I warned you all that I have a lot of dream projects but, for real and for serious, if I had to name the one that gnaws on my brain like a caveman climbing a steep wall with his teeth, I’d have to go with video gaming’s number one Neanderthal, Bonk. Paleolithic super dude Bonk is a carnivorous caveman who solves all of life’s problems with his head. By bashing the problems with his head to be specific. He made his debut stateside on the much-beloved (by me) TurboGrafx-16 with the excellent Bonk’s Adventure.
I can’t fully explain why, out of everything I could have asked for, I chose the TurboGrafx-16 as my fifteenth birthday present. From Keith Courage to Legendary Axe to Bloody Wolf to JJ and Jeff, everything on the TG-16 felt exciting and new and kinda weird, and I was just drawn to it. Of course, I had no idea that, when I excitedly plugged in the console for the first time in August 1991, the TurboGrafx was already on its last legs and would go on clearance just a year later. (Though it meant I could and did grab the TurboGrafx-CD add-on for 20% of MSRP soon after which, in turn, meant I could play The Addams Family and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Score.) The console’s creator, NEC, just couldn’t compete with the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. I still loved the little black console with the little flat cartridges though and I played as much as I could. My absolute favorite game on it was Bonk’s Adventure.
Developed by the astoundingly long-standing Red Company and published by the sadly defunct Hudson Soft, Bonk’s Adventure is a side-scrolling action-platformer with a…familiar premise. A giant lizard-looking monarch (King Drool) kidnaps a pink-clad royal (Princess Za) and it’s up to our hero (Bonk) to rescue her. A competing concept the advertisements aimed for directly. Well, the US commercials did. I don’t know what’s happening in the Japanese one.
While the story is pretty copy/paste, the gameplay is not. Bonk’s primary attack employs his giant noggin which he uses to bash a variety of (literally) egg-headed dinos who have fallen under evil King Drool’s control. Bashing enemies is fun–whether you’re sauntering up to them to do a quick “how do you doink” or jumping into the air and coming down dome-first into their personal space. The way the baddies shake and shudder–and their eyes do that wibble-wobble thing when you smack into them–felt good. How a game rewards player input is huge to overall experience, people. Success alone is not enough. Celebrate the player’s success. Bonk’s Adventure knew this.
Bonk could level up his offense by indulging in some good old-fashioned meat-eating. Chomping on a carne collectible increases Bonk’s brainpower. The sudden influx of protein gives him the ability to shake the ground at the lowest level and, at the highest, gives our big-headed hero temporary invulnerability. Eating meat also brings out Bonk’s primal nature by pushing our prehistoric hero further to the left on the evolutionary scale. (Again, the developers know the value of visual feedback.) Some images of the (d)evolution:
In addition to the jump I’ve mentioned, Bonk also had a mid-air spin mechanic players could spam to keep the caveman airborne in a perpetual spiral. You did this to slow your descent, aim falls to collect power-ups, and get to weak points on larger enemies.
The world of Bonk’s Adventure is a colorful prehistoric land full of bright and bouncy flowers, erupting volcanoes, vines, ice shards, dancing cacti, and screen-filling bosses. Everything about this game made me happy then and still makes me happy now. I beat the entire game…I don’t even know how many times. It was, hands down, my Game of the Year 1991 and has remained in my top ten gaming memories ever since.
How much do I love Bonk? I have used his monster-mashin’ melon as my avatar at one time or another on every platform you can imagine. Look at my about page and tell me you don’t see the resemblance.
The original Bonk’s Adventure was followed by direct sequels Bonk’s Revenge and Bonk’s Big Adventure. The second alters Bonk’s abilities by allowing him to freeze enemies when under meat’s influence. The third gives Bonk the ability to triple in size making him an even bigger threat (zing!). Nintendo got ports of the TG-16 games and then an original called Super Bonk which had the caveman bopping through time. (This saw a Japan-only sequel). Mobile saw some Bonk releases all the way up to 2008. (Once again, only in Japan.) A sci-fi spinoff series of side-scrolling shooters, Air Zonk and Super Air Zonk: Rockabilly-Paradise, brought our bald-headed boy into the future as a cybernetic superdude with a lightning bolt hairpiece and some radical shades. I haven’t played all of these, to be fair, though I did play the main three and Air Zonk (when it was released on Virtual Console back in 2007 or so).
The last drawing on the wall this series got was the announcement of Bonk: Brink of Extinction back in 2009. A cinematic trailer was released followed by a handful of screenshots where you see Bonk with an array of noggin-focused abilities from a fire head to a literal block head and even hair (!!!). The game promised a coop campaign as well as alternate play modes. Brink of Extinction looked like exactly what I wanted from a new Bonk and then some. I was so ready to play that game the moment it hit Xbox Live Arcade. Alas, the game was ultimately cancelled. A build made its way into the wild though and you can view some gameplay here.
Platformers are evergreen and are often stacked with other features, from masocore difficulty to roguelite progression to amped up physics. Platforming has basically become a mother sauce that inventive developers are adding all kinds of tasty new spices into. Bonk already has a super fun foundation that we haven’t seen iterated on in the years since. Given the chance, I know what I’d do to bring Bonk into the modern age. I’m dying to do so–and may even have a design doc that I dabble in now and then.
As with all these dream projects, this concept crosses my mind A LOT. I mean, I’ll just say it: UNIVERSE, I WANT TO MAKE A NEW BONK. Last I dug into it, Konami owned the rights but they’ve been focused on only a handful of their original IPs lately. Still though, never say never, I suppose. If I had the chance, I’d happily bash my head against that wall in hopes of busting through. Until then–or until some other lucky soul gets a chance–Bonk remains in the (pre)history books.
