It's new to me: The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
Now here's a series that merits an explanation.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle was released for the NES in 1989, and only in North America. This, despite being developed and published by a Japanese company, Kemco. You might be wondering how that happened, given that, usually, games were developed in Japan that didn’t release in North America, and rarely was it the other way around. With The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, though, it is both a game that only released in North America and not Japan, and one that released in Japan but not North America. Sort of.
You see, The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, which did not release in Japan, released in Japan before it released in North America. That sentence makes sense, I promise! That’s because The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, when it came out in February of ‘89 for the Famicom Disk System, was known as Roger Rabbit. And in September, when it released for the Game Boy in Japan, it was known as Mickey Mouse. Not “Roger Rabbit Crazy Castle” or “Mickey Mouse Crazy Castle,” just Roger Rabbit, and Mickey Mouse. North America received the same game on the NES that same September, where it was known as The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle.
The Crazy Castle designation would end up sticking, as that’s what this series is referred to as a whole these days. But the various licensing agreements also ended up sticking, and became sort of a normal part of the series, with games differing not so much in content, but in what licensed universe and characters would appear in it all based on what region they were released in. And that was entirely up to which licenses Kemco had active in which regions.
While Kemco had the Roger Rabbit license in Japan in 1989, they did not have it in North America. Capcom was responsible for a number of Disney games at the time, and publisher LJN had Rare develop a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? adaptation that, coincidentally, would also release in September of 1989. Kemco ended up utilizing a Looney Tunes license, and turned this Roger Rabbit game into one featuring Bugs Bunny, instead. The hearts Roger Rabbit chased down in Japan became carrots in North America, and the weasel enemies became multicolored Sylvester the Cats.
When the Mickey Mouse version of the game released on the North American Game Boy, it was once again a Bugs Bunny game, and once again titled The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, although this time it had the new levels introduced in the Mickey Mouse edition, as well. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle would end up getting three direct numbered sequels, plus a fifth spin-off game featuring Woody the Woodpecker. There were four additional Mickey Mouse games released in Japan, as well, but don’t worry, the “missing” one was accounted for. Mickey Mouse IV: Mahō no Labyrinth actually did release in North America, just not as a Bugs Bunny outing. In North America, it was known as The Real Ghostbusters in place of Mickey Mouse, with you playing as Peter Venkman. In Europe, though, this same game was known as Garfield’s Labyrinth, because Kemco had a license for Garfield games there. Mickey Mouse, Ghostbusters, and Garfield? Video games are truly a magical thing.
To add another wrinkle to this, The Real Ghostbusters has similar enough level design to the Amiga game P.P. Hammer and his Pneumatic Weapon that the creator of that game later said it was “a complete ripoff” of his outing. Maybe we’ll talk more about that another day, though, even if it’s just an excuse to talk about a video game where Garfield has to make his way through a labyrinth.
Today, the focus is on Bugs Bunny, and his inaugural journey through the titular Crazy Castle. While the format would change a bit over time, in this initial outing, Bugs Bunny cannot jump, and must walk pretty much everywhere he’s going. There are doors with stairs that lead up or down, which lets you get from one floor to another, and there are some other ways to travel like pipes, stairways, or straight-up falling. What you’re trying to do is collect each of the eight carrots in each of 60 stages, and do so without coming into contact with one of the enemies in the stage. Those enemies being, depending on the stage, a few different colored sprites of Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, or Daffy Duck.
Each of these different foes has different behaviors you’ll have to memorize in order to successfully make your way through each stage of the Crazy Castle. The pink Sylvester can use doors, pipes, and stairs, and will use every one he comes across, but only to travel up. The grey Sylvester moves towards Bugs if they’re on the same floor as him, or toward him if Bugs isn’t moving even if he’s on another floor, and if Bugs is moving, they’ll move in the same direction, but will also go up (and only up) pipes, stairs, and through doors like the pink Sylvester. The black Sylvester is a lot like the others, except he might choose not to use the stairs, doors, or pipes, which makes him a little tougher to predict the movement patterns of. The green Sylvester basically does whatever he wants to do, and you can’t force him to move certain ways with your own movement like you can some of the others.
Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam are the same outside of their sprites, and have similar movement to the grey Sylvester, except without the use of pipes et al. Daffy Duck also doesn’t use any of those things, and will pretty much copy Bugs’ movement, which means you can accidentally get yourself trapped somewhere with him, and end up dying because of it.
To take care of these enemies, you either have to straight-up avoid them — often, but not always, a possibility — or defeat them using various items found in the stages. There’s a carrot juice item that temporarily makes Bugs invincible and allows him to defeat any foe he touches, but I cannot stress enough just how temporary this power is: you might not even get a chance to use it if you don’t time picking it up just right relative to where an enemy is on the screen. Boxing gloves can be picked up and stored, and then thrown at an enemy to defeat them: if you miss, the glove will hit a wall and can be picked up again, but if you successfully land a blow with it, it’ll disappear along with whoever you hit with it. There’s a very cartoon-worthy 10-ton weight you can drop from above on foes that moves a single space at a time, a safe that does the same thing but moves two spaces at a time since it weighs less, a wooden crate, which moves three at a time, and a metal bucket, which moves five spaces: you can also kick these into foes in front of you.
Bugs has eight carrots per level to pick up, each worth 100 points except for the final carrot, which gives you an extra life. Points are basically there just to show how well you did before a game over, but if you manage to go long stretches without dying, you can accumulate one extra life per stage, meaning you can really build up that point total with some smart play. While early stages are very easy, the game gets much more complicated and expects much more out of you in a hurry. The introduction of pipes makes stages more complex, and later levels are designed much more around the limitations of Bugs as well as the various forms of travel: you have to be smart about exploiting little loopholes, like the fact that touching an enemy is instant death unless it occurs while you’re both traveling through the same pipe in opposite directions, or one of you is actively going up the stairs in a door while the other is coming down that same passageway. You’ll need to take advantage of this kind of timing in order to get past certain foes, especially if you don’t have any items to defeat them with, or need to save those items for someone there’s no loophole for. Like the Yosemite Sam on stage 19, who you drop through a pipe to get to the carrot he’s protecting: without an item, you simply can’t succeed at this part, since there’s no way to get behind him otherwise, even as he paces back and forth. Go there without an item, and you’ll die: you have to keep an eye out for this sort of thing, which is why this is a puzzle platformer.
It seems at first like there’s just the one song and one background setting in the game, but both of these change as you get further into the game. At first, you have a few castle levels in a row, then some more futuristic ones with the pipes, and then the game starts bouncing back and forth between these at will, while also introducing other settings into the mix. Since the gameplay is different for each of these settings, as they’ve got or are missing certain elements like pipes or stairs, it keeps you from getting into a lull with doing the same kind of stage over and over again. That more and more foes keep being added, and the number of ways to properly do a level without accidentally walking yourself into a corner you can’t come out of decreases over time, keeps you on your toes, too. It’s a simple game, conceptually, but there’s some real fun to be had here once Kemco starts flexing their level design muscles.
Musically, the game reminds me quite a bit of early Nintendo-developed NES games. Not Super Mario Bros., but the ones with soundtracks that came off as if they were riffing on public domain tunes, like 8-bit renditions of music you might hear at a fair or carnival, or dipping into classical music because again, who was going to stop them from doing that? Which, fitting, really, given the arcade origins of so many of them. It fits The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, too, given Looney Tunes’ own nods to freely available music they could riff on or utilize for a gag. Are you going to hear this stage theme from The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle and tell me it doesn’t sound like it would have fit in something like Wrecking Crew or Ice Climbers or Balloon Fight?
There’s no ability to save on this cartridge, so you’ll have to use passwords. Which is fine, unless you really cared about your high score being recorded, but that, like your progress, vanishes when you turn the system off. In addition, the game loops when you complete level 60, and brings you back to level 1, but it’s not a more difficult version of the game: it’s just the game, again. A shame that they didn’t go for something more, but with how intentional some of the design was late in terms of specific items being needed for specific enemies, maybe this was a little too much effort to put in, like an entire second game being developed on top of the first.
Given this is a licensed property, there’s little chance it ends up on Nintendo Switch Online despite being basically a perfect title to put on there otherwise, and unless there’s a Crazy Castle collection on the horizon, they probably won’t be up for sale again, either. Which is a shame! It’s not going to completely change your life, but this is a fun game, and there are certainly plenty of them. They sold well enough for Kemco to make a whole bunch of them, and they even gave making their own mascot for the series a go, when they converted Mickey Mouse III into Kid Klown in Night Mayor World in North America, launching the Kid Klown series in the process.
That’d be something, though, if Kemco threw the entirety of Crazy Castle together via licensing deals with Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Columbia, and Nickelodeon, which now has the rights to Garfield. Each regional version of each game, all together in one package? It could never be done, of course. Though, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? seemed an impossibility, too, given it utilized characters from multiple mega studios, so hey. Wouldn’t it be fitting for Kemco to pull that off here, considering?
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