With new records being set, in 2025, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! is still making a name for itself.
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! was released on NES on November 21, 1987. While Punch Out seemed like an orangery boxing game, it was much much more than that! The game has been taken to its absolute limits and the legendary fight with Tyson himself has been whittled down to just under two minutes. Today, while Tyson is unaffiliated with Punch Out, the series lives on in the Wii remake of the game. But while the new game is impressive, players still go back to the simplistic and challenging brilliance of Mike Tyson’s Punch out.
While Punch Out was originally played on arcade cabinets, Nintendo wanted to port the game to the home consoles. Punch Out was designed as a fast paced boxing game. It was all about reading your opponents tells and reacting to their movements. The arcade was able to show the boxers the player would face in all their terrifying glory. The NES, however, did not have the technical power to achieve any of this. Due to technical limitations the NES could not show much of anything in detail. This was a large problem for a game that relied on looking at your opponent and reacting to it. The boxers that the player faced needed to be large and intimidating, they needed to be reactive, and they needed to have a personality.
It seemed that Punch Out was going to end up like many other ports from the arcade. It was going to encourage you to go play the better version at the arcade. The NES and its lack of detail was a problem that needed to be fixed. The solution was found in a special chip, the MMC2, that was developed and put into every single copy of Punch Out. This chip gave the NES the ability to show much more detail in its sprites, as the boxers the players face were now able to show emotions by celebrating when they won and showing terror when the player dodged one of their many punches. The player character was shrunken down and the other boxers increased in size to give the boxers the space they needed to show off. This was revolutionary and made Punch Out on NES more than a dream.
By BillCramer (CC BY-SA 4.0)
As development on the game continued, the world of boxing in the real world evolved. A young boxer had challenged the heavyweight champion. The boxer had a record of 22-0 and after the fight this increased to 23-0. The boxer, known as “the baddest man on the planet,” was Mike Tyson. Nintendo saw the young boxer as the perfect opportunity and after they signed an agreement it was set. Tyson would be the star of the show in what would become Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. He would be the final fight and the final challenge to any who played the game.
Kids all over the US were told that “Mike Tyson is awaiting your challenge,” and the game was a hit. Within two years, the game had sold more than three million copies. The game was able to sell not just because of Tyson, but also because it was simple. The player could punch, dodge and block,and that was it. This simplicity made it so anyone could play, but only the best could challenge Tyson.
The other made up boxers and their personalities made players want to stay in the game. There was Glass Joe, a boxer who was 1-99 and a terrible fighter, there was the menacing Bald Bull who’s threatening “bull rush” terrified any who stood against it, and there was the elegant and cocky Don Flamenco who thought he was better than the player in every way. Of course Tyson was also there with his terrifying record and equally terrifying pouches that could knock the player down in just one shot. These fighters gave the game an identity that was unseen in other NES games.
The game was simple, sure, but it grew to be incredibly difficult. As the player beat the easier boxers, the game would ramp up the difficulty rapidly. The player needed to learn a boxer’s tells and they needed to know when to punch and when to dodge. The fight against Tyson himself seemed nearly impossible. Tyson could take the player down in one shot, moved incredibly quickly, and had massive amounts of endurance. However, it was not impossible if a player was resilient enough he would go down and the player would be able to say they had completed Tyson’s challenge.
Today the legendary fight has been taken down to less then two minutes. In February 2025, the speed runner Summoning Salt beat the legendary boxer in 1:59.97. This incredible achievement shows just how far the game has been taken in its long life span, and who knows there could be much more for Punch Out in the future.
