Blasts From the Pasts I
All right, gents and dames, my first foray in the vicious, nostalgic amphitheater that is Gravity Beetle. There are enough bloggers out there to teeter on the bleeding edge of gaming culture and spit out pithy remarks, and thus, I will spare you one more. It’s here I’d like to bring attention to the games that weren’t under the radar, they were somewhere else entirely.
The 80’s and 90’s experienced an extremely dense influx of games, in a time before the resolution of the game could hide a lot of cut corners in the graphics department. Even the most staggeringly uncreative developing houses were forced to deliberate and piece together a coherent and recognizable atmosphere in order to draw in players, and, subsequently, quarters. Many times this simply lead to overly blasé and minimalistic abuse of common arcade stock stereotypes. Airplanes flying around and shooting bigger airplanes. Medieval stock characters with swords and magic stiffly slashing at stock medieval villains like dragons and… Dragons.
But sometimes developers try to carve their own stylistic path instead of succumbing to the ease of assuming these thin, overused skins. The results can be explosively interesting.
And that is why I’d like to dedicate my first blog post to the infinitely baffling Hard Head series.
The first game in the saga is Hard Head, which mysteriously fell from the gaping asshole of the elusive SunA Electronics in 1988. The golden age of arcades was interesting in the fact that there were countless developers that slinked onto the scene to make a quick buck off America’s fever that only quarters could cure, only to immediately fade into the darkness after sometimes only one game. It was also rife with rampant bootlegging, hacks, and other uncredited use, as well as extremely limited cabinet releases and other delights. This, predictably, constituted the biggest technological clusterfuck in the history of mankind, making it impossible to procure any information about games from developers that aren’t still around nowadays. An hour of scouring the net with Google bore next to no fruit, and I’m disappointed to say I have nothing on SunA. Which is genuinely disheartening when a single game raises so many questions.
Hard Head starts out innocently enough. The title screen is a bit tacky, what with its clashing technicolor palette and somewhat unusual font, but for the era it occupied such a title screen is hardly outstanding in any way. The real magic begins when you answer its plea for quarters.
Upon pressing the start button we’re treated to a brief cutscene of our hero, the titular Hard Head (as well as a palette swap of himself, a clone/brother for co-op play), following what we can presume to be a love interest, underneath an unsettlingly long road map of the game’s stages. The girl gives him a saucy peck (which probably felt like smooching an upright beluga) and bids him farewell, or, rather, “BYE! BYE”.
This is the extent of the game’s exposition. While it does offer more insight than many arcade games that thrust you right into the action, the elements of this intro are just off-kilter enough to warrant a longing for more explanation. First off, what the sequined, cross-dressing fuck is wrong with Hard Head? Is this what happens when pregnant women are allowed extensive access to hard drugs and cage fighting? What kind of woman would love such a blubbery man-baby? And for that matter, was the screwed up punctuation a one-off mistake? What’s with the Western font?
You guys are ever so lucky to have a guy like me around to play this through and find out, so you don’t have to. Let us explore this kitschy, off-kilter universe together.
Welcome to the first level. We notice here that SunA was forgiving enough to give Hard Head a vitality bar. No paper skin for us! And, lordy, right after that you see everything else. It’s as if the developers had scanned the drawings of a seven year old and sighed into them the breath of horrifying life. This applies to more than the scenery; in these screenshots (lovingly and meticulously provided by me) you can quite clearly see just how unique this universe can be.
But first, let’s get our feet wet with this game’s engine. There are two buttons and a joystick with which you control this shuffling palsy. Hard Head can jump, and he also has a horn with which he can blow into the faces of his adversaries and send them careening to the heavens encapsulated in a bubble. I can respect this, because, aptitude wise, he and I have a lot in common. Jumping is something you will do very often in this game, because strewn about every stage are countless boxes of wonder floating at head-height that you must destroy because video game protagonists and boxes are eternal, invariable adversaries. Encased within every block is some damned item that can be collected for points. Typical things like petty foodstuffs and precious metals and—
Cigarettes…? Possibly alcoholic cocktails?
This is when further questioning SunA is futile. From here on I stifle my skepticism and simply accept Hard Head for what it is.
A first glimpse of the fauna. A red whatsit scuttles quickly stage right, eyes ever walleyed and teeth chattering.
Hmm, what have we here? A heart, just out in the open? Obviously a goodie for Hard Head of some sort, so let’s hop up and grab it!
Holy hell.
Oh. That’s what it was. A bouns. My score increases tenfold. Beginning to think English was not SunA’s first language. Or if it was, most of the staff probably looked like ol’ H.H. himself.
Here’s another enemy, what looks like a yam with tiny legs, frantically pacing upon the platform on which the gods had placed him. How long has he been there? What troubles him so? A creature with a lot on his mind, I decided to spare him and simply jump over the bruin.
Most of the level up until this point was nothing major, just the same elements from before recycled, with one singular bottomless pit in between. Here we have what seems to be the first unique feature to the game’s engine: A soccer ball that Hard Head can kick through the stage by using the same button he blows his trumpet with.
Nearing the end of the stage, we find exactly why the soccer ball was placed in the stage: above the end of the stage is a goal post. The reason this shot is dimmer than the others is because I had to pause the game in order to show you the GIGANTIC FUCKING BOULDER THAT FALLS FROM THE SKY OUT OF NOWHERE.
Anyway, with the proper spacing, Hard Head can kick the soccer ball into the goal post for extra points. It’s here I’d like to point out, once again, that the year was 1988. The sounds of Hard Head are composed mostly of very synthetic and typical beeps and boops accompanied by music that sounds as if it were composed by a blind retard with flipper hands on a synthesizer. It’s not good, but it is very mild and at least listenable. Which is why I jumped out of my seat when the second the ball passed through the goal the speakers EXPLODED with a digitized voice of BOOMING, EVIL LAUGHTER at twice the volume of the typical acoustics. I shit you not.
Finishing a stage is pretty uneventful and doesn’t deserve notice in this documentary. The duo return to the screen with the map and house, and the girl emerges to rendezvous with her inbred homies, followed by as many of those chattering cockeyed monsters we saw earlier as you have finished levels, in this case, one.
It’s going to be a long and painstaking journey from here on, more than I can take over the course of one night, so it is here I will stop for now. Having played this game all the way through once before (what is wrong with me?), I can tell you now, we have only scratched the surface. Keep your eyes on Gravity Beetle for the next installment!
Max out!
EDIT: Ladies and gentlemen, look what technology has done!
