Popeye (Arcade) Playthrough
481A playthrough of Nintendo's 1982 license-based arcade game, Popeye.
Nintendo's Popeye, released two years after the movie starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, was the first video game to ever feature the famous spinach-munching sailor.
Nintendo had initially begun work on a Popeye game back in 1981, but King Features Syndicate rejected their proposal. Instead of scrapping the project, Shigeru Miyamoto set to work creating a replacement cast of original characters based on King Kong. The resulting game, Donkey Kong, was one of the biggest arcade hits of the year.
Once Donkey Kong and its sequel had established Nintendo as a major player in the industry, King reconsidered their stance and granted Nintendo's licensing request, and when it was released at the end of 1982, Popeye became Nintendo's third major arcade success.
In Popeye, the goal is to collect the objects Olive Oyl tosses from the top of the screen while dodging Brutus's (Bluto's) attacks. There are three stages, each with its own unique layout, theme, and gimmick. In the first, Popeye has to collect hearts and can drop a bucket on Brutus's head to slow him down. In the second, he collects music notes and can launch himself from Wimpy's seesaw to reach Swee'Pea for bonus points. In the third, Popeye has to collect letters that spell "Help" as he avoids Bernard the Buzzard on a pirate ship.
Popeye can defend himself by punching dangerous objects out of the air, and if he grabs a can of spinach, he can temporarily knock Brutus out of play. Most of the time, though, it's a game of cat and mouse, and Popeye will have to thread a careful, defensive path through each stage if he wants to survive beyond the first few rounds. Much like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, Popeye is a classic, simple game that is easy to pick up and play but is nuanced enough to keep people (and their quarters) coming back for more.
Aside from its license, one of the game's biggest draws was its graphics. The machine runs on the then typical Z80A processor (an enhanced 8088 chip, essentially), but the game outputs an interlaced 512x448 image which allows it to display super clean, high-resolution sprites atop a simple, low resolution background plane. It looks amazing, and the style still holds up. In 2023, it's pretty much the video game equivalent of Masahiro Sakurai: you can tell that it's no longer a spring chicken, but it has aged so gracefully that you could easily mistake as something far newer than it really is.
(Seriously, how does he still look so young? The dude is in his 50s!)
We rented the NES version countless times when I was a kid, and I always loved it. I still do, and I was stoked as a teenager to find out that the arcade version was even better. I've never been especially fond of games from the arcade's first "golden age" - as a kid growing up in the NES era, they always felt like they were just a bit before my time - but Popeye was one of the rare few from that generation that really managed to sink its hooks into me.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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