In Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers nearly everything is a weapon, as long as a chipmunk can lift it. Chip and Dale, the two heroes of Disney’s cartoon, pick up crates, steel boxes and balls and throw them at Fat Cat’s gang, and when two people play, each can pick up the other. Total! liked “being able to stun your friend (try bouncing a crate off his nut), or even balancing him on your head.” Capcom made the game for the NES in 1990, the year after its DuckTales, and Nintendo Power put it on the cover of its July/August issue.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom, under licence from Disney.
- Released: NES in America, June 1990; Famicom in Japan, June 1990; in Britain, by the end of 1991.
- Players: one, or two at the same time.
- Sales: 1.2 million, according to Capcom.
- Sequel: Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers 2 (1993).
- Later release: The Disney Afternoon Collection (2017).
Fat Cat’s trick
The game opens with a small job. In Nintendo Power’s telling, the Rescue Rangers set out to help a girl called Mandy find her lost cat; Mean Machines made it the “next door neighbour’s cat”. It is a trap. Fat Cat took the cat to keep the chipmunks busy while he kidnapped their friend, the inventor Gadget, and, as Mean Machines put it, the two rodents have to rescue her “before Fat Cat forces her to invent something really evil”. Gadget still finds ways to give them advice along the way, and finding Zipper makes a chipmunk invincible for a short time.
Nintendo Power’s guide mapped the route as zones lettered A to G, with arrows between them, because the player chooses where to go next. Total! compared it to Super Mario: “you can select which level Chip ‘n’ Dale should go to next”, and Hardcore Gaming 101 later noted that the map lets a player skip some levels altogether. The zones are what a chipmunk would see of a city. There is a huge tree where flying squirrels in ninja outfits attack, a coffee shop and a kitchen, a library overrun by Racquet Roos firing tennis balls, a toyland with a robot at the end, a stage that ends with a fast-swimming grouper, a run of steel pipes and giant ball bearings, and finally Fat Cat’s Casino, full of “hat tossing ’gators and rough-housing rhinos”. Total! counted seven levels of about four stages each.
Crates and teamwork
The crate is the centre of the game. A chipmunk picks one up and throws it, or holds it and presses down on the control pad to hide inside it while an enemy walks past. Steel boxes are too heavy to throw far, but can be stacked “for height”. Acorns restore energy, and every 50 flowers or 10 stars collected earn an extra life. The bosses, from a multi-armed machine in the opening stage to an owl and Fat Cat himself, are beaten the same way each time: pick up the red ball and throw it at them.
The puzzles grow out of the same idea. Mean Machines described a giant beaker in the laboratory, far too high to jump, with three blocks next to it: “The trick is to pile the blocks into a tower.” With two players the throwing gets competitive. Hardcore Gaming 101 pointed out that a player can “pick up your friend and toss them at obstacles”, and Total! found that the two-player game had “some ingenious two-player twists”.
Reception
The game was a success. In November 1990 it was in Nintendo Power‘s top-30 charts of both players’ and dealers’ picks, and Capcom’s list of its million-selling games puts it at 1.2 million copies. In 1997 Nintendo Power included it among its 100 best Nintendo games: “Capcom lived up to its reputation for superior play control and graphics. The ninja squirrels should have had their own game.”
British players met it later. Club Nintendo announced at the end of 1991 that “Chip ‘n’ Dale are here!”, and ACE had already noted that “thanks to games like Duck Tales and Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers, Capcom is getting really friendly with Walt Disney”. Mean Machines gave it 88% in February 1992. Its reviewers thought it “tough and enjoyable” and liked the “small but detailed sprites and cartoony robots” and the theme tune, though one admitted that “it hardly pushes back the boundaries of console gaming”. The other singled out its speed: “Chip and Dale zipping around the screen at a great rate of knots”. Total! reviewed it in April 1992 at £45, praising “a real cartoony feel” and “a brain-curdling difficulty curve”, though it found the restart points “few and far between”.
Rescue Rangers 2 and later
Capcom showed Rescue Rangers 2 for the NES at Nintendo’s Famicom Space World show in Tokyo in 1993. Nintendo Power’s Pak Watcher, previewing it that December, had expected a sequel “similar to the original” and found exactly that, with excellent control and play that was “always fast and fun, just what you’d expect from Capcom”. The magazine gave the sequel a feature in January 1994. Both games came back in 2017 in Digital Eclipse’s The Disney Afternoon Collection for Capcom, with DuckTales, TaleSpin and Darkwing Duck, a rewind feature and new Time Attack and Boss Rush modes.
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 11, March/April 1990: Winter Consumer Electronics Show report (Capcom’s “two player simultaneous Rescue Rangers game”).
- Nintendo Power issue 14, July/August 1990, cover and pp. 26–31: guide (Mandy and Fat Cat, Gadget, hiding in crates, steel boxes, flowers, stars and acorns, Zipper, zones A to G, the flying squirrels, the Racquet Roos, the robot, Fat Cat’s Casino, the bosses).
- Nintendo Power issue 18, November 1990: readers’, professionals’ and dealers’ charts.
- ACE issue 47, August 1991, news: Capcom and Disney.
- Club Nintendo (UK) volume 3 issue 6, 1991, p. 28: “Chip ‘n’ Dale are here!”
- Mean Machines issue 17, February 1992, pp. 52–54: NES review, 88% (the story, the laboratory beaker, the verdicts). The score is as given in the Mean Machines Archive transcription (web). http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/269/rescue-rangers.php
- Total! issue 4, April 1992, pp. 26–27: NES review (£45, one or two players, choosing levels, seven levels, stunning and balancing your partner, the restart points).
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 13, October 1993, pp. 10–12: Famicom Space World report (Rescue Rangers 2). Nintendo Power issue 55, December 1993: “Pak Watcher”, Rescue Rangers 2. Issue 56, January 1994: Rescue Rangers 2 feature.
- Nintendo Power issue 100, September 1997: “100 Best Nintendo Games of All Time” (Capcom, NES, June 1990).
- Capcom, “Platinum Titles”, as of 30 September 2007 (archived, web): Famicom, June 1990, 1.2 million units. https://web.archive.org/web/20080116224723/http://ir.capcom.co.jp/english/data/million.html
- Michael Ayala, “Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers”, Hardcore Gaming 101, 25 June 2009 (web, secondary): the map and skipping levels, throwing your partner, the bosses. http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/chip-n-dale-rescue-rangers/
- Digital Eclipse, “The Disney Afternoon Collection” (web): the six games, rewind, Time Attack and Boss Rush. https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/disneyafternoon
- Wikipedia, “The Disney Afternoon Collection” (web, secondary): Capcom as publisher and the release in April 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disney_Afternoon_Collection