10 Video Game Openings That Pissed Everyone Off
3. Morse Code - Victory Road
The original Ikari Warriors was designed as an arcade adaption of action megahit Rambo: First Blood that SNK were forced to rebrand when they couldn't get the rights. Still, it proved plenty successful and prompted a handful of sequels.
The second game in the series, Victory Road, sees its Sylvester Stallone-esque protagonists flung into the distant future to fight aliens with rocket launchers. Because it was the late 1980s and apparently as long as you had fun, the logic behind a game didn’t matter. When it was a hit in arcades, SNK commissioned Micronics to develop an NES version.
The at-the-time high fidelity of the arcade meant for decently okay voice samples but these wouldn’t transfer to the comparably restrictive hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Thus, someone had a stroke of what they probably thought was genius. If we can’t have voice clips, we’ll use the next best thing: Morse code.
The opening cutscene to Victory Road NES is not only despairingly slow but incredibly painful on the ear as the NES chipset beeps out every single letter in Morse code. As if that would somehow register with and be appreciated by 1980s kids hyped up on sugar who just wanted to blast monsters.
Victory Road isn’t remembered for much but if it was to win any award it would be for easily the worst NES cutscene.