In June 1991 Nintendo Power gave most of its review pages to one game. “You’ll probably wish we’d used all 100 pages to cover it!” the editor wrote. The game was Battletoads, made by Rare for the American publisher Tradewest, and the 36-page feature mapped every one of its twelve levels. Players needed the maps. Battletoads starts as a side-on fighting game and then keeps changing into something else: a long drop on a cable into a crater, a race through a tunnel on a speeder bike, a ride across rapids, a climb up the backs of giant snakes. Each change brought new ways to die, and the game gave you only three lives.
Fast facts
- Developer: Rare. Publisher: Tradewest.
- Released: 1991 for the NES; Mean Machines expected the British release in May 1992 at £39.99.
- Heroes: Rash and Zitz, playable alone or together; their friend Pimple is the one who needs rescuing.
- Structure: twelve levels, from the surface of Ragnarok’s World to the Dark Queen’s Tower.
- Lives: three, with flies to eat for energy and occasional extra lives.
Toads in space
The story fits on a cereal box. Aboard the spaceship Vulture, the Battletoads and their mentor, Professor T. Bird, are taking Princess Angelica home. Angelica and Pimple go for a joyride in the Toadster and are swallowed by the Dark Queen’s flagship, the Gargantua, and carried off to Ragnarok’s World. Rash and Zitz go after them. Nintendo Power explained that the two “have different personalities, but in terms of game play their abilities are identical”.
Retro Gamer later described the toads as one of the many teams of “streetwise” cartoon animals “thrown up in the wake of those Ninja Turtles”, and put it more bluntly elsewhere: “Shamelessly riding on the back of the Ninja Turtles craze”. The fighting had its own character. Punches finished with exaggerated cartoon blows, which Nintendo Power named the Big Bad Boot and the Kiss My Fist, and a toad could pick up an enemy, or his partner, and throw him off a cliff.
A different game every level
The first level is the beat-’em-up the box promises, against the Dark Queen’s Psyko Pigs. It ends with a fight against a Tall Walker in which the view switches to the walker’s own cockpit, a “Walker Cam” from which the player sees the toad from the receiving end. The second level drops the toads two miles down an impact crater on cables, swinging to hit birds and dodge robot guns. The third, the Turbo Tunnel, puts them on speeder bikes through a twisting tunnel of columns that appear at speed. Nintendo Power advised players to memorise the pattern, and warned that “you’ll probably have to tackle it many times before you master it.”
Later levels kept the changes coming: surfboards on a river of logs and whirlpools, and the Karnath’s Lair, where the toads ride and climb giant snakes to reach an exit. Mean Machines listed what kept it fresh: “so many changes in the action, such as the jet biking and abseiling sections, that it’s difficult to get bored”.
Hard together
Two players made it harder, not easier. Nintendo Power warned that in two-player mode the toads “can interact with each other, which can be detrimental to your progress”: a swinging fist hits a partner as easily as an enemy, and on the crater level “it’s easy to smash your pal”. On the platforms one player could leave the other behind or be unable to make a jump.
The difficulty was the point, and Mean Machines liked it. Its reviewer called Battletoads “a refreshing and original game which really grabbed me”, combining “a variety of different game styles, great graphics, a neat sense of humour” with “superb, challenging and highly addictive gameplay”. The game was “brilliantly designed to allow you to get just a little bit further each time you play”. Retro Gamer’s verdict in 2005 was cooler: “a solid little beat-’em-up”, rarely associated with Rare.
The franchise
Nintendo Power reported in 1991 that a possible NES sequel, a Super NES game and an arcade game were in the works. Most of that happened. A Battletoads for the Game Boy appeared in 1991. In 1993 came versions of the NES game for the Mega Drive and Game Gear, Battletoads in Ragnarok’s World for the Game Boy, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs for the Super NES, and Battletoads & Double Dragon, in which the toads team up with Billy and Jimmy Lee of Double Dragon. Nintendo Power found Battlemaniacs so like the NES game that readers looking for “something that’s really new” might prefer the crossover. An arcade game, Super Battletoads, followed in 1994, published by Electronic Arts.
Not every version came from Rare. Mindscape’s Amiga and CD32 version of 1994 was savaged. Amiga Power’s Rich Pelley found it “chronically badly-programmed”, and Amiga Format told readers that Battletoads was “not a game you should consider buying”.
Later life
Rare became a Microsoft studio in 2002, and the toads went with it. Rare Replay, a 30-game collection for the Xbox One released on 4 August 2015, included the NES Battletoads and the 1994 arcade game, which according to Xbox’s announcement “has never had a home release… until now!” A new Battletoads, developed by Dlala Studios with Rare’s support and published by Xbox Game Studios, came out on 20 August 2020 for Xbox One and Windows, the first game in which the toads had starred since the 1990s.
Sources
- Nintendo Power volume 25, June 1991, p. 4 (editor’s note), pp. 8–41 (Battletoads review and maps: the story, Rash and Zitz, two-player play, the Big Bad Boot and Kiss My Fist, three lives, the Walker Cam, the crater, the Turbo Tunnel, Surf City, the Karnath’s Lair, plans for a sequel, a Super NES game and an arcade game).
- Mean Machines issue 19, April 1992, pp. 57–58: NES review (copyright 1991 Rare, Tradewest, £39.99, May release, three lives; the reviewers’ verdicts).
- Nintendo Power volume 49, June 1993, pp. 28–43: Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Battletoads in Ragnarok’s World and Battletoads & Double Dragon.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, pp. 31–33: Rare softography (the Game Boy game of 1991; the Mega Drive, Game Gear, Game Boy and Super NES games of 1993; Super Battletoads, arcade, Electronic Arts, 1994) and the Ninja Turtles comparison. Issue 26, 2006, p. 22: Battletoads & Double Dragon (“thrown up in the wake of those Ninja Turtles”).
- Amiga Power issue 42, October 1994, p. 51: Amiga review (Mindscape). Amiga Format issue 65, November 1994, p. 73: CD32 round-up.
- For Rare’s move to Microsoft in 2002, see the Rare entry and its sources.
- Xbox Wire, “Rare Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary with a Massive 30-Game Collection”, 16 June 2015 (web, secondary): Rare Replay’s release date and its two Battletoads games. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2015/06/16/xbox-rare-celebrates-its-30th-anniversary-with-a-massive-30-game-collection/
- Xbox Wire, “Battletoads Incoming! Anarchic Amphibians Arrive August 20 with Xbox Game Pass”, 31 July 2020 (web, secondary), and Wikipedia, “Battletoads (2020 video game)” (web, secondary): Dlala Studios, Rare, Xbox Game Studios, the release date. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/31/battletoads-incoming-anarchic-amphibians-arrive-august-20-with-xbox-game-pass/