Little Mac, the True Champion of the NES Era

You cannot back down, you must only move forward, throw the decisive hook, and hope that your opponent goes down on the mat, for good. The referee fixes his eyes on you, then looks at the boxer lying on the mat, and starts counting. One, two, three. The count longest of your life. Ten seems so far away, so unattainable, and yet there you are, one step away from final victory…

Punch Out!! is the most fun and challenging thing you will ever play in your life, and precisely for this reason it rose to prominence from the very first day it went on sale, which happened in 1984, but it was the third chapter, released in 1987 in the middle of the NES, era, that made the saga famous even overseas.

Punch Out!! represents the perfect hybrid between an arcade and sports video game, allowing the player to face a type of gameplay focused on timing and skill with the controller: in the role of our alter ego, that Little Mac who will turn out to be the ideal avatar, namely an unknown boxer with the desire to climb to the top and face the Champion of Champions (Mike Tyson himself, later unfortunately replaced by a more anonymous Mr. Dream, due to image rights issues), we will have to fight our way through increasingly demanding challenges against ever tougher, bigger and… damn fast boxers!

The matches in Punch Out! revolve around duels based on the right combination of speed, reflexes and sharp eyesight: whenever our opponent is about to hit us, their silhouette will light up, allowing us to act and dodge the punch, before counterattacking and punching them, with uppercuts and hooks!

Il gioco, frutto della creativa mente di Genyo Takeda, uno dei grandi pilastri della Nintendo e che ancora oggi è saldamente uno dei principali “consiglieri” di Miyamoto, è dotato di una curva di apprendimento per il giocatore ben strutturata, il gameplay, benché semplificato dal genere incanalato nel filone di uno sport piuttosto lineare dal punto di vista delle regole e dello svolgimento, regala momenti alti grazie alla felice scelta di rendere gli avversari di Little Mac decisamente macchiettistici e dall’impronta volutamente demenziale ed eccessiva.

So we will find ourselves in front of “athletes” of the caliber of Glass Joe and his fluid movements, so to speak, or the big and bulky (but we are not referring to his muscular build) King Hippo: the character design of the protagonists of Punch Out!! relies heavily on their appearance, which is friendly and appealing to video gamers of all ages.

Va da sé che realism and simulation of the “boxing” discipline are concepts completely detached from the product you will have in your hands, aspects that give way to the purely arcade and frenetic side and that decreed the success of the game.

The winning choice by Nintendo was in fact to shape Punch Out!! toward a very specific direction, which diverged from the emerging products packed with statistics and strictly adherent to the rules of the sport that they boasted to be a more or less faithful big-screen rendition.

Con its devastating uppercuts and the expressions funny, with the animations and sprites always off the rails and the difficulty increasing as Little Mac climbs the summit, Punch Out!! found its way to legend with punches and sales.

Today, its Super Nintendo versions and original NES cartridges complete with manual and box are sought after by collectors and enthusiasts around the world.