Collection essentials #86: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES)

Here’s another very popular NES title from Nintendo. And it doesn’t play quite how you’d think from the title and the cover. In the future, most sports games with the endorsement of a real-life athlete are games that try to accurately simulate the sport. But that’s not what Punch-Out!! is at all. It’s a rather cartoony, unrealistic game about pattern recognition.

Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! were originally arcade games, both released in 1984. They had impressive graphics for the time and featured the player character with a transparent “wirefame” body so as not to obstruct the enemy boxer too much. Nintendo wanted to bring Punch-Out!! to the NES, but the graphics and wireframe effects were too advanced for the hardware. But that didn’t stop them. Punch-Out!! on the NES is not so much a direct port of the arcade games but rather the same concept reimagined with a lot of the same opponents and built comfortably within the restrictions of the NES, and that was really the right way to go. Rather than a nameless wireframe character, you play as a small boxer named Little Mac, and he’s small for the same reason, so as not to block your view of the opponent so much.

The basic gameplay of Punch-Out!! is fairly simple. You basically have five different punches, those being left and right body blows, left and right jabs, plus a special uppercut you can only use if you have a “star” to burn, and those are earned by punching opponents at very specific times. You can also guard or dodge to avoid taking damage. Your first opponent, Glass Joe, is pretty darn easy, but before very long the game pumps up the challenge. To win, you’ll have to learn how to react to each enemy’s specific attacks. It does create a sort of trial-and-error gameplay style, which is often considered a negative with video games, but you’re supposed to know that about Punch-Out!! going in, and the enemies do telegraph their moves in a way that it’s possible to react once you have learned how, so it’s not quite so bad as the sort of trial-and-error you get from less-well-designed games.

Aside from Mike Tyson, the characters of the game are entirely fictional. They hail from different real-world countries, though, and are based on certain stereotypes of people from those places. This seems cringeworthy in modern times considering how we try to avoid that sort of thing now, though Punch-Out!! has been re-released in recent years and has not really gained a lot of criticism. I think that’s probably because the game is obviously not meant to be taken very seriously, it doesn’t depict anything that truly and clearly crosses a line of being offensive, it was developed by Japanese people who are perhaps not held to the same level of scrutiny, and most people who play it nowadays are aware of the context of the game’s time. 

Mike Tyson is the final character you’ll fight, and it’s one of the most famous and notoriously difficult boss fights from the era. He starts off by throwing a series of nasty uppercuts at you that will knock you down instantly even if your life bar is full, and generally has very fast attacks after that too. He’s certainly beatable, though, and I’ve taken him down twice. Tyson may seem harder in modern times than he actually is, which gives me an opportunity to talk about a related topic, that being “input lag.” When played on modern TVs, or when playing a re-release of the game on something like the “NES Classic Edition” (a standalone system with built-in games) or the Nintendo Switch Online NES catalog, there’s going to be a bit of extra “lag” when you press buttons that wasn’t there playing on the original console on an old TV. For most games this is perfectly playable and not that big a deal, but Punch-Out!! is an example of a game where it actually does matter quite a bit. Even if it’s less than a second, that extra time between when you press a button and when your character reacts does matter in a game where you’re expected to react very quickly. With certain modern setups, the Tyson fight can go from merely hard to borderline impossible if you don’t react like lightning.

You may notice there are two cartridges in the picture. That’s because Nintendo only had the license to use Mike Tyson in their game for a limited amount of time, but Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! was still popular when that license expired, so they decided to strip him from the game and sell it as simply “Punch-Out!!.” The fight against Tyson is still there, he’s just replaced by an original character named “Mr. Dream” who fights in exactly the same way. Any re-release of this game like the ones I mentioned earlier will feature Mr. Dream instead of Tyson.

It took me a little time to warm-up to Punch-Out!! as the trial-and-error gameplay did cause me some frustration on my first go. But after working at it and beating it, I grew to enjoy and appreciate it like everybody else, though I think I do prefer the sequels. It’s very well-made and one of the most memorable offerings on the NES, a true essential.