Game

Game

Game

This game is a very special one.

Bongo is a 1983 arcade game, a conversion kit of Galaxian. What is a conversion kit? Well, back in the day, you’d by an arcade game, like Galaxian, which is cheaper and accessible (there were SO MANY copies of Galaxian made that even now they’re like less than a hundred bucks for a PCB), and once it becomes yesterday’s news, what do you do? Just get a new machine? No! Some people made Conversion Kits which you could easily put on old hardware to get an ENTIRELY new game out of it! And now you have Bongo instead of Galaxian!

This does come with some negatives, though. For years, it was assumed Bongo was lost media. We knew ABOUT it, people had heard about it, and there were home conversions for home PCs, but no one could find an actual copy. But then, one day, someone was going through some old broken PCBs to see what he could fix and throw away. He found a Galaxian PCB that was broken in an annoying way, which he COULD fix, but why bother? Except, it had a piece of tape on it with the words “BONGO”. He had no idea what that meant, but hey, that’s kinda interesting, maybe it’s something?

He fixed it up, and Bongo came to life for the first time in years.

Bongo is a very jank arcade platformer. The Mario We Have At Home. You have three buttons, left, right, and up, which is jump, because of course it is. Why WOULDN’T up be jump? Your being chased by a dinosaur, and you must run away! That wasn’t a typo. The game says that. Your being chased! Jump through 27 different screens, each with hazards, timing your way through, until you reach the end and trap the dinosaur. And then… it all gets a little faster, and go into loop 2!

So yeah, it’s not a complex game, but it’s VERY weird to control and feel. Seriously, you have no idea until you see this game in motion. And Bongo is this weird little happy jaundiced man who makes the booty work it as he walks, I dunno what the hell is up with him, but I absolutely adore him. This game is a huge meme in some arcade streamer’s circles, mine included. In fact, I have SPECIAL history with Bongo, as I am the world’s leading Bongo-ologist. I got research grants and everything for my work with Bongo. Not joking.

I was curious if Bongo had a kill screen, cause kill screens fascinate me a lot. So I TAS’d the game, trying to find the exact end, and I did. The final screen on loop 6. I spent all night trying to find a way through that screen. I was sick with a fever while working, so it was just a way to distract myself while I rested, but I worked WAY harder than I needed to and did permutations of ways to beat that screen until 5 in the morning, to no avail. Then, I went to bed, and had a fever dream where I jumped over the dinosaur. I woke up the following day to stream, and explained I couldn’t beat this screen so it was the kill screen…. and then, I jumped over the dinosaur, on a whim.

It’s possible. And with that, I found a major glitch in the game, and was awarded grant money by fan of the game @Chuboh for my hard work. If you’re interested in seeing the TAS, here you go:

It was taken down off of TASvideos cause it’s not a speed TAS, it’s a score TAS, and they apparently didn’t want that on their site lol also it’s a pretty low effort TAS, let’s be real.

Anyways, so I actually tried to master this ages ago, like when I first started doing Retro Achievements, cause the game and I have such a deep bond. But I only finally mastered it today, because one of the achievements is beat loop 2, I hadn’t really done score grinding in a while, and this game is REALLY HARD. But I sat down today, and after like 5 hours of nonstop Bongo (with a small break in the middle to play Ristar), I did it. Loop 2 beaten, game #52 mastered.

Huh. This post was almost a Obscure Games You May Not Have Heard Of post, huh?