Punch-Out!! (1987 video game)

Punch-Out!! features Little Mac, a young boxer fighting his way up through ranks of the World Video Boxing Association. After facing a series of colorful fictional opponents in three circuits and winning the championship in each, Little Mac enters a final "Dream Fight" against a highly skilled boxer. In the Gold Version, the final boss is Super Macho Man, who was also the final opponent in Super Punch-Out!!. ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!'' features Mike Tyson, the real-life undisputed World Heavyweight boxing Champion at the time. After the license to use Tyson's likeness expired in 1990, he was replaced by the fictional Mr. Dream in later releases of the game. Mario has a cameo as the referee. Three opponents from the Minor and Major Circuits reappear in the World Circuit, with new attacks that force the player to devise a new strategy. ==Development==

Punch-Out!! was developed by Nintendo Research & Development No. 3. Genyo Takeda (the producer of the Punch-Out!! arcade games), was the director of the NES game. Because the NES was not as powerful as the arcade hardware, they could not recreate the arcade graphics. Instead of making the playable boxer wire-framed or transparent in order to see the opponent, they made the playable boxer smaller and named him Little Mac, a 17-year-old boxer weighing about 107 pounds. The behavior of each opposing boxer follows a set pattern requiring trial and error and memorization to defeat them. Music The opening and closing/"credits" music for Punch Out!! is "Look Sharp-Be Sharp", composed by Mahlon Merrick for the 1942–1960 radio and television program Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. All opponents except Bald Bull, Great Tiger, Mr. Sandman, and Mike Tyson / Mr. Dream have ring-entrance music. Most instances are a classical or folk theme, usually from the fighter's country of origin: Glass Joe has the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise"; Von Kaiser and Super Macho Man, the latter possibly due to a code-reuse artifact, have Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries"; Piston Honda has Japanese folk song "Sakura"; Don Flamenco has a portion of "March of the Toreadors" from Georges Bizet's opera Carmen; and Soda Popinski has Russian folk song "The Song of the Volga Boatmen". ==Release==

Gold version Before the public release of ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Nintendo released it in a gold-colored Famicom cartridge titled Punch-Out!!'' in Japan, without Mike Tyson, as a prize for participating in the Famicom Disk System's Family Computer Golf: U.S. Course tournament held in September 1987. 10,000 units were producedhalf were given as high score prizes, and the rest were given as a lottery prize. Its final opponent is Super Macho Man, who is also the final opponent in the arcade game Super Punch-Out!!. ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!'' Nintendo of America's founder and former president Minoru Arakawa attended a boxing match during the Heavyweight unification series that featured its future champion Mike Tyson. Arakawa became so astonished with the athlete's "power and skill" that he was inspired to use his likeness and the tournament itself in the upcoming game. Tyson was rumored to have been paid $50,000 for a three-year period for his likeness. This transaction was something of a risk for Nintendo, as it occurred before Tyson won the World Boxing Council (WBC) heavyweight championship from Trevor Berbick on November 22, 1986, which greatly increased the profit for the game. Nintendo would release the Mike Tyson version of Punch-Out!! in Japan soon after its North American release. Punch-Out!! ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! was rebranded to simply Punch-Out!!'', and re-released in the U.S. and Europe in 1990 and 1991, respectively. When Nintendo's license had expired with Mike Tyson, his likeness was replaced by a fictional character named Mr. Dream. This version of the game was used in all major re-releases, including the Virtual Console, Animal Crossing for GameCube, the NES Classic Edition, and on the Nintendo Classics service (which Mike Tyson humorously contested). ==Reception==

More than copies of ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! were sold in North America by 1988. It is one of two NES games to reach this sales milestone that year, along with The Legend of Zelda''. Punch-Out!! was well received by critics. In 1989, Computer and Video Games magazine said the NES version of "the great boxing arcade game" had "big, brilliantly drawn and animated sprites, a brilliant control method and utterly superlative gameplay", making it "definitely THE best boxing game available on any machine". In August 2008, Nintendo Power listed it as the sixth best NES game, praising it for putting arcade-style fun over realism. Historian Steve L. Kent called it the second major game of 1987. In 2005, Punch-Out!! is on GameSpots list of the greatest games of all time. Editor Shawn Laib of Den of Geek ranked it 7th out of the 15 Best NES Games of All Time, and Esquire's Dom Nero and Cameron Sherrill ranked it fifth. GamesRadar ranked it the 11th best NES game ever made, calling it a "brilliant puzzle game [disguised] as a sports game". Game Informer ranked ''Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! as its 14th favorite game ever in 2001. The staff noted that no boxing game since has been as "beloved". IGN named it the 7th best NES game. Official Nintendo Magazine'' ranked the game 74th in a list of greatest Nintendo games. ==In media==

On The Tonight Show on October 29, 2014, Mike Tyson was challenged by host Jimmy Fallon to play the game on live TV. The virtual Tyson defeated the real Tyson in the first round by TKO. While interrogating a murder suspect in Brooklyn Nine-Nines Season 5 episode "The Box", Detective Jake Peralta laments the difficulty of beating the Punch-Out!! character Great Tiger as he teleports around the ring. To which the accused confidently asserts, "I beat him every time. You just punch him when he gets dizzy." In Family Guys Season 7 episode "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven", during a family grace, Peter asks God for the "cheat codes for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out", saying he has "been stuck on Bald Bull for 4 years". == Notes ==