Original Release: Nintendo, 1984, NES / VS Arcade
Other Releases: PC-88 / Sharp X1 (1985), Game Boy (1989), Gamecube (in Animal Crossing – 2001), Game Boy Advance (2002), Virtual Console (2008), Switch (2019)
The original NES golf game was one of the first for Satoru Iwata and remained the only golf game on the console until 1988
Golf (Famicom, Nintendo, 1984)
Where to Buy: ebay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Nintendo’s humble Golf was one of the first 10 games released for the Famicom Disk in Japan in 1983-84, and then one of the first ported for the NES and the VS arcade systems. It has absolutely aged badly, due primarily to vicious swing timing (and imprecise eight-direction aiming that involves a lot of guessing doesn’t help either), but in 1984 I’d guess this looked pretty impressive for a home title and probably kept people plugging away getting used to the awful swing bar just due to lack of other options and novelty. To be fair I’m pretty sure this is the first game ever to have this sort of timed swing bar, which has become a genre staple since, but this first effort was calibrated pretty badly.
It was hidden in the Nintendo Switch firmware as a secret bonus until update 4.0.0 in December 2017, when typically petty-ass Nintendo overwrote it with junk data (they’ll destroy anything to Flog even one more sale).
It comes packed with just one 18-hole course to play just for the score, but Nintendo released a series of follow-up disks in Japan with new courses (that never made it to the West in any form). For extra confusion, however, Nintendo tweaked the engine with some of these releases despite using the “Golf” designation for all of them. Some altered the perspective a bit, others post-NES Open adopted that game’s engine instead (some screenshots included). But all are tied together by the crappy swing bar that basically makes them unplayable.
Links
How Golf was used to try to link Famicoms together in a sort of proto-internet in the late 80s
Videos