Battletoads for the Nintendo Entertainment System came out on June 1st, 1991. I was 11. I became obsessed with this game almost instantly. I even remember buying it at the Sunrise Mall (R.I.P.) in Massapequa, Long Island with my mom and brother. We bumped into my Aunt Mary and cousin Diana and I remember taking the box out of the bag and just staring at the game…
Sick.
…hoping my cousin would go home and tell her brother Frank what I just got. My mom said something like, “Put it back in the bag or you’ll break it!”
The game is known for being one of the absolute hardest, unforgivingly difficult games ever made for the NES. Back then, we just accepted this as normal. Like, a lot of popular games were hard, such as Castlevania and Mega Man. But Battletoads was DIFFERENT. This was released at the height of Turtle-Mania. Everything wanted to be the Ninja Turtles. Most failed. It made sense for every toy company and video game developer to try to capitalize on that hype. Battletoads succeeded somewhat.
The game was popular. It looked awesome. Had crazy boxart (see above). Awesome characters (their names are Rash, Zitz, and Pimple…I mean c’mon). Incredible music. Tight graphics. And it sorta came out of nowhere. Even the TMNT fan boy in me wasn’t mad. I loved everything about it. As soon as you popped it in and started playing it, you were in for a treat. But then…that pause music!
I mean…what in the fuck? This beat is amazing. It had no business being a lowly pause menu tune. There were definitely times when I just put the game on, started it, paused it, and cleaned up the game room before I started actually playing. It was catchy AF.
Me cleaning my room
So, I started to get really good at the game. I was always good at NES games back in my early years. I had a knack for most and I enjoyed completing or beating all the games I had (over 70 games at one point). I remember using Nintendo Power to get thru some Battletoads levels and read about the location of certain enemies, etc. But…Game Genie wasn’t really an option.
So, the original Game Genie for NES was a game changer.
It was insane. You’d plug your Game Pak (ugh) into the Game Genie, then insert that into the NES and a very basic screen would pop up. You’d have to scroll thru the book that came with Game Genie and find the game you were playing, find the code you’d want (Infinite Lives, Infinite Weapons…) and input that code. Then you’d start the game and voila. Easy peasy. However, Battletoads wasn’t in the original book. I got Game Genie right when it came out, but a LATER version of the manual had some Battletoads codes in it. (You could also subscribe to get more books every few months for more codes).
So, obviously it had infinite lives or something right? Not to my memory.
My memory apparently sucks because for some reason I never used these.
I remember it had like “start with 6 lives!” or some bullshit like that. None of the codes were enough to get you to beat the Dark Queen easily. So, I just forgot about it and dedicated my life to getting really good at it. The more and more I played and found out where a few of the warps were, I started to believe I could beat this game.
Which leads us to Thanksgiving, 1991. I brought it to my cousin’s house (yes the same one from the first paragraph!) and we started playing. I was having a good run. The speed tunnel by then was a joke to me. Super easy. Snow level was easy. But the later levels were how you say…fucking ridiculously hard. What game DOESN’T want you to eventually complete it? This game was sadistic. It made you think it never wanted you to finish it and would do everything it could to make sure that happened. A surfing level with terrible controls? Sure. A weird hand-unicycle level with 8,000,000,000 sharp turns with a giant ball chasing you that goes faster than you? Definitely. A level that went straight up for what seemed like 30 miles? Got it.
What I’m trying to say is that the game was so stupid. And I loved it. I never really got mad or frustrated at it, like I do today playing video games. I just accepted it was a hard game, and if I was going to be the coolest boy in school then I’d just have to beat it.
For those that are old like me, you remember how EASILY the NES would just shut off sometimes. If someone walked by the TV too stompily, it would reset. If a controller was yanked out, bye bye. So this was at my family Thanksgiving day get together. Very precarious conditions to play this game. I was getting closer and closer to the final level when dinner was served. I was being yelled at by my parents, my aunts, cousins, siblings, dogs, whoever was there. I didn’t care. I had to beat it. “LET ME JUST BEAT THIS I HATE TURKEY ANYWAY!!!!”
I vaguely remember someone coming in and almost just shutting it off (Parents just don’t understand, Will!) which would probably have made me go ballistic in that basement. When it finally happened and I finally punched that Dark Queen’s face off, I celebrated. Alone. My cousin Frank was next to me, I think. But imagine being 11, ready to accept your title as the ‘coolest kid in school’ after beating one of the hardest games ever, and no one barely cared? I had to pretend to eat mashed potatoes and cold turkey and hard biscuits.
I don’t think I ever beat Battletoads again, legitimately. I’ve done it since with emulators and cheats and all that just for nostalgic reasons (guess what: it’s still hard with infinite lives, energy, and invincibility). But I can proudly say I’m one of the few people to have beaten Battletoads for NES without the use of a Game Genie. Still waiting on my ‘coolest kid ever’ trophy. Must have gotten lost in the mail.
You’ll always be the coolest kid in school, assuming that school is Dork University.