As some have seen from my posts on here, I’m currently going for a full set of hangtab NES games. I working on an expansion of my original black box video (Youtube link on my page if you’re curious) to include all of the third party hangtabs as well. I’ll continue posting these subsets in the coming weeks, though I don’t have an exact date of when the series will debut.
Anyways, about these three!
Two of these three games were quite unique, filling or expanding upon niches that had yet to be capitalized on. Rygar was one of the first action RPGs released for the NES with a (kind of) fleshed out story. It utilized more than just side-scrolling, transitioning to a top-down camera angle with fluid movement up and down. Solomon’s Key complemented previous puzzle games, mainly Nintendo’s own releases in Wrecking Crew and Gyromite, in that it actually let the player jump. Instead of simply working within a level, players were encouraged to think outside of the box, creating and destroying their own terrain to traverse stages. Mighty Bomb Jack, on the other hand, is kind of just a worse Mario. It has some good ideas that attempt to separate it from the the pinnacle of platformers at the time, but is ultimately weighted down by its tedious level design. I hate to boil it down that much, but this is hardly the place to get so deep into the weeds.
Each of these three releases came with game-specific posters. In Rygar’s case, it’s really just a bigger version of the cover art. However, Mighty Bomb Jack and Solomon’s Key’s posters are maps of their respective games, similar to what Nintendo would do with Zelda just a few months later. There’s some pretty crucial info on them, too; Solomon’s Key includes a code that allows players to reset from the beginning of a level instead of having to replay the entire game. This wasn’t even mentioned in the manual. Tecmo also employed a clever way to get people to collect all of their games. On the back page of each manual is a little stamp containing the game’s icon. If all four, including Star Force (which doesn’t have a hangtab box) and a 5th, secret game, were collected, you would win what I can only assume to be a watch. Though I can’t find any definitive proof of what would be won. If any of you guys know please leave a comment!
The hardest of these three to find with an intact hangtab was absolutely Mighty Bomb Jack. All of them got the same amount of print runs, as far as I can tell, so I can’t exactly explain why this is the case. I’m also not going for variants on these third-party hangtabs, but all three of these are different prints. On the back of each box is either “Made in Japan” written in black text, printed on a sticker, or completely omitted. I believe that “Made in Japan” omitted makes it a true first print, but don’t quote me on that.
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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/nes/comments/1 ... _come_out/