Remembering Hudson Soft: Air Zonk

Hudson decided to make the Turbografx's mascot edgier by giving him sunglasses, and by God it worked.

Hudson Soft, founded in the 70s, did just about everything a studio and publisher could do in the video game industry before it was fully absorbed into Konami on March 1, 2012. For the next month here at Retro XP, the focus will be on the roles the studio played, the games they developed, the games they published, the consoles they were attached to, and the legacy they left behind. After all, someone has to remember them, since Konami doesn’t always seem to. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

Remember Bonk? If not, you can just read this first. Anyway, Bonk was the PC Engine and Turbografx-16 mascot, the platform protagonist they hitched the proverbial wagon to, but by 1992, the video games were growing up and entering their edgier phase. Sonic the Hedgehog had attitude and ran really fast, Sega did what Nintendon’t and all that happy stuff: how was a simple, adorable caveman with a big noggin supposed to keep pace?

Easy: by putting on sunglasses and adding a lightning bolt mohawk and shifting thousands of years into the future and also being a cyborg. And, in the most 1990s move possible, by changing his name to incorporate a Z: Bonk was now known as Zonk. And finally, by no longer being the star of a platformer, but instead, of a fast-paced shoot-em-up. Or cute-em-up, really. You can only add so many hard edges to Bonk, you know?

Zonk also has a hell of a theme song to go along with this change. It’s included in this opening video for the Turbografx-16 version of Air Zonk, in which Bonk puts on the sunglasses that then bring us to the future where Zonk resides:

How did Bonk make the transition from slow-paced platformer to shoot-em-up? The developer responsible for the Bonk games, Red Company, was also pretty successful at the whole shoot-em-up thing: Red might be best known for things like Sakura Wars at this point, but they’re also responsible for classics of the horizontal shoot-em-up world like Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder. Air Zonk deserves mention alongside those titles, too, as it’s not just a funny spinoff of Bonk, but one of the more enjoyable shmups on a system absolutely loaded with quality ones.

It’s impressive from basically every angle you can consider. Visually, it’s full of sight gags and references to Bonk — the walls of the fifth and final stage are even tiled with art from Bonk’s Adventure — but it’s also technically impressive, with some serious parallax scrolling effects, as well as highly detailed foes and allies and backgrounds and environments. The soundtrack is excellent, too, using the sound chip-based Turbografx-16 hardware to great effect. Between this and the Red Book audio on Lords of Thunder, Red Company showed they very much cared about and understood the value of the music in a shmup (though, it’s worth pointing out that neither of the composers from Air Zonk, Daisuke Morishima and Hisashi Matsushita, worked on the very metal Lords of Thunder soundtrack. That was Satoshi Miyashita’s doing.)

The 10 allies Zonk can choose from (or have chosen for him) during Air Zonk’s five levels. Image credit: RAWG

The gameplay itself is also excellent, and that’s in large part due to the way the weapons system of Air Zonk works. Zonk starts out with a basic rapid-fire, single-direction shot, but he also has flame jets on his boots that allow him to damage any enemies that come up from behind or that you put behind you with your own maneuvering. There are seven different basic weapon upgrades you can acquire that change things up from this relative pea shooter: boomerangs, alligator teeth, the traditional homing missile, and so on, with the most effective of these probably being the one that shrinks Zonk (and his hit box!) down considerably, but without sacrificing the power of his shots, and while adding the ability to shoot in multiple directions. You can move Zonk around as usual, and a secondary wave of bullets will fire in whatever direction you’re pressing. It’s helpful for attacking enemies from every angle, which is good, because enemies will come at you or place themselves all around the screen, not just in front of you.

If this were all the weapon system had to offer, it wouldn’t stand out that much, but there’s another wrinkle that sets it apart to make Air Zonk both fun and memorable. And that’s your allies: there are 10 to choose from, and each has wildly different capabilities. You can either choose which ally is going to come to your aid next, or just have that automatically selected for you each time you can summon one, but regardless, an ally can only be utilized once per game. And they are literally game-changing. Or can be, if you use them correctly.

The smiley face coins from Bonk are here in Air Zonk, too, with a new purpose: at first, they just seem to be a way to score more points — a positive on its own, given Zonk earns extra lives via points — but after you collect eight of them in a stage, you’ll see a larger smiley face. This one, once collected, calls an ally to you, and that pal will start shooting as support. These friends include a SCUD missile named Scud, a baseball named Bob, a cow named Moo Moo, a mummy named Mumbles, and more. If you can collect another eight smiley faces before your ally takes so much damage they leave your side, then another large smiley will appear: collect this, and Zonk will merge with his ally into an indestructible, and often comedic, force of nature.

You get 20 seconds of invulnerability when this occurs, which is great on its own, especially if the timing matches up where you happen to be fighting a boss when the merge happens. But you also get a hugely upgraded weapon by merging, far more noticeable in its usefulness than just having an ally by your side was. Merging with Bob, for instance, turns Zonk into a professional baseball pitcher, uniform, exaggerated windup, and all: he will now throw baseballs at his opponents, and they are devastating. Merging with Moo Moo the cow causes Zonk to transform into a cow tank that fires milk bottles which cause splash damage upon impact. Merge Zonk and the dog Ripp, and the new form will start firing off vertically oriented letters that spell BOW in quick succession. Zonk and Mumbles become a spinning drill, Zonk and Scud become a spaceship armed with an array of lasers… they’re great fun to look at, to play with, and experimenting with the various allies is a huge part of the appeal of this game.

Sure, on the lower difficulties — there are three in Zonk, Sweet, Spicy, and Bitter — you can get away with just letting the game pick your ally for you. During the toughest bits, though, you’re going to want to figure out which ally makes the most sense in a given stage, so you can get the most out of the transformation. Especially since, after the invulnerability period ends, you can stay in that enhanced form until you take damage. All of the weapon systems work like this: if you’ve picked up a weapon upgrade, you’ll just lose that instead of a life. If all you have is the most basic cannon, then taking damage will kill Zonk, and you’ll use up a precious extra life. It’s similar to the system in Bonk, really: if Bonk had an upgrade, he’d lose that before taking any damage, but the difference here is that Bonk lost some health from his health bar: Zonk straight-up dies if he’s shot without an upgrade in place. Each got it right for their respective genre.

While there are just five stages in Zonk, they tend to be on the long side, enough so that a mid-boss battle is a presence in each. The environments you’re in tend to change after the mid-boss, too, so it looks and feels a lot more like 10 short stages than five long ones in that regard. (It should be noted, as well, that the mid-boss fights and boss fights carry on the legacy of Bonk, in that they feature large, interesting foes, and are the right balance of fun and difficult to navigate.) Every environment is a welcome change of pace from the kind of locales you often see in the shmup genre: instead of the inky blackness of space once again, or flying over a post-apocalyptic landscape, Zonk is flying over water with a city and factories in the background, or flying through an enormous sports complex, or within the stronghold of a dinosaur king his ancestor used to bonk with his head, painted to look like it’s from the stone age. Regardless of the where or the what, Zonk is supremely colorful and bright, leaning into the cute part of cute-em-up, and successfully so.

Between the three difficulty levels and the 10 ally characters, there are plenty of reasons to revisit Zonk when you finish up, too. Sure, it’s missing modern bells and whistles like online rankings or a Caravan mode, but it’s just so much fun to play and experience, that you don’t care that the only person you’re trying to impress here is yourself.

There was a sequel to Air Zonk on the Turbografx CD that required the Super CD upgrade — Super Air Zonk: Rockabilly Paradise — and it’s such a shame that it isn’t a better game. Red Company didn’t handle this one, though, with the studio Dual developing this sequel, and it suffered for the change. The ally system has been changed to remove the experimentation of the first game, and there are fewer weapons to choose from overall, making for a less intriguing space to play around in, before you even get to the fact that the level design itself is inferior, and it somehow is graphically worse, too, despite the more powerful hardware at its disposal. A disappointment that you can read more about at Hardcore Gaming 101 — our focus here today is on Air Zonk specifically, after all.

Zonk was meant to be something of a mascot refresh, and was therefore featured in Turbografx marketing afer the first game’s release. There is even a late-life release of the base Turbografx-16 model that incorporates Zonk into its design: coincidentally enough, I saw one in stock in the wild a week before writing this, on a Turbografx-16 system that had (at the time, of course) been reduced from a $99 MSRP to the brand new price of $69. Zonk was right there in the middle of the box, the most prominent mascot of the bunch, and right near that new price. As it was already 1992 when Air Zonk released, however, there was only time for the one sequel, and no further spinoffs that played on this new mascot variant in the way that, say, Nintendo and Sega acted with their own leads. Hudson Soft also didn’t start putting out Air Zonk titles for other systems after the Turbografx-16 and PC Engine families were laid to rest. Bonk lived on elsewhere, but Zonk? The futuristic mascot, maybe somewhat ironically, lacked a future after Hudson was no longer a first-party publisher.

Air Zonk might be a series that’s been resting for decades now, but the original can still be purchased today. Though, as is too often the case, only for a short time. It’s on the Wii U Virtual Console for $5.99, until that storefront shuts down this time next year, and is also included in the Turbografx-16 Mini console, that is (1) sadly exclusive to Amazon and (2) you need to keep an eye out for fresh shipments of if you want to avoid paying nearly triple its $100 MSRP for it. If you don’t have a Wii U and aren’t lucky enough to find a TG-16 Mini at its base price, then emulation is the answer if you want to play Air Zonk. And you should, because it succeeds on basically every level a shoot-em-up can: it looks great, it sounds great, and it only gets better the more you familiarize yourself with its enjoyable systems. It might not have brought the Turbografx to new heights in North America, but that’s certainly not a knock against Air Zonk’s quality.

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