Oso Terrible

Bryan Ochalla from The Gay Gamer brought this article about the Japanese launch of the Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive) to my attention, and it's morbidly fascinating, in the same way a fifteen car pile-up or the crash of the Hindenburg would be. While the Genesis had a fairly successful launch in the United States, with Thunder Force II and Ghouls 'n Ghosts available right out of the starting gate, things did not go so smoothly for its Japanese counterpart. One of the first games available for the Mega Drive was Osomatsu-Kun: Hachamecha Gekijo, a thoroughly unremarkable side-scrolling platformer based on a popular comic book series.

Somewhere in that nightmare of peach and
magenta, there's a Kit Kat bar. You can tell
it's a Kit Kat bar even at that size, so at least
they got the product placement right.

Hastily thrown together to make the launch of the Mega Drive, what modest aspirations Osomatsu-Kun had were dashed by a ROM shortage, cutting its size to 256K and leaving the game with just three stages. The game was the headliner for the Mega Drive launch event, and while the system's designer Hideki Sato doesn't come right out and say it, he heavily implies that early titles like Osomatsu-Kun doomed Sega's chances of competing with the Super Famicom, years before that system was even released!

I've played the game in an emulator, and while Osomatsu-Kun doesn't quite live down to its reputation as a system killer, it ain't good. Levels scroll in just one direction, and the game's extreme linearity is clumsily balanced by paths that loop back onto themselves if you take the wrong exit. The control (although not as "floaty" as the MD Shock article suggests) is passable at best, cheap hits are frequent, and Osomatsu's sole means of defense, a sling shot, is short on range and speed until the second stage.

Osomatsu-Kun creator Fujio Akatsuka reportedly
flung an ashtray at one of the game's designers,
eerily mirroring this outburst from another
crabby cartoonist on The Simpsons.
(image from Frinkiac)

Despite its colorful, cartoony graphics, Osomatsu-Kun has the feel of a middle of the road NES release that arrived one generation too late, and it's not the first impression anyone wants to make with their freshly released, cutting edge game console. If you ever wondered why the Mega Drive struggled in vain to compete with the Super Famicom in Japan while the two systems were evenly matched here in the United States, this is exhibit A. 

Thanks once again to MD Shock for publishing this enlightening article, and to Bryan Ochalla for telling me about it.