Remember when I talked to you about Mappy yesterday? I was s..
Added 2022-03-05 14:30:39 +0000 UTCRemember when I talked to you about Mappy yesterday? I was surprised to see how few people had ever played that game. I'm used to seeing it on Arcade1Up machines so, to me, it was a "common game". Then I did some research. Mappy is an early Namco arcade game that achieved great success in Japan, and very little success in the United States. Behind its cute characters and presentation is a surprisingly strategic platform arcade game that requires a lot of planning, and can become quite frantic. It runs on the same hardware as Super Pac-Man (two Motorola M6809 microprocessors running at 1.536 MHz), but modified to support horizontal scrolling. Since Mappy wasn't extraordinarily popular in the U.S., there isn't a lot of history to report. The name Mappy is likely derived from mappo (マッポ), a Japanese slang term (slightly insulting) for a policeman. The large red cat was known as "Nyamco" in Japan, which besides being a play on Namco, comes from nyanko (ニャンコ), the Japanese equivalent of "kitty cat". Nyamco was renamed "Goro" in the U.S. release of the game. Mappy was ported to a large number of home computers and consoles in Japan, and saw no American conversions. However, it has now shown up more recently in the United States thanks to the Namco Museum 50th Anniversary compilations, Microsoft Revenge of Arcade for Windows, and the Jakks Pacific Namco TV Games Plug-And-Play systems. Interesting background story...if it was an American game, it would probably be called "Piggy" LOL based on why they called it Mappy, haha! Still not sold on that game (yet). I still haven't beaten the damn default high score on the machine and that annoys me!!! Hope you're all having a wonderful Saturday morning. Do you like reading about the history of some games?
