Popeye retrospective: An echo of what might have been | NES Works

A look into the history of a game that almost was something completely different, in a sense: Nintendo's Popeye, the held-over take on the arcade platformer that Donkey Kong was meant to be. Sort of. It's an interesting slice of Nintendo history, as we wrap the NES releases of the company's trio of Famicom launch titles.

[@JoshuaJacobs83]

I know I’m late to the party but this is becoming one of my favorite video series to watch. Only complaint is they’re over too soon yet they’re the perfect length to binge.

[@CplEthane]

The reason the arcade sprites looked so good in comparison to everything else, and why the Famicom port sprites look so sqaushed, is because the arcade hardware for Popeye had a sprite layer that was 512x448 (actually 448x512 given arcade screen orientation) while the background layer was 256x224. This means the sprite layer was able to give 4x the detail to a character tile than what the background could manage. The Famicom simply could not replicate the 512x448 sprite layer the arcade enjoyed, instead being limited to 256x224. This was a hard limitation on the hardware, and had nothing to do with the limited cart sizes of the era or lack of MMC chips. All the Famicom's enhancements and trickery that came about at the end of its life on the market wouldn't have enabled it to recreate this essentially high definition graphic output for its sprites.

[@superleviathan]

Had Popeye come later in the Famicom's life, Nintendo would have gotten around that with the old stand-by of cobbling characters out of multiple sprites. Not arcade-perfect, but a sizable improvement. The license issue is probably why the Famicom Disk System didn't get an update like it did for Mario Bros., Excitebike and other early games.

[@MCastleberry1980]

I love to come back to these older videos as a refresher. It does bum me out though that Nintendo's Popeye will probably never see a reissue because of licensing, and it's such a fun game. The camp ground my family used to visit back in the 90s actually had an old Popeye cabinet in its little arcade, so I dumped a ton of quarters into it on camping trips.

[@necrotick]

It's purely cosmetic, but it always bothered me that the NES port was missing Wimpy. Not as good on graphics, but the Atari 5200 had Wimpy included like on the arcade. I love this game! Perhaps with the release of Cuphead there might be a renewed interest in Popeye.

[@necrotick]

I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a necro post today.

[@ramengamer4806]

@@necrotick I'm pretty sure the reason for the NES ports omission of Wimpy was because of licensing fees. Like how the Popeye cartoons made by Famous Studios got rid of some things that the Fleischer Studios Popeye had.

[@angeldejesussanchezgonzale9968]

​@@ramengamer4806 and also because the game was launched in 1983 back then the nes memory was limited for just few sprites so they have to sacrifice some memory

[@ramengamer4806]

@@angeldejesussanchezgonzale9968 Yeah, that too!

[@KuraIthys]

Those arcade sprites are quite the thing. Really drives home the point of how far ahead arcade machines were at the time compared to home systems. Even if the underlying reason was something as simple as a larger ROM or more RAM, it still had a big impact...

[@JeremyParish]

Popeye ran on strange hardware in general. The sprites were rendered in a high-resolution mode, but the backgrounds were super low-rez, almost like Atari 2600 graphics.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@JeremyParish Interesting it was done that way.

[@Desmaad]

@@JeremyParish A lot like Midway hardware in the mid-'80s.

[@jlc992]

As with your talk with Activision on Retronauts with license games (Activision having Ghostbusters in 84). You can tell that Nintendo at least had some feeling of guess either respect or at least feeling they needed to make something more than just your typical license game on the shelf.

[@severeerror52]

I legitimately laughed when you said "zone of danger" I've been watching too much Archer.

[@fumanchu7]

Lana. Lana. LANA. LAAAAAAANAAAAAA!!!!!!!! What?!? Danger Zone

[@kevinbowyer7205]

Amazing episode as always!

[@christopheralberne5153]

I remember playing this in the arcade when I was a kid I didn't know that it was a nes game too.

[@goatbone]

2:26 There is of course a Popeye cartoon centred around a skyscraper construction site "A Dream Walking"

[@FloatingSunfish]

I played the crap out of this as a kid. Goooood times... 😄

[@malasdair]

Always secretly loved this game. Hard to argue for, but there's something about the hand-to-hand combat for me. Great vid! (is there some video flicker during the ship sequences on the right?)

[@robertlauncher]

Brutus? That looks like Bluto

[@JeremyParish]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@JeremyParish Yep, important!

[@me-xz8zf]

Popeye for Smash Ultimate!!!

[@user-sw6ni2tq6h]

Great video, I watched it before earlier, think of what could have been!😀😃

[@keimakoh]

The comments about Bluto's behavior were quite interesting, as I never actually considered this game as much more than a brief 10 minute annoyance back in the day.

[@underdog1117]

Love that game..played it in the arcade all the time..

[@jeffreyrussell4874]

I really enjoy these! Thanks!

[@magnusdiridian]

and I wanted to play Super Popeye Bros and Popeye Kart so badly too

[@jamesmoss3424]

I like popeye cartoons and I play the game it's pretty cool. 😀👍🎮

[@STEVEHEROLD]

always loved this game. remember playing it in arcade a lot when it came. always wished Nintendo had made a sequel to this game... or even some hombrewer making a new version with more boards like DK II Arcade.

[@mrcrushin]

Great stuff! I wonder why they chose to go so simple with the background sprites in the NES port. They look like chunky Atari-style half-assed attempts a replicating the original, when the NES Sprites are capable of much more fidelity. Like the girders in Donkey Kong, for example. Was this just because of the memory limitations?

[@JeremyParish]

If you go back and look, the arcade backgrounds were equally simplistic - the mast lines on the ship stage, for example. Presumably due to storage or display issues, yeah.

[@gabrieleriva651]

Jeremy Parish yeah, like the first generation of Pokemon used blocky sprites for the backs.

[@KuraIthys]

My guess would be storage space. When you go back and look at games of the 80's and 90's and correlate their appearance and complexity to the amount of storage space they had to work with, the results really say a lot about how important a factor that actually is. The NES Kirby game that released in 1993 for instance is 768 kilobytes, and could be mistaken for a SNES title if you don't examine it too closely. The average early SNES game meanwhile is about 1 megabyte, so they look similar, and they're in the same ballpark in terms of how much storage space was available... It's a really important yet easy to overlook technical improvement over time. The difference between Mario 3 and the original has as much to do with having nearly 10 times the storage space as it does anything else.

[@mresturk9336]

Probably storage space. Those first generation NES cartridges were hard capped to a maximum size of a mere 40 kilobytes. And being a launch title its unlikely Popeye had even that much space. NES cartridges didn't start to expand in size until mapper chips started being used, which began around early 1987. Same reason the NES Donkey Kong port is missing a stage, despite later NES games having WAY MORE content.

[@riverdealer]

i still have this game for the Atari 400/800 so it was released outside of nintendo

[@OzeroCa]

No mention of the Coleco version? I played THAT sucker to death!

[@kevinmcqueary7395]

Somehow, sometimes I wish that this version of Popeye was released on the Nintendo Switch, and I don't just mean like part of the NES online thing, or as a dlc on its own. I just mean like in general. Any way that they want to do it doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's possible.

[@Ginormousaurus]

I want the arcade version to be released for the Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series. The rights issues would have to be worked out, of course, but it's a classic from the golden age of arcade games that deserves to be available again. I'd also like Popeye to be a playable DLC character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, although I know that's never going to happen.

[@goatbone]

Have to say that like Brutus, Donkey Kong could hurl projectilies thst also violated the laws of platforms.

[@OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOq]

I swear I know the exact cartoon of Popeye he watched that that inspired him. They was fighting in a sky scrapper Brutus and Popeye.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

That was probably "A Dream Walking".

[@wheeledjustice7381]

I'm working my way through the NES Library at the moment and honestly, Popeye is my favorite out of the three Famicom launch titles. There's something addicting about it.

[@patrickw.2887]

please for Nintendo Switch 😍🤩 my favorite game on the c64

[@mindcrome]

One of the most important video games

[@whyllian1234]

Oh the nostalgia...

[@michaelsegal3558]

Actually the sea hag throws sculls not bottles

[@rocfanatic13]

Great memories playing this game. The bad guys name is Bluto not Brutus

[@JeremyParish]

No, you're mistaken. I did my research. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus

[@rocfanatic13]

@@JeremyParish cool I didn't know that. I assumed it would be Bluto. I'm a recent subscriber to your channel. Keep up the great videos! :)

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@JeremyParish I wouldn't doubt King Features still kept using Brutus that late in the game. The video game itself feels like it was based on the 1960's cartoon series that King Features made on their own to compete with the older Popeye cartoons that were owned by a different company.

[@LethalBubbles]

If Nintendo had went with Popeye-licenced DK they wouldn't have gotten the Universal lawsuit damages & Howard Lincoln wouldn't have become VP.

[@thewolfgabe3656]

Did you know there was actually a 3D remake of sorts of Popeye released on Switch recently and its a steaming pile of flaming hot garbage?

[@jeffreyrussell4874]

its Bluto!!! not Brutus lol

[@JeremyParish]

No. Check the manual. It's Brutus in this game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus

[@billbobaggins5734]

Nuts to the manual

[@elvistwatty]

Jeremy Parish kind of crazy the flip flop in use of the names.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@elvistwatty Well blame King Features for not knowing what they had when they had it!

[@GeoffreyToday]

Presumably when you say Brutus, you mean Bluto :p

[@capeman29]

I was wondering about this too

[@zerocooler7]

Actually, for a time Popeye's rival was indeed called Brutus. Check here for more: sweethaven.wikia.com/wiki/Brutus

[@EdgedShadow]

This always confused me as a kid too, but the manual does indeed call him Brutus.

[@iami3rian394]

He was ALWAYS Brutus in many foreign countries, for example Brazil. Considering Japan's issues pronouncing "L's" I have no trouble believing his name was Brutus there as well. I'm not even sure you can write Bluto in Japanese... Also, Gojira. Just saying.

[@johnforkner]

Et tu Bluto?