Really terrible arcade ports: 720: The game

Long before Tony Hawk's Pro Skater took the world by storm on the PS 1 there were other games that attempted to recreate the magic of the world's best skaters. I would imagine that even Tony Hawk wasn't a household name back then and even though I was in elementary school and basically everyone was into skating in some capacity, I don't recall skaters being world-famous and rich the way that they are now.

We kind of looked forward to skateboarding games because it seemed like a nice concept and the 720 arcade game used a different kind of joystick in that it was very durable and was meant to be moved quickly in a circular fashion instead of being rigidly fixed in a central position. This was so you could try (and of course mostly fail) to land aerial tricks such as well, a 720.

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_{These were considered awesome graphics in 1986}

The arcade was a lot of fun and I would imagine that Atari made quite a lot of money off of the cabinets. The graphics were pretty crisp (again, for the time) and the gameplay was innovative. The concept wasn't terribly difficult in that you needed to get to a skate park in time and perform tricks in order to earn more tickets for admission into various skate parks.

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Once in the park you would compete with unseen others for cash that you could use to upgrade your board for additional speed and mobility but for the most part people wouldn't get that far. You see this sort of concept isn't terribly conducive to getting people to shove more quarters into the machine so they had to have some method of making you "die." This is where the infamous Skate or Die! mantra comes in.

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If you screwed around for too long in one of the neighborhoods trying to get money for your tricks eventually the game would shout "Skate or DIE!" at you and a horde of bees would appear on the screen that would relentlessly pursue you and they would eventually get faster until it was impossible to outrun them.

It seems silly now, but I recall in arcades this game was actually one of the more popular ones and I would ogle the older people who had become really good at this game and watch them with a sense of awe. That was something that was pretty awesome about arcades in the past, it s as social environment and the nerds who mastered the games were actually heroes to all of us youngsters and they would offer pointers and help us all to get better at the games ourselves.

Given the success of the arcade machine it is no surprise that Atari attempted to port this game to many different consoles including their direct competitors who were at that time kicking their asses in the home console war (it wasn't really a "war", Nintendo had won by that point) and the home game was just awful in a way that almost all Atari games were awful.

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_{Is that supposed to be a car?}

Let's be fair to Atari and go ahead and say that literally every single arcade game that was ported to any home console until the mid 90's was a very poor recreation of the arcade original. It was impossible for it to not be given the huge difference in processing and graphical power that an arcade machine had over any home console.

But Atari didn't just stop there. We were accustomed to arcade games being much more crisp than the home versions but 720 on the NES was basically unplayable. Since the rotational joystick of the arcade was a truly necessary part of the game, replicating this process on a D-pad controller fast enough was basically impossible. You couldn't land any tricks that would pay out enough money to get any tickets to the parks and no matter how much you tried to injure your left thumb doing so, you would fail and fall.

I think I tried to play this game just a few times before admitting to my friend who had bought this game that "this is stupid... wanna go outside?" and maybe that was a good thing because then we would go outside and actually skateboard... poorly.

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_{bodybuilders flexing in the streets because that is what those guys do, right?}

According to the Questicle website which is actually a really cool website for people who want to re-live the nostalgia of the "golden age of gaming," 720 is the 27th worst game ever made for the NES and at least in my opinion it is not at all surprising that it was made by Atari who at that point seemed to stop really caring anymore: They had already badly lost the console war and were now further tarnishing their company name by porting really bad games to other consoles.

The insulted us further by also porting 720 to the GameBoy, which was even worse than the one on the NES

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It should be no surprise that after an initial surge in sales based on enthusiasm over the arcade game that these terrible releases quickly dropped in sales because even though we only had word-of-mouth and gaming magazines to go by as far as evaluations of games are concerned, word got around very fast that 720 was to be avoided by all costs.

At that point in my life I had very little money to buy games and thankfully I made the correct decision when I didn't get involved with this one. When I saw it at my friend's place and he didn't even tell me that he had it I was at first excited, then after playing it for just a few minutes I realized why he didn't tell me he had it.

720 is truly one of the worst ports of all time and its inclusion on Questicle's website as one of the worst is well and truly deserved. I think they probably wanted to rank it higher but chose 27 since it has two of the game's title in the number. It was actually a bit of a lesson for us. Arcade games, at least at that point in time, were to be avoided on home consoles across the board.