Remembering Hudson Soft: Bonk's Revenge
His name is Bonk, and that's what he does.
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.
Have you ever played a Bonk game? You should play a Bonk game. In the 80s and 90s, if you were a company with a console, you simply needed a platformer to build your business around. Nintendo’s dominance with the Famicom/NES in Japan and North America had more than a little bit to do with the brilliance of Super Mario Bros., and that its main character, Mario, could serve as a mascot and recognizable face in other franchises certainly didn’t hurt, either. Sega, in the 80s, had Alex Kidd as their primary platforming mascot, which obviously didn’t work out nearly as well as Mario — hence their focus on creating something that would, a process that eventually led to Sonic the Hedgehog. That worked out pretty well for Sega, considering the Mega Drive/Genesis was an international success, thriving in the regions they succeeded in during the 80s while also giving the company the inroads in North America they just could not manage with the Kidd-led Master System.
And Hudson, with their PC Engine/Turbografx-16 console? Bomberman was the company’s key mascot, sure, but Bomberman was for the masses. He was in arcades, then on Nintendo’s very successful systems; none of that stopped just because Hudson had their own console. And Bomberman wasn’t a platformer franchise, either — at least, not yet. That’s where Bonk came in. While Hudson didn’t develop the first Bonk game (or subsequent titles, either), it is very much their series. While maybe not as obvious in North America, where the hardware half of the Turbografx arrangement, tech giant NEC, served as publisher, it was pretty self-evident in Japan. Not only did Hudson publish Bonk’s Adventure, the first game in the franchise, in Japan, but there, it was called PC Genjin. And if you think “PC Genjin” sounds like “PC Engine,” then you are correct. It also means “PC Caveman” when translated to English, however, so it’s not just there for the sound of it. Bonk, after all, is a caveman.
It’s also a pun within a pun, because even the “PC” part of the name is a gag. It stands for “Pithecanthropus Computerus,” which is a play on Pithecanthropus erectus, which itself means “upright ape-man.” It’s a good thing “Bonk” is such a fun name to say, or else I’d be upset about losing out on this extreme level of cleverness in the localization.
A thoughtful name is one thing, but Bonk’s Adventure/PC Genjin is also great fun even if it’s mostly a starting point for the franchise. The game, developed by Red Company and Atlus, originally released in Japan in 1989. While you’ll certainly recognize some elements from other platformers — you can “jump” on other enemies to defeat them, there are projectiles and power-ups — it has its own language that you need to learn. And it’s worth learning. “Jump” was in quotes there because that’s not really what you do: you bonk enemies, with your big ole head. Bonk’s body is susceptible to all kinds of damage, unless what is struck is his head. He can attack by jumping and landing head first on a foe. He can jump straight up and harm an enemy from underneath. His head is the key to it all, whether by bonking or grabbing on to the side of a wall and biting his way up, or wall-jumping via bouncing his head off of a wall and letting the momentum from that crash send him across a gap and into another wall he can bonk off of to repeat the process in the other direction.
The concept was a hit, enough that Bonk’s Adventure ended up ported to a number of other systems even though it was so tied to the Japanese PC Engine that it was named to sound like it. (North American ports skipped the need to rename for console-specific releases, and just stuck with Bonk’s Adventure.) It also received a number of sequels on the Turbografx-16, and continued to persist beyond that system’s life, as well. Which Turbografx-specific sequel is the best is very much up for debate: there are those who prefer Bonk 3: Bonk’s Big Adventure because of the added layer of the embiggening of Bonk, and the quality of the games is close enough that it can be difficult to say anyone is wrong about their preference.
Me, though? I’m a Bonk’s Revenge guy. It’s the purest form of Bonk found in the original game, but with the kind of little improvements in design, sound, graphics, animation, and feel that you often get with a sequel that go a long way, and it all makes for a title that’s so good you kind of wonder why Red Company eventually quit making platformers, anyway.
Red Company (or Red Entertainment, depending on when in their history you’re referring to them) is better known these days for their Japanese role-playing games, which has a lot to do with the fact that they were responsible for all of the Sakura Wars games from the series’ wonderful inception until the 2019 reboot, and shifted gears in the last decade to work on the similar-ish tactical dating sim Record of Agarest War. When they work on other new games or franchises — Fossil Fighters, Nostalgia, Our World is Ended — they tend to stick to JRPGs or visual novels, too. Red Company, though, used to dabble. There was the platformer, Bonk — lots of Bonk, really — but Red Company also developed the excellent horizontal shoot-em-ups, Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder for the Turbografx-CD.
Atlus was no longer involved with Bonk by the time its first sequel released, but there’s still a little hint of their one-time presence in Bonk’s Revenge. There are a whole bunch of collectible smiley faces in each stage in Bonk, which are counted up and used to determine what post-level bonus you’re going to get to your health or extra lives. These Smileys have more than a passing resemblance to Atlus’ mascot, Jack Frost:
Anyway, that’s enough context and history for now. How does Bonk play? Slow, but not in a frustrating way. It’s a deliberate game, with deliberate movements. Only Bonk’s head is free to avoid damage, so you have to be intentional in keeping his body away from the various anthropomorphic dinosaur foes, the spikes, the traps, the flames, the volcanic rock, all of it. Bonk also picks up speed if he acquires power-ups: basic Bonk can take a number of hits, dependent on how many hearts you have left in the meter, but if you’ve acquired a power-up, you not only get to take an additional hit before losing any health, but you move faster and attack with more strength, too.
The first power-up — which is a small piece of cooked meat still on the bone — changes Bonk’s face from that of a smiling little guy into an angrier little guy, who also happens to breathe fire. Your bonking, too, can cause more of a problem for foes: now, if you bonk the ground, enemies freeze in place. The second power-up comes from finding a second piece of small meat while you already have the first, or from finding one huge hunk of beef. In that form, you not only move much faster and have even stronger projectile attacks, but you’re also invulnerable. These are both temporary power-ups, however, the extra hits you can take before losing health will remain even when the invulnerability and flames die down.
Once you get a feel for how Bonk moves and how the game’s systems work — the targeted bonking, the power-ups, that you can press the bonking button repeatedly in order to continue moving through the air, the way the game hides its bonus items and bonus rooms, how vital collecting Smileys for health upgrades and extra lives is to making it through the entire game, the need to master wall-jumping and climbing up cliffsides with Bonk’s powerful prehistoric jaws — it feels great to play. It’ll feel plodding and unfamiliar at first, but as you acclimate yourself to what’s expected of you and how you’re supposed to fulfill those expectations, the beauty of the game’s systems reveal themselves. It’s not as immediately satisfying as Super Mario Bros., no, nor is it as inventive as Super Mario Bros. 3, but Bonk’s Revenge is still one of the finest platformers of its time, and a jewel in the Turbografx-16’s library.
Fruit plays a major role in Bonk, as befits a platformer of its era. Fruit gives you points, which you’ll need to earn extra lives outside of the actual 1-up item itself, but it also refills Bonk’s health. While Bonk begins the game with just three hearts, which shrink a little bit with each hit from an enemy or trap, he can expand his total life by finding blue heart items. These won’t fill automatically, not even after dying and coming back, and they are not retained after a game over, but they are the greatest incentive you have to try to clear this whole game on a single credit. You’ll want the extra health for the later boss fights, and the final, seventh stage, which is a boss rush that leads to the final battle.
It’s also just fun to look at and listen to. The music is good, and the sound effects are oh-so-fitting for the environments you’re playing through. The art is really what gets me, though. The Bonk games really show off what the Turbografx-16 was capable of: it had some graphical limitations compared to later fourth-generation consoles like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, sure, in the same way the Playstation 2 and GameCube graphically eclipsed the generation-opening Dreamcast. Such is the fate of the system that releases early on purpose. But in comparison to the very much still active 8-bit NES and Master System of the time? Bonk just looks stunning. Huge sprites! Smooth gameplay! None of the hitches or graphical oddities or flickering of the NES! Just look at all of the detail in this screenshot from the above embedded video:
As great as Super Mario Bros. 3 is — and it is — you weren’t finding that level of detail and color anywhere, especially not in backgrounds which were very often solid colors like sky blue and black as much as possible in order to allow the NES to produce the level of detail it was capable of. Graphics aren’t everything, of course, and as said, the Turbografx obviously made better-looking games than third-generation consoles, being a fourth-generation system: I’m simply pointing out that Bonk looked cool as hell in comparison to the competition of the time, and was a lot of fun, to boot. It might not have worked for North American audiences, in terms of Turbografx-16 sales, but the PC Engine was a certified hit in Japan, and the presence of Bonk games on the console certainly played a role in that.
Bonk’s Revenge isn’t the most available game in the world, but it’s far from unavailable. It was on the Wii’s Virtual Console, and while that’s shut down, you can still grab it on the Wii U’s store, which won’t close until the end of March 2023. It’s included in both the PC Engine and Turbografx-16 Mini consoles, and is (or at least was?) on the Japanese version of the Playstation Network, through the Playstation 3 store. Which you can still access if you really want to, though, it takes a bit of effort these days. It should be more available than it is, and not just in the sense that everything should be more available than it is. It’s a platforming classic, the high point of the series, and still tons of fun three decades later.
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