Gauntlet was one of my favorite arcade games back in the day. I got my NES for Christmas of 1987 when I was 10 years old. I started hearing Gauntlet was coming out for the NES, and became immediately excited. I distinctly remember two things. One, the game was advertised for quite a while before it came out, and I think it had some delays, so that probably led to the multiple release dates. Two, during the summer of 88, I called a Toys R Us in a city near us (we did not have one in our town until the following year of 89), and when they said they had it in stock, my dad immediately drove me there to buy it, because he knew how long I had been waiting for the game. So, I think a summer 88 release is accurate.
The genius of RBI baseball was the chunky graphics and thick bats, which make the collision between bat and ball look convincing and feel satisfying. I absolutely adored this game as a kid, and it was the only game my Dad played -- ever!
The three Tengen games got quite a bit of coverage in the first three issues of Nintendo Power in the summer of 1988, with RBI Baseball being part of a baseball feature in the first issue while Gauntlet and Pac-Man both getting spotlighted in the second ish. Then all mention of Tengen just vanished for the next six years. In fact when Nintendo reviewed Pac-Man's 1993 release, they called it the "first official version on the NES". On a sidenote, Nintendo and Tengen did bury the hatchet in 1994 and Nintendo announced in Nintendo Power they would become a license again, even mentioning the three games. But then Tengen got purchased by Time Warner and that was it.
I received the unlicensed Tengen RBI Baseball for my 8th birthday and upon ripping through the gift wrap and then the cardboard box like an uncivilized savage, I discovered this weird black cartridge I had never seen. Shortly thereafter I got upset and thought it wasn't for NES as I had never seen a cartridge like this before. After further inspection and assurance from my father all was well. Just a memory I always like to share when the subject of unlicensed Tengen games comes up. Even though im over 4 yrs late great video as always Jeremy.
R.B.I Baseball has had some pretty good staying power with some baseball fans; some players still host tournaments and leagues using emulator netplay and rom hacks of the original game to update it with expansion teams and rosters with modern players, even changing the colors on some of the sprites as appropriate.
I was there. I was an eyewitness and I can tell you that Gaunlet appeared on the NES during July of 1988. My local rental store received their copy that month and I recall seeing the game apear in stores around that time. Furthermore the first issue of Nintendo Power covered it as a new release. That first Nintendo Power Issue was from July/August 1988.
RBI Baseball was legendary in my social circles, only unseated by SNK's Baseball Stars for the NES. Gauntlet was another amazing game -- yeah it was difficult, but I think that added to its mystery. It seemed like such a vast dungeon when I was a kid.
As someone who doesn't even care for baseball, I have some great memories of playing RBI Baseball over at my friends' place growing up. Gauntlet was also great fun, of course. Seeing Rolling Thunder on here, though - that one was my favorite of all of these. Yes, the graphics were simple, even for the time, but I LOVED that game, and can easily sit down and kill an hour with it to this day!
To say that no one character in Gauntlet was superior is kind of a hefty claim. The speedrun community favors the elf not only for the obvious reason, but also because the game gets ridiculous in its closing stages and it ultimately becomes far easier to play as him than any other character because of his specific advantages. Despite being presented as the "beginners" character, every speedrunner I've ever spoken with questions whether it's even POSSIBLE to finish the game with the warrior.
My problem with NES Gauntlet is that it lacks the best part of the game: those cheesy voice clips saying things like "Sorcerers may be invisible" and "Welcome to the tray-sure room". Without that, all it's got is the hard-as-nails, quarter-destroying gameplay, and at home you don't even get the visceral thrill of gambling for fun with your allowance. ...Although personally I was a little young for the arcade version, so my childhood experience is with that damn Gauntlet Legends game for N64, which was equally annoying and difficult, but less funny. P.S. Thanks for the Wonder Momo mention. I can only hope that someday _every_ obscure in-joke that Namco put in Baten Kaitos will make an appearance in this series.
RBI Baseball got a release on the VS system as well. Since it was an Arcade game, Tengen instead went under the name Atari Games. The marquee says "Atari Baseball" in front of the word R.B.I. Tengen/Atari Games would later release Tetris on the VS system, licensed and published by Nintendo. Presumably, Atari Games held the rights to Arcade versions of Tetris, so the only way to have a VS system version of Tetris was to have Atari Games release it. I think that version got released on the NES, and caused all the Tetris scandals.
@Michael Turner: September 1987 NES games that haven't been covered yet: Deadly Towers Double Dribble Ring King Spy Hunter Stadium Events Star Voyager Stinger (game shown in next Episode preview) Tiger-Heli Winter Games
ANyone who loves Gauntlet needs to play Hammerwatch - an absolute gem on an indie game and even has gauntlet tribute bonus stages. Steer clear of the sequel though
I keep an old Tengen Rabbit chip in my gameroom as a sort of historical curiosity/knick-knack. The whole process behind that thing and the unlicensed carts is fantastic in my opinion. Dirty, but brilliant how they obtained the coding. And to think, with the precedent Accolade set with their unlicensed carts, all they really would have had to do is make their releases multi-platform and they might have had protection of the law (depending on the courts mind you, this was years and years before the Accolade case).
If I recall correctly, I think I saw RBI Baseball in one of Nintendo’s VS System arcade cabinets back in the day. I’m sure Hamster will release it on Arcade Archives in the near future.
Yeah, Vs. RBI Baseball made it out-PC-10 RBI Baseball was cast into purgatory (or reflashed into Super Mario Bros. 2 ROMs, if that photo was anything to go by).
Huh, so Tengen actually went licensed in the beginning? That's crazy, I always thought it was the other way around. I was also unaware that the NES version of Gauntlet introduced new gameplay elements. It certainly helps make the repetitive gameplay a little more palatable. I have fond memories of RBI baseball. I wasn't ever much of a sports guy, but it was one of the few sports titles my parents bought for me as a kid and it was also one of the only games my Dad ever played with me (he wasn't much into videogames, like many parents at the time). The game hasn't aged the best, but getting home runs were always satisfying though. Very interesting to know it was originally a Namco baseball game, I did not know about that either. It certainly explains the visual style. Speaking of Namco, their ports were excellent (Galaga, Pac-Man, Xevious, etc)!
Hmmm...Stinger in the next episode. Had no idea it was a TwinBee game. What a contrast from the NES days when Konami had great games to now, when new Konami games tend to be bad. Never played Stinger or Double Dribble (Konami's September 1987 releases)
RBI Baseball is in essence the Great Value Baseball Game you're stuck with if you're a Switch or Xbox One owner (worse in Microsoft's case as they bought the High Heat series yet, like the 50+ franchises they made in the 2000s when trying to find an audience for the original Xbox, left it sitting out in the sun to rot), wondering why 2K dropped their series years ago and lamenting that you don't have access to Sony's The Show series. It fills a need that was once common, but is now unheard of; multiple sports video game franchises of the same genre of sport. Back in the day, EA, Take Two Interactive, Acclaim, SEGA, 989 Studio, and even 3D0 routinely made various sports entries, but today, only EA and Take Two have a monopoly on whatever sport you are interested in. The only other exception is NBA 2K and EA's NBA Live series, but given the lack of popularity of NBA Live and EA's poor reputation in general as a developer nowadays, that seems to no longer be valid. That "musty" feeling is not due to a lack of progression but complacency, since there already exists a gold standard in baseball games for North America, which means there's no need to make a great game on your own, just a functional one that you can recycle a budget game year after year.
I remember enjoying the NES version of gauntlet, hell I still have a copy! fun times and I liked the extra RPG-ish elements they threw in like the experience/levelling stuff, and it retained the powerups system and those also carried over via password.
That RBI Baseball music, also appears in Bases Loaded. Is it some sort of Japanese baseball tune? Or is it a public domain song that I don't recognize?
I'm quite sure these games showed up on 1987. I remember a buddy of mine getting Gauntlet and RBI Baseball as one was one of my favorite coin-op titles and the other was a big upgrade over the NES Baseball title I owned since system launch. My memory of the time is quite solid.
As much as people complain about Nintendo's old practices, I wish it was commonplace. The industry could use some quality control. Nothing wrong with making sure only average or better products get released. It was a perfectly legit strategy after seeing what happened with Atari.
Aaah ha ha I recognize that Rampart footage.... Anyway, this is a terrific video as always! You have a way of drawing facts together from different sources to make an interesting and plausible narrative. Also I love that you referenced Venture, which is as close to a forgotten classic as you can get. I finished Gauntlet the honest way back in the NES era, by hunting down every Clue Room and piecing together the randomized password. It turns out there is an exit, I seem to remember in the first room of the last world, where if you go into it it takes you back, without fanfare, to the title screen! I actually asked the Tengen game councilor (many of the big companies had their own phone hotlines back then in addition to Nintendo) about that, and he said, word from the developer, that it was "Another of Mordak's tricks," with Mordak I think being the bad guy who taunts you on the password screens. I still don't know what that means really. Also -- how about the use of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Pac-Man and ghosts on the cover of the NES box? I discovered a fairly serious bug in the NES version of Pac-Man, back on Wii-U Virtual Console, which causes the ghost AI to break on the 8th Key level, and which makes the game much easier right when it should be getting to its hardest level.
My friends and I, literally played gauntlet to death, as we would have all night play throughs, pizza and soda, until we would pass out...our only breaks were for repeat viewings of Terminator, Highlander, or some other cool 80s VHS we could get our parents to rent..lol Those were the days....
There were 4 Pac-Man games on NES: Licensed by Tengen, unlicensed by Tengen, 10th Anniversary, and licensed by Namco Hometek. All of them are simple repackaging Namco's 1984 Famicom port/version of Pac-Man. Since this version has already been touched on Game Boy Works
@@JeremyParish, I have. That 10th Anniversary Edition of Pac-Man was released in 1990 in celebration of Pac-Man's 10th Anniversary. Unlicensed port of the 1980 Midway arcade game to the Nintendo Entertainment System game.
God, Gauntlet looks a HELL of a lot more like Tower of Druaga than I remember it being, but then I didn't own either of them, so I'm not the best person to give my opinion about these. And "House of Donkey Kong" is my favourite Universal Monsters film.
It is clearly a shame that Nintendo and Namco had such a bad falling out in the NES era, since the recent NSO release of Tower of Babel (renamed to Mystery Tower and complete with a localized title screen and localized box art too!) shows a level of quality that rivalled Nintendo's early NES work. Though I will say part of it is on Namco's head for one major thing: their support of Atari and in turn Tengen Games, which Howard Lincoln and the company were absolutely pissed at for their illegal (and yes, it was) reverse engineering of the 10-NES chip. Though, honestly, if anyone who binges Chrontendo is aware, not all of Namco's Japanese only output was on the level of Konami's. Though SD Splatterhouse is definitely a great NES-ized take on Splatterhouse.
I actually played rbi baseball on a Nintendo vs arcade machine this past summer at flippers in North Carolina. You need a lot of quarters to get through that.
I have both the black unlicensed Pac-Man and the licensed Namco release and I can confirm they are exactly the same. Also from my experience no Tengen black cart game on NES is an absolute stinker while the same cannot be said about some licensed games (LJN, Hi-tech, and much of Akklaim's releases, anyone? ) lol
interestingly enough, Tengen was also an official licencee for sega, beginning publication shortly after then parent company Namco began pubblishing on the console.
I loved Gauntlet. But there was no balance, the wood elf was easy mode, all other characters were hard mode. The Ogre was Impossible. It was really all about speed.
I think that Atari Games released boards of it compatible with Nintendo's "Vs." NES arcade hardware units called "Atari RBI Baseball" or "Vs. RBI Baseball" or something along those lines, just not on the PlayChoice-10. I know that I've played it! Just not sure if it was considered an "officially licensed by Nintendo" release at that point, or if, like the Tengen home cartridges, it was an independently-sold release compatible with the hardware.
It would have been pretty brazen of Atari, the company that actually killed the US market, to take issue with another company, even a Japanese one, reviving it. Anyways, Atari has been bought and sold, chopped up and set aside so many times... their strength was in their engineers and programmers. Those people aren't there any more. The 2600 was a singular achievement. Anybody expecting the new VCS to even release, let alone succeed at being a useful piece of hardware, are kidding themselves.
I get the feeling Jeremy may have been quite tired when he recorded this episode. At 9:11 he says "Atari and Sega's friction might have been obvious" but given the context of the preceding and following sentences I THINK he meant to say "Atari and Nintendo's friction". Then at 9:56 he says "Nintendo would shift it's Japanese home console efforts to NEC's PC Engine" where he DEFINITELY meant to say "Namco" instead of "Nintendo". Easy slips to make and I normally wouldn't even bother pointing them out, but considering part of the point of this series is historical preservation I thought it important nip any potential future confusion =)
I remember seeing the black RBI Baseball cartridge at the video rental store and being really confused why it had a different look from my Bases Loaded 2.
Perhaps you have a great deal of facts to support the picture that you attempt to paint other than Back to the Future Part II "Read My Fax" of oppressive Japanese business in America, I think you blew it way out of proportion. None-the-less, I consider your vids my "high quality" retro gaming videos. Very professional. Quite a treasure to have access to these. You obviously could make money off your productions, like those people who make those retro coffee table books.
That was the American public's perception of Japanese businesses during the 1980s. The US dollar rose in value in the early 1980s, which increased the US trade deficit. The low value of the Japanese yen relative to the US dollar meant that Japanese exports could be cheaper and more competitive than goods and services produced in the US. In September 1985, the US, Japan, France, the UK, and West Germany agreed to the Plaza Accord , which devalued the US dollar against the Japanese yen and German Deutsche Mark. That hurt Japanese exporters, but Japanese companies used the increased purchasing power of the yen and access to easy credit to go on a buying spree of American assets in the latter half of the 1980s. Real estate and stock market prices in Japan soared. Americans' fear of Japanese economic domination ended after the Japanese asset price bubble burst in early 1992 and Japan entered a "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation.
I liked the NES version of Gauntlet. Tended to play as the speedster one. RBI Baseball was always a meh kind of game, I know Japan had a lot of those on the Famicom.
My first gaming system was an Atari 7800 (probably because it was cheaper) and even then I knew NES had better games. In fact having all these "Atari" games on NES only made the Atari systems look more pathetic
Hey Jeremy Parish, could you share some other YT channels made by your fellow ex-EGM staffers? Great journalistic work, definitely a breath of fresh air vs. the usual commercial trash here..
I can't even be motivated to collect for Atari, so many games are just space and blips and bloops. It's not hard to understand why the market would bottom out with so many low quality games or re-releases for like 80 bucks and no internet or easily available reviews.
"computer entertainment, the only u.s. publication covering console games at the time". What about electronic game player, published four bimonthly issues in 88 (precursor to egm)
Sure, but Computer Entertainer was the only U.S. publication that contained a published, contemporary record of 1987 releases, and therefore is the only reliable source of that info.
See other companies sould have took note how Atari messed up here, Nintendo and Sega will do the same with Sony.....but imagine if Sega/Sony was a thing(edit) on packman top left is that some kinda glitch
No, that was real. But black Tengen carts weren't licensed by Nintendo. This episode was about the three Tengen games that shipped in licensed grey carts.
Which ones would you recommend Jeremy? I am particularly interested in the economics of the company as the more I learn about it, the more it feels to me that Atari may have been an even bigger waste of money and talent then Commodore managed to be (a hard task if any).
Wait, Atari declined a deal with Nintendo to distribute and sell the NES? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Not quite. The whole story is a bit more complicated. It has been debated whether Atari ever considered seriously marketing the NES outside of Japan. Atari decided it had better prospects with the 7800, which it would have complete control over versus just selling rebranded Famicoms for Nintendo. But Atari *still* planned to sign the Nintendo deal with the intent of using it to *block* the sale of the NES outside of Japan. Luckily for Nintendo, Atari's collapse caught up with it before the deal could be signed. Atari's CEO resigned (was fired) under concerns of mismanagement and being one of several Atari management figured who were under an SEC investigation for insider trading. The Nintendo deal fell apart afterward.
Adam King That’s because the company was split apart and 7800 was shelved for two years while its new owners figured things out. The Atari NES scenario, I think, presupposes the company remained intact and launched the 7800 as intended.
Gauntlet was one of my favorite arcade games back in the day. I got my NES for Christmas of 1987 when I was 10 years old. I started hearing Gauntlet was coming out for the NES, and became immediately excited. I distinctly remember two things. One, the game was advertised for quite a while before it came out, and I think it had some delays, so that probably led to the multiple release dates. Two, during the summer of 88, I called a Toys R Us in a city near us (we did not have one in our town until the following year of 89), and when they said they had it in stock, my dad immediately drove me there to buy it, because he knew how long I had been waiting for the game. So, I think a summer 88 release is accurate.
Summer ‘88 is correct.
The genius of RBI baseball was the chunky graphics and thick bats, which make the collision between bat and ball look convincing and feel satisfying. I absolutely adored this game as a kid, and it was the only game my Dad played -- ever!
This version of Gauntlet will always have special place in my heart
The three Tengen games got quite a bit of coverage in the first three issues of Nintendo Power in the summer of 1988, with RBI Baseball being part of a baseball feature in the first issue while Gauntlet and Pac-Man both getting spotlighted in the second ish. Then all mention of Tengen just vanished for the next six years. In fact when Nintendo reviewed Pac-Man's 1993 release, they called it the "first official version on the NES".
On a sidenote, Nintendo and Tengen did bury the hatchet in 1994 and Nintendo announced in Nintendo Power they would become a license again, even mentioning the three games. But then Tengen got purchased by Time Warner and that was it.
That Gauntlet title screen music still makes me feel like a high fantasy hero....
I received the unlicensed Tengen RBI Baseball for my 8th birthday and upon ripping through the gift wrap and then the cardboard box like an uncivilized savage, I discovered this weird black cartridge I had never seen. Shortly thereafter I got upset and thought it wasn't for NES as I had never seen a cartridge like this before. After further inspection and assurance from my father all was well. Just a memory I always like to share when the subject of unlicensed Tengen games comes up. Even though im over 4 yrs late great video as always Jeremy.
Don't feel bad I to am late to the party
R.B.I Baseball has had some pretty good staying power with some baseball fans; some players still host tournaments and leagues using emulator netplay and rom hacks of the original game to update it with expansion teams and rosters with modern players, even changing the colors on some of the sprites as appropriate.
They do this with Tecmo Bowl as well!
@@rodneylives Yeah! I love how these simple sports games have just lived on!
and in japan its a legaday game
With all of the deals made (or broken) for the various Famicom/NES releases, it may as well be called Pact Man.
Lol pact Man! Noice 🙂
I was there. I was an eyewitness and I can tell you that Gaunlet appeared on the NES during July of 1988. My local rental store received their copy that month and I recall seeing the game apear in stores around that time. Furthermore the first issue of Nintendo Power covered it as a new release. That first Nintendo Power Issue was from July/August 1988.
_"In six weeks, Atari turned Pac-Man Fever into Pac-Man Cancer."_
Still sends shivers down my spine to this day.
RBI Baseball was legendary in my social circles, only unseated by SNK's Baseball Stars for the NES. Gauntlet was another amazing game -- yeah it was difficult, but I think that added to its mystery. It seemed like such a vast dungeon when I was a kid.
As someone who doesn't even care for baseball, I have some great memories of playing RBI Baseball over at my friends' place growing up. Gauntlet was also great fun, of course. Seeing Rolling Thunder on here, though - that one was my favorite of all of these. Yes, the graphics were simple, even for the time, but I LOVED that game, and can easily sit down and kill an hour with it to this day!
Great episode as usual. According to Leonard Tramiel (son of Jack Tramiel), their last name is pronounced Tramel (silent i).
To say that no one character in Gauntlet was superior is kind of a hefty claim. The speedrun community favors the elf not only for the obvious reason, but also because the game gets ridiculous in its closing stages and it ultimately becomes far easier to play as him than any other character because of his specific advantages. Despite being presented as the "beginners" character, every speedrunner I've ever spoken with questions whether it's even POSSIBLE to finish the game with the warrior.
My problem with NES Gauntlet is that it lacks the best part of the game: those cheesy voice clips saying things like "Sorcerers may be invisible" and "Welcome to the tray-sure room". Without that, all it's got is the hard-as-nails, quarter-destroying gameplay, and at home you don't even get the visceral thrill of gambling for fun with your allowance.
...Although personally I was a little young for the arcade version, so my childhood experience is with that damn Gauntlet Legends game for N64, which was equally annoying and difficult, but less funny.
P.S. Thanks for the Wonder Momo mention. I can only hope that someday _every_ obscure in-joke that Namco put in Baten Kaitos will make an appearance in this series.
The entire NES works will be done before i get all the reference cards in Baten Kaitos. Curse that Pac Man card.
Wizard needs food badly!
Remember don't shoot food!
“Valkyrie is about to die.”
All your powers will be lost!
never realized Pac Man was released 3 times, lol. The balls of Tengen/Namco.
RBI Baseball got a release on the VS system as well. Since it was an Arcade game, Tengen instead went under the name Atari Games. The marquee says "Atari Baseball" in front of the word R.B.I.
Tengen/Atari Games would later release Tetris on the VS system, licensed and published by Nintendo. Presumably, Atari Games held the rights to Arcade versions of Tetris, so the only way to have a VS system version of Tetris was to have Atari Games release it. I think that version got released on the NES, and caused all the Tetris scandals.
that version had no nintendo involvement
and rbi was put on the system by namco
Getting closer to Mega Man. What an episode that will be.
17 episodes to go.
Jeremy Parish cripes. Something to look forward to in 2025 I guess..
@Michael Turner: September 1987 NES games that haven't been covered yet:
Deadly Towers
Double Dribble
Ring King
Spy Hunter
Stadium Events
Star Voyager
Stinger (game shown in next Episode preview)
Tiger-Heli
Winter Games
ANyone who loves Gauntlet needs to play Hammerwatch - an absolute gem on an indie game and even has gauntlet tribute bonus stages. Steer clear of the sequel though
Those RBI fielders do NOT fuck around.
My favourite NES baseball game is the Nintendo baseball game
Tengen Tetris is cool because it has that cooperative mode.
Gauntlet still has the same appeal if you like difficult multiplayer games.
Tengen Tetris is overrated, and people only think it's great because of the two-player mode which isn't as good as you think it is.
RBI Baseball was one of the good baseball games of the time.
I always found "invisible wall maze" levels way more infuriating than even the eagles in Ninja Gaiden.
Objection: You've already had a game designed and developed outside Japan. Slalom by Rare
I keep an old Tengen Rabbit chip in my gameroom as a sort of historical curiosity/knick-knack. The whole process behind that thing and the unlicensed carts is fantastic in my opinion. Dirty, but brilliant how they obtained the coding. And to think, with the precedent Accolade set with their unlicensed carts, all they really would have had to do is make their releases multi-platform and they might have had protection of the law (depending on the courts mind you, this was years and years before the Accolade case).
The “not licensed by Nintendo of America” was the greatest in-joke on the Atari-Nintendo spat ever.
If I recall correctly, I think I saw RBI Baseball in one of Nintendo’s VS System arcade cabinets back in the day. I’m sure Hamster will release it on Arcade Archives in the near future.
Yeah, Vs. RBI Baseball made it out-PC-10 RBI Baseball was cast into purgatory (or reflashed into Super Mario Bros. 2 ROMs, if that photo was anything to go by).
Huh, so Tengen actually went licensed in the beginning? That's crazy, I always thought it was the other way around. I was also unaware that the NES version of Gauntlet introduced new gameplay elements. It certainly helps make the repetitive gameplay a little more palatable.
I have fond memories of RBI baseball. I wasn't ever much of a sports guy, but it was one of the few sports titles my parents bought for me as a kid and it was also one of the only games my Dad ever played with me (he wasn't much into videogames, like many parents at the time). The game hasn't aged the best, but getting home runs were always satisfying though. Very interesting to know it was originally a Namco baseball game, I did not know about that either. It certainly explains the visual style.
Speaking of Namco, their ports were excellent (Galaga, Pac-Man, Xevious, etc)!
The dislikes are from Nintendo of America.
Those unbelievable jerks
@@JeremyParish Can't agree more.
Hmmm...Stinger in the next episode. Had no idea it was a TwinBee game. What a contrast from the NES days when Konami had great games to now, when new Konami games tend to be bad. Never played Stinger or Double Dribble (Konami's September 1987 releases)
RBI Baseball is in essence the Great Value Baseball Game you're stuck with if you're a Switch or Xbox One owner (worse in Microsoft's case as they bought the High Heat series yet, like the 50+ franchises they made in the 2000s when trying to find an audience for the original Xbox, left it sitting out in the sun to rot), wondering why 2K dropped their series years ago and lamenting that you don't have access to Sony's The Show series. It fills a need that was once common, but is now unheard of; multiple sports video game franchises of the same genre of sport. Back in the day, EA, Take Two Interactive, Acclaim, SEGA, 989 Studio, and even 3D0 routinely made various sports entries, but today, only EA and Take Two have a monopoly on whatever sport you are interested in. The only other exception is NBA 2K and EA's NBA Live series, but given the lack of popularity of NBA Live and EA's poor reputation in general as a developer nowadays, that seems to no longer be valid. That "musty" feeling is not due to a lack of progression but complacency, since there already exists a gold standard in baseball games for North America, which means there's no need to make a great game on your own, just a functional one that you can recycle a budget game year after year.
The NES version of Gauntlet also had an ending.
RBI Baseball and Famista is the Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons of baseball games.
I remember enjoying the NES version of gauntlet, hell I still have a copy! fun times and I liked the extra RPG-ish elements they threw in like the experience/levelling stuff, and it retained the powerups system and those also carried over via password.
Stinger! I played that one to death back when I was a squishy-headed babyman.
It's a pretty good game!
That RBI Baseball music, also appears in Bases Loaded. Is it some sort of Japanese baseball tune? Or is it a public domain song that I don't recognize?
I'm quite sure these games showed up on 1987. I remember a buddy of mine getting Gauntlet and RBI Baseball as one was one of my favorite coin-op titles and the other was a big upgrade over the NES Baseball title I owned since system launch. My memory of the time is quite solid.
As much as people complain about Nintendo's old practices, I wish it was commonplace. The industry could use some quality control. Nothing wrong with making sure only average or better products get released. It was a perfectly legit strategy after seeing what happened with Atari.
"Chunky Pipsqueak Baseball" :'D
With squashy-headed babymen!
Aaah ha ha I recognize that Rampart footage....
Anyway, this is a terrific video as always! You have a way of drawing facts together from different sources to make an interesting and plausible narrative.
Also I love that you referenced Venture, which is as close to a forgotten classic as you can get.
I finished Gauntlet the honest way back in the NES era, by hunting down every Clue Room and piecing together the randomized password. It turns out there is an exit, I seem to remember in the first room of the last world, where if you go into it it takes you back, without fanfare, to the title screen! I actually asked the Tengen game councilor (many of the big companies had their own phone hotlines back then in addition to Nintendo) about that, and he said, word from the developer, that it was "Another of Mordak's tricks," with Mordak I think being the bad guy who taunts you on the password screens. I still don't know what that means really.
Also -- how about the use of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Pac-Man and ghosts on the cover of the NES box? I discovered a fairly serious bug in the NES version of Pac-Man, back on Wii-U Virtual Console, which causes the ghost AI to break on the 8th Key level, and which makes the game much easier right when it should be getting to its hardest level.
5:05 I loved Venture. I think it's more fun than Gauntlet, even today
I hope future episodes will show more of Tengen.
I've not seen such bravery
Pretty sure Gauntlet came out way before 1998...
My friends and I, literally played gauntlet to death, as we would have all night play throughs, pizza and soda, until we would pass out...our only breaks were for repeat viewings of Terminator, Highlander, or some other cool 80s VHS we could get our parents to rent..lol
Those were the days....
There were 4 Pac-Man games on NES: Licensed by Tengen, unlicensed by Tengen, 10th Anniversary, and licensed by Namco Hometek. All of them are simple repackaging Namco's 1984 Famicom port/version of Pac-Man. Since this version has already been touched on Game Boy Works
Somehow I have never seen OR heard of that 10th anniversary edition. Huh.
@@JeremyParish, I have. That 10th Anniversary Edition of Pac-Man was released in 1990 in celebration of Pac-Man's 10th Anniversary. Unlicensed port of the 1980 Midway arcade game to the Nintendo Entertainment System game.
God, Gauntlet looks a HELL of a lot more like Tower of Druaga than I remember it being, but then I didn't own either of them, so I'm not the best person to give my opinion about these.
And "House of Donkey Kong" is my favourite Universal Monsters film.
Yeah, too bad Gauntlet didn't get a shout-out in one of the weirdest RPGs ever made.
...Or its own anime.
@@cinnamonnoir2487 I'm not a massive fan of anime, so I don't really mind they never got one. Does seem a shame though.
It is clearly a shame that Nintendo and Namco had such a bad falling out in the NES era, since the recent NSO release of Tower of Babel (renamed to Mystery Tower and complete with a localized title screen and localized box art too!) shows a level of quality that rivalled Nintendo's early NES work. Though I will say part of it is on Namco's head for one major thing: their support of Atari and in turn Tengen Games, which Howard Lincoln and the company were absolutely pissed at for their illegal (and yes, it was) reverse engineering of the 10-NES chip.
Though, honestly, if anyone who binges Chrontendo is aware, not all of Namco's Japanese only output was on the level of Konami's. Though SD Splatterhouse is definitely a great NES-ized take on Splatterhouse.
I had so much fun with this version of gauntlet. Good stuff.
This RUclips video is in a different, non-standard form factor.
4:29 Wasn't Slalom developed in the UK?
I actually played rbi baseball on a Nintendo vs arcade machine this past summer at flippers in North Carolina. You need a lot of quarters to get through that.
I have both the black unlicensed Pac-Man and the licensed Namco release and I can confirm they are exactly the same. Also from my experience no Tengen black cart game on NES is an absolute stinker while the same cannot be said about some licensed games (LJN, Hi-tech, and much of Akklaim's releases, anyone? ) lol
interestingly enough, Tengen was also an official licencee for sega, beginning publication shortly after then parent company Namco began pubblishing on the console.
I loved Gauntlet. But there was no balance, the wood elf was easy mode, all other characters were hard mode. The Ogre was Impossible. It was really all about speed.
Are you sure RBI Baseball wasn't released on the play choice 10? I vividly remember hearing that classic tune while walking around in aladdins castle.
I think that Atari Games released boards of it compatible with Nintendo's "Vs." NES arcade hardware units called "Atari RBI Baseball" or "Vs. RBI Baseball" or something along those lines, just not on the PlayChoice-10. I know that I've played it! Just not sure if it was considered an "officially licensed by Nintendo" release at that point, or if, like the Tengen home cartridges, it was an independently-sold release compatible with the hardware.
I remember playing these tengen games just because of the black cartridges
Wednesday mornings are my fav!
I can confirm from memory that rbi was out before Major League Baseball
Well done as always
It would have been pretty brazen of Atari, the company that actually killed the US market, to take issue with another company, even a Japanese one, reviving it. Anyways, Atari has been bought and sold, chopped up and set aside so many times... their strength was in their engineers and programmers. Those people aren't there any more. The 2600 was a singular achievement. Anybody expecting the new VCS to even release, let alone succeed at being a useful piece of hardware, are kidding themselves.
I thought Marble Madness was made by Milton Bradly
Alright Jeremy!! Some Atari unlicensed action!
I get the feeling Jeremy may have been quite tired when he recorded this episode. At 9:11 he says "Atari and Sega's friction might have been obvious" but given the context of the preceding and following sentences I THINK he meant to say "Atari and Nintendo's friction". Then at 9:56 he says "Nintendo would shift it's Japanese home console efforts to NEC's PC Engine" where he DEFINITELY meant to say "Namco" instead of "Nintendo". Easy slips to make and I normally wouldn't even bother pointing them out, but considering part of the point of this series is historical preservation I thought it important nip any potential future confusion =)
That's my secret, Cap, I'm always tired
No, at 9:11, he means to say "Atari and Sega's feuds [With Nintendo] might have been obvious."
I played RBI Baseball in the arcade before I played it on NES.
Tengen is very cool. 😀👍🎮
I remember seeing the black RBI Baseball cartridge at the video rental store and being really confused why it had a different look from my Bases Loaded 2.
3:17 Best Tetris of all and the only one I'd play.
To be fair you can end a game of RBI by being ahead 10 points of your opponent
Perhaps you have a great deal of facts to support the picture that you attempt to paint other than Back to the Future Part II "Read My Fax" of oppressive Japanese business in America, I think you blew it way out of proportion. None-the-less, I consider your vids my "high quality" retro gaming videos. Very professional. Quite a treasure to have access to these. You obviously could make money off your productions, like those people who make those retro coffee table books.
That was the American public's perception of Japanese businesses during the 1980s. The US dollar rose in value in the early 1980s, which increased the US trade deficit. The low value of the Japanese yen relative to the US dollar meant that Japanese exports could be cheaper and more competitive than goods and services produced in the US. In September 1985, the US, Japan, France, the UK, and West Germany agreed to the Plaza Accord , which devalued the US dollar against the Japanese yen and German Deutsche Mark. That hurt Japanese exporters, but Japanese companies used the increased purchasing power of the yen and access to easy credit to go on a buying spree of American assets in the latter half of the 1980s. Real estate and stock market prices in Japan soared. Americans' fear of Japanese economic domination ended after the Japanese asset price bubble burst in early 1992 and Japan entered a "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation.
If you can't beat em, join em.
If you can't join em, cheat.
8:12 on the screen it says namcot not namco
But at 9:04 it does say namco not namcot
I hate baseball, but RBI Baseball is a great game even today.
I liked the NES version of Gauntlet. Tended to play as the speedster one. RBI Baseball was always a meh kind of game, I know Japan had a lot of those on the Famicom.
Re-Pacaging.
rampart is an awesome arcade game 2:10
So basically the unlicensed Pac man is licensed but unlicensed... Wtf.
If you put a game in a box and release a license and an unlicense and don't open the box, is the game licensed or not? 🤔
@@ValkyrieTiara My head hurts now :(
9:57 u said nintendo but I think u meant Namco
My first gaming system was an Atari 7800 (probably because it was cheaper) and even then I knew NES had better games. In fact having all these "Atari" games on NES only made the Atari systems look more pathetic
Hey Jeremy Parish, could you share some other YT channels made by your fellow ex-EGM staffers? Great journalistic work, definitely a breath of fresh air vs. the usual commercial trash here..
But is NES works licensed by Nintendo of Japan?
I can't even be motivated to collect for Atari, so many games are just space and blips and bloops. It's not hard to understand why the market would bottom out with so many low quality games or re-releases for like 80 bucks and no internet or easily available reviews.
I wonder what the difference between Namco and Namcot is?
Namcot was the company's home publishing arm in Japan.
@@JeremyParish I gotcha
"computer entertainment, the only u.s. publication covering console games at the time". What about electronic game player, published four bimonthly issues in 88 (precursor to egm)
Sure, but Computer Entertainer was the only U.S. publication that contained a published, contemporary record of 1987 releases, and therefore is the only reliable source of that info.
July 1998?? WoW they were really that unsure lol
See other companies sould have took note how Atari messed up here, Nintendo and Sega will do the same with Sony.....but imagine if Sega/Sony was a thing(edit) on packman top left is that some kinda glitch
Great stuff as always 🙏
You see Pac Man. You smell pizza.
What's the outro music in these videos?
@Michael Turner It doesn't sound like it...
Afterburner should be in here, somewhere ?
No. It was never released by Tengen under Nintendo's license-only these three games were.
@@JeremyParish But I used to have a black Afterburner cart that said Tengen. Mandela effect?
No, that was real. But black Tengen carts weren't licensed by Nintendo. This episode was about the three Tengen games that shipped in licensed grey carts.
What movie was that clip from?
someone (you, haha) should do a complete history of Atari from the very start to its present incarnation.
Atari's history has been thoroughly covered across multiple books by many people!
Fair enough, I meant on YT though but that's been probably done too. but they probably don't sound as good as you though.
Which ones would you recommend Jeremy? I am particularly interested in the economics of the company as the more I learn about it, the more it feels to me that Atari may have been an even bigger waste of money and talent then Commodore managed to be (a hard task if any).
MCFLY!!!!!!!
Wait, Atari declined a deal with Nintendo to distribute and sell the NES?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Not quite. The whole story is a bit more complicated. It has been debated whether Atari ever considered seriously marketing the NES outside of Japan. Atari decided it had better prospects with the 7800, which it would have complete control over versus just selling rebranded Famicoms for Nintendo. But Atari *still* planned to sign the Nintendo deal with the intent of using it to *block* the sale of the NES outside of Japan. Luckily for Nintendo, Atari's collapse caught up with it before the deal could be signed. Atari's CEO resigned (was fired) under concerns of mismanagement and being one of several Atari management figured who were under an SEC investigation for insider trading. The Nintendo deal fell apart afterward.
@@BainesMkII It's hilarious in retrospect how much money they left on the table either way.
Thanks for the informative post!
My suspicion is that if they ever seriously considered an NES deal, it would have been to quietly kill the system's U.S. distro in favor of the 7800.
I don't know about that, given how poorly Atari supported the 7800 with outdated software and literally months-long gaps between releases.
Adam King That’s because the company was split apart and 7800 was shelved for two years while its new owners figured things out. The Atari NES scenario, I think, presupposes the company remained intact and launched the 7800 as intended.
RBI baseball had such annoying music I had to turn the TV sound off. Second one was even worse!