2) Beating Mike Tyson – Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out
There are bosses in gaming so infamous that they haunt the people who played them. Mike Tyson is one of those bosses for me.
007-373-5963. That’s a number I can recite from memory. Why? Because that’s the pass code to get to Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. I know this because I spent a good chunk of my adolescence trying to beat him. If you play the game now, you almost realize how it set the tone for quicktime events. No, really. He flashes pink the moment before he hits you and you hit a direction to dodge. You do this over and over until he tires and you can hit him. Then you repeat the process. See, same idea as QTEs, it just didn’t have a name back then (and was FAR harder than modern day QTEs).
Then he throws in those straight punches to mix it up, but there is a rhythm to it and once you play it enough, you pick up on it. It may have taken me many, many tries, but when I finally felled the mighty beast, it was one of the few times I stood up and cheered out loud WHILE gaming. That is how badass it made me feel.