Its was a wonderful world of warriors, magic and monsters, so naturally we decided to ignore most it and instead focus on emblemizing a nightcap-wearing midget.
If you've read some of my more recent Memory Bank pieces, then you're aware that I've always been a big fan of beat-'em-up games and that they represent an important part of my gaming past. For the longest time, beat-'em-ups were my favorite type of action game, and I was lucky enough to have friends who loved them just as much as I did. In fact, some of my very best video game memories are of times when my wacky pals and I would play multiplayer-focused brawlers and endlessly laugh and banter on about the funny thoughts and ideas their characters and gameplay inspired. I'm not exaggerating when I say that each of those experiences did a whole lot to strengthen our special bond.
And let me tell you, man: There was no equivalent to the type of spirited fun that would result when you and your closest friends would get together on a summer afternoon and spend a few hours playing a wild, action-packed beat-'em-up; and when we were so engrossed in the experience that the only thing we desired to do was exuberantly commentate on the action and laugh at each other's stupid jokes, we knew that it was the best of times.
That beat-'em-ups could provide that type of fun was one of the biggest reasons why I loved them. Theirs was a special power.
Now, for most of the 1980s, I associated beat-'em-ups strictly with arcades, and I did so because (a) only arcade hardware was powerful enough to produce large-scale multi-man fighting scenes and thus the explosive, frenzied action I was looking for in my beat-'em-ups, and (b) arcades, with their bustling atmospheres, were the perfect places for games whose action was known to encourage jocular social interactions and loud, animated expressions of jubilation and disappointment.
Home consoles like the NES and the Master System simply couldn't offer that type of experience. Those of their ilk were too technologically limited to produce large-scale multi-man brawls, and their beat-'em-ups would usually fall flat because developers' typical response to the power-gap issue was to scale down the action and then try to make up the difference by ramping up the difficulty. And this misguided practice tended to produce stiff, spiritless action games that were too difficult to be fun and restrained to where they possessed little to none of their arcade inspirations' visual flair or social appeal.
"Arcades will always be the true home of beat-'em-ups," I thought. "That's where they belong."
Still, I couldn't help but be highly intrigued when my best friend, Dominick, introduced me to his newly purchased 16-bit Sega Genesis and its launch game: an arcade-style brawler called "Altered Beast" (before then, I didn't know that either product existed). As I watched Altered Beast's demo play, I was in awe of what I was observing. This was the first time I was seeing a visually and mechanically arcade-level beat-'em-up on a home console. I almost couldn't believe that on display, right there on that TV screen, was a console game that looked and played exactly like an arcade game. It was kinda surreal. (You can read more about my introduction to the Genesis and Altered Beast in this piece.)
And our subsequent play-through of the game was so immensely satisfying--and insofar so reminiscent of fun, frenzied experiences we'd typically have in arcades--that I was persuaded to think that perhaps there was a place for arcade-style beat-'em-ups on home consoles. "If what Altered Beast has shown me is any indication," I thought, "there just may be a future in which arcade experiences can be replicated in the home environment!"
I left Dominick's house that day excited about the potential for such a future.
I wasn't fully convinced, though, until one particular day in the early months of 1990. It was then when Dominick surprised me with his most recently purchased Genesis game: Golden Axe, a game with which I was entirely unfamiliar.
I remember how I read through the manual and mistakenly came to the conclusion that there were no physical or statistical differences between the three hero characters and that the only thing unique about them was their magic potential (the number of "Magic" slots available to them and the potency of the slots' associated spells). The way I saw it, though, using a character with a greater number of magic bars was inconvenient because it simply took too long to fill all of the slots! You were better served to use the Dwarf, I thought, because he reached his peak potential quicker, and thus he would have more opportunities per stage to use his best spell; and the acceleratory nature of this process would make up for the fact that his best spell was much weaker than the Barbarian and the Amazon's!
This was yet more of my incredible "video-game logic."
Really, though, I was going to use the Dwarf, anyway, simply because I thought that his attacks looked the coolest.
All the while, I was still in awe of what the game was showing me. Golden Axe, more so than Altered Beast, very much looked like the type of high-end video game I'd typically see whenever I was browsing my way through a local arcade. Its characters were large in size, finely detailed, and amazingly-well-animated. Its backgrounds, textures and environments were gorgeous-looking. Its action moved at a brisk pace. And, most importantly, it was able to render multiple characters at a time! Counting the heroes, the enemies and the rideable beasts, there was potential for there to be at least eight characters onscreen in any given scene! And that level of activity indeed produced what I was desiring to experience--that aforementioned "wild and frenzied" action!
"Now this is a true beat-'em-up!" I kept thinking as Dominick and I tossed around club-wielding grunts and giant hammer-swinging brutes.
I wasn't quite as impressed by the game's sound design, no, but I still found it to be very solid. It did what it needed to do: provide us a collection of satisfying thumps, thwacks and whomps and other sound effects that worked to convey viscerally pleasing expressions of violence!
Also, it had an awesome, wonderfully invigorating opening-stage theme! It was one of those tunes that the power to fill you with spirit, get your adrenaline pumping, and put you in the mood to smash, hammer and slam some fools!
"That's how you set the tone in a beat-'em-up," I thought to myself. "You come out swinging with your most spirited tune!"
That Stage 1 theme would stay with me forever, and it would continue to serve as one of my prime sources of nostalgia for Golden Axe--as would pretty much everything it showed me that day.
So yeah--Dominick and I were having a blast with Golden Axe. Well before we even finished the second stage, we were already in agreement that Golden Axe was one of the best console beat-'em-ups we'd ever played. In that moment, we knew that it was a special time for consoles. We could feel it in the air as we rumbled with hordes of baddies and traversed our way through some of the most visually alluring environments we'd ever seen in a home-console game.
The rest of the experience was all about experimentation and discovering new ways to have fun!
Golden Axe's best addition, I thought, was the dash attack, since it was great for getting the jump on incoming enemies and maintaining control of the battlefield's center portion, which was key in these types of games. It added a whole new dimension to beat-'em-ups, whose crowd-control options, before then, boiled down to methodically manipulating the movements of sandwiching enemies and trying to force them to cluster in a corner. The dash attack gave us a much better option; it allowed us to instead swiftly charge from one end of the battlefield to the other and in doing so instantly knock away approaching enemies and more effectively prevent them from congregating at the screen's center.
Much like Ninja Gaiden's flip-throw, Golden Axe's dash attacks were highly effective and fun to use! That's why I was apt to abuse them. Hell--there were play-throughs in which dash attacks accounted for 90% or more of my total offense! And they were such satisfying moves, too; the speed and force with which those shoulder-charges and dropkicks hit were so viscerally pleasing, and the augmenting "thud" sound effect was sweet music to the ear!
And dash attacks were even more satisfying when they sent enemies flying into bottomless pits! Because everyone knows that the single most gratifying thing you can do in a beat-'em-up is toss or knock enemies into pits! We were always looking for those opportunities. We lived for them. And Golden Axe provided them to us with great frequency. That was another reason why we loved the game.
But as I said earlier: I was immediately drawn to the Dwarf because he had that large, wicked-looking battle axe and the coolest fighting moves--including what I thought was the game's best neutral combo: a series of axe swipes followed up by a couple of pommel strikes and then a discarding front kick. For me, his having long range and the swiftest attack-execution more than made up for the fact that his magic potential was low and his spells were only marginally effective.
"It doesn't matter that your spells are weak when you have speed and the most effective crowd-control move: the long-reaching jumping axe-strike," I argued.
It helped the Dwarf's case, too, that he was the only fighter who had an exclusive move-type: a rolling strike that you could execute by pressing the attack and jump buttons simultaneously! The move was great for quickly repelling enemies that were sneaking in from behind, and that meant something in a game in which "sneaking in from behind" was pretty much every enemy type's standard tactic.
"For all of these reasons, the Dwarf is clearly the best of the three," I felt confident in saying.
I almost never used the Barbarian or the Amazon, and, really, I didn't feel bad about disregarding them. I never felt as though I was missing anything beyond a handful of cool-looking spells. So during our two-player play-throughs, I'd focus on controlling the battlefield and let Dominick, who preferred to use the magically gifted Amazon, provide the spell cover. And that's how we played Golden Axe.
We were completely enamored with Golden Axe. We couldn't stay away from it. It was one of the best console beat-'em-ups we'd ever played. Thus it quickly came to take the spot Altered Beast (whose flaws became increasingly evident to us when we started comparing the two games) in our daily ritual, and furthermore it took the mantle as our go-to console beat-'em-up. It was simply the superior game, and it represented the more successful of Sega's attempts to establish the Genesis as an arcade-level platform and in doing so provide it a hard-edged, aggressive-feeling personality.
None of this is meant to imply that we were able to capably beat Golden Axe, no. We couldn't. It was a considerably difficult game, and I'm not sure that we finished it more than once (legitimately, at least). Hell--we were lucky if we could make it to the final stage! Usually we'd have to use the secret stage-select code to access it (how Dominick and his family learned about the code, I'm not sure; I'm guessing that they read about it in a magazine).
Really, though, we never really cared about how much or how little progress we were making. We never concerned ourselves with the question of whether or not we could beat the game. No--the only thing that mattered to us was the experience; the most important thing was that Golden Axe was able to reliably provide us a good helping of top-level beat-'em-up action and do so regardless of how long or short our play-through was.
Quite simply, we'd always have a great time with Golden Axe. Playing it was always a ton of fun.
As always, the lively conversations we'd have about the game and its world were important part of the experience; they were a big part of the fun. What we enjoyed most was engaging in silly banter and therein mocking and joking about the game's deficiencies (as we did when we were playing Renegade, Ghostbusters and other games whose flaws we found comical) and game aspects that amused us. We would, for instance, imitate the enemies' stunted movements and wall-hugging mannerisms and otherwise mimic their scratchy- and oddly-disconnected-sounding death cries and voice samples; and we'd do stuff like this both while we were playing the game and out and about in the real world.
And then there were our favorite targets of mockery! Oh man--let me tell you about them!
You see: One of our favorite game elements were those brief encounters you'd have with the diminutive nightcap-wearing thieves who would suddenly run onto the screen, dart all over the place, and periodically pause their movements and do so in a way that said, "Hey, player--now would be a good time to come over and give me a good thwackin'!" If you obliged and thus delivered a shot to an idle thief, he would fly back, comically, and then drop a magic-containing pot. And for whatever reason, we found their behavior to be hilarious. Everything these little fellows did made us laugh.
In particular, we loved those between-stage sequences in which the thieves would pop in and attempt to steal our magic pots. Why, exactly, I'm not sure. All I know is that we had a weird fixation with these sequences and that the silly banter we'd routinely exchange as they were elapsing spawned the creation of a legend.
So at some point, we decided to name the game's two thief characters "Dink," since, we thought, they bore a strong resemblance to the Jawa-parodying Dinks from the movie Spaceballs, of which we were both big fans. (Spaceballs was, in fact, Dominick's all-time-favorite movie. He'd watch it every time it was airing on one of the movie channels. And because I was aware of such, I decided to buy him a VHS copy of the movie for his birthday; and I wasn't surprised to learn that he and his younger brother, Michael, watched it literally every day.)
And much like all of the other video-game characters we were always lovingly mocking (like those from Renegade, Trojan, Rygar and Altered Beast), Dink became a part of our group's culture, which is to say that we were always finding unique ways to work him into our assortment of dopey leisure activities. He was, for instance, a recurring figure in our long-running "Master Criminal" series, which was formed from newspaper images that we'd draw over and then cut out; after cutting an image out, we'd tape a small notepad paper onto its back and then print on said paper the created character's physical characteristics, special powers, and the crime(s) for which he or she was "Wanted." Dink's crime, usually, was the theft of an "important magical item."
Over time, though, the character underwent a transformation and evolved into what you see in the image above--an amalgamation of the Golden Axe thief and another one of our usual targets of mockery: New York City mayor David Dinkins, whose name, we couldn't help but observe, happened to have "Dink" in it! For that reason, we saw theirs as a natural marriage. And what did you get when you combined a thieving dwarf and a politician? Why, the ultimate magic-stealing miscreant! (I guess even at a young age we perceived politicians to be crooks.)
Though, the evolution wasn't complete, we thought, because this new Dink incarnation didn't yet have his own catchphrases! We decided that the best way to get him some was to find a character who was famous for his memorable witticisms and throw that character, too, into the mixing pot. We settled on what was of course the obvious choice: the mugger from Deja Vu.
Most famously, the mugger would get in your face and demand that you hand over "all of your money," and when you'd sock him in the face, he'd flee while yelling, "I'll be back!" For reasons I can't explain (yet again), my friends and I loved this mugger and all of his dialogue, so it made sense to us to take our favorite mugger quotes and then reshape them a bit and thus turn them into our desired Dink catchphrases! And once we did that, Dink took his true final form!
From then on, any kid who was currently pretending to be the Dink character would suddenly accost you and yell, "Give me allllllll your magic!" And when repelled in some way (usually with a fake jab), he'd flee while yelling "I'll be baaaaaack!"
Dink would make many special appearances in the future. Sometimes he'd suit up and join our imaginary wiffle-ball teams, other times he'd appear as a playable character in one of my personally created board games, and quite often he'd show up as an unkillable joke character (as played by me whenever I'd decide to suddenly channel his spirit and attempt to catch the toy-rifle-holding sheriff off guard) in our live-action renditions of Law of the West (one of my favorite Commodore 64 games).
We were strange kids, yes.
Sadly, as time went on and our lives started to move in different directions, my friends and I saw less and less of each other, and we didn't engage in group activities quite as often; and by the time 1996 rolled around, we had all but stopped playing games together. And when that happened, the era in which video games were the most relevant things in our lives came to an end; and like so many others, Golden Axe (and, of course, our friend Dink) exited our collective consciousness. Our time with it was over.
In the years after we went our separate ways, I rarely returned to Golden Axe. It just didn't call to me as much. I mean, I stilled loved the game, yeah, but whenever I'd play it, I'd always feel like something was missing and quit after a few minutes. It just wasn't the same without my friends--without the laughter and the silly banter, which were, I felt, essential parts of the Golden Axe experience.
Though, I did manage to recapture some of that magic in 2009, when my brother, James, and his step-family came in from Missouri and stayed with me for a few weeks. James brought along his Nintendo Wii, which contained a quite a few Virtual Console games (I was so surprised to learn that his step-kids, who were around 10 years old, had come to like these old games and would often play them with him). One of them was Golden Axe, of which he, too, was a fan.
We only played it a couple of times (usually during the nighttime hours when his Xbox 360 downloads were completing), yeah, but each time, we had a ton of fun with it. After so many years, it was nice to once again play Golden Axe and do so in an ideally festive setting. It was nice to enjoy lively, banter-filled evenings that were somewhat reminiscent of the ones my old pals and I used to spend together.
Though those days were very few in number, I'll remember them as fondly as any. I have to because, as I've learned, those kinds of memories come in shorter and shorter supply as you get older. So it becomes the case that you have to find them where you can and then hold them dear. And that's what I'm going to continue to do.
Since then, I've been revisiting Golden Axe with some degree of regularity (I play through it at least once every two years), and each time, I come away with the same opinion: It holds up really well; it's still a very enjoyable, very rewarding beat-'em-up. And it's a game that no fan of the genre should miss.
It has its obvious flaws, sure: Since the camera only moves forward when you're positioned near the edge of the screen, you have a very limited amount of time to react to incoming enemies, who will likely get the drop on you with their blitzing dash moves. The enemy AI is so undercooked that tracking enemies will attempt to make a beeline for you even when there are death pits directly in front of them, and consequently they'll mindlessly walk themselves into said death pits. And stage length is very inconsistent, with some stages being so short (about two or three screens in length) that they can hardly be called "stages"! Their meager length will have you thinking that Golden Axe's claiming to be "eight stages long" is pure embellishment. Really, it would have been fine had the developers combined a few stage-sets and chopped the stage number down to five or six, either of which would still have been a satisfactory number. (I have to say, though: Considering how short the game actually is, I'm not sure how my friends and I weren't able to consistently beat it. It must have been that we sucked at it.)
In the grand scheme, though, these flaws don't amount to much. None of them serve to make the game any less enjoyable. No--they're at best minor shortcomings, and, unquestionably, they're far outweighed by the game's good points.
Truly, Golden Axe has a lot going for it: It controls well. Its action is both fun and satisfying. It contains some wonderfully unique elements (a magic system that allows for the use of cool spells, the most spectacular of which summon raging infernos and huge fire-breathing dragons; and the ability to ride on and command saddled creatures--dragons and reptiles that can breathe flames, spew fireballs, and deliver tail-whips). It offers a fair challenge. And it has to it such a strong nostalgia factor--an early-era-Genesis vibe that's more powerfully absorbing and more transportive than even Altered Beast's; the moment its music meets your ears, you'll be instantly transported back to 1989, and your only thoughts will be of those summer days when you and your friends used to gather into the den and spend hours joyously playing all of your Genesis favorites.
These are the qualities that make Golden Axe an all-time classic.
Over the years, I've seen many a person express that Golden Axe isn't a great game because it's "too short," and I've always responded to that type of critic with the same argument: I tell them that they're missing the point--that "lengthy" is not synonymous with "great."
Golden Axe's length isn't "short," I say; it's "just right" or, more accurately, "exactly what it needs to be." Golden Axe is, after all, a game that was designed to do a job: deliver a fun, satisfying action experience and do so within an ideal time frame (somewhere between 20-25 minutes). And it does that job very well. It does it so well, in fact, that it always leaves you wanting more. So you keep returning to it. And each time you do, it gives you exactly what you need. That's what a "great" game does.
That's what it did for us back in the day. Whenever we desired to entertain ourselves with a half hour's worth of fun-filled, stimulating beat-'em-up action, we'd turn to Golden Axe, and on every such occasion, it would deliver to us exactly what we were looking for. In addition, as a special bonus, it would inspire us to engage in in the types of blissful banter and fun activities that would always serve to strengthen our friendship.
That's why it was one of our favorites.
In those early years, the Genesis was, to me, "the beat-'em-up machine," and Golden Axe was one of the games that helped it to become the king of that space. And because Golden Axe was so good at what it did, it served to provide us some of the most memorable experiences we ever had with the console. And we'd never forget what it meant to the Genesis, to the beat-'em-up genre, and to our personal gaming culture.
Isn't that right, Dink?
Dink: "Give me allllllllll your magic!"
Mr. P: "No." [strikes Dink in the face with an axe pommel]
Dink: "I'll be baaaaaaaaack!"
You damn well better.
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