Between 1989 and ‘96 was the best time to be alive. We ate sugar for breakfast, groceries were affordable, and the internet as we know it today didn’t really exist. Mark my words, the world started going to shit after American Gladiators went off the air.
The show almost feels like the embodiment of how excessive and unself-aware the time period was. Big ‘roided up guys and ladies in spandex with radical names battling the general public in colorful and ridiculous feats of strength. I barely remember it, and I still think it was awesome. I was a bit too young for it, but my sister and I would watch Gladiators 2000 (the children’s version of American Gladiators) some mornings before school.
Those are some cozy but very hazy memories.
I’d say that’s why I picked up 1991’s American Gladiators for NES, but that would be a lie. I figured it would be bad, but I couldn’t predict it would leave me nostalgic for a show that I barely remember.
If you’re not familiar, American Gladiators was sort of a proto-reality show where a number of contestants from the general public would try to win a tournament against each other. Most events also involved battling against the “Gladiators,” who were essentially game show bosses.
So, for example, “Swing Shot” has the contestants try to grab balls and bring them back to their hoop while attached to a bungee cord that allows them to leap around. The Gladiators are just there to frustrate them by slapping those balls right out of their hands. That was the typical setup; the contestants tried to score points while the Gladiators tried to prevent that.
I say “general public,” but really, most of the contestants are pretty fit in their own right. They just aren’t drinking steroid shakes for breakfast, so they’re usually dwarfed by the Gladiators themselves.
The NES version (other console ports are different) of American Gladiators has five events from the show: The Wall, Human Cannonball, Assault, Powerball, and Joust. It supports two players if you have friends, or just one player if you’re like me. However, it’s alternating multiplayer, so you’re not going to be directly jousting your friend. Instead, you simply compete for score with one person wearing blue and the other hot pink.
To complete one of the game’s four levels, you have to succeed in each of the five events without losing all your lives. This is terrible, because if you choke on one of the events, you have to complete the rest all over again, and some are much harder than others. Each of the mini-games is completely different, so I’m going to go through them from easiest to most difficult.
Powerball
In Powerball, you find yourself on a field with five holes you need to drop balls in. There are three Gladiators trying to slap your balls, so you need to avoid them. You start with one ball, and each time you either get slapped or sink a ball, a new one appears on the opposite end of the, uh, Powerball court (or whatever). You win if you fill all the holes.
This one isn’t so much the “easiest,” but it’s just the one you don’t “lose.” If you don’t succeed in jamming up the holes with your balls, you still just proceed. The event is marked as complete. You just don’t get as many points from it. So, regardless of whether you win or lose, Powerball is essentially a gimme.
Assault
In the show, Assault was probably my favorite event. The contestants had to shoot a target with a variety of Nerf guns while a Gladiator with a much bigger Nerf gun tried to snipe them. It was fucking awesome.
The 8-bit interpretation is, I think, a reasonable representation, even if they had to take a different approach. You run up a vertically scrolling screen, while the Gladiator slides side-to-side in a gun-chair. You just have to avoid their shots until you make it to cover, where you find a little rocket thing, which enables you to shoot at the Gladiator. You only get a couple of shots, and the Gladiator takes a few to knock out. This varies as you proceed through the levels.
It’s not exactly how it works in the show. For example, the Gladiator doesn’t usually die in a fiery explosion when the contestant wins in the show. However, I think it does a decent job of capturing the general challenge of the event.
Human Cannonball
This one sounds completely made up, but it really existed in the show. A contestant grabs a rope and tries to knock a Gladiator off a podium by swinging into them. It sounds like a good way for someone to get injured, so I looked it up. Apparently, there was a documentary about the show made last year, and one of the Gladiators, Malibu, says he had his head split open on his first day on the show during this event. The official American Gladiators YouTube channel apparently had a clip of this listed as the “Hit Of The Century,” and it got taken down sometime after the documentary was released. Yeah, the context kind of changes how impressive the hit might have been.
So, it’s a bit, erm, interesting that whenever you knock a Gladiator down in the NES game, they emit a rather high-quality digitized scream. Like, a real terror scream and I’m pretty sure it’s stock audio that I’ve heard before. It’s shockingly hilarious.
The event takes some getting used to, but it’s not too bad when you get a feel for it. You just have to learn to time your jumps so you grab the end of the rope and let go when your ass is basically right in the Gladiator’s face.
Joust
Most people probably remember American Gladiators for the Joust event. A contestant and a Gladiator would battle it out atop these tall pedestals with giant cotton swaps. In contrast to Human Cannonball, this event looks the most safe. As safe as, say, Sock’em Boppers, which I’m pretty confident concussed a few children.
The NES version kind of sucks in a way that reminds me of China Warrior. You kind of just flail at the Gladiator while trying your best to figure out whether it’s the high, mid, or low attack that is most effective. You can read their movements to an extent, but it’s hard to tell if the collision detection is bad or if you’re just not hitting your foe correctly. As long as you’re hitting them more frequently than they’re hitting you, you can generally gain ground until they fall off their podium (screaming, of course).
Afterward, you do some quick platforming to the next podium to challenge another Gladiator. It’s not impossible, but it is rather unpredictable and hard to control.
The Wall
The Wall is just… Okay, deep breath here. In the show, The Wall is, like, a recreational climbing wall. In the NES game, however, it’s about a mile high. And sometimes, it also goes sideways. The goal is to reach the top, and every so often, a Gladiator shows up to try and knock you off.
To move, you have to rapidly tap A and B to move your left and right hand to different positions. The climbable area is essentially just a grid. To its credit, it makes it pretty easy to tell where your hands are and if you can grab a certain spot. However, getting your hands on the same horizontal level is another matter. And if you don’t actually grab that grate, you’ll fall. There are some extremely narrow spots where you need to be very careful of where your hands are. Maybe I was missing something here, but sometimes my dude would grab too high, and then I was screwed.
Most of the mechanics here are fine. The Gladiators can be avoided by putting an ungrabbable spot between you and them. Hitting A and B rapidly while having to slow down for trickier spots works decently, and it only hurts your carpel tunnels a lot. However, the fact that I couldn’t get my hands to cooperate and one mistake made during this massive journey meant losing a life, the whole experience quickly became frustrating. And physically painful.
And this is where I got caught up. I could rarely win all five games within five lives, especially when it came to The Wall. I managed to complete the first and second levels, but I gave up on the third because I hit a part in The Wall that I couldn’t figure out how to get around. After the rage subsided, I watched a video of someone playing through it, and I don’t even know what the hell they’re doing at that part. The spot they fit through is one tile too narrow to climb, but they manage it by doing a weird, one-handed shimmy. Is that a mechanic or an exploit?
When I started playing American Gladiators, there was a really weird glitch. On The Wall, if I hit the A button, my dude would just fall to his doom. Just drop. It confused me to no end. I read the manual, and it just said, “B button for left hand, A button for right hand.” However, that just wasn’t working for me.
And then, on Assault, I’d press a button to start the round, at which point it would instantly end and start tallying up my time bonus. Pretty sure that isn’t how the game is played.
I thought I was doing something wrong, so I just moved on to other events while checking Assault and The Wall every so often to confirm the bug was still happening. Eventually, through no effort of my own, it just fixed itself. A started functioning on The Wall, and Assault didn’t just instantly hand me the W.
It’s kind of ironic that the real barrier for me to make progress in American Gladiators was literally The Wall. Aside from its unreasonable expectations, it’s not really that bad. I think that if I played it with save states rather than on original hardware as I did here, I’d probably take the time to play through it.
No, wait, scratch that. I’d still have to figure out how to magically shimmy through that section of wall. Gosh, I think I just really want to like the game, so I’m forgetting that the third level actually requires arcane knowledge to complete. It’s just so close to being a… well, okay, maybe not a good game, but one that would be worth a weekend rental. Agh, it’s so unfortunate. We could all use a little more Nitro in our lives.
