Mike Tyson's feeling Left-Out!!

This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm not into sports...ok, you could at least feign surprise. Anyway, I mention this because while I think sports are a waste of time better spent playing video games or blogging about video games, I do like video games and sometimes there's some overlap.

Ok, there's not a ton of overlap between video games and sports,
and when it does happen, it's generally pretty dumb but still, it happens. 

Great Tiger, the boxer from India, had
magic powers. Because the 80's.

Huh? No, not sports video games, not really. All sports games are, objectively and universally, junk. Except Punch-Out!!. Punch-Out!! was actually pretty good. Oh, and that's not me getting excited and using two exclamation points, that's just the title of the game. Sort of. The game was originally an arcade game called Punch-Out!!, (again, nothing I can do about the punctuation), about boxing against different, kind of racist stereotypes, but most nerds of a certain age remember the NES versions. And this is where it gets complicated, so if you want to bail, I'll understand.

"Wow! Golf legend Lee Trevino!"

-No kid ever

Still there? Super. So pretty much anything I know about sports comes from video games, and the reason I know who Mike Tyson is is because of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which was an adaptation of the arcade game with Mike Tyson thrown in. Sometimes a video game publisher will get a famous sports figure to lend their name and likeness to a game to give it, you know, famous person appeal. I guess they figured kids followed sports personalities? I didn't, but you know, I didn't particularly like going outside.

Take John Madden for example. There've been like thirty-six games in the John Madden Football series. John Madden doesn't know shit about software engineering, but he does know how to collect royalty checks and I think at this point he's better known as that guy from the Madden games than as a real sports personality.

I only knew him from the used bin at EB and as the guy
whose post-game commentary cut into Star Trek: TNG's timeslot. 

Fun Fact: Mike Tyson is 14 feet tall.

(source: NES)

Why did I even bring this up? Oh, right, so when Nintendo's licensing deal with Mike Tyson ran out, they didn't try and renew it, but instead re-released the game as just Punch-Out!! It's exactly the same game except with Tyson-who was the game's final boss, replaced by some rando called Mr. Dream. Mr. Dream had all the same moves as Tyson, was just as controller-throwingly hard to beat as Tyson but looked legally distinct from former world heavyweight champion, so Nintendo didn't have to pay him shit. But that still doesn't explain why I'm talking about a thirty-year old video game.

This does though. Nintendo, in their excruciatingly slow drip-feed of NES games on Switch are re-releasing Punch-Out!! Yes, the one sans Tyson.

With two games re-released per month, it's unlikely we'll see even a fraction of the
680 NES games make it to Switch. But hey, good thing we got goddamn Ice Climber.

Tyson also tweeted this pic of 8-bit Tyson
KO-ing Mr. Dream, demonstrating that he's
not only good at boxing, but also photoshop.

Taking this as a slight, Mike Tyson went on Twitter and asked everyone to tell Nintendo how much we all miss him and demand that they re-release the version of Punch-Out!! with him in it instead of the version with Mr. Dream:

"mr dream? everyone tell @NintendoAmerica who they think of when they hear punch out"

-Tyson, registering his disgust

on Twitter, throwing caution,

and capitalization to the wind

Appearing in the Hangover
was the least of his offenses.

Yes. When I think of Punch-Out!! I do think of Mike Tyson because again, my sports knowledge comes from video games. But it also comes from crimes that made the national news, so Punch-Out!! makes me think about how he was convicted of raping Desiree Washington in 1991. Then I remember that his lawyer tried to get the victim's sexual history admitted as evidence, and that he only served half his sentence. Then I think about him biting Evander Holyfield's ear and then that time he threatened to eat Lennox Lewis's children. 

So who can say why Nintendo is re-releasing Punch-Out!! and not Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!? Who knows why they do anything they do? But if I were to guess, I'd say it either has something to do with Nintendo not wanting to pay a licensing fee or not wanting to associate themselves with a violent sex-offender who threatens his opponent's children. Or both.

On the other hand they've had great success with a
glorified cockfighting simulator, so what do I know?