The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle: Jumpless Bunnies

Also known as the quintessential Game Boy earworm of my childhood, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle is a very strange puzzle platformer from Kemco released not far from Nintendo’s first true mass-market handheld’s debut. Crazy Castle in itself is not too crazy—it’s a bad port of an average NES game—but keeping track of all the different versions Kemco put out can be maddening.

The original Famicom Disk System game didn’t star any of the Looney Tunes heroes at all: it was released in Japan as simply Roger Rabbit, where Roger collects hearts instead of carrots and dodges shady rhinos in black suits who presumably helped capture his girlfriend. For the US release, Roger Rabbit was already taken so they must have said to themselves “hey what’s another license we have lying around starring a rabbit? Right!” and thus Bugs Bunny was born. But Simply calling it Bugs Bunny also was impossible so let’s prefix it with The and say it’s taking place in a crazy castle? Are you with me so far?

Kemco simply reskinned and repackaged the game and called it a day: the gameplay, the level layouts, and the monotonous but very catchy music (see Zophar’s Domain, record 12. Flat Brick Stage) all remained the same:

If you take a look at the above footage and are familiar with the EUR/US Game Boy game we’re discussing here, you’ll immediately notice the biggest problem I have with the Game Boy port: the original Famicom/NES adaptations were smooth, while the Game Boy version is an incredibly irritating choppy experience. This is a game where turning and taking stairs are a matter of life and death as you can’t jump to evade enemies. Pressing the directional pad a frame too late will get you killed. Oh, and you can’t change your mind midway through a staircase. Of course you can’t.

If that wasn’t crazy enough for you, the Japanese Game Boy version featured Bugs Bunny nor Roger Rabbit. Instead, it was called Mickey Mouse. What the? Mickey Mouse! Even worse, both the Crazy Castle series—a subtitle only used when Bugs’ license was employed—and the Mickey Mouse series got successors on the Game Boy which are the same reskinned games, with version numbers that also start differentiating… C-c-c-crazy! Is that it, then? Nope, Crazy Castle 5 on the GBA features… *drumroll* Woody Woodpecker.

Anyway. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: I chased down all five Crazy Castle carts and will ignore the Mickey Mouse¹ ones—except when they’re subtitled, in which case it’s a non-Kemco licensed 2D platformer.

As for the first Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle game, there’s little to say: the objective of each level is to gather all carrots whilst avoiding getting hit by Sylvesters, Daffy Ducks, and Yosemite Sams. And that only is a problem if the designers cram in that many enemies that it becomes almost impossible to outrun them: most of the times, the AI is incredibly dumb, up to the point that I was yelling at my Game Boy Oh come on, just hit me already, I’m cornered! But for some reason the Sylvester stopped, looked at me, and then just turned around!?

There’s not much level variation either. The tile layout and music switches every five or so levels but besides introducing pipes as a way to travel across the level instead of stairs, it’s a very one-dimensional experience. You can grab and shoot a glove to defend yourself or push plant pots or safes around to hopefully drop on your enemies, but that’s about it.

I guess they called it Crazy Castle because you must be crazy if you want to finish all 80 levels on the Game Boy. For the persistent ones, there’s a password system that lets you restart specific levels with 5 lives. It takes about an half hour to get to level 20, meaning it’s game over after an hour or two.

Pierre-Luc Gagné from Game Boy Essentials dug up the history of this crazy carrot-eater, pointing out a few interesting properties of the game in the process: it was supposedly the first Game Boy game with big sprites. Also, since it was released very early in the handheld’s life, it still sold more than a million copies—what else were you going to play anyway?

In the end, The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle is yet another mediocre Game Boy game that has a more interesting development and release backstory than it has interesting gameplay, even though we early Game Boy adopters had little choice but to play it anyway. My more naive younger self did appreciate the simpleness of the game, something my older self has trouble with due to limited patience. It’s not a true Looney Tunes game: it has nothing to do with Bugs. It’s not a good platformer or a puzzler. It doesn’t have great chiptune music like Carrot Crazy does. It didn’t even taken place in a castle.

If it is, the pipework is in dire need of decluttering.