Going through MAME, playing the various arcade ROMs I’ve downloaded, it doesn’t take long for me to find something that’s truly out there. The very nature of arcade games leads to this happening a lot. They are designed for you to put in a quarter, play until you win or lose, then the next person in the arcade puts in a quarter, then the next person, and so on. It’s not a format for telling a complex story, and often times, not even one for telling a basic story. Plus, what stories exist in these games are usually written in a language that the writer is not fluent in, so then there’s a reliance on flashy visual storytelling, which then leads to a lot of very surreal games for a person to discover late at night in their emulator. Usually, you might get a game that’s just a little weird, or a little nonsensical. But then you get games like Mutant Night.
Mutant Night is a platformer made by a company called UPL. This developer worked on games like Ninja-kun (which would later be acquired by Jaleco and become Ninja Jajamaru), Atomic Robo Kid, and Gomola Speed on the PC-Engine. Their games tend to share some visual flair, like flashing colored orbs and fairly detailed, grim looking machine-based enemies that clash with the rest of the visuals. This makes UPL’s output very distinct, in some cases, making the feel almost haunted in a way. Mutant Night is no different.
The first thing you do in Mutant Night is walk forward, shoot a few enemies, then pick up an item that will temporarily turn you into a completely invincible giant. You keep walking forward, obliterating everything with your very presence, until you reach the level’s exit. Stage 2 is a single room where you’re expected to pick up all of the floating orbs around you, a bonus level in all but name. This is probably where you figure out that you can jump in the air infinitely, like a form of rudimentary flight, with only the ceiling to stop your upward movement. You’ll need this later, both to complete vertical-based stages, and clear massive beds of obstacles. You find other power-ups, besides the one that makes you big, like one that makes you very small and surrounds you with other small clones of yourself that move around of their own volition, or one that replaces your standard projectile (a colorful flashing orb fired from your singular eye) with normal sized clones of yourself that walk or float in a straight line, damaging everything in their path.
Nothing has any real visual consistency. Your character is this cartoonish thing that is surprisingly well animated for 1987. The enemies are metallic things, either nondescript shapes or based on animals like monkeys and fish. Levels change drastically from one to the next: subterranean ruins, caves, deserts, what appears to be the deck of a spaceship, a room of geometric shapes, what appears to be the surface of Earth’s moon, all of types of stuff. The music ranges from moody foreboding to what sounds like an upbeat anxiety attack.
Mutant Night is this nonsensical journey with no point, no destination, no conclusion. It is also brutally difficult, bordering on unfairly difficult, so good fucking luck trying to complete all sixty-two levels Mutant Night has to offer. I haven’t even gotten into how the game actually plays. In terms of just pressing buttons, I can really only describe Mutant Night in one way: it’s like a Japanese developer attempting to make their own ZX Spectrum game. Jumping and floating has this tight inertia to it that takes time to get used to. You’re just a little guy, shooting colorful balls at strange things, all in a world that doesn’t follow any logic. It’s so familiar, and yet it’s not like anything you’ve played before. Nothing makes sense. It doesn’t feel real. This is why I love it. It is strange, it is unusual, and it is unfiltered creativity.
Mutant Night is the kind of game that doesn’t really exist anymore, aside from a handful of independent creators. The kind of game that isn’t made for mass appeal, or really any kind of appeal towards normies. The kind of game that makes sense to at least one member of the development team, and that was good enough to keep working on it. The kind of game that feels like something you imagined late at night during a bout of insomnia, and now you have to spend the next several minutes arguing with your own internal monologue as to whether or not you finally managed to fall asleep and just had a short dream. Mutant Night is something we need more of.