Bonanza Bros was the first Mega Drive game I ever played. It was the reason I was interested in the machine in the first place. Today I would put it up there with Quackshot and ToeJam & Earl as one of the handful of games that for me makes that machine so exciting. (I appreciate Gunstar Heroes belongs on this list too, but I had temporarily moved on from video games by the time that came out and I had to discover it much later.)
Even now, Bonanza Bros sums up what made 16-bit gaming so astonishing. On the surface, this is pretty simple stuff. You play as a robber – or two robbers in co-op – who break into various types of buildings, race around nabbing the stuff you’re after, fighting off guards and then making it to the roof where a sort of airship allows you to escape. It’s a pretty basic thing to play – I think the first time my friend plugged it into his Mega Drive he completed it in one sitting.
But that wasn’t the full story – and the game mechanics not being the full story was what 16-bit gaming was all about. Games suddenly had time for incidental details. Sonic tapped his foot if you left him long enough, the kids in Mystical Ninja put their heads through funny hole-riddled statues for no reason. And in Bonanza Bros? Bonanza Bros was filled with incidental detailing.
These are the things I remember the most. I remember you could trip on a coke can in one level and fall over. I remember if you leaned against a door for too long a fly would come and land on your head. I remember that if you missed a bounce pad you might crash into the floor and be buried, head-first, legs sticking out for a few seconds. You might surprise a housekeeper who would drop their plates. All of this stuff was by the bye as much as the central point of the game was concerned, but it spoke to a degree of freedom and imagination and whimsy that these new 16-bit machines allowed. Mode 7 on the SNES was great, sure, but 16-bit will forever be the whimsy era for me, the point at which even the most straightforward of games suddenly had the bandwidth for a bit of extraneous quirk.