Nintendo's little gem of a puzzle-platformer helped to accelerate the rise of "arcade-like" games.
So it was the early-summer period of 1986, and there I was, at my friend Dominick's house, becoming further acquainted with the NES ("the Nintendo," as we called it) and its uniquely-flavored games. I don't recall when, exactly, I first discovered the NES, nor do I remember who introduced me to the console, but I can say with certainty that it was Dominick who did the most to immerse me in its world and familiarize me with its library. Every time I'd go over to his house, he'd excitedly introduce me to a game I hadn't seen before and then happily teach me how to play it.
On this particular day, he was hyped to showcase for me a game called "Wrecking Crew," his latest purchase.
The name didn't ring a bell. I'd never heard of such a game, nor had I ever heard anything about Mario appearing in game that wasn't related to either the Donkey Kong or Mario Bros./Super Mario Bros. series.
"Why is a big-name character like Mario starring in a second-tier-lookin' game like this?" I wondered to myself in a dismissive tone as I examined the box's pixelated imagery. "I mean, it's probably not anything special."
But when we began to play it, my attitude quickly changed. Immediately I was intrigued by what I was seeing on that TV screen. My first thought was that Wrecking Crew's presentation and visual style were highly reminiscent of those that were on display in Gyromite, a game for which I had a fondness (Dominick and I had been playing it routinely ever since he introduced me to it earlier in the year). And when the action commenced, I found that it also featured a pretty interesting concept: clear a stage by destroying every object in sight! "That's something new!" I thought.
Wrecking Crew had a nice look, its wall-demolishing mechanics were inventive, its gameplay was easy to intuit, and it was a lot of fun to play! Instantly it reminded me of my favorite Commodore 64 arcade-style platformers, all of which contributed something distinctly new to the single-screen-platforming genre. Those that did so successfully were the best arcade-style platformers around!
Though, around that time, I'd started to feel uncomfortable with using the term "arcade-style" to describe games of their ilk because, really, I didn't think that it applied very well. In examining those games closely, I came to realize that theirs was a divergent quality that set them apart in some way, though I wasn't yet linguistically intelligent enough to explain what that quality was or how, exactly, it rendered them incompatible with the term. So all I could do was use overly simplistic language and say that "they look a lot like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros., yeah, but they're, like, somehow different."
What I wanted to express was that games like Gyromite, Wrecking Crew, Trolls and Tribulations and Toy Bizarre were born from existing arcade-platformer design philosophies, yes, but they were modified to embrace the disparate values of their respective platforms. Basically their developers infused them with customized elements that were designed to make them more palatable to people who grew up on console and computer games--to people who were either intimidated by arcade games or just plain bad at them.
Developers like Nintendo realized that pure arcade games weren't a particularly good fit for home platforms, since they were often cruelly designed and extremely punishing, so they decided to create consolized variants of them or what I like to call "arcade-like" games, a more-accessible type.
"Now wait a minute," you object, feeling somewhat perplexed. "What are these so-called 'differences' that apparently make 'arcade-like' games 'divergent' from standard arcade games? They seem the same to me!"
Well, there's a simple explanation: Think of an "arcade-like" game as the genetically-altered offspring of its coin-op progenitors. On the surface, it bears a close resemblance to them, yes, but at the core-level, it exhibits key variances. Such variances can range from (a) the elimination or deemphasizing of time- or health-limits to (b) the injection of puzzle elements or any such features that afford players the leeway to remain idle and meticulously examine stage layouts (if an arcade game were to ever include such a feature, it would strike us as something highly uncharacteristic).
When he hear the term arcade-style, we immediately think of a game that provides us a very limited number of lives and then makes the unreasonable demand that we earn a high score by advancing through stages that were designed to kill us off as quickly as possible. An arcade-like game, in contrast, provides us tools that allow us to survive for long periods of time and awards us high-score status if we can use those tools to capably clear series of complexly designed stages whose difficulty-progression is logically, reasonably incremented.
In short, "arcade-like" games were something new: consolized variants of arcade games. And Wrecking Crew was one of the best of this emerging breed.
I was drawn to Wrecking Crew because I loved games of its type--those that featured a well-balanced mix of platforming action and puzzle-solving. I was weaned on their kind. I grew up playing weird and wonderful Commodore 64 puzzle-platformers like Hard Hat Mack, Dino Eggs and Cliff Hanger. And I adored all of them. Games of their ilk helped to establish puzzle-platforming as my favorite genre of video game. So Wrecking Crew was right up my alley.
And it so happened to be that Wrecking Crew was just as good as any of the aforementioned. It featured smooth, flowing platforming action and some of the best puzzle design I'd ever seen in a game. I greatly enjoyed playing it. At the time, it was my favorite NES game.
I was so fond of Wrecking Crew, in fact, that I made sure to grab myself a copy of the game when I became an NES-owner later on in the decade. I picked it up during the summer of 1989, when my father rewarded me for a painting job (my brother and I painted the three-family house in which my aunt and grandmother and some family friends lived) by buying me some NES games. I acquired it alongside Balloon Fight, Ice Climber and a couple of others.
Now, I know what you're thinking: You suspect that I picked up Wrecking Crew for the same reason I picked up Balloon Fight, Ice Climber and many of the other NES games I've talked about on this blog--that I only wanted it because at the time I was deep into my "copycat" phase in which I desired to own any game that I'd played at a friend or cousin's house. Well, reader, you're completely wrong in that thinking. To the contrary: I added Wrecking Crew to my collection because I considered it to be one of the best puzzle-platformers in existence ... and because I'd played it at a friend's house. Oh, and also because it had Mario in it.
Get it right, man. Geez.
So now that I've talked it up for so long, I suppose I should explain to you why, specifically, I found it to be such a wonderfully compelling game. Well, first there was the objective: clear the screen of all objects and then move on to the next screen. That, I felt, was the best formula for video games. To me, there was nothing as fun or as rewarding as negotiating your way around infested spaces and using your special abilities to clear them of all danger. That was exactly the type of challenge I was looking for in my games. And if such a game also demanded that I solve puzzles along the way, then all the better; I loved to think my way through challenges--to be engaged on that level.
Wrecking Crew offered all of that: It demanded that I demolish different types of walls and structures and do so in a calculated fashion. It wasn't quite that simple, of course: At the same time, you had deal with a number of troubling issues. For one, you had to find a way to contend with and outwit groups of relentlessly-pursuant enemies. They came in three types, each of which had an observable pattern: The red wrench-shaped creatures ("Gotchawrenches") gravitated toward Mario's current position and always did so by taking the most direct path. Purple wrench-shaped creatures did the same, only they moved much faster. And the bipedal Eggplant Men (again--what is it with Japanese developers and eggplants?) continuously moved in one direction and climbed any ladder they came across.
Then there was the worst of the lot--an absolute terror of a foe called Foreman Spike, whose job was to "supervise" Mario's (or Luigi's, if you were playing in the game's two-player mode) activities by running constant interference. Spike could mimic all of Mario's movements and actions, and he'd use his advanced A.I. to spite Mario at every turn. Mainly, he'd hammer away at any wall or structure in front of which Mario was currently positioned and do so with the intention of destroying it and knocking the prone Mario down to the screen's ground level. And because he occupied the background plane and was thus partly obscured by standing walls and structures, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of where he was. Though, regardless of whether or not you could pinpoint his location, he still represented the same threat; at any point he could screw up your timing, knock you down to an inescapable lower level, or render a puzzle unsolvable by demolishing an object that needed to remain standing.
Thankfully he didn't appear in every stage.
I'm tellin' you, man: It was always a great relief when the game previewed a stage and Spike was noticeably absent from it. I couldn't stand that meddlesome little bugger.
Also, there was the issue of Mario's limited maneuverability. Really, this wasn't the cat we knew from Super Mario Bros. or even vanilla Mario Bros., no; this incarnation of Mario couldn't dash along the ground or leap over enemies; rather, all he could do was walk along the ground at a consistent speed and climb ladders. So you had no choice but to take stock of the enemies and cautiously plan your route, lest you'd become trapped between groups of critters.
Additionally, you had to make sure not to cut off your own accessibility. You couldn't refrain from observing a stage's structuring and just hammer away all willy-nilly, no; you had find opportunity to inspect the entire screen and suss out potential trouble spots--spaces you wouldn't be to access or escape from if certain objects (destructible ladders, usually) were demolished prematurely. And this is what comprised Wrecking Crew's intriguing puzzle element. Your task, it said, was to find the correct order of operations and do so while under pressure. That, to me, was an ideal combination of gameplay elements.
Though, Mario wasn't completely without adequate recourse. He could escape from danger by climbing ladders, as mentioned, and also by crossing through a level's border and warping his way to the other side of the screen, Mario Bros.-style. In the most desperate of situations, he could also escape by striking a bomb and allowing himself to get caught in the blast, doing which sent him flying down to the stage's bottom level. And he'd survive both the blast and the drop because his Wrecking Crew-era incarnation was apparently impervious to explosions and his leg strength had improved dramatically since his Donkey Kong days. That's what Dominick and I theorized.
And you also had to consider the nature of the game's structures: Each type functioned differently and could withstand varying amounts of hammer-strikes. First there were the destructible walls: Wooden panels shattered in one hit while the sturdier light- and dark-gray brick walls required two and three hits, respectively. You couldn't clear the stage without demolishing all of them. Then there were the white ladders, which offered Mario a means of transport, yes, but also had to be demolished at some point--at times when destroying them wouldn't rob you of access to certain levels.
Otherwise, there were the "props," as the game's manual termed them: (1) Gold ladders, whose only purpose was to provide accessibility to higher and lower levels. (2) Steel pillars, destroying which would cause the objects they were supporting to drop down a level. (3) Bombs, which would explode after being struck and destroy any blocks, or any rows of blocks, that were adjacent to it; their blasts, also, would send both in-proximity enemies and Mario Bros. flying down to the screen's ground level. (4) Green doors, which when open would send any passing enemy into the background plane, where it'd become a harmless silhouette. And (5) barrels, which couldn't be destroyed; they were merely obstructions.
Part of the fun was figuring out how to use these "props" to your advantage. I'd learn how to do so over time, as per Dominick's guidance.
There were no time-limits, no, but the game had a way to keep you from idling about for two long. It had Mario Bros.-like fireballs, which would appear periodically, on whichever level you were currently occupying, and wave their way across the screen. If you wanted to avoid it, you had to quickly flee to an upper or lower level. Though, if you were daring enough to attempt as much, you could otherwise dodge a fireball by running beneath it the moment it began to arc upward; but anyone who ever successfully pulled off this trick knew that dodging a fireball required a high degree of concentration and very specific timing. Unless you were in a position where you had no choice but to do so, it was never advisable to get anywhere near fireballs.
I was never sure what the interval between fireball appearances was, no, but I did discover a method for correctly anticipating said appearances: Their spawning always coincided with the sounding of certain musical notes. Within a few days of playing Wrecking Crew, I could accurately predict when the fireballs would appear just by closely listening to the music (it helped that the game only had a single stage theme). Being able to do this made me feel as though I were some sort of prodigy. I mean, my friends couldn't seem to do it, so obviously there was something special about me!
Or it could have been that I'd chosen to hang around complete idiots.
I'll let you be the judge of that.
As was typical of games of its type, Wrecking Crew allowed you start the action on any of its 100 stages. So if you Game Overed in a stage, you could immediately return to it, though your score would of course reset. This was fine with me; since Wrecking Crew wasn't one of those games that awarded you 1ups when you reached certain milestones (10,000 points; 20,000 points; or whatever), I never really concerned myself with the score. The only thing I cared about was being able to pick up the action right where I left off. "If only my Commodore 64 favorites let me do that," I'd always think.
The game did award 1ups, yes, but it would only do so whenever you were able to uncover all five letters of Mario's name in sequential order (M-A-R-I-O). Though, accomplishing as much wasn't a matter of discovering where each letter was hidden and then simply demolishing the respective objects in the correct order, no; rather, Wrecking Crew's was an arcane system wherein the next letter in the order wouldn't show up at all if you failed to demolish objects in a very specific order right from the start. None of us could ever figure out how it worked (hell--I can barely grasp it now). This was an aspect of the game we simply ignored.
Also, in continuing the tradition, the game regularly granted you access to a bonus stage; you'd be sent to one after completing a stage whose number was a multiple of four. In these timed challenges, you could earn up to 10,000 bonus point for being the first to uncover a hidden coin; you'd get 5,000 points for finding it before the bonus timer's countdown began and 10,000 points (the "Super Bonus") for finding it behind the very first wall you demolished. Your opponent, naturally, was Spike, who would try to ruin it for you by tearing up the opposite side of the screen in an attempt to uncover it before you could; if he succeeded in doing so, you'd be robbed of a bonus.
I beat Spike to the coin about 95% of the time, I'd say. I was able to do so by putting into practice a theory that appeared to hold water: Prior to its being hidden, the coin would whip back and forth across the screen, directly over the row of destructible walls. After completing the bonus round a number of times, I noticed that in each round the coin was hidden behind a wall that was positioned four or five tiles to the left or right of the space where the whipping coin vanished and usually on the side toward which the coin was heading.
So it's either that I broke the code or that I was extremely lucky. I may never know for sure.
I'll let you decide if you should care about any of that.
And those were the ingredients that produced a mighty fine little dish called Wrecking Crew, which was one of my all-time-favorite arcade-like platformers. I held it in high regard because it did so well to combine two equally appealing elements: fast-paced, flowing arcade action and a puzzle-solving aspect that invited me to think about what I was doing--to plan out my path of destruction! That's what the best arcade-like games did: They captured the spirit of their arcade progenitors while removing many of their unfortunate barriers, thus providing you an experience that was yours to shape.
And because Wrecking Crew possessed the spirit of an arcade game, it was one of those that was best enjoyed in a social environment, where every line of banter served to positively augment the experience in some way. That's why I always made sure to play it with a group of friends--those with whom I could (a) exchange bad puns, (b) co-develop strategies, and (c) share theories as to where and how Wrecking Crew fit into the Mario Bros. canon, which we all believed to exist.
I, much more than any of my friends, was fascinated by Wrecking Crew's portrayal of Mario. "How did a circus-trainer-turned-plumber wind up becoming a construction worker?" I'd wonder.
Back then, in the days before Nintendo casually dismissed any notion that there was a continuity or a canon to the Mario series, it was fun to wonder about the character's past. I can recall how I used to frequently draw up timelines of his life and try to piece together when, exactly, he settled into all of these odd jobs and how all of it led to his becoming a plumber who got sucked down a drain. "Was he a construction worker before he served as an operator at the cement factory?" I'd try to determine. "And where do his officiating duties fit into this?"
I continued to think about such things until Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario's creator, revealed that there was no connection--that each Mario game was akin to a self-contained episode of Popeye. At that point, none of it mattered anymore. Nintendo had successfully removed all of the wonder and mystery and destroyed everything we ever imagined. It's a shame that the company chose to do that.
Still, none of that changes that my friends and I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how it all fit together.
As usual, though, I had the most fun when I played Wrecking Crew with Dominick, my closest friend. It was he who taught me all of the tricks and helped me to become an expert Wrecking Crew player. He showed me how you could trap enemies in barrels and thus permanently remove them from the picture. How you could set up bomb combos and thus destroy multiple rows of walls in one shot. How you could freeze time by tricking a string of four enemies into passing through an open green door. And, most importantly, how you could strike bombs in a specific order and thus call forth the mighty Golden Hammer (the "Super Hammer," as we called it), which could destroy any wall in one hit and, if you could time your strike correctly, send adjacently-positioned enemies flying down to the stage's bottom level.
In truth, we only knew how to call forth the Golden Hammer in Phase 6, so after obtaining it there, we'd always try our hardest to hold onto it for as long as possible (if ever we uncovered a Golden Hammer in some other stage, it was purely by accident). Hell--we'd grab it if only to hear its accompanying theme, which was both lively and empowering. We really dug this tune. We'd be sad when it stopped playing--when inevitably we'd die horribly. Its loss signaled the end of the party.
Though, neither of us knew that the Golden Hammer also granted you the ability to hover across empty space, which you could do by rapidly swinging the hammer while holding left or right. But how would we have known about it, really? Nothing of the sort was mentioned in the manual. The manual's designer must have neglected to include such information. Or maybe the localization team decided to leave it out.
I wouldn't know about it for another 19 years--until 2008, when it appeared in Super Smash Bros. Brawl as an item. Its description stated that you can float in midair if you press the attack button repeatedly. "How did I not know that?" I wondered upon reading it. It was one of times when I was momentarily paralyzed by the shock of suddenly discovering that a game I'd been playing for decades had more depth to it than I knew. The best games often possess that quality; there's always more to them than you know.
Another thing I liked about Wrecking Crew was its feeling of rawness. It had that launch-game air to it--that quality of being unapologetically experimental. It was well-made, certainly, but also rough around the edges; though, those unpolished elements didn't so much blemish it as much as they served to provide it some curious personality quirks.
You could say that Wrecking Crew had a few underdeveloped aspects. If you trapped yourself in a barrel, for instance, the game was over--not in a clearly communicated "You lost. Please try again!" kind of way, no, but instead in an undeclared "Nice softlock, pal. Now you're screwed!" fashion. You see: The developers forgot to program in a self-destruct command, so if you got trapped in a barrel, you were permanently stuck; your only option was to press the Select button and return to the title screen (alternatively you could also hit the NES' reset button, which was out of the question for us because the NES was, like, all the way over there). If the price of getting softlocked was the resetting of our scores, then it was no big deal, but if such an event put us in a position where we had to abruptly end our game at a time when one of us was in possession of a Golden Hammer, then we'd get pissed. The best solution, we learned, was to extremely cautious around barrel-supporting pillars.
Also, inexplicably, certain stages could only be cleared by using exploits like the one that allowed you to gain temporary invulnerability by positioning yourself atop a ladder at the point where it overlapped with the level barrier; this would render you immune from enemies that were marching along overhead. I would never have been able to clear these stages had Dominick not informed me of said exploits. I still wonder how he learned of them. At the time, I never thought to ask.
And then there was the "Design Mode," which allowed you to create up to four of your own Wrecking Crew stages! "This is pretty neat," I thought to myself when Dominick first showcased this mode for me.
The only problem was that the mode's "save" option was completely nonfunctional. It didn't work because the Wrecking Crew cartridge didn't contain a save battery (this was a consequence of Nintendo converting a writable disk game into a cartridge game and not supplying the latter a comparable save component). The game's manual noted that the save function didn't work but (deceitfully, it seemed) spoke of a "potential product development" that would one day make it operable. I'm sure that progress is being made in that front.
But I wasn't angry about any of this, no. I saw these quirks as essential aspects of Wrecking Crew; they helped to imbue it with that wonderfully raw feel that I looked for in my launch games.
That may sound like misguided apologism to you, and, well, it kinda is. But what can I say? I can't help but love foundational games and their odd quirks.
Wrecking Crew's "Design Mode" actually taught me a lot about myself and my creative aptitude. Mainly, I discovered that I wasn't capable of rendering scenes that were complexly or irregularly structured (read: interesting). My mind wouldn't let me; it would stamp out any conceptualization of chaotically arranged or multidimensional stage layouts and force me to create those that were instead highly systematized (like the spiraling maze I was always sure to make) or sickeningly symmetrical. Take a look at the screenshots above to see what I'm talking about.
Above all, I learned that game design just wasn't in the cards for an OCD-afflicted freak like me. Trying to think asymmetrically was too stressful. I just couldn't do it. So over the years I largely avoided games' create-a-stage modes. The only exception was my brief dabbling in Doom-wad creation, though, of course, every one of my stages contained nothing but thirty to forty rows of neatly arranged enemies, with all rows lined up in size order.
You should play them sometime.
In my early-Internet years--at some point in the year 2000--I was excited to discover that Wrecking Crew had a sequel. It was an obscure Super Famicom game called Wrecking Crew '98. "I can't believe I didn't know about this!" I said to myself. "I can't wait to experience some updated Wrecking Crew action!"
Though, I was immediately disappointed when I learned that it was instead a competitive block-dropping puzzle game in the vein of Wario's Woods and thus nothing close to an arcade-like puzzle-platformer. I played it for about ten minutes before permanently abandoning it. I just couldn't get into it: Its action was too involved, and there was never a clear indication as to what I was supposed to be doing (it didn't help that all of the text was written in Japanese). I came away thinking that Wrecking Crew '98 was one of the most perplexing, inaccessible block-dropping puzzlers I'd ever played.
Not that anything would have changed had I been able to grasp the concept; no--I still would have considered it to be just as bland and uninteresting. The original Wrecking Crew deserved a better sequel--one that was much more faithful to it. (The original Wrecking Crew is included on the cartridge, though it's poorly emulated; it's too darkly colored and its audio has a compressed-sounding quality.)
Well, at least there were other newly discovered games to which I could turn--treasures like Rockman & Forte and Beyond Shadowgate, both of which, contrarily, had a lot more respect for their predecessors.
Also, I still had access to the original Wrecking Crew, which was still as compelling as ever. "So what if it never got a true sequel," I thought. "The original is enough on its own. I can play it forever."
So far, that opinion is holding up: It's 2014, and still I'm playing it on a regular basis. And my old routine hasn't changed: I load up Wrecking Crew with the intention of clearing its first few stages--of getting a small-yet-reliably satiating taste of its action--but wind up playing through the entire game in a handful of separate sessions. Once I'm engaged, I just can't stop myself; the game is too damn addicting!
And whenever I'm fully immersed in Wrecking Crew, I always make sure to take a moment to reminisce about our first days together. I make sure to drink in its charmingly simple sights and sounds and let them work their magic--let them permeate my soul and evoke memories of the early years, when I'd play Wrecking Crew on that quiet little corner on 85th Street--at Dominick's house, which I'll forever associate with this game.
Thanks, buddy, for introducing me to it (and to so many others).
That's my story with Wrecking Crew--one of the best arcade-like puzzle-platformers ever made and a perennial contender for the medium's "tragically overlooked/underrated" award. It doesn't carry the cultural weight of Mario's big NES adventures, no, but it's still worthy of being recognized as one of the mustachioed hero's most classic works. At the least, it should be credited for doing a fine job in helping to shape an emerging genre of action game and therein the NES' very foundation.
For me, Wrecking Crew was just as foundational. It was the first unforgettably great arcade-like game I'd ever played. It helped me to fall in love with the NES, which would go on to become my all-time favorite platform. And it provided me many in the way of indelible, treasured memories.
It was, you could say, one of my gaming DNA's most important building blocks.
Indeed Wrecking Crew is part of my genetic code, and it'll remain as such for as long as I live.
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