Unreleased Hockey Role Playing Games
Despite whatever preconceptions you may have about their audiences, there has long been a connection, if uneasy, between sports and role playing games. Typically—if you are willing to indulge the oversimplification—they are based on abstractions of warfare. (The difference between a die roll and a touchdown pass is significant, sure, but they are a distillation of the base elements of combat: territory conquered, enemies defeated by physical dominance, local, regional and national pride, and so on.) Both are heavily stats-driven, leading dedicated fans and players to scour for inefficiencies in the underlying math. Both augment their quantitative side with a storytelling layer, using the data in service of narratives of player and character advancement. Both fanbases love cosplay.
Today, fantasy sports are an entrenched marriage of the two, accounting for a multi-billion dollar industry with an estimated reach in the tens of millions. However there has long been some common ground; early sports/game adaptations go back centuries. Writing for The National Baseball Hall of Fame, Rick Burton notes several baseball board and card games dating back to the early 1900s, including “cards, dice, spinners, die-cut stadiums and miniature paper figurines meant to represent in-the-field players or base runners.” (Burton also cites early home versions involving pinball flippers dating back to the 1860s, not far removed from the advent of the sport itself.) Games that began to incorporate actual player stats followed, including 1930’s National Pastime, a board game featuring cards based on real players. Rotisserie Baseball—the direct predecessor to modern fantasy sports, using box scores as data points—was established in the early 1980s.
For video games, both sides of the divide (sports and RPGs, nerd games and jock games) also began to find some common ground. Modern day sports games now offer modes that are functionally role playing games, part of a larger trend in game development to add depth to action-oriented games using traditional RPG mechanics: experience points, skill trees, buffs and debuffs, etc.
But even in the NES days the distinction was starting to blur. While launch-era Baseball was an action-forward distillation of the sport’s basics, a few years later games like Major League Baseball and Bases Loaded would introduce player stats and roster management. Other sports saw similar evolutions. Tecmo in particular pushed the boundaries with its league sports sims such as basketball (Tecmo NBA Basketball) and football (Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl), incorporating real players with personalized stats.
Hockey games on the NES, though, seemed to follow a different trajectory. The games best regarded either used national teams (Nintendo’s Ice Hockey), or made-up teams (Blades of Steel). While there were later games that attempted to incorporate NHL players, and a little more simulation depth, they were largely forgotten. The defining hockey games for the system tended to embrace an elemental, arcadey simplicity.
Why that is the case probably involves a larger set of questions about the geography of game development in the NES era, hockey’s lesser status among North America’s major sports leagues and the animated nature of the sport itself. Perhaps there’s an inherent slapstick to a sport full of collisions, falling and fighting that caught the attention of the period’s developers. These elements would translate to early video game hardware better than, say, the intricacies of line changes and power play rotation.
It’s interesting that as the NES aged, and advanced cartridge technology allowed for deeper gameplay systems, hockey game developers weren’t uniformly pushing for more accurate simulations of the real game. Instead, there was a brief moment where this heightened, comic understanding of the sport served as the basis for games with deeper, but seemingly mismatched, genre hallmarks. In 1993 a pair of unrelated (and ultimately unreleased) games prepared to combine arcade hockey with classic RPG mechanics: Crash ‘n’ the Boys Ice Challenge and Hit the Ice.
Crash ‘n’ the Boys Ice Challenge
Release date: 1993 (unreleased)
Developer/Publisher: Technos
Hit the Ice
Release date: 1993 (unreleased)
Developer/Publisher: Taito
Crash ‘n’ the Boys: Ice Challenge
The Kunio-kun series has a long history in Japan, only sporadically appearing in the West with a variety of titles and publishers. It’s centered on high school student Kunio, a greaser-era throwback who has a penchant for beating the shit out of people. The series began with the Arcade brawler Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, later ported to the Famicom and localized for the NES as Renegade. It took an immediate swerve with Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball Bu, a dodgeball tournament sim translated as Super Dodge Ball, then building on Renegade’s rough draft with Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, known elsewhere as River City Ransom or Street Gangs.
These two games set the template for most of the series: either Kunio was wronged in some way (often a kidnapped girlfriend) and was tasked with brawling his way through a series of teen gangs, or he is the cornerstone of one of Nekketsu High School’s many varsity sports. After Super Dodge Ball most of the series used River City Ransom as a foundation, both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay. Regardless of the sport, many of the later games maintained River City’s Ransom’s fighting mechanics.
The Famicom had about seven of these Kunio sports games, including everything from dodgeball to basketball, track and field, and soccer (twice). A few of these games never made it out of Japan: the excellent Nekketsu! Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes is an insane reimagining of basketball with melee weapons and three hoops stacked on top of each other, while Downtown Nekketsu Kōshinkyoku: Soreyuke Daiundōkai remixes River City Ransom into a linear footrace, something like parkour with more assault and some light breaking and entering. The ones that did make it over were scattered between publishers in a way that suggested no shared history. Super Dodge Ball was published by Sony Imagesoft and Nintendo World Cup (Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball Bu: Soccer Hen) was a first-party release.
River City Ransom’s US publisher, American Technos, later released the track and field entry Bikkuri Nekketsu Shin Kiroku! Harukanaru Kin Medal as Crash ‘n’ the Boys: Street Challenge in 1992. This appeared to be their attempt at brand consolidation for the Western audience, as the Kunio hockey game Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey Bu: Subette Koronde Dairantō was announced as Crash ‘n’ the Boys: Ice Challenge for release in May 1993. Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power both ran previews with images of an English localization, EGM calling it, “One of the best NES hockey games ever!” while Nintendo Power dismissed it as “simplified” and “not very challenging.” All the same, Ice Challenge’s release appeared certain. EGM’s preview claimed it was “99%” complete.
Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey Bu: Subette Koronde Dairantō gets mangled by machine translation, but it’s something in the spirit of Go Go! Hot-blooded Hockey Club: Slip and Slide Brawl. (As a rule, Famicom games always had the better titles.) It has a versus mode that supports up to four players, but the default is a story mode that sees Kunio-kun—fresh off of his success with the dodgeball club—approached by a member of Nekketsu High School’s crappy hockey team. They are desperate for his help. A quick scrimmage proves their point; after breezing through a tutorial match, the game’s story mode begins. Kunio’s team takes on a series of rival clubs who are defined by non-hockey pursuits: kendo, cheerleading, baseball, American football, and so on.
After defeating each club, Kunio’s team gains access to their uniforms. Switching equipment between games affects your baseline stats; each uniform has its own unique attack and defense numbers, as well as a special move that can be performed by attacking in the middle of a jump.
That’s right—jump. Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey Bu: Subette Koronde Dairantō (or for the sake of brevity, Ice Challenge) is built upon River City Ransom’s foundation. The controls are similar: B and A together jumps (while in the air, A swings your stick, B performs the special move). On defense both A and B check, although checking in this game is more like a two-handed slash, carried over from River City Ransom’s pipes and baseball bats.
Offense is a little trickier, and is—other than the mid-air special attacks—what separates Ice Challenge’s on-ice action from other hockey games. B is a standard shot. Hold it long enough and your stick will start to flash, powering up a slap shot that can bowl through opponents. The A button, rather than a conventional pass, sort of flips the puck in the air a short distance. Players can use this move to avoid defenses, but the game invites you to flip the puck up, jump, then time a shot from mid air—sort of a one-man one timer. In theory you could use the A button to attempt to dump and chase, but Ice Challenge has its own logic that is resistant to actual hockey strategy. (Though if you’re really dedicated, you could use this move to attempt something akin to the Michigan.)
This would be enough for an endearing game—an offbeat but inventive take on the sport that has little interest in realism—but Ice Challenge wants you to consider the numbers underpinning all of this. Each team has five players and four roster spots (a simplified line of center, wing and defenseman, plus a goalie). Every character in the game has a unique name, appearance and set of stats, including HP, power and speed. The story mode’s difficulty is on a sharp curve, and in order to keep winning you’ll need to be wary of how you manage these assets. Lines have to be set and reconfigured before each period, and it’s a balancing act to determine if a character’s high HP, for example, would be better suited for offense or defense. In-game players will begin to wear down if they take too much abuse, so it’s vital to keep their lines rotated. The uniform system provides one more layer of strategy, adding stat boosts and special move efficiency as considerations.
OK fine—is any of this really a role playing game? Maybe I’m stretching the term a bit. It wasn’t uncommon to find NES sports games with roster management (especially baseball sims). The hockey games we did get were almost exclusively action-oriented. Compared to something like Ice Hockey or Blades of Steel, the mere presence of player stats makes this feel like Wizardry.
I think that Ice Challenge sits in something of a gray area, not unlike the Be a Pro modes in modern sports games. There are plenty of what get classified, nowadays, as RPG elements: named characters with unique stats; a focus on how those characters are positioned in action; equipment management; an overarching story told through between-mission cutscenes; etc. The game has hit points. While it lacks the overworld map and item shopping you would associate with a classic console RPG, the segmented ‘combat’ and roster management screens—with a pause to place characters in position according to their abilities—start to resemble the nascent Tactical RPG genre. Fire Emblem’s Famicom debut predated Ike Ike! by only two years.
(Also it’s worth noting that Ice Challenge’s Famicom basketball successor, Nekketsu! Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes, goes a bit further in the classic RPG direction with an overworld map and towns offering items and ability upgrades. Its title roughly translates to Hot-blooded! Street Basket: Go For It Dunk Heroes—again, Famicom games got the cool names.)
Granted, I could be full of shit. Get a few beers in me and I’ll defend Madden Football as a turn-based tactics game. (It sort of is!) But if Ice Challenge’s RPG merits are debatable, Taito’s abandoned Hit the Ice port leaves absolutely no doubt.
Hit the Ice image by The Arcade Flyer Archive, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13011928