31 years ago, this student video game impressed Nintendo so much that Mario’s parents recruited its developers! It’s now playable on Switch

Game News 31 years ago, this student video game impressed Nintendo so much that Mario’s parents recruited its developers! It’s now playable on Switch

No arms, but a raised fist!

There is a game that was released on the NES, on the Wii Virtual Console, on the 3DS, on the Wii U and recently arrived on the Nintendo Switch Online offer that you probably don’t know. However, it exceeded the technical limits of the Famicom and proved to the world that it was possible to create a really good versus fighting game on 8-bits. That software is Joy Mech Fight, released on May 21, 1993 only in Japan. What is certain is that the first few minutes in its venture do not reveal what it will be remembered for by enthusiasts. After a short cinematic introductory scene in which we see two scientists helping to create a robot, the successive screens – title, game modes, world map, character selection – shine more for their simplicity than for their graphic search. When the first 1v1 fight begins, Joy Mech Fight inspires respect.

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Before Street Fighter became a hit in terms of versus battles, the rare 1v1 fighting games on the NES had pretty poor gameplay on the profile. Titles like Karate Champ, Yie-Ar Kung Fu, Karateka, and Tenkaichi Bushi Keru Nagūru boldly attacked the genre while running up against the many limitations of the Nintendo machine. But Joy Mech Fight will get around the problems with cleverness and talent. Its philosophy is as clear as it is avant-garde: It is more important to focus on gameplay than realism when technology does not deliver convincing results. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, developers who launched fighting games on 8-bit used humanoid fighters, that is, they had arms and legs. For its part, Joy Mech Fight offers something original to find a solution to the display deficiencies of the console, which has difficulty displaying large sprites by removing the connections between the chest and the limbs. Like Rayman, the protagonists of the software also have hands and feet that rotate around their body.

This technique of managing sprites (arms/hands/feet) around a bust gives developers the ability to render and animate large characters smoothly while freeing up memory, allowing for the integration of the impressive number of 36 fighters. The designers were also able to draw inspiration from Street Fighter 2 and offer rich gameplay with 6 basic moves, 4 special moves, projections, secret techniques or even stun if you take too many hits… Everything is done using the two small buttons on the NES controller. And the worst thing is that the handling is good! In addition, Joy Mech Fight has the luxury of including a well-designed tutorial that shows the attacks in a demo and places the pad buttons on the screen. A first!

Champion Seeds

Although the team in question is Nintendo’s Research and Development Division 1 (R&D1), they are not the usual minds behind the project. Essentially, Joy Mech Fight is just a demo put together by two Japanese students, Koichi Hayashida and Koichiro Eto, during a game development seminar organized by Nintendo (the Nintendo Dentsû Seminar).When the Kyoto company discovered this project, then called Battle Battle League, they decided to offer the talented duo a contract so that they could develop a complete game. All under the supervision of Gunpei Yokoi, the famous inventor of the Game Boy. Joy Mech Fight was Nintendo’s second foray into the world of fighting games after Urban Champion in 1984, also released on the NES.

If we remove the special thanks, there are 8 people credited to the design of the software. Joy Mech Fight is also the first game they have worked on. The vast majority of the team members will not have a long career in the world of video games, working on rather confidential titles such as Monster Rancher, Ultraman Invaders and Chocobo Racing, with the exception of sound designer Hideaki Shimizu, who owns his weapons on Joy Mech Fight and who we will see in the credits of more than thirty Nintendo productions. Koichiro Eto will not continue his adventure in the video game world. Koichi Hayashida, for his part, becomes the main programmer of Super Mario Sunshine and then produces Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario Galaxy 2

If you want to see for yourself what’s so special about this robot fighting game, and if you want to help Dr. Little Eamon thwart Dr. Ivan Walnach’s plans, you can easily do so by picking up your Switch and playing the NES catalog from the Nintendo Switch Online offering. Joy Mech Fight has been around since late 2023.