Wrecking Crew gave Mario a job that had nothing to do with rescuing anyone. He and Luigi are demolition men, and each screen is a building of walls, ladders and pillars that has to be knocked down completely. Mario carries a heavy hammer and cannot jump, so every swing is a decision: smash the wrong ladder and he may never reach the wall above it. Nintendo released it for the Famicom in Japan in June 1985 and for the NES in North America that October, and it came with something few console games of the time offered, a mode for designing your own stages.
Demolition as a puzzle
Germany’s Club Nintendo magazine set out the premise in 1990: times had been bad for Mario as a plumber, so he opened a demolition business with his brother. Nothing was too much for them, “from iron ladders to solid stone walls”, but a few small pests kept getting in the way, and until a site was cleared they could not take the next job. Bombs helped and hurt. They destroyed everything near them, the magazine warned, and the blast could take out the platform Mario was standing on and drop him at the feet of a monster.
There are 100 stages, and the difficulty comes from what Mario cannot do. Without a jump, he moves between floors only by ladders, and the ladders are part of what he has to destroy, so each stage has an order that works and many that leave him stranded. Enemies patrol while he thinks. The best known are the Gotcha Wrench, the Eggplant Man and Foreman Spike, Mario’s rival on the site. A golden hammer changes the rules for a while: Mean Machines told readers in 1990 that with it, pressing the buttons rapidly let Mario rise into the air and steer.
The Eggplant Man left a mark on another Nintendo game. Toru Osawa, designer of Kid Icarus, said he had loved the Eggplant Man in Yoshio Sakamoto’s Wrecking Crew and wanted an eggplant of his own; the result was the Eggplant Wizard.
Design mode
The cartridge also held a stage editor. Club Nintendo called it a “DESIGN” program with which players could make thousands of different pictures for Mario and Luigi, and Italy’s K described the game in 1989 as programmable, letting the player “design buildings and then demolish them”. In Japan, designs could be saved to cassette with the Famicom Data Recorder, the tape deck sold for Family BASIC. The game wrote its data in the tape format of Sharp’s MZ personal computers. The NES had no such recorder. When The Games Machine surveyed the NES range for British readers in October 1987, it noted that Wrecking Crew’s LOAD and SAVE options could not be used, though they pointed to an interesting possibility for the console. Nintendo re-released the game on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1989, and that version saves designs to disk without the recorder.
Who made it
Wrecking Crew came from Nintendo R&D1, the department led by Gunpei Yokoi. Yoshio Sakamoto said he worked on it in 1985, the same year as Balloon Fight. The programming came from outside Nintendo: the founders of Intelligent Systems, then a department of Iwasaki Giken Kogyo, list it among the Famicom games they worked on. A credit hidden in the cartridge names four programmers and the date 25 April 1985. Hirokazu Tanaka wrote the music.
Other versions
Nintendo also made Vs. Wrecking Crew for its Vs. System arcade cabinets. The Italian magazine Videogiochi saw it at a trade fair in the spring of 1985 among a run of Vs. conversions, describing it as the game “in which Mario and Luigi destroy houses, brick after brick”. The NES version reached Europe in 1987, and by March 1988 a British mail-order dealer was selling it for £28.50, more than Super Mario Bros. at £19.99. A Super Famicom follow-up, Wrecking Crew ’98, was released only in Japan, and the original was reissued for the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2004.
Sources
- Club Nintendo (Germany), February 1990: the premise, bombs and the “DESIGN” program.
- Mean Machines issue 1, October 1990, tips pages: the golden hammer.
- K (Italy), May 1989: “Un gioco programmabile che consente al giocatore di disegnare palazzi e poi di demolirli”.
- The Games Machine issue 1, October 1987, p. 34: Nintendo’s NES range, and Wrecking Crew’s unusable LOAD and SAVE options.
- Zzap!64 issue 35, March 1988: mail-order advertisement listing Wrecking Crew at £28.50 and Super Mario Bros. at £19.99.
- Videogiochi issue 27, June 1985: trade-fair report including Vs. Wrecking Crew.
- Nintendo Dream, interview with four Famicom Disk System developers, 6 and 21 September 2004 (Japanese; republished on Nintendo DREAM WEB, 21 February 2023): Sakamoto on Wrecking Crew; Osawa on the Eggplant Man and the Eggplant Wizard (see the Kid Icarus and Yoshio Sakamoto entries). https://www.ndw.jp/disksystem-interview-230221/
- Intelligent Systems company history (see the Intelligent Systems entry): Wrecking Crew among the founders’ Famicom games.
- NESdev Wiki, “Family BASIC Data Recorder”, “List of games with significant regional differences” and “List of NES music composers” (web, secondary): the Sharp MZ tape format; the Disk System version saving without the recorder; the ROM’s programmer credit dated 1985/4/25; Hirokazu Tanaka. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Family_BASIC_Data_Recorder
- “Wrecking Crew (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates, 100 stages, the hammer’s weight, the enemies’ names, the Disk System and Game Boy Advance releases and Wrecking Crew ’98. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_Crew_(video_game)