Let's Face It, Nobody Was Fooled

Classic Zeroes Material
By: Zartan; circa 1/3/99

The Arcade Exposed.

Your mom was right. There was something dark and sinister about the arcade, and you didn't get it, did you? The eighties weren't the time of Dacron and carefree consumerism you thought they were...

	Amidar...
	... and Amigo.

	Moon Patrol...
	... and Moon Rangor.

"This looks like a job for the Moon Rangors!"

Look at this. Obviously, they were attempting to make us believe this game -- this cynical, cheap, two-bit bootleg -- was called Moon Ranger. Thanks to this title screen, though, this game will now and forever be known to me and everyone I know as Moon Rangor. How does someone make a mess like this, step back, and say "Ahhhh. A job well done. Let's get these ROMs burned and send this one off for production."

FOR GOD'S SAKE, LOOK AT THIS PIECE OF SHIT! I preach the Moon Rangor gospel, friends and neighbors. It's about more than jumping over craters, blowing up rocks and saving a few bucks on licensing fees. It's about an entire attitude, about being fully satisfied with living a life of full-blown mediocrity. When someone can cheerfully and thoughtlessly immortalize their own laziness and stupidity like this, it makes me wonder who they really thought they'd be fooling. Were they expecting a line of bootleg Moon Ranger t-shirts to pop up? Kids, eagerly chattering over lunch, debating last night's Dukes of Hazzard and the finer points of their favorite arcade game -- Moon Ranger? I doubt it. I'd love to meet this guy:

PROGRAMMER: "Yeah, I'm the programmer behind the infamous Moon Ranger bootleg of 1982."
ME: "Oh, yeah -- you mean Moon Rangor."
PROGRAMMER: "God damn it! Is anyone ever going to let me move on? That was seventeen fucking years ago! I needed the money! Damn you overly critical nostalgia mutants!"
ME: "All right, fine. Moon Ranger it is. What else have you been up to?"
PROGRAMMER: "Back in the late eighties, I worked for Color Dreams, which was later known as -- hey, are you all right?"
ME (beatific): "No, I'm okay, really. I understand everything now."

"We cut corners on spelling and pass the savings along to you, the consumer!" . Also note that players of Moon Rangor get one less life than the leading brand. This could only mean the end of civilization as we know it.

	Time Pilot...
	... and Space Pilot.

(or "Shooting oneself in the foot made simple")

Time Pilot was one of my very first favorite games. This was back in the days when there was more to an arcade than thirty-one thousand flavors of Street Fighter II and an abandoned, woefully maintained Addams Family pinball under the dimmer lights towards the back (file under "standard crusty old gamer's complaints", thank you) and you could, without too much trouble, find a Time Pilot in just about any town you might visit. I had something of a perverse, hyperactive imagination as a child, and it didn't take too long before I'd come up with my own storyline for Time Pilot. Basically, you were someone from the future, when Earth had become overcrowded and polluted, etc, your standard dystopian setting. Your goal was to kill as many people as possible, in the past, thus stemming the tide of population growth. Yes, I was a weird kid. But on to the bootleg.

A quick lesson in copyright law, kids: removing the "©" on a copyrighted work does not render said copyright null and void. The fact that this game is a blatant, pixel-for-pixel theft, couldn't be more obvious. I can imagine the bootleggers' argument in court; they'd probably offer up some lame excuse that they just "liked the sound of the word Konami" and any similarity to the enormous video game designers' group already extant was pure and unhappy coincidence. In their defense, though, i can say that they at least made an attempt to alter the title convincingly. You'd think that if they could spare the time to try to make the word "Space" go along with the rest of the title, they could have blacked out the word "KONAMI", which still squats quite happily right there at the bottom of the screen. I have a feeling that the new logo was just knocked out by some schmuck on his lunch hour, who had finished his lard-n-chocolate syrup sandwich and didn't feel like twiddling his thumbs or playing "chicken" with shopping carts out back with the rest of his buddies.

So, with half an hour and a lazy, dismembered interest in the task before him, he sat down and crafted the work of graphic brilliance you see here now -- Space Pilot. It's not a very good name for a Time Pilot bootleg, since you spend almost all of the game well within the confines of Earth's atmosphere. I don't know, maybe my judgment's a bit colored at the moment. After a great steaming turd like Moon Rangor, synchronized swimming as performed by retarded midgets would look like a fucking work of genius.

	Frogger...
	... and Frog.

"Yes. As a matter of fact, this is the least inspired bootleg title ever."

Frogger is a simple, but perverse game. Help the frog get home safely, despite the fact that just about everything will kill you. No stretch of the imagination there -- "one hit wonder" games were de rigueur in the eighties. I had to find it a bit odd, though, that this frog couldn't swim. Admittedly, the game would lose a good chunk of its challenge if he could swim, and hey? who am I to mess with success? So let's put aside my minor beefs with Frogger, even though the way that he purply bloats up and bursts when he dies is just fucking creepy.

Frogger as Prometheus.

But still, Frogger is good, wholesome entertainment with a snappy title and an appealing color scheme. Frog, on the other hand, is the sort of bootleg I imagine third-graders sneaking into alleyways to play in between rocks of crack. "Psst. Hey kid. You could pay a whole quarter to play--" the seedy-looking man with the soiled coat spits the word out, coated with a thin layer of disgust "--Frogger, but Frog is only ten cents. You know you want to." Frog also has a sickly, jaundiced look to it, as if it intends to get out and become a proper, original game... after just one last hit.

There's a psychological power play here. Frogger lays down a series of instructions, including a warning to avoid those treacherous diving turtles. Frog, on the other hand, goes for the quick-fix, appealing to the reptilian cortex's craving for instant gratification. The message to impressionable children is this: "There are no rules. Do whatever you have to, take unnecessary risks, and get those points." And just take a good long look at the seductive expression on the faces of those frogs. Are you feeling the irresistible pull of Frog yet? Can you put yourself in the shoes of a child, confused and alone, with only one quarter in his pocket... and say "no" to the terrible might of the yellow frogs? I didn't think you could, but don't be ashamed. We can only thank our lucky stars that, as a singularly evil and bizarre bootleg, Frog never had the distribution power to really gain a foothold in our tender young minds. I won't come right out and blame Frog for the sharp rise in teen pregancies in the early 1980's; it's just something to think about.

No thanks, Sega.

Grrr! Does no one fear Kong's kopyright? _ Huh huh, dude, check it out. Donkey Kong wants us to get high. _ "Jumpman". Good one, Miyamoto.

The Donkey Kong Family.

Take a good, long look at the pictures above. Everyone knows them. They're probably part of our collective unconscious by this point. It's Donkey Kong, god damn it. What a stupid gorilla that Donkey Kong is -- thinking he can outrun and outsmart our weird little hero, Jumpman. (Before I get a bunch of half-cocked letters from someone claiming to be "MaRiO d00d 6969", or something along those lines, I'll point out that he was actually called "Jumpman" in Donkey Kong. At first, anyway. I have no idea from where they eventually got the name "Mario" -- I seem to remember an informational little snippet in Nintendo Power, way back when, that explained it. Apparently, when the Nintendo of America building was under construction, the foreman's name was Mario.

Then again, that story should be considered 100% apocryphal, since my memory has a tendency to either (a) get things very, very wrong or (b) make them up entirely. Of course, I'm never aware of this until someone shoves some evidence in my face. I have a couple of old friends, both of whom I haven't seen for years, who swore on the porverbial stack of Bibles that I saw Spaceballs with them in the movie theatre. I didn't. I did not, and would never have, a desire to see Spaceballs on the big screen. They insisted, telling me what I was wearing and what I ate, and if we weren't so (relatively) young at that point I'd swear at was an orchestrated attempt at a mindfuck. That and the fact that one of the guys in question, Tom, couldn't be counted on not to walk into walls, much less maintain an elaborate ruse. This is all very much beside the point.

Okay, Donkey Kong was a goddamn qualified blockbuster, and it makes perfect sense that someone should decide that they wanted a slice of the action. It's funny how genius works -- you always hear stories of two people inventing the same thing at roughly the same time on opposite sides of the globe. On a smaller scale comes the march of the bootlegs...

_ Uh, Crazy Kong, you've got a little something stuck in your teeth there... _
When I get out of this fucking girder I'm gonna smash your little yellow ass.

Crazy Kong.

Thus comes Crazy Kong, a radioactive mutant with the second least-inspired title among bootlegs. (That honor, of course, belongs to the aforementioned Frog, about which the less is said the better.) There were no less than four versions of Crazy Kong; this one runs on Scramble hardware... meaning that if you owned a convenience store, and Scramble just wasn't raking in the shekels hand over fist, you could just hop in your mint green Plymouth Fury, make a quick trip down to the local crack house, and get the rom boards for Crazy Kong. Drop them on into your cabinet -- ahh, never mind the marquee and Scramble-oriented labels, Johnny -- and it would work. Sort of. It makes sense that someone would realize that there is a market in disgruntled Scramble owners, since the fun and excitement of Scramble lasted for about three games, at which point you thought "Shit. How long is this fucking game? I'm never going to get to BASE"

Drop a coin into Donkey Kong, hit start, and you'd be greeted with the middle image back up the top. Each level of play represented 25 meters of this weird 100 meter quasi-structure. I love how we, as young game players, made excuses for the graphical limitations of our time -- "Oh, it's a building under construction. A whaddyacallit, scaffolding. Yeah, that's why there's hammers everywhere." Only a game player is capable of this mental shift, which explained my mother's lack of enthusiasm when I showed her the "awesome graphics" of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! . Anyway, "How high can you get?", in this context, makes perfect sense (and fodder for chuckling dope-smoking morons everywhere). But players in less scrupulous arcades were faced with the enigma you see directly above. "How high can you try!" -- not a question, but a command. Talk about a total mindfuck -- Crazy Kong might as well be saying "try is all you're going to be doing. I eat little shits like you for breakfast." Yes, Crazy Kong orders you to get up there and deal with the aquamarine abomination that has snatched your equally bizarre girlfriend for reasons best left to the imagination. Crazy Kong's red teeth suggest menace and unspeakable acts. Think about it.

And now the real ugliness comes out. Crazy Kong, being crazy, can't be bothered with extra frames of animation like his well-adjusted brother. The barrels are just jettisoned from his backside. And Crazy Kong is surprisingly quick for an enormous gorilla embedded in a girder. Unfortunately, this is not the Donkey Kong bootleg in which Jumpman emits a high-pitched karate attack shriek whenever he jumps. He just makes some pathetic sproinging noise. Come to think of it, there really isn't much to be said for this video game, except to serve as a warning against recreational drug use. Or perhaps an activity to compliment it.

_ Yeah yeah. Go ahead. See if I care.
_ You try squeezing a barrel out your ass, and see if you feel like smiling.

Monkey Donkey.

Now this is more like it. Sort of. Yes, Monkey Donkey is the game that treats you to the high-pitched karate attack shriek whenever Jumpman... um... jumps. Oh, and whenever you die, you turn a very interesting shade of red. Anyway, I prefer the name Monkey Donkey to Crazy Kong any day of the week. Monkey Donkey just has a wonderfully stupid sound to it. And look at the title screen, at the wacky staggered lettering and zany lower-case letters. Yes, it's safe to say that Monkey Donkey is kid-friendly. No red-stained teeth here. One bit that still confuses me, though -- and this is almost a universal trait of bootlegs -- is the inclusion of the date. Is this a stab at legitimacy? Perhaps to serve as a reference for future anthropologists? Or maybe, in some cases, it's part of the title, like Airport '77. "The Great Ape is loose? And he's stolen your extremely sickly girlfriend! Monkey Donkey: 1981! Coming soon!" Well, all right. Maybe not.

I rather like the fact that Monkey Donkey is so anemically coded. They couldn't even bother with punctuation on the "How high can you try" bit. I can see Monkey Donkey in his La-Z-Boy, smoking a smelly five cent cigar, watching Jerry Springer: Too Hot For TV and saying, distractedly, that you can try as high as you goddamn please and it doesn't make a bit of difference to him, so stop bothering him already or you'll be taking your meals through a straw for the next two weeks. Grumpy old Monkey Donkey.

To his credit, Monkey Donkey does have more than one frame of animation to his name. He possesses, in fact, the full range of animations you'd expect from a barrel flingin' monkey. The only problem is that they seem to run on a timer, and this timer does not match up with when he flings the barrels. So, regrettably, Monkey Donkey also shoots barrels out of his ass. He's also a shape-shifter, as shown in this dramatic footage from the Institute for Stupid Gorilla Syndrome:

Only calcium chloride can stop the change! Help me, Peter!
"Grrr. Shoddy palette swap scare and confuse me": The many faces of Monkey Donkey

Yes, Monkey Donkey turns many shades of strange throughout the game. The fourth frame in that sequence, that of Monkey Donkey as a pasty-faced Mongoloid gorilla, is taken from the truly weird pie factory level, which actually exists in Donkey Kong itself. For those of you that haven't seen it -- and I really feel for you, really I do -- Jumpman must reach the top, as usual, only this time he must navigate conveyor belts, and avoid pies yes that's right, pies. Even if you do take the apologist track and say that Jumpman and company are on a construction site, there is absolutely no excuse for pies -- pies that kill -- to be crawling down conveyor belts at all hours of the night. Speaking of baffling hazards, Monkey Donkey does not have the fireballs that look like aborted fetuses ; what a pity. However, when you finally defeat the mighty Monkey Donkey, you get a somewhat different ending:

Well, I don't approve of THAT.
Isn't this fucked up? You apparently broke his neck.

Invinco: not a bootleg. It just sucks.

If you press the "2 player" button, the machine will spit battery acid. You've been warned. ___
Pac-Man vs Hangly Man

Boy oh boy, Nittoh sure has some nerve, don't they? (I am assuming that Nittoh is, in fact, a group, since no one would be stupid enough to put their name on a bootleg. Then again...) Look at this blatant rip-off. The only trouble is this: I like it. Quite a bit, actually. I think that Hangly Man is the coolest thing that ever was. I remember the first time I laid eyes on Hangly Man, back at John den Hartog's Atmospherical Heights webpage. "Hangly Man?" I thought to myself. "Hangly Man? What the fuck is a Hangly Man?" At first, I was a bit disappointed to find out that it was just another Pac-Man bootleg. I mean, after all, there is nothing inherently different about Hangly Man. The maze is a bit different, with the main differences being (a) there are three tunnels, rather than just one and (b) there's a little extra room around some of the corners, as opposed to the very linear maze of Pac-Man. Oh, there's one other thing -- when you grab a power pellet on the second board,the walls go invisible. Yeah, that'll throw you off a bit. Woe betide the unsuspecting victim of Nittoh's treacherous ways!

Why bother playing this... ____ when you can get your ass kicked by this?
Compare and contrast. Notice that my high score on Hangly Man sucks. Because it's hard, I tell you.

And so, my attitude towards Hangly Man was, in the words of Russell, my ex-roommate: "I don't want to play Hangly Man. It's fucking stupid." Stupid, in this case, meaning "really really hard". Some days passed, though, and I couldn't get Hangly Man off my mind. It was the word "hangly" (pronounced hang-glee), mostly. I started to pepper my conversation with it. It became something like the word "smurf" in the old cartoon series of the same name -- "hangly" could be made to mean anything and everything, and very often was. It began to permeate the lives of the people around me. And that's when I took another look at Hangly Man.

I soon came to realize that being hangly was about a whole lot more than eating dots and having a masochistic tendency in one's choice of video games. Being hangly is a lifestyle -- being hangly is demanding more out of life. I like to think that now, having this brilliant insight, I've become more of a hangly man than I've ever been. Hangly is zen for a warped human race, the blitzed, cynical, ravenous children and the puffy, complacent, arrogant adults. It takes a different breed to step up to the challenge of Hangly Man.

Well, maybe. Not much later, I was to actually figure out the true roots of all this "hangly" business. I was at my friend Doug's apartment, watching his copy of The Mystery of Mamo, when something in the background, only briefly, caught my eye. A sign, in a crowded urban establishing shot, that read "Lestlan". Lestlan? ...of course. They meant it to say "Restaurant", but... you know how it is. The Japanese never seem to get their L's and R's straight -- as recently as Samurai Shodown 4, even, the word VICTOLY is splashed across the screen in angry red when you defeat your opponent. With the "A" sounding like "ah", "hangly" becomes "hungry". Which actually, if you can imagine, begins to make some sense. It was, of course, too late to make any difference at all.

_____
Oh fuck. Galaxian hardware.

We all know how wonderful bootlegs that run on the wrong hardware can be. Just cast your mind back to Crazy Kong. I dare you. But Crazy Kong looks like the industry's finest hour when compared to this fat, stinking offal. It's Pac-Man, all right, Yeah, it's Pac-Man in the sense that Sloth in The Goonies was a human being. Before I go on, I want to promise you that I did not make this up. There's no Photoshop trickery at work here; in fact, the only thing that makes this funny is that it's true. (If I had thought up those fucking names, I'd just be pathetic, and I sure as hell wouldn't be advertising the fact.)

That's one of the strangest things about this bootleg -- and don't worry, there are plenty to choose from -- the names of the ghosts. Urchin, Romp, Stylist, and, everyone's favorite, Crybaby. These are not names of video game monsters. These are character archetypes from a bloody Charles "why yes, I was paid by the word, how did you ever guess" Dickens novel. I wish I could extrapolate some sort of defining characteristic, as it applies to the game, from these baffling and wildly inappropriate names, but there is none to be found. They just swarm around and generally piss me off. Especially Stylist, that mincing fey twat, since he's got no eyes. Whose idea was that? Who proposed: "Hey, I know! Let's make things a little different. Let's give one of the ghosts no eyes." And his buddies-in-mediocrity said "Ooh, that's creepy! Let's do it!" And as far as Macky, Micky, Mucky, and Mocky go -- everyone knows that they were the short lived "New Monkees".

Assuming that you don't take a look at the attract mode and run for the nearest exorcist, you'll find the game to be perfectly capable of meeting and exceeding your tolerances for irritating sounds, eye-searing color schemes, and surreal game play. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Just walk away.

Mmmm... look at this appetizing layout. Those pellets you'll soon be gobbling can only be described with the two dreaded words: "burnt umber". The two words any child with a 64-box of crayons learned to dread. And those cherries -- do I hear someone's stomach rumbling? Yes, it's impossible to look at this bootleg without feeling something in the pit of your stomach.

When you eat a ghost, they don't turn into a floating pair of eyes. Oh no. That would apparently be beyond the capacity of the programmers who, it has been established, like to make eyes disappear. Here's what you get after killing off a ghost: Try to contain your excitement. But watch out! When the ghosts are about to go back on the attack, they flash:

I bet I just blew Urchin's mind. ___________ Mmmm. Mystery bloated fruit.
Walls? Pac-Man laughs at your walls! ______________What the fuck is this? A pumpkin?

_______
Pinky: the statesman.

Notice that, if I did go to Japan, I could talk freely about my favorite ghost without running into an ugly language barrier. A splendid time would be had by all, as illustrated:

And hats off to you too, my friend, for knowing that when I say "Speedy", I mean "Machibuse". It's this sort of universal understanding that engenders tolerance in places that years of war reparations and prohibitive tariffs just don't reach.

Smashing an Invinco machine is considered legal, or at least overlooked by the authorities, in most states. What are you waiting for?