Famicom 1984, Pt. 1: From Tennis to Nuts & Milk (Feb.-July 1984) | NES Works Gaiden #19

Now that we've seen both Nintendo and Sega's offerings for 1983, we move along to 1984 and the first wave of Famicom releases. All but one of these titles have already put in an appearance on NES Works proper as entries in the 1985 and ’86 Black Box NES launch rollout catalog, so the first half of this episode is simple a recap and reminder to give a sense of these games' place in the context of their 1984 debut in Japan.
The second half, however, downshifts into low gear to take a leisurely cruise through a game that is generally regarded as a joke (thanks to its title) outside of Japan, when it's regarded at all: Hudson's Nuts & Milk. My hope is that after viewing this episode, you'll have a better appreciation for the place Nuts & Milk holds in video game history-not simply for how it represents a key change for Nintendo's business model, but also for how radically Hudson reinvented it to appeal to Famicom consumers. (You may, of course, continue to chuckle at its name. Titter, even.)
Games this episode:
• Tennis
• Pinball
• Wild Gunman
• Duck Hunt
• Golf
• Hogan's Alley
• Donkey Kong 3
• Nuts & Milk
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its KZbin debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.

[@declanfair4540]

You know, this provides much more context than I expected. With how often Nuts and Milk has been mentioned, its nice to finally get some info on what it was and why it was so successful beyond it being a third party release.

[@mt-ks7nx]

This channel has worked 21 days without a Heiankyo alien reference.

[@dexdigi]

underrated comment

[@starofjustice1]

That's no good.

[@MAYOFORCE]

I for one am under the belief that Jeremy himself is a Heiankyo Alien

[@JeremyParish]

I did spend a few days near the Heian shrine in Kyoto last year, so that was true for a while

[@MAYOFORCE]

@@JeremyParish okay that's funny

[@absolutezeronow7928]

Stanley the Bugman and Milk probably both are members of the Obscure Video Game Protagonists Club and probably both own Members Only jackets. Nice to see Hudson's entry to the Famicom and the era of third party Famicom games begin.

[@DaneeBound]

George Orwell certainly didn't see that one coming.

[@TacoDiceCosas]

As a kid who grow up in Mexico and his contact with video games were bootleg multicarts full of japanese games, Nuts and Milk is a classic from my childhood. Great video as always.

[@namordespuesdelnamor]

Haha es verdad ...conocimos muchos de esos jugando u Family pirata en sus cartuchos de forma japonesa.

[@SatoshiMatrix1]

Again, my name credited when Mr. Parish uses B-roll makes me smile. I gotta upload more stuff I have!

[@Krisipoke]

Nuts & Milk is so underrated. It's not only the very first 3rd party game on a Nintendo console ever, but I think it's the most fun game on the Famicom up to that point.

[@lightspeedmurphy7546]

My exposure to Nuts and Milk was through a couple Famiclones that I used to own. In fact, this is one of those games that are most common through Famiclones and multicarts for me back then which led me to discover other games that were Japan only like Exerion and so on.

[@alanelkins2408]

I think this might be the dad-jokiest opening yet. Don't ever change, Jeremy.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

Nuts and Milk is one of those games where I'm like "Why did that not make it overseas?", like Antarctic Adventure and F-1 Race.

[@starlightwitch12]

That Nuts & Milk game is common in some bootleg multicart cartridges, in fact I used to own bootleg carts which had Nuts and MIlk repeated.

[@JeremyParish]

Yeah, that's gonna be true for just about any NROM Famicom game. Those multicarts were indiscriminate shotgun blasts of as many tiny ROMs as could be crammed into the available space.

[@billcook4768]

Golf: co-designed my Miyamoto. Programmed by Iwata. Sound by Koji Kondo. Quite the pedigree for such a simple little cart.

[@Fragenzeichenplatte]

Even successful developers start small.

[@KristopherBel]

@@Fragenzeichenplatte 6ll

[@Fragenzeichenplatte]

@@KristopherBel 2ZZ

[@retrogamaniac3673]

Dear Mr. Parish, your videos are always interesting, well structured and enjoyable. Nuts & Milk was a really interesting work, and still it is, if you watch this little piece of software compared to its year of release. For years, in the '90s, I've played this game only on some Famiclone consoles, with the copyright line removed from the start screen: due to its extreme similarity with the first/black box Nintendo games, before the arrival of a decent internet connection at home, I've always thought that it was a game published by Nintendo!

[@jasonblalock4429]

One of my all-time favorite pieces of video game trivia is that Nintendo invented the FMV game. Most people have never even heard of the og Wild Gunman.

[@Larry]

I think Nuts and Milk became best known in the West as "That game" that would appear on every Famiclone ever released, along with Door Door, Circus Charlie and that Columns knock off with the statue of liberty :D

[@retrogamaniac3673]

"Columns knock off with the statue of liberty" = Magic Jewelry! :D I'm still asking if it was ever released as a physical pirate/unlicensed cartridge (maybe on Famicom, I suppose) or it has always been just a rom for the Famiclones! Nuts & Milk is featured on almost every Famiclone console ever released, and I'm still playin' it today: it's a cute game, but the jumping mechanics are really awful and the level progression is quite unbalanced! Ugh!

[@BB-te8tc]

Clu Clu Land popped up a lot too, I think.

[@MercuryCrusader]

It's the legacy of old bootleg Famicom multigame carts. I grew up with a "110-in-1" cartridge and the old "Honey Bee" cartridge adapter I got in the late '80s, and those early Famicom titles were just part of the experience.

[@AFnord]

Yeah, that's exactly how I got to play it for the first time. On a dodgy multicart for a famiclone a friend of mine somehow managed to get hold of. A multicart with 99 games, of which at least 9 of them were Nuts & Milk, and at least 20 of them were Contra starting at different levels and/or with different guns and/or with the Konami code enabled by default.

[@BB-te8tc]

@@AFnord I think I had something like this once, too. There was a convenience store near my house when I was growing up and they rented out bootleg Famicom carts alongside this weird gray pin converter with a "ribbon" tied to it it, presumably for pulling the game out of the NES when done. They had a couple multicarts that had endless clones/hacks of Battle City, Nuts & Milk, Goonies, Contra, and "Super Mary"

[@dpgreene]

I always preferred the clay shooting mode in Duck Hunt even as kid! It really teaches you how to aim properly. I fired a real gun once in my life and just nailed it with 5 bullets/5 bull eyes. The fellow guiding me asked how I pulled that off if this was my first time, I replied “I played a lot of Duck Hunt”. I didn’t elaborate but it was Duck Hunt Game C specifically.

[@Bannanawaffles2]

ayyy YES this is exactly what I was hoping for :3

[@Pikachu132]

Hogan's Alley was always my favorite NES light gun game, game B (the alley one) in particular. It's a great twitch shooter that may seem very simple and basic at first, but gets really bloody challenging after 6-7 levels.

[@PowerInOne22]

Didn’t know the original controller buttons were originally soft chiclet buttons. Interesting

[@DaneeBound]

This was originally talked about by Jeremy in NES Works Episode 000 Part 1 back in October 2016 If you're new here: Welcome

[@JeremyParish]

Heh. They didn’t have the same spongy action as Select/Start, but they don’t feel as nice as the hard round buttons.

[@MaidenHell1977]

I love this channel so god damn much.

[@BrianKapellusch]

Nuts & Milk. Together at last.

[@Belzeboobies]

17:13 heh, I see what you did there.

[@JeremyParish]

The name of that mod was one of those beautiful coincidences where everything fell into place during editing for the benefit of the one person who noticed (you, I guess)

[@joe.dot.]

Helluva episode! 💜🙏🏽

[@namordespuesdelnamor]

Thank you for your work, i love your series.

[@Butterstix2014]

Lmao, it’s funny comparing their response to the processor flaw and replacement of those crappy square buttons with their current response to the Joycon drift issue

[@alanschmitt9865]

The Baseball clip really got me 😂

[@GrimmiesN]

Ahh I'm so happy! I love Nuts and Milk! I asked you if you would cover it in the comments of another video a few months ago and you basically told me no. Hahaha. I got super hyped when i saw the title!

[@TroyBlackford]

VERY interesting. Didn't know about this key release, but it was great finally getting set straight. Thanks!

[@dillontam9752]

I'm wondering if Pinball's lack of hardware scrolling is due to the status bar being at the side of the screen rather than at the top or bottom- without getting too technical, horizontal scroll splits (so that the playfield moves while the status bar doesn't) are far easier on NES compared to vertical ones since cathode rays travel horizontally instead of vertically.

[@JeremyParish]

Could be, but also consider that no Famicom release implemented any sort of scrolling prior to Hogan's Alley, even though the hardware-based support was a big selling point for the system. It's a little strange and probably speaks to Nintendo's inexperience actually creating video games (instead of designing them and contracting the dev labor) to that point.

[@Ginormousaurus]

Having a pinball video game quickly and smoothly scroll up and down might have been beyond the capabilities of the Famicom in 1984, even if the status bar wasn't on the side. Alien Crush was released four years later for the PC Engine it didn't scroll vertically either. Alien Crush's sequel Devil's Crush did have vertical scrolling, as did the NES games Rock 'n Ball, Pin-Bot, Pinball Quest, and High Speed, but those were 1989-1991 releases.

[@jamesmoss3424]

Nuts & Milk look good for me to play. 😀👍🎮

[@shorterrecording]

I wish I could like this twice.

[@shorterrecording]

At least.

[@JeremyParish]

Crank up those burner accounts!

[@Saturnome]

I'm sure Nuts and Milk is better known in the west than many official licenced releases! Great game.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

I wonder: If Hudson hadn't been taken over by Konami, might Nuts & Milk made it to Switch as part of a Hudson collection?

[@DaneeBound]

Nuts & Milk was reissued several times on Virtual Console in Japan. First on Wii in 2007 (by that point Konami already were majority owners of Hudson Soft), then on 3DS in 2013 and finally on Wii U in 2014. If you have a Japanese 3DS or Wii U, you can still obtain the game for a mere 524 yen.

[@Poever]

@@DaneeBound it’s a crying shame it’s never come to the western Virtual Console, let alone the NES Online app for Switch. There’s nothing to be localized in it and all it’d need would be an ESRB/PEGI rating

[@DaneeBound]

@@Poever "all it’d need would be an ESRB/PEGI rating." Except nowadays you can submit your download-only games to the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) and they'll generate an appropriate rating for each market.

[@XanthinZarda]

And so we reach the end of the legendary Pulse Wave series; a new chapter breathes for the Famicom as it begins to surge, the tides slowly turning as over behind the Iron Curtain, work would begin on a legendary game whose ethos would take a four year journey to arrive.

[@RealSlavicBear]

I played a lot of Nuts & Milk and I think in general it was known in the West where Famiclones were readily available, as it was a popular game on multicarts.

[@BenCol]

6:42 Where did the duck go? I never knew mallards had the ability to phase between different planes of reality.

[@allecazzam8224]

Can you please do a video about little Nemo? That’s the ONLY nes game I never beat as a kid.... thanks man! Keep up the good work :)

[@massivepileup]

That C64 version of N&M looked like a ZX Spectrum port with its lack of multicolor sprites. The C64's signature style is that multicolor mode which combines two pixels into one in order to get 2 bit color (3 colors and transparency) as opposed to 1 bit color (1 color and transparency). The ZXS could only do the 1 bit mode so ports tend to have a distinct look.

[@ReyndOut]

Yes!

[@nate567987]

Also Hudson had ported basic to all of the Japanese pcs as hubasic

[@parimabartender]

You know if you plug in a controller to port 2 on the NES while playing duck hunt you can control the ducks

[@BasementBrothers]

Was the footage of Donkey Kong 3 done with the VS System palette? The color seems off...

[@ethelchip3620]

Nuts and milk is super underrated and still fun. I don’t get how they were able to squeeze 50 stages in such an early game, but Nintendo couldn’t fit the pie factory. Nuts and milk for smash!!

[@parimabartender]

8:06 +51 LOL

[@WhoIsSirChasm]

Donkey Kong 3 might be the only game where I think the Game & Watch version is the superior option.

[@shortcat]

3:41 so they didn't take advantage of visual gimmick opting for more clarity instead. amazing user experience work for 1984.

[@rubberwoody]

Soup to nuts....and milk

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

Classy!

[@rubberwoody]

@@ChristopherSobieniak soup to nuts is an idiom

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@rubberwoody I know!

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@rubberwoody I just meant that it was classy you said that!

[@Kafei2006]

The NES Golf main character appears in Captain Rainbow on Wii, where they simply call him "Ossan" (middle aged guy). So... not Mario, not officially anyway. Though the ressemblance is too uncanny to be a coincidence for sure.

[@Ginormousaurus]

I like to believe that Ossan is Mario and Luigi's father.

[@signaltome]

I used to own Tennis (for nes) back when I was young, I won it at a local game contest where I got second place. Too bad I did not really appreciate it back then, sports games were boring. Tbh they still are for me (for the most part) but at least I can admit that it looks good for the era it was in. ;-) Edit: Duck hunt was bundled with the NES when I got it in a dual Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt package. While I played more Super Mario I still played Duck Hunt with the zapper. Oh I wish I could shoot that stupid dog for laughing at me when I missed though. I am sure I am not alone in that. :-P

[@melon3109]

is it strange that Donkey Kong was created to replace a poorly performing arcade shooter only to get a sequel that was itself a poorly received arcade shooter?

[@JeremyParish]

Kongception

[@gonkdroidincarnate4237]

@@JeremyParish Your replies are gold

[@TeruteruBozusama]

Unless I've somehow missed it do I hope you can make a video explaining the cartridge colors, as to me at least that's a lot of fun. Like the region triangles on pal boxes gcn (maybe even earlier) onwards.

[@JeremyParish]

There's nothing really to explain-for the first year of the Famicom, third parties were allowed to manufacture their own carts, so they just did whatever they wanted (including the signature Konami hole and the famous Irem LED).

[@NateRD90]

Just over 20 years later, and Nintendo completely ignored all of their regulations they had on third-party publishers and developers, and it resulted in the Wii having endless shovelware.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

See also: The Switch e-shop. But, to be fair, we're living in an information age. Everyone has instant access to reviews on the games available, and every developer has instant access to an education on good game design. There's a lot of hot garbage, but there's also no way you can play through every single good game in a single life time.

[@MCastleberry1980]

"Avoid the nefarious Nuts" *Snickers because I'm a child*

[@JeremyParish]

It’s ok, it was meant to be a little snicker-worthy

[@magus2342]

Wow, $250 for a keyboard, BASIC cart, and a cassette recorder. That'd put the system around that of a C64, which admittedly had a 6502 family chip as well.

[@JeremyParish]

Yeah, but good luck getting a C64 in Japan. The platform barely even made a blip over there and was discontinued after a few months, apparently.

[@magus2342]

@@JeremyParish It makes sense. The PC 8801 alone already had 64k of ram and more vram than the C64, although the C64 had the amazing SID chip for sound. It also had the advantage of local distribution. In addition, Western titles loaded via floppy wouldn't work on the damn thing due to memory differences.

[@JeremyParish]

Really, the big killer for western PCs in Japan was their lack of high-rez graphic support. Japanese text is denser and more complex than Roman type, and western systems usually didn’t support that (or the multi-stroke character input required for typing kanji).

[@magus2342]

@@JeremyParish Normally you'd be right, but the C64 for Japan had legible katakana support and 3 kanji (for dates). That's likely the source of the memory differences. But that very bare bones support was easily outclassed by the local systems.

[@JeremyParish]

I did not know that!

[@Wuss2ns]

Ahh nuts & milk.... The 2 genders

[@JeremyParish]

That’s Boomer thinking, kid

[@JetblackThemeTime]

Big Brother? I'm an only child.

[@JeremyParish]

That you know of

[@JetblackThemeTime]

@@JeremyParish :O