Game:

Punch Club (2016)

Duration: 15:25

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6

Gameplay Performed by: TrevorDFox

Punch Club (originally titled VHS Story) is a sporting management simulation developed by Lazy Bear Games and published by tinyBuild. In the game, the player manages an upcoming boxer in training and preparation for a series of boxing matches at a local club, while searching for clues of who killed their father. The game was developed as a humorous take on action films of the 1980s and 1990s. The game was released in January 2016 for Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android, following a Twitch Plays Pokémon-style event on Twitch. A Nintendo 3DS port of the game was announced in a September 2016 Nintendo Direct for release in January 2017 after some delays. Ports for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were released on March 31, 2017.

Punch Club was initially developed by the Russia-based, three-person Lazy Bear Studios under the name VHS Story, which stood for Video Hero Super Story. Sviatoslav Cherkasov, one of the developers, said that their whole team, in 2015, were around thirty years old, and had grown up around Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis titles, cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and action movies of the 80s and 90s distributed at that time on VHS tapes from stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. As fans of strategy games, they sought to combine these features, coming up with what they considered to be a Street Fighter manager, inspired by the story of the Rocky movies.

For the fighting portion of the game, the studio found that having the player lack direct control of their boxer fit well with their tycoon game. The selection of movies made it similar to the strategy required for collectible card games, giving the player ways to adjust their strategy based on how well their boxer matched with a competitor even during the course of a fight. Further, as the player lacked interaction during the boxing rounds, the player will be able to watch the fight, which they believed was more entertaining. For the larger game, they did not want to have a story-driven title, and made most of the quests optional.

The game entered its alpha release in December 2014, with original plans to release on Microsoft Windows, but with the potential for other platforms due to the cross-platform Unity engine. To help fund the game, the developers looked to spur pre-release sales in addition to other funding sources, and used Steam's Greenlight feature to gauge interest in the game. The Greenlight process in January 2015 successfully approved the game for release on Steam within five days, one of the fastest Greenlit games on the service. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2015, tinyBuild announced that they would be helping to publish the game, now titled Punch Club, for Windows and mobile platforms.

To release the game, tinyBuild created an event similar to the Twitch Plays Pokémon social gaming events, in which the viewers on their Twitch channel can enter commands to control the game's character, with the mass numbers of viewers often giving conflicting commands to make for humorous events in game. The "Twitch Plays Punch Club" event was started on January 7, 2016, promising viewers that once they completed the game, they would release the title, or otherwise release the title on January 25, 2016 regardless. The viewers of the event successfully completed the game in 36 hours, and as promised, the game was officially released on January 9.

In February 2016, Lazy Bear and tinyBuild announced the game had sold over 250,000 copies across all platforms, with over $2 million in revenue. As a result, they announced plans to release in March 2016 a free expansion, "The Dark Fist", along with improvements to the game, including integration with Twitch to allow players to bet virtual currency on fights which can unlock additional in-game content, and saves that work cross-platform.

tinyBuild's Netherlands studio helped to port the game to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with these set to release on March 31, 2017.

Punch Club currently has a Metacritic aggregate score of 73/100 from 30 reviews.

By March 2016, Alex Nichiporchik of tinyBuild who published Punch Club, reported that the game has sold more than 300,000 copies, but also have reported piracy of the title exceeding 1.6 million units. Punch Club was one of the disputed titles in the controversy on the legitimacy of key-reselling by the online store G2A.

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