Seems like a strange choice.  Monochrome pinball game (note, not a pinball sim) released on the original grey brick that handheld gaming was built on.  Released in the early 90’s, where gaming progressed to a highpoint in purity with the late 8-bit early 16-bit generation.  Not a big seller, rarely seen on the shelves, and even I acquired it by chance.

Yes, it  is good.  Very good in fact and apart from various notorious time-suckers over the years it’s been by far my most constantly played game.  I’ve had it since the early 90’s and have played it on the original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, Super Gameboy, GBA, PC emulator, emulated on PSP, on my eeepc while on holidays and now on an M3 cart on my DS.  What is it that makes it so good?  First, a bit of history.

As mentioned, it was acquired in the early 90’s, where a young boy received a Game Boy under the tree for Christmas, and the game he really wanted with it (ie Super Mario Land).  However, at that particular time the Game Boys sold came with another game shrinkwrapped to the box.  By pure chance, when my parents bought the Game Boy for me they picked up the box with Revenge of the Gator stuck on the front.

I am eternally grateful for this random incident of fortune.

Out of the three games I got with the Game Boy that day, two of them created archetypes for what handheld gaming was to be about: Super Mario Land and Tetris.

With the former, it was shown that games designed for the TV-based consoles could be shrunk down and with clever design the games could be stripped down to their purest parts while still retaining the most recognisable aspects.  They didn’t quite get it right with SML (feel wasn’t quite there and the super ball was a poor replacement for fireballs) but many games got it very very right after that point.

As for Tetris… Well it’s Tetris.  Nothing more really needs to be said about that.

The third game was Revenge of the ‘Gator, and if it did create an archetype for future games of its sort then it didn’t create as much societal impact as the other two.  For one, pinball already existed in arcades well before the first sprite appeared on a screen, and so when pinball made its eventual shift across to computerized formats, it was initially treated as a sim along the same lines as driving and flight sims, where physical accuracy to real world events was the requirement for quality.  This created issues when turned into pixels.

The weight of the pinball and its movement across the playfield, off the bumpers and off the paddles needed to be close to reality and this put off people like me who weren’t real pinball fans in the first place.  However the main issue was screen real-estate.

The standard pinball field is long and thin, with one singular area full of bumpers, ball runs and all other types of amusements.  Computer screens, TVs and handheld screens are rectangular, and almost always wider than they are high (conveniently ignoring the Vectrex).  Game design choices had to be made and they were made in multiple ways, either compressing the field to one screen, adding scrolling (thus making it difficult to judge shots and accurately hit the ball) or in later days creating the “human’s eye view” of the table seen in the likes of Super Pinball: Behind the Mask on the SNES.  Of course, the further the ball got along the field the smaller and less detailed it got, making it difficult to judge depth.

Revenge of the ‘Gator solved both these, and in the process made a video game that happened to have pinball components, rather than a pinball game.

The weight of the ball in RotG is something I thoroughly enjoy.  It’s not a metallic ball in feel.  It’s lighter, slightly slower and more precise.  It can be controlled off the flippers very precisely.  Call it personal preference but you always feel in complete control of where the ball goes off the flippers.

With the pinball area, the designers had yet another problem when designing RotG.  It was for the original Game Boy, complete with small playing area and ghosting when sprites scroll.  This was solved by having multiple small areas, each with their own sets of flippers, own goals and own points to aim for.  The aim is to always go to a higher field, and to go higher you have to hit targets and then shoot into the run that gets you to the next field.  However even right down the bottom you still have the chance to get pushed up to a top field given a bit of skill.

Where the designers really succeeded with RotG and where they DID create a archetype is by embracing what pinball on a computing device could do.  They added bonus warp zone screens.  They added brick-breaking areas, they had you feeding fish to a gator who you then shot out of the sky when it got too fat, they had you breaking eggs and playing whack-a-mole.

They had gators on the title screen dancing to the most infuriatingly good Game Boy music since the Tetris theme.

Since that time, although computerized pinball is still a rather niche genre, the approach shown by RotG has flowed through to a great number of other pinball games and has served especially well the handheld versions of these (I’m thinking Kirby’s Pinball Land and to a lesser extent Metroid Prime Pinball and the decidedly average Mario Pinball Land)

So, the place in history as the archetype of a genre is reasonably solid (in my opinion anyway).  However the rosy vision of the past often hides shortcomings in games and occasionally completely covers up the fact that they weren’t any good at all.  So, how does a 1989 vintange monochrome pinball game look and play today in the harsh light of modern game progression?

It still plays excellently.  It still feels and plays well, whether it’s on the native platform, newer one or as a rom on the PC, PSP or DS.

It’s still fun to pick up and play.  I bet anyone reading this who hasn’t played it could do the same and thoroughly enjoy it (although I would recommend you track down the cart on eBay and play it the way nature intended).

So, Revenge of the ‘Gator, best game ever?  Maybe not, but still one of the finest games I’ve ever played, and possibly the most underappreciated game on the planet.