#7: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

December 1987: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

One does not imagine that Mike Tyson has ever spent a significant amount of time actually playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, though doubtless he has played it at least once, on camera, for publicity purposes, if nothing else. But the image of Mike Tyson spending hours learning the patterns and perfecting the timing required to beat each of the racial stereotypes that stand before you as obstacles on the path to a bout with Mike Tyson himself is rather preposterous. He did, after all, have an actual boxing career in the real world to concentrate on, which you’d have to assume would take precedence.

This is the curious thing about celebrity endorsements of video games, a phenomenon which is confined almost entirely to the genre of sports games, which generally provide an experience that is almost, but not entirely, completely dissimilar to actually participating in the sport in question. Evaluating your opponent’s tactics and finding ways to exploit their weaknesses is, I’m sure, a key skill in boxing, but I feel like its importance somewhat pales in comparison to the ability to take multiple blows to the head without falling unconscious. I am probably better than Mike Tyson at Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! but I would certainly never want to get into an actual boxing ring with him. A NES can provide you with a series of opponents who operate according to predictable patterns with clear vulnerabilities, but, barring some extremely hardcore and probably illegal modifications, it can’t punch you in the face. Jumping ahead a bit, games like the boxing mode of Wii Sports might even give you a actual physical workout, but they still won’t punch you in the actual physical face.

I am not, to be clear, suggesting that this is a bad thing, or that these games are in some way failures for being inadequate representations of the sports they purport to simulate. That’s not really what anyone expects, or even particularly wants from these games. So why then would a celebrity endorsement even matter? What does Mike Tyson know about video games anyway?

Well, if we’re conceding that Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! does not fail in an attempt to simulate the experience of boxing so much as it makes no real attempt to do any such thing, perhaps we should stop talking about it as a boxing game and start talking about it as a video game for a little while. In their own ways, all of the games we’ve looked at so far have taken somewhat of a kitchen sink approach, throwing all kinds of different things at the player, so that if one doesn’t quite land, there’ll soon be something totally different around. The Legend of Zelda is obviously the epitome of this, but even Bubble Bobble, despite its confined space, has a wide variety of enemies, bubbles that create waterfalls, bonus bubbles with letters inside that can add up to extra lives, and so on.

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! does not do this. Instead, it does one thing, and concentrates on doing it well. It is, essentially a series of boss fights; learn their patterns, figure out which of the five moves you have at your disposal you need to use to counter them and when, and keep on pumping away until you win. The difficulty curve is pretty excellently pitched; as you progress through the ranks, the game will expect faster and faster reaction times, and punish you more and more harshly for your mistakes. Checkpoints are provided every few fights so that you don’t need to beat the hell out of Glass Joe over and over when you’ve already progressed well beyond the point where doing so provides any useful learning experience, but spaced apart enough that there are real stakes to the ‘title bouts’ that occur just before each checkpoint.

It is, in the end, not an excellent simulation of boxing, but an excellent simulation of a fantasy of being a boxer. And that’s what people are really looking for when they play these kind of celebrity endorsed sports games. All the thrills of being in the ring, of driving a rally car, of doing cool tricks on a skateboard; none of the risks of brain damage from too many blows to the head, of flipping your car into a ditch, of breaking your ribs falling of the board. And hey, while we’re being fantasists, why not pretend that if a real pro like Mike Tyson or Colin McRae or Tony Hawk says it’s cool, then that totally lends authenticity to our fantasy? As stretches of reality go, that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to pretending that I’d stand any chance in the ring against Mike Tyson.

 

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