Released in its original form in 1983, Punch Out!! is recognized as one of Nintendo’s more prominent sports games, spanning a legacy of four main series game, a slew of spinoffs and a feature in the widely popular Super Smash Bros Series. Super Punch Out!! (1994), the SNES successor to the wildly popular original game retains much of the gameplay and thematic elements of the original, with updated graphics and mechanics to appeal to a broader audience of consumers who demanded a home console version of the original arcade game. Despite its mass market appeal, particularly around young boys, it seems that the Punch Out!! Series had a possibly problematic social effect on its players, and using Super Punch Out!! As our reference, I hope to dissect how the game’s emphasis on competitive violence and projection of ethnic stereotypes promotes problematic messaging to its players.
Super Punch Out!! finds itself at a series of curious intersections. For one, the game is labelled as both a sports game and a fighting game, which though not impossible, puts the objective of the game on an interesting bi-layered path. Progress is measured by performing better than your opponent - true to most sports game - but the means of achieving that progress comes from the fighting components of the game: depleting the health of your opponent through physical combat, in this case, ‘boxing’. Players can move through circuits of matches with their opponents and will win the circuit if they successfully knock out all their opponents. Already, it’s evident that a game like this centers around violence, though that’s not uncommon particularly for a combat sport game. The mechanics are simple enough, where the player can combine directional buttons and action keys to generate different punch combos, and if the player manages to land enough hits without taking damage, they can unleash a more powerful strike as a result. This aspect seems particularly interesting; as the game seems to be rewarding players for both successfully attacking their opponent and not letting their opponent hit them, establishing an understanding that success in matches is defined by your enemies failure and vice versa. Furthermore, at the end of each round, the player receives a score based on the complexity of the attacks they chose and also how quickly they defeated their opponent; this score is later compared to the scores of other players who have used the same cartridge. This display of your performance relative to another player’s seems eerily linked to the measure of success found within the gameplay itself: your success is relative to everyone else’s failure and this notion of climbing above others to gain the highest success breeds a violent competition that begins to feel concerning.
While boxing seems to be the reference sport at hand, the theatricality and performativity of the opponents combined with this “special move” mechanism also seems to lead the game to redefine its focus sport as a sort of WWE-boxing hybrid. Concurrently, the game was designed primarily by a team of Japanese developers at a Japanese company, but focuses heavily on Western, or mainly America-centric aesthetic; in fact, the character whom the player controls (often labelled as Little Mac) sports evident Western/Euro-centric features like blue eyes, blond hair and white skin; while also donning blue boxing shorts and bright red shoes, generating the patriotic color palette of red, white and blue. So this intersection of a Japanese game with evident focus on America seems particularly juicy; as it begs the question of why these designers chose to portray characters in the way that they did. Starting with the main player-character, who as aforementioned, is a Western appearing hero. His range of attacks is limited and doesn’t have a particularly ostentatious “special move”, and relative to his opponents he is balanced across both speed and power, therefore much of the specialized performance is reliant on the player’s skill. I need to ask whether having this “baseline” character play through rounds of combat against representatives from different countries represents some kind of Fighting-game vision of the American Dream. The hero, despite not having any special powers, fights his way from the bottom of the leaderboard to the top - and in order to do that, he needs to ensure that his opponents are the victims of his success. This underdog story is a common trope and storyline in American Media, especially at that time and for movies that centred on sports: think Rocky (1976), the Karate Kid (1984) and Rudy (1993). The unsettling aspects of Super Punch Out!! seem to arise from whom you’re fighting to attain your success. Your line of opponents seem entirely based on stereotypical portrayals of their nationalities combined with unnecessary and often problematic historical shortcomings about those countries. Take for instance, the Hong Kong Opponent: Dragon Chan, who not only combines elements of Kung-Fu into his fighting, but who also regains strength through meditation. This reduction of an entire country to a character whose personality comes entirely from Chinese Kung-Fu films enforces a singular vision of that particular nationality, that foreseeably will alter how players visualize people from those countries. It’s tokenism used almost as a form of entertainment; as if the designers tried to condense everything they could grasp about a country into a character without really doing well-informed research. The concern from earlier is validated further by the player’s need to defeat these hyper racialized characters to succeed, prompting questions about whether Super Punch Out!! represents something deeper about this American Hero defeating foreign opponents through physical combat. Is this, on a greater scale, a projection of how countries interact with each other? How fighting between countries for some strange established dominance is where our world was going? And on top of that, is watching that fight go down some odd form of entertainment - some kind of sick Hunger Games meets the G20 Summit?
In a product that was designed for entertainment, we have to ask ourselves what kind of messaging is coming through especially in the design of these characters. Reducing opponents to racist stereotypes and having an American hero pummell through them all seems inherently problematic and surely there must be a way to make these characters, even though they are opponents, more complex and diverse. Ultimately, their role is to act as resistant and stereotyped pawns for this American hero to step off of to reach success, and I would like to see them evolve into real and true characters. Hopefully one day we can find a Punch Out!! game somewhere that is more inclusive, but not any less amusing; in my eyes, that game would be a true knockout.
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