In any iteration, Punch-Out!! is pure prizefighting genius, a verdict that should come as no surprise to even the most casual gamer. Considering it was first released in 1987, the cinematic feel of its presentation is staggering. Drawing on Rocky-esque tropes—most notably the training cut-scene with a cityscape in the background, not Philadelphia but even better Manhattan, complete with the Statue of Liberty—Punch-Out!! evokes a fundamentally American aesthetic and narrative arc.
Apart from the presentation, Punch-Out!! remains noteworthy on account of its characters. While Little Mac, the Caucasian-American protagonist under the player's control, is underwhelming and diminutive, virtually faceless with his back to the player for most of the game, the antagonists he faces are the stuff of legend. What is most fascinating about the pixelated pugilists is that they are, from the perspective of the American consumer, almost entirely composed of foreigners, and each of these internationally-flavored opponents is depicted in an aggressively stereotypical fashion. There is, for example, a fairly obvious Orientalism informing the look and comportment of several characters, such as Piston Hondo, a Japanese fighter complete with logographic headband and easily agitated eyebrows above his epicanthic gaze. The Orientalism is even more egregious in the case of Great Tiger, a turbaned Sikh who is, quite impressively, capable of a fakir-like flickering in and out of visibility whilst floating about the ring. Curiously enough, the game was developed by an all-Japanese crew headed by Nintendo standout Genyo Takeda, suggesting that some of the East Asian stereotypes may have been self-deprecating in-jokes.
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| The feckless French stereotype (right) |
But the caricatures go beyond Orientalism, for all cultures portrayed in Punch-Out!! are painted in gaudy, monochromatic tones. Don Flamenco is a Spanish romantic who dances pompously with a rose-stem between his teeth; far more flair than substance, he mounts minimal offense, making for an easy knock out. The Frenchman Glass Joe is even more hapless, victim of perhaps the archest stereotyping: gutless and ineffectual, he goes down easiest of any character. These stereotypes are not just aesthetical, but are literally coded right into the fabric of the gameplay. Punch-Out!!'s characters are as notorious among NES enthusiasts for their logic patterns as they are for their looks and personalities. Thus, it is unanimously known that corpulent Pacific Islander King Hippo will jab mercilessly before inevitably jumping in the air and unhinging his massive craw, opening himself up to a fistic assault which will cause him to drop his drawers and expose his vulnerable spheroid gut for further damage. Moreover, everyone knows that when the gem in the middle of Great Tiger's turban begins to sparkle, it’s due time to block his attacks. Punch-Out!! essentially reduces the cultural Other to a sort of automaton, limited to a narrow range of behaviors and gestures, and altogether incapable of change. By contrast, Little Mac has the ability to move left and right, and punch in any sequence the player deems fitting. The American subject(ivity), then, fully realized in the player/consumer holding the controller, is possessed with expansive agency relative to the Other. To be American is to fully actualize this agency, and most markedly so through sport—if not the physical act itself, then the spectation thereof or the participation in spectation via video game simulation. In any event, the Other is to be conquered en route to glory.
Punch-Out!! proffers further sociopolitical commentary vis-à-vis the most obvious Other of its era. Given that the Berlin wall was edging towards a fall and the Cold War was approaching absolute zero during the development of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (the game’s original North American home release in 1987), a character like Soda Popinski can be read in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitics. The pinkish hue of his skin signifies quite plainly his socialist background—that is, the "pinko commie". Moreover, Popinski minces his well-muscled frame around the ring in a skimpy Speedo, definitely not standard boxing attire, indexing a certain degree of effeminacy for the political Other. Correspondingly, he is given to dancing mid-match. More damningly, Popinski is characterized by an obvious fixation for quaffing the soda pop for which he is named, an act of obsessive consumption that would seem to forsake his inborn Marxist orientation. Thus, the hypocrisy of Popinski's collectivist, Communist values and the individual restraint they would ideally embody is conveyed via his irrepressible pattern of consumption centering upon a beverage commercially popularized in America. This makes for a more rigorous (and less juvenile) critique of Russo-Soviet culture than the character's original conceptualization earlier on in the game’s development—that is, "Vodka Drunkenski", a moniker that was eventually modified when it was adjudged potentially offensive, for whatever reason.
Punch-Out!!'s American adversaries do not appear until the end of the game, and they provide the toughest competition. They also have the least personality, amounting to little more than generic strong men who are hyper-competent in the sweet science. The message seems to be clear: the world is the rest, but America is the best; we're not dancing around anymore. Evidently, the Japanese programmers were enamored of America. Oddly enough, the incumbent champ Super Macho Man fights in the same pattern as Popinski, perhaps conjecturing the dialectal ideological mirror that Americans and Soviets, Capitalists and Communists, provided for one another. This may be a subtle critique from the Japanese developers, though it is more likely lazy programming. The final boss in 1990's Punch-Out!! is another American, Mr. Dream by name, and he has the least character of all, square-headed and box-cut with an inexorable winning smile. This is America, an exceptional force cutting through the layers of dross that constitute all the other ethnicities of the world and their cultural overlays, and giving you, in the end, pure sinew with a grin.
As its title indicates, the original home version of Punch-Out!! featured Mike Tyson until Nintendo's license to use the likeness of the Baddest Man on the Planet expired. Mr. Dream, then, was a re-skinning of Tyson for the 1990 re-release of the game. This proved to be a fortuitous move, as family-friendly Nintendo certainly wouldn't want anything to do with the embattled Iron Mike who would soon after be convicted of rape charges. Mr. Dream, then, can be interpreted as a white-bread gentrification or domestication of Mike Tyson; that is, a more palatable—and entirely fictional—realization of the American dream. Perhaps behind the unfaltering smile, though, there still lurks the predatory animal heart of America, moving in Mike Tyson’s predetermined pattern.
In sum, Punch-Out!! is nothing short of timeless, in much the same way Orientalists presumed the colonial Other to be, what with their inherent ahistorical torpor. This sense of civilizational stagnancy is readily visible in the game’s non-American characters, who collectively evidence a particular lack of imagination—or rather a commitment to a particular constellation of troublesome cross-cultural imaginings—on the part of the programmers. While Punch-Out!! is undeniably problematic politically speaking, its gameplay holds up even today, and for that reason, among others, the odious stereotypes it perpetuates will live on in the annals of Boxiana and beyond.
