Extropia’s Retro-gaming: Chan And Chan

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

‘CHAN AND CHAN’.

“Chan and Chan” came out for the PC Engine in 1987. It was available only as a Japanese import, although a version of the game released as JJ and Jeff came out for the Tubografx. This Westernised port removed most of the features that made the original so...weird.

So, what was ‘Chan And Chan’? Well, imagine that some game company looked at a platformer like Super Marios Bros and said, “you know what a game like this needs? It needs to have toilet humour, and it needs to be more surreal”.

That pretty much sums up Chan And Chan. Basically, it’s not much different to Super Mario Bros. As was the case with that game, in Chan And Chan you have to dash from left to right. Along the way, you must jump over gaps, leap onto platforms and avoid contact with enemies. Mario (or his brother Luigi) could release coins from certain parts of the environment by head butting it. In Chan And Chan, coins are released by kicking certain objects in the environment.

So, yes, Chan And Chan would look very familiar to anyone who has played a side-scrolling platformer. Just like Super Mario Bros, the player could choose between two player-characters: Kato Chan, a besuited chap with a large head that makes him look like a caricature of a Japanese businessman, or his equally sharp-dressed brother, Ken.

As you run through the environments, you encounter the unchosen brother along the way, who is often engaged in some scatalogical activities- peeing up lampposts, or crouching behind bushes, red-faced (kick him and he flies into the air doing a moonie). The enemies throw turds at you, and in case you were wondering of all this toilet humour was restricted to the non-player characters only, fear not, for your character can be made to fart a noxious cloud at will.

When I played the game all those years ago, I had no idea what it was all about. ‘Chan And Chan’ begins with the two brothers sat in a living room. On a table between them there is a red phone. It rings and one of them answers it-in Japanese. I had no idea what they were saying. To add to the confusion, as you run through the environment, you often come across public toilets. When you enter them, you get transported to heaven and meet strange characters that don’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the game. All in all, Chan And Chan was a bit rude and really weird.

It was only years later, thanks to the Internet, that I was able to understand what this game was really about. It turns out that this was the first PC Engine game to feature celebrities as playable characters. They may not have been familiar to me, but Japanese players may well have recognised the characters as Cha Kato (born 1943) and Ken Shimura (1950). Cha Kato was a member of a comedy group/rockband called The Drifters, whose claim to fame included supporting The Beatles when they first toured Japan. From 1969 to 1985 there was a TV show whose title translated as ‘It’s 8 O’Clock, All Members Of the Drifters Assemble’ (its best thought of as a Japanese version of Monty Python). Ken Shimura joined the show at the start of the series.

Then, in 1985, Shimura and Kato starred in their own show, ‘Funtime TV’. As well has featuring a segment in which viewers sent in amusing clips caught on home video (predating ‘Failarmy’ by several decades) the show featured sketches, including one which ran for over six years and numbered some 200 instalments.

This sketch was called ‘Detective Story’. In each episode, someone would call up Shimura and Kato on their red phone, asking for help. The duo would investigate and something funny or embarrassing would happen along the way.

Sound familiar? Yes indeed, the game Chan And Chan was based on that long-running sketch ‘Detective Story’. As for the strange characters you meet along the way, well, those are cameo appearances of characters from ‘Funtime TV’.

So, that’s Chan And Chan, a game based on a long-running sketch in a Japanese comedy show. It may not have had the most original gameplay (let’s face it, there are plenty of side-scrolling platformers) but it had pretty decent graphics and some bizarre humour and that makes it memorable.

REFERENCES:

“Who Are Cato And Ken?’ By Kajillionaire