The Best NES Quotes of All Time

The Internet is full of memes that come and go. Remember that Rebecca Black “Friday” song? Its baffling popularity and the smug self-aware irony of everyone who supported it faded in mere days. If someone catches you trying to work the lyrics to “Friday” into a joke, they will look at you like you’re an old man trying to fit in by spouting off the sort of mean-spirited racist jokes that were all the rage in the 1940s. Rebecca Black’s relevancy has actually become negative and mentioning her name actually causes her to become more obscure. She’s like the opposite of the Candyman. But not all memes have to spend the twilight years of their high school lives giving handjobs at every school function. Some of them can stand up of their own merits, most of which are those spawned from the broken English of NES games. I’m proud to present to you a list in no particular order of the greatest NES quotes of all time. Now before you little turd sniffers get into a hissy and point out in the comments which quotes I’ve forgotten, remember that “best quotes” is, first of all, wholly subjective, and secondly, “best quotes” means “the quotes I was able to think of when I told Dustin I wanted to do a piece for ballsrog.com.”

“It’s a secret to everybody” Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda for the NES was Shigeru Miyamoto’s homage to his childhood days of wandering the countryside of Japan, exploring. I’ll be the first to admit that I do suffer from a bout of Japanophile-ism, but until I learned this little nugget of trivia I had no idea that the Japanese countryside had wandering monsters, secret caves, and graveyards spawning endless ghosts. Here in the States I used to wander the woods and occasionally I would come across a pile of broken tonic bottles someone in the 1930s threw away (back in the good old days when you just tossed your trash anywhere). One of the things that made The Legend of Zelda so compelling was its many secrets, and the first time you strategically placed a bomb and had it blow a hole into the side of a cliff, accompanied by the world’s most satisfying midi sound, you knew you were in for something special. Living inside of one of these secret caverns is a Moblin who doesn’t want to kill you, but instead wants to reward you with rupees for your troubles. Ironically, it’s a secret to nobody because every kid on the playground knew about that shit and if you didn’t, you were probably in for an old-school beatdown, 80s style.

“Barf!” River City Ransom

I never heard of RCR until I was an adult. I’m being totally honest here. I know everyone loves to reference it and speak of its quirky charms and warm their feet at the crackling fire of wistful nostalgia, but I kind of feel like no one really heard of this game until Seanbaby made it famous on his site back in the early part of the millenium. It’s a great game, don’t get me wrong, but it’s weird how everyone is so hipstery about it. In River City Ransom, you battle rival school gangs to try to save a hottie from an evil broham named Slick. Unlike other side-scrolling beat ‘em ups of the time, like Double Dragon, RCR had a loot and power-up system with RPG sensibilities. You could power your character up by cashing in on food or spa treatments. This allowed you to punch and kick the living crap out of a rival gang member until he vomited from the abuse. The game underwent significant tweaking for Western audiences, which makes me want to learn Japanese and play the original so my mind could collapse under the weight of the baffling Japaneseness. Seriously though, “BARF!” was added to make it easier to swallow for round-eyes? In a way it did make its mark in the video gaming lore, but not in the way the over-worked and underpaid localization specialist intended.

“Let us make a journey to the cave of monsters!” Bubble Bobble

Yes, Bubble Bobble, let us make a journey to the cave of monsters. Upon first reading of this quote, your brain immediately turns on its “laughable Engrish” temporal lobe and it begins to feed itself creamy doses of hot dopamine. But upon closer inspection you realize that in actuality, that awkward quote is almost acceptable English. You could almost get away with making a journey. Almost. You have to assume that a journey is something you create and not something you partake in, but really, isn’t every journey nothing more than the whole of a sum of many different parts? So while it doesn’t really make sense to say “make a journey,” it’s almost OK so long as you’re willing to make an excuse for it. And “Let us” seems silly at first glance until you stop to realize that “let’s” is just a contraction of “let us,” and while using “let us” in place of its more convenient contracted form tosses in an unnecessary extra syllable, it’s still 100% acceptable English. Fuck you, Bubble Bobble.

“A winner is you!” Pro Wrestling

Here’s one for the Hall of Fame. Pro-Wrestling is the NES game that showed America how awesome the world of professional wrestling could be if only it were soaked in a salty brine of 8-bit limitations and strained through a fine filter of Japan-to-US translation attempts. Wrestling in the 80s was pretty awesome as it was. We had Macho Man and Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan and countless others. Hogan was the greatest of all, encapsulating perfectly the spirit of America as he marched around the ring waving his giant stars and stripes before tearing off his pre-shredded Hulkamania t-shirt. The only man who was impervious to the lasting effects of a sleeper hold, Hulk Hogan was once the only thing stopping Russia from launching their nukes at us. Kids these days know him as the creepy bag of leather who tries to get their parents to rent HDTVs from Rent-a-Center, but as someone who was there I can tell you that at one point in history, Hulk Hogan was the single most important man alive. In the Pro Wrestling NES game, the closest thing to Hulk Hogan was King Slender, but only because his nickname is “Cold-blooded warrior, jr.” That’s pretty great right there. Pro Wrestling also had the first luchador in gaming with Starman, the invincible Super space-traveller whose flying cross chop sometimes caused kids to begin bleeding profusely from their heads while playing the game. If you were skilled enough to win a match, you would be greeted with a splash screen of your triumphant wrestler with the quote “A winner is you!” This quote is everywhere on the Internet now, the precursor to today’s “Full of win!” Other bastardizations include “A winnar is you!” and “A winner iz u lulz.”

“Join the Nintendo Fun Club today! Mac” Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

The single greatest boxing game of all time is, and always will be, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Everyone has played it. Everyone. You spend much of the time learning the secrets of timing and strategic blocks and dodge to best your much larger foes. Each boxer is more challenging than the last and after smashing your way through all of them, you face Iron Mike Tyson, who is literally impossible. I’m not using the word “literally” improperly, I mean it: the game is programmed so that beating him is just not something that can be done. If you go on YouTube you can see videos of people beating Tyson, but these were done with edits and ROM-hacks where they turned the “Impossiblity Bit” from 1 to 0. You probably have some friends who say they’ve beaten him, or you might recall besting him after months of trying, honing your button pressing skills to the sort of fine edge that samurais used on their katana. But you didn’t. Your mind is playing tricks on you and by playing into it you’re doing nothing but deepening your level of dementia. Pretty soon you’ll be pissing your pants and wearing your pajamas to the mall. Between rounds, Mac would sit in the corner while Doc Louis gave him advice like “Watch his left!” and “Dodge his punch, then counter-punch!” But the best advice Doc gives is “Join the Nintendo Fun Club today! Mac” The Nintendo Fun Club was the precursor to Nintendo Power Magazine, a sort of enthusiast’s newsletter that invited kids to the world of fun that was locked inside of their TVs and could be opened with the golden key of Nintendo products. Why Doc would give this advice in the middle of a fight to a dazed pugilist remains a mystery, but bad timing aside, it’s some pretty good advice. Nintendo propaganda in the mail is always awesome.

Bad Dudes

“The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?” Bad Dudes

Are you fucking kidding me? No one is bad enough to even parse that sentence properly, much less fulfill the request therein. Let’s break it down. First off, the President has been kidnapped. Given the tremendous amount of security that surrounds the President 24/7, the fact that he has been kidnapped means shit just got real as fuck. But he wasn’t kidnapped by some foreign pee-hole scratchers, he was kidnapped by ninjas. The president of the USA, probably the most protected human being on planet Earth, has been kidnapped by ninjas. Ninjas. Ninjas kidnapped the president. Can you wrap your mind around that? Ninjas are, by design, unbelievably powerful, but a group of ninjas working together to break through the defenses of the Secret Service and snatch away the leader of the free world is probably going to conquer Earth, rename it Ninjaplanet, and make us all into ninja-slaves sharpening their swords and pulling their throwing stars out of trees and wooden fences. Are you a bad enough dude? Fuck you, of course I’m not. I’m up against a foe so powerful it’s like every sixth-grade power fantasy come to life. The Chuck Norris everyone used to meme about isn’t even that powerful, and the real-life Chuck Norris is basically a beard that attached itself to a man for the purposes of humor. At the end of this seemingly impossible (in concept) game, after rescuing the President, he invites you to enjoy a hamburger with him. Thanks, Mr. President. After bending the laws of nature to save you, I sure want to eat a hamburger. Boy oh boy. The last screen is of the president munching a burger while a bad dude stands there looking impossible,  an army of Secret Service agents standing at the ready. I sort of hope that someone updates this game for the modern era, and President Obama invites you to celebrate his rescue with a Kool Mild, but I doubt very highly that will happen.