences and had to be released as something else xD
Character Soft is by far the most underrated publisher for the Famicom. They got their start on the console in 1990 around the same time when the Super Famicom launched and they're whole thing was to release Famicom Sanrio games for a budget price. They tended to also take existing games and either make something similar or outright take an existing game and reskin it to Sanrio characters. I'd highly reccomend checking out the Famidaily episodes of these games by RndStranger, he's covered all of these Sanrio Famicom games in detail on top of the rest of the Famicom library.
Nintendo and Pax Softnica also quietly developed Snoopy Concert, but it was published by Mitsui Fudosan, Dentsu. The copyright for Snoopy Concert was shared by United Feature Syndicate, Inc., Nintendo (1995), The Harry Fox Agency, Inc., Derry Music Company, GRP Records, Inc.
Dentsu were the ones to initiate Kaettekita Mario Bros. too (that FDS re-write only game that was a collaboration between Nintendo and Nagatanien to advertise Nagatanien's food products).
Hello Kitty World is also attributed to Mario Company (shares are split between Dentsu and Nintendo), while published by Character Soft.
Sanrio Carnival 2; another Character Soft game, also has a Mario Company notice but it appears Nintendo had no involvement.
Hello Kitty's Bead Factory is a Yoshi's Cookie-like game. No Nintendo staff are in the credits, but the game has a (C)1999 Nintendo/Imagineer notice.
Our man never mentioned Joust in this video lol
Coz its not worth mentioning.
Here's something semi-related but definitely not a classic; A Series of Unfortunate Events on GBA is just a reskin of Home Alone on SNES
EDIT: It appears I was wrong about this, but I'm 100% sure I was thinking of something very similar if so, if anyone manages to find the GBA game in question that'd be fun, whatever it was it definitely lifted the entire engine and simply replaced the sprites.
Good luck.
Sort of related but Nicktoons Freeze Frame Frenzy on GBA is pretty much Gekisha Boy for the PC Engine. I say sort of related because it's not technically a reskin but it's own game that rips off pretty much all of the gameplay of that game.
Gotta mention the whole crazy castle thing now lol
This blew my mind…
And I was just thinking about that movie... and the actress who played Violet Baudelaire... oh and Jim Carrey.
no it isn't I've played the gba one and they don't play anything alike
I love a good Balloon Fight. Excellent video, Jon! I recall in the early days of flash games online, somebody made a Balloon Fight game where you leveled up as you defeated enemies and could customize your balloon fighter's appearance, and I sunk several hours into it! Good times...
9:48 I just discovered a couple of weeks ago that an arcade version of Balloon Fight exists called Ballon Fight VS. I played on an original machine and that game also has 4 players and goes for more vertical level design
I love the Balloon games, I also love the hello kitty sprites. This is a wonderful mash-up.
I love these dives you do into little-known topics.
Similar examples of reskins like that are also the Wonder Boy series in Brazil that got “Turma da Mônica” license attached (Brazilian comic series) and the Crazy Castle series, which each game got a different license for different countries.
You should have mentioned that not only did they reuse the World Championships song in the bonus stage, but the intro to the original song has a Mario tune that was modified into a garbled sounding mess for Hello Kitty World to hide the Mario music!
10:04 LOST WINDS I haven't thought about that in yearssss, I had very few wiiware titles but I remember really loving that one as a kid! 😄
10:08 Oh thank goodness he mentioned something about the Wii, I was getting worried
Releasing a game in another platform with a different skin is pretty much what the Wonder Boy series is known for. An arcade and Master System game published by SEGA got ported to the NES as "Adventure Island" and the other games of the franchise also got ported to Famicom and TurboGrafx 16 each one if a different name
Adventure Island was Hudson noticing a hole in SEGA's rights for Wonder Boy stating SEGA only owns the name and characters and making use of it.
Which is probably how the Monster Boy indie game got away with using Wonder Boy songs and enemies.
@@Mari_Izu not exactly. Weston (the developers) owned the source code while SEGA owned everything else. Weston sold the code to Hudson and they ported the game as Adventure Island.
SEGA was ok with that, they were also ported some of their games to the NES (like Fantasy Zone) and TurboGrafx (like Golden axe) so it wasn't a big deal, and that's also why it happened with the other Wonder Boy games after the first one
People are so obsessed with Super Mario Bros. 2 Being a Yume Kojo Doki Doki Panic reskin (when it's more than that) that they forgot this shit happened all the time in the 80s and 90s.
There was an awesome flash game I played in the early 2000s that was basically Balloon Fight. It has character customizations, 1v1 battle mode, weapons, & cool environmental effects. It was called Balloon Duel & it was on Newgrounds.
Yeah, I played that too... I don't know if I was good at it or not...
I remember that one.
It'd be cool if someone created a mod of Hello Kitty World that replaces the main character sprites with those of Alice, Jim, and Samm from Balloon Kid, modifies the blimp to read "FIGHT," modifies the title screen to read "BALLOON KID," and modifies the backgrounds to look more like Pencilvania from the original game.
Check out the Game Boy game Bamse, a.k.a. Baby T-Rex, a.k.a. Agro Soar, a.k.a. We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. Same game with different skins. Bamse was the version exclusive to my home country Sweden.
The Arcade version called Vs. Balloon Fight is actually pretty different and has vertical levela like Tingle's.
in your collection, you're missing one! Balloon Fight on e-Reader and Animal Crossing! I also have this lovely rom hack of the original done in memory of Iwata, replacing the balloon fighter with a sprite of him.
That’s a very interesting reskin! It’s crazy to learn all about this from Hello Kitty!
You're missing the vs arcade version of balloon fight, plus the animal crossing, e-reader, and GBA Famicom mini series versions.
A Famicom game in the 2000's era!? And it's a Hello Kitty reskin of the Japanese Balloon Kid!? Nintendo was real adamant about not letting the Famicom or SFC die!
Also, on the topic of Tingle Balloon Fight, I'm genuinely surprised that they never did a Balloon Fight game with Donkey Kong Country characters, specifically Diddy and Dixie Kong... just some weird thought I had in the back of my mind.
Thanks, Jon for helping me brush up on my Hello Kitty knowledge!
Wouldn't Tetris Attack be an example of this too? It was released as Panel de Pon in Japan but reskinned with Yoshi's Island characters in the US.
yeah I think my favorite easter egg in HKW is the bonus round music they ported over from the NWC1990 carts! some of the hello kitty games were actually kinda fun, and this one's definitely no exception. this one's on my list for when I do get around to collecting famicom stuff!
Amazing! I never knew this existed. I'm playing it now! Thank you!
I have a theory that the ballon series is secretly where the animal crossing games come from they are a pre series like DK is to Mario
I remember emulating this game as a kid and never knew about this. Really cool video
Definitely look at the Crazy Castle series, it's insane. Originally a Roger Rabbit game, they were reskinned into Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Garfield, Woody Woodpecker, Ghostbusters, and some others.
I've only played balloon fight on NES but I could see myself having fun with these sequels since the original game is addicting and fun
here's another fun one, Elevator Action Ex for the GBC (not released in NA I think) got reskinned as Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage (for the GBC in NA)
Lulu from warioware is based on the appearance of the balloon kid.
Jon is the best kind of gamer. Great video! Good vibes indeed.
In nintendo land, each time you play, the level progress.
I have a lot of nostalgia for BK, it was one of the first Gameboy games I bought and even played it with link cable as my friend also had it. Love the balloon inflation noise!
I just had a sneaky go on the hello kitty version, yeah it's the same but as Jon says, bouncing off the walls makes the mini game much easier!
John Cartwright: confirmed Ballon Fight megafan
Balloon Fight 99 getting announced in 3, 2, 1...
This is an awesome video. Great job Jon! I also love that they didn’t dumb down the game just to make it easier because it would be a “girl’s game”. Games that are geared toward any audience should still be quality games.
When you think you know everything about Nintendo Jon just comes in and… “Did you know?”
Balloon fight is so weird, Nintendo just attaches this balloon mechanic on any character they want like tingle or the villager from animal crossing as if it's a skill every Nintendo character has from nature
With the complete baloon fight series, you would also need WarioWare DIY Showcase, along with the arcade and game and watch versions.
Really awesome to hear you cover Balloon Kid and the rest of the series! I played Balloon kid on analogue pocket for the first time this year and loved it. Next you should cover another underrated Gameboy game (that I also played this year): Kid Icarus Of Myths and Monsters. This game also never released in Japan 😮 (until the 3DS VC release)
“John from unpaidxplain here”
“John from soapbox here”
“John here!” Much better.
Balloon Fight is a more interesting game series than I thought.
Jon, if you're still craving more Balloon Fight there is one more game that's not quite official but very much worth a try! It's an old Flash game from XGen Studios called Balloon Duel. I played it for hours when I was a kid. It's more of a 1v1 duel mode against CPUs that get more and more difficult, and you have equipment you can upgrade with the money you earn from your wins.
I played it and beat it, fun stuff. You should check out the Sanrio version of Bomberman called Keroppi's Splash Bomb.
You still need the official Japanese PC ports by Hudson and also the Game & Watch, also if you haven’t played the arcade version it’s on Switch. Vs. Balloon Fight is actually very different to the NES game despite using basically the same sprites
Two Jon vids in one week :0. We eating good right now.
Darn it. Was wanting to make a video on this myself.
Was also interested in making a skin hack of it to reimplenent balloon fight GBs graphics in.
Balloon Fight
Those are some nice visuals for a NES game
This is what Tails’ Sky Patrol should have been!
7:25 But I said NWC.
Also, you forgot WarioWare Smooth Moves when talking about all the different versions of Balloon Fight.
Have the famicom cartridge, got it in a bulk lot, because it says 'hello kitty' never bothered to play it. After watching this video I am searching for it now 😅
To me this kind of feels like a fan port + character mod
8:14 When are we getting "Epic Kitty"?
I love Sanrio, so this was a really neat watch! Great video!
I remember Lost Winds!
I hope Sanrio/Nintendo put this on NSO
Fake Balloon Fight fan!! Come back when you have VS. Balloon Fight on Switch, Balloon Fight on Sharp X1, the Balloon Fight Game & Watch, the unreleased Famicom Disk System port, the Balloon Trip minigame in WarioWare: Smooth Moves and the Tuner Fight minigame in the Nintendo DSi Metronome /j
(I would totally be down to collab on an entire video about all the Balloon Fight games and minigames)
The original Hello Kitty Island Adventure! I _do_ hope that Nintendo's eventually able to put this up on NSO; it'd certainly be a better Nintendo-published licensed game than Quest for Camelot... though, I'm also fully aware that we'll probably just get Balloon Kid.
Im surprised you didnt mention the 3d version in wario ware smooth moves.! You disapoint me Jon!!!!! ;)
Hey Jon, if you ever run out of video ideas, you should consider making one on the boktai games on gba cause I’d love to see you talk about them
They should make a modern ballon trip game
Or just port nintendo lands minigame
Honestly better way to play Balloon Kid
Jon: “I don’t have any ideas for a new video, help”
Someone else: “Just take the video you already did and reword it”
Jon: “Great idea”
😂
And put it on a different platform. XD
Not sure why Jon felt the need to have his face on the thumbnail. This is so obviously a Jon video 😅
Reskinning and porting a game to an outdated console with a completely different IP is something I would think a Chinese bootlegger would do, not Nintendo themselves, haha.
I have Balloon Fight NES on 3DS i probably got for free. Never got into that game. I did enjoy that Nintendo Land game a little bit tho.
I guess another obvious thing about ballon fight series that no one needs to mention is the fact that you keep going left...
Speaking of reskin, I know it is super well known and maybe somebody discussed it before, but is it time to talk about (again?) the SMS Blackbelt aka localized version of Fist of North Star? Its an awesome game that is reskined very nicely, no worse than this hello kitty or smb2 (usa)
Yes a hello kitty game
It happens a surprising amount back in the day.
One of the Final Fantasy games on Game Boy was actually the first entry in what would become the Mana series.
Another Jonner (jon banger)
Jon
Jon
Jon
Jon
You say you own every Balloon Fight game, yet you don't own the Game & Watch, curious.
And balloon fight on nes is just a stolen game called Joust
Jon carrying GVG like Squirtle at the first Gym