“Nintendo Golf lets you choose your clubs, change your stance, control your swings — even select the angle of impact on an 18 hole championship course. You view the course from both a close-up and overview perspective as you move down the fairway. Select 1 or 2 player stroke play or 2 player match play for the most exciting tee to green competition.”
Fun fact: did you know 1985 was a long, long time ago? Thirty-five years might be just a number to some readers, but in terms of gaming tech, that’s astonishingly far-flung. It’s not enough to state how many things we consider par for the course nowadays were listed as actual features back then. Just look at that blurb again. ‘Choose your clubs‘, ‘control your swings‘, ‘select 1 or 2 player‘. Even just the concept of golf being in the same sentence as the word ‘exciting’ speaks of an age unfamiliar.
Back in the old days when game cartridges were projectile-sized.
As silly as it may seem nowadays, though, something as simple as ‘virtually recreate the path of a tiny white ball moving on grass’ was new territory to explore at the time. Recreating ANY activity as a video game was a challenge. Making that game fun to play? Even more-so. So when you’ve got the eponymous sport in question, sure, some tried, to what I would hesitatingly call ‘results’.
Look, folks, it was a different time.
Enter the Nintendo Entertainment System, October 1985. Launching in North America with a tidy opening of 17 games, many will remember it for Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. But alongside those were those ordinary pastimes turned virtual: Baseball, Tennis, Soccer, and of course, Golf. So, what does this even have to do with Mario, consummate consumer of mushrooms and perpetrator of violent crimes against koopas?
Easy. He’s the star of this game.
Arguably just a cameo, but, it’s in an official strategy guide, so that’s -double- canon in this house.
In standard NES fashion, the Mushroom Kingdom’s star representative cameos as the sole character of the game. It’s never stated where Golf lies in the plumber’s timeline, but the size of that gut and the fact that he’s busying himself playing regular outdoor Golf instead of the actual dozens of other weekend activities we’ve seen him in gives me the personal impression that these are the later post-retirement years, probably after Peach has taken the kids, karts, and castles in a heart-wrenching divorce.
It’s nice to see he’s finally grown out of those overalls, though.
So the goal is simple. Strike the ball across the greens and make it through 18 courses in as few strokes as possible. Your score is kept through the game and you want that number as low as you can get it. It’s standard golf gameplay, with no wacky hijinks or anything of the sort to disturb your day. Your main obstacle is nature itself, be it bunkers that halve your shot distance, woods and ponds that penalize you with an Out of Bounds, and wind that… actually doesn’t do much to sway a shot unless it’s really blowing upwards of 15 MPH, but even still, just barely.
You had one job, ball.
The fact that wind even is a factor at all is kind of charming though, given the year this came out in. As a matter of fact, for how basic Golf is, a LOT of it is ‘charming’ from a technical standpoint. Being able to take advantage of the meter to curve your swing, turning yourself in circle actually affecting the behind-the-shoulder view and displaying obstacles around you matching your overhead view, or even just how little arrows on the green indicate a slope against your ball in the putting view. It’s a surprising amount of thought in tiny details for an NES game.
NOTHING BUT NET. …Er- club?
There’s also a ton of clubs. Do you know your clubs? Well if you don’t, you… still won’t, after playing Golf, because even the manual doesn’t quite explain the difference between them all. On the fair side, it does provide a chart of each club and their maximum distance, and what can be inferred from this chart is that from longest to shortest, there’s Wood (W) clubs, Iron (I) clubs, ‘PW’ and ‘SW’ clubs that most people don’t use because even the manual doesn’t bother giving them a name so why would you, and finally, your faithful putter (PT).
At first glance, the variety of clubs is there to help you get used to the timing on your swing, as the difference between clubs of the same type is basically a drop in power in favor of a wider ‘straight shot’ window when you’re setting the stroke. If you want a harder smack, you’ll have to get used to the clubs with smaller timing windows (meaning you’re more likely to hit the ball off center if you don’t have said timing down.) It’s actually kind of neat, for such an old game. Once you understand the maximum distance of the various clubs, you might even start guessing which one would give you that perfect shot to roll onto the green.
Going through the whole game with nothing but 1W like a chad is also a valid option.
There’s a 2-player mode, and the option of either Stroke (total amount of strokes) or Match (best of 18 holes). Dragging somebody into this alongside yourself is the optimal way to play, if only because now there’s also another person in the room who is equally clueless about Gold as you are, and both of you can bask in the quizzical nature of the golf terminology that will beep at you through the experience. Do you know what a birdie is? An eagle? A double bogey? This isn’t filler, I’m genuinely asking this. Slap those in the comments because I’ve played this game at least once a year for over two decades and still haven’t puzzled that out.
Okay, well, I understand THAT message, at least.
I sat here while typing this, reaching for anything else to say about the game, but the truth is, that’s the entire thing from start to finish. And you know what? I like that. Golf is very much a product of its time, a game that can be played entirely with six buttons. A to time your shots, left and right to aim, up and down to select a club. The B button itself isn’t even used. It’s simple, something even the most casual of players can pick up with minimal instruction.
I’m sorry, are those lines representing the optimal path for each course? Are you telling me I didn’t need to figure that out for myself?
Golf is a game that not everybody has played, but everybody knows about. Even if you’ve never seen an NES in your life, you’ve most likely seen Golf on a virtual console or the Nintendo eShop. Programmed solely by Satoru Iwata as one of his first projects for the company, it even wound up on the Nintendo Switch as a well-hidden Easter egg, a tribute lovingly activated with his signature gesture.
Looking at it from that perspective, it’s a nice little piece of programming work. An enduring one, even, lending itself to Let’s Plays, reviews, and speedruns. Can Baseball, Tennis, and Soccer make the same claim? It’s familiar greens that stick with you even if you haven’t picked up an NES controller in years.
The Dapper Zaffre Mage is a beleaguered purveyor of positive vibes and merry thoughts, who was once described as a cinnamon roll for reasons beyond his ken. Occasional exasperated ramblings and odder oddities can be found over at his Twitter.
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