[content warning: discussion of racist language and imagery]
Trawling old magazines for the charts, I picked up a lot else besides. It was inescapable how explicit sexism dug in hard in the late ‘90s, led enthusiastically by advertisers. In the mid-’80s it was much less in-your-face. On the other hand, casual racism was everywhere. The charts page in Your Sinclair Issue 2 has a line graph showing Way of the Exploding Fist and Fighting Warrior outperforming Frank Bruno’s Boxing over time. The caption reads ‘These inscrutable oriental types seem to have the drop on our own Frank Bruno – but then again, they don’t play by the Queensbury Rules!’. Two games made in Australia and depicting respectively karate and fighting in Egypt are met with the same blanket dehumanising stereotypes and insinuations about cheating foreigners. And Frank Bruno’s Boxing itself aligns itself with the magazine there. The second opponent in it is one ‘Fling Long Chop’ introduced as being from ‘the land of the rising hi-fi’ Japan.
The irony is that Frank Bruno’s Boxing is blatantly based on a Japanese game, specifically Nintendo’s Super Punch-Out!! arcade game. In both you control a boxer from a tight fixed view just behind them, watch the opponent in front of you for exaggerated tells to predict their moves, and use essentially the same limited range of dodges and punches to try to knock them down enough times that they won’t get up again. Not only that, but some of those opponents are exactly the same. The huge, bearded Canadian lumberjack you start off against in Frank Bruno’s Boxing may be called Canadian Crusher instead of Super Punch-Out!!’s Bear Hugger, but he’s the same guy. Andra Puncheredov is the same drunken Russian stereotype as Vodka Drunkenski. Frank Bruno’s Boxing is a rip-off. That doesn’t seem very Queensbury Rules, does it?
It’s worse than that, though. Not in the sense that it’s a really ugly and poorly-executed imitation as a game, although it is, but in that Elite took a game already filled with national stereotypes and took it much further. Fling Long Chop, too, is based on a Super Punch-Out!! character. In that game he was Dragon Chan, a kung-fu fighter from Hong Kong. So Elite took one of Nintendo’s characters who was a comparatively tame stereotype, gave him a nonsensical and much more racist Chinese-mocking name, and had the mismatch of making him Japanese into the bargain, so they could… make a bad joke about hi-fis? The racism isn’t incidental, it’s the only possible appeal of their ideas.
There’s still deeper to sink. Frank Bruno’s Boxing has some new characters to add: Frenchie (so creative!), Ravioli Mafiosi, Antipodean Andy and… Tribal Trouble. While all the other characters are given nationalities, Tribal Trouble is just listed as being from Africa. He is a horrendous racist caricature, down to having a bone through his nose, and continues a long and violent history of dehumanising depictions of Black people. There were plenty of Black British people the 80s – one of them was a champion boxer who got a game named after him! Some of them must have played it too, and been around other people whose standards of what was acceptable were influenced by playing it. It’s difficult to imagine that it didn’t result in harm to people.
I’m playing through a sequence of the UK’s popular computer games and video games because I think it can say a lot about how things are and how things were, and how we got here from there. And as often as that story is a story of creative inspiration and new possibilities, it’s also the story of a popular British game in the local industry’s golden age delivering poisonous racism via shoddily stealing an entire game from Japan.
