NES Godzilla Prototype

Before I begin to write this, and begin my expedition, I wanted to use this as a way to remind myself that I do not know what I'm messing with.

A couple days ago I had taken the time to read about my fellow friend Zachary's experience with their cartridge of the NES game Godzilla: Monster of Monsters, along with Carl's experience of the same cartridge. What I read truly shook me, to say the least.

Before reading, I had never known that a video game could cause such harm both mentally and physically.

To get what I had originally started writing about, these two experiences with the Godzilla NES game made me remember the prototype copy of the game that I owned for about a couple years now. The game itself landed in my possession after finding an auction selling rare versions of video games old and new, and also after giving up quite a bit of money for it.

Even after all this time, I've never played this copy of the game, seeing that it would've just been a more primitive version of the main Godzilla game. The experience seen from Zachary and Carl with their copy of the game made me think otherwise. While I wasn't expecting much from my copy, I want to at least see what this prototype had in store.

Before I began playing the game, I wanted to record any differences of the game with a screencap program, similar to what Zachary did for his copy. I e-mailed him, asking if I could get a download link to the screencap program he used. He responded with a link and then also asking what I needed it for, to which I said "Oh, it's nothing. Just wanted a good screencap program to capture some gameplay footage." I quickly set up the screen capture program after after it downloaded.

Upon booting up the game, I wasn't met with a normal title screen. Instead, a more simple looking one popped up. The logo with Godzilla in front of it was missing, and in its place was text that simply said "GODZILLA MONSTER GAME." Both mentions of Toho at the top and the copyright at the bottom were both missing as well.

Pressing A advanced to the next screen. Some text appeared, saying "STAGE 1," completely skipping the cutscene that was supposed to play before dropping you in the Earth stage. The Earth's board remained mostly the same as the original game, aside from the other levels, jungle and portal levels being replaced by the mountain levels. The bosses from the map, Moguera and Gezora, were represented by a gray square with text in them stating which one is which.

What caught my eye next was the playable monsters. Alongside Godzilla and Mothra was a sprite for Anguirus. After reading Zachary's experience with the game, it led to me researching more about the game. Anguirus, along with Rodan, were unplayable and also unfinished ally monsters. Here, however, Anguirus's sprite looked slightly different. He was on all fours instead of standing up like Godzilla.

This is probably a copy of the game with a more complete Anguirus sprite sheet. I held back on using him, though, moving first with Godzilla to start advancing through the board.

The mountain levels were the same, except for the lack of many enemies. The only things that attacked me were the background hazards and the occasional ship in the sky.

The score meter was missing and Godzilla was stuck in his crouching animation. I could still attack, but the animation for kicking, punching or tail swinging would not play. Power was also renamed to "charge," and it slowly builds up energy instead of being full upon entering a level.

All of the mountain levels played out the same. Afterward, it was time to fight Gezora. Gezora's fight was the same, althought the Earth music played instead of Gezora's theme. Gezora also did not have a charge and life meter. Instead, a 4 represented how many bars of life he had left. One more thing I noticed about the fight was that there was no timer. The fight would continue until either monster was defeated. Godzilla's still stuck in its crouching animation.

When Gezora was defeated, he did not sink down to the bottom with explosion particles surrounding him. He instead just faded away.

I was then taken back to the board. Gezora's piece was now at the top right of the screen. Moguera was ignoring Godzilla and Mothra and was moving towards Anguirus, so I decided to move Anguirus's piece. Anguirus can move three spaces, so I suppose he's the middle ground between Godzilla and Mothra in terms of movement.

After walking through a couple levels, I was now fighting Moguera. Anguirus was called "Angilas," but I'm still gonna refer to him as Anguirus because it's more familiar to me.

Anguirus has lower health than Godzilla, but there was something he had that made up for it. Anguirus could move back and forth much quicker and could slowly regenerate health. He also gained charge faster. When pressing B, he could perform a forward lunge, an attack that made him leap forward and deal damage while also knocking back the enemy slightly, which depleted one bar of charge. Pressing Start would make Anguirus burrow into the ground, which drains charge constantly but makes you gain health. This could also be used to avoid attacks.

Moguera faded away the same way Gezora did when he was defeated. Other than all those slight differences in Anguirus, the game played out as normal. I proceeded to the base and advanced Mothra, Godzilla and Anguirus to the next stage.

Before the next stage screen appeared, a screen displayed before it, showing a white version of the Godzilla sprite along with the text "STAGE CLEAR." When it appeared on screen, it made quite a loud sound, which made me jump a bit. I will post more about stage 2 in the next update of this little document as I play more and record more of this prototype.

So far, aside from the levels disappearing from the Earth stage, I would have preferred this version of the game over the one we got officially. Anguirus is fun to play, and the game seems to have overall quality of life changes.

Anyways, on to stage 2.

The stage started out with a cutscene. It showed some buildings rumbling from side to side, with a little radar dish sitting at the top. The text below the building screen says "A GIANT MONSTER IS APPROACHING!" There was music playing in the form of the Japan-exclusive Solar System theme.

Oh wow. This was honestly quite a shock. Unlockable monsters? And it's Rodan? Sign me up. This prototype so far has been way better than the original game.

Mars looked quite the bit different. Moguera and Gezore were gone from the board, being replaced by Rodan and a UFO enemy. Weirdly enough, Varan, Rodan and the UFO enemy had actual sprites and weren't represented by gray squares. I suppose these bosses were finished before Moguera and Gezora. The board has gone from a pinkish color to a bright yellow, and the portal levels are once again not present. There is a new level type that looks like some destroyed buildings. I moved Anguirus onto these levels first to see what they're like.

The city level was, well, a city. It's a level you would expect to see in a Godzilla game. There are buildings you could destroy and tanks and jets to smash. I wonder why this was left out in the main game. I feel like these kinds of levels would have tied more to the theme of Godzilla. One odd thing did happen in the stage, however. At the end of the level, a whited out Godzilla sprite sat unmoving.

When I walked up to it, the sprite turned around and glitched out, then the game stopped for a second, all the sounds and music freezing as well, before taking me back to the board. I assumed this was some sort of miniboss they were coding in that they never finished. The fact that the sprite used Godzilla's sprite made me wonder "What if I use Godzilla in this level?" And so I moved Godzilla to one of the other city tiles.

When I got to the end of the level, the Godzilla sprite was already turned around to face me. When I walked up to it, something strange happened. Well, for one, Godzilla stopped crouching. He had his normal animation again. Secondly, the background had turned a bright white and gray. The white Godzilla sprite had moved to the other side and was blacked out. The game also made a loud buzzing noise. After that, though, the game went back to the board. This level was probably really unfinished if it was causing a lot of bugs like this.

Going back to the board revealed a new tile with a gray square in it. Once I defeat all three of the bosses, I'll go explore with Mothra. For now, I'm going to fight Varan.

Varan was the same as usual, so I didn't take any screenshots, except whenever I entered the battle and when he was defeated. I forgot to take a screencap of this until now, but when you level up, not only does your health and charge fill up like normal, but text saying "LEVEL UP!" also shows above you level. I think it's cute, and it should have stayed in the main game.

Varan's piece disappeared and was replaced by a purple square that was now placed at the top right, like Moguera's and Gezora's from the previous world. Really odd, since they already had the board sprite for Varan, but whatever, I suppose.

Rodan moved towards Godzilla, initiating a fight between the two. Rodan uses unused sprites from the main game, althought tinted more red, and not as glitchy. Rodan was a fairly agile opponent, flying up and down constantly, making it hard to get hits in. He had three ways of attacking: he could perform a simple bite, and he could also fire a beam of energy from his mouth, which dealt quite a bit of damage. He could also perform a swooping grab, grabbing monsters in his talons and dealing damage before dropping you back down. He was a challenge for sure, but once he was low on health, he was no match for my fully charged Atomic Breath.

A screen appeared right after the fight was over, showing Godzilla, Mothra, Anguirus and Rodan with the text "RODAN HAS JOINED YOUR TEAM." The more playable monsters I have, the better.

At the board screen, the Rodan sprite was now facing to the right, and I could select and move him. He can move four spaces, similar to Mothra. The UFO enemy was ignoring every monster but Mothra and was heading towards her, so I moved Mothra's piece up and over to the boss.

The UFO was named Mothership, and it entered with two UFO enemies around it. Mothership didn't attack much, it just flew around and summoned more UFO enemies. Weirdly enough, the UFO's theme was Saturn's theme. One interesting, yet irritating thing I did, though, was spawn these giant fireballs that dealt a lot of damage, and they were super annoying. The tiny UFOs also took more hits to kill than normal, which was also quite the annoyance as well. While Mothra is more mobile than Godzilla, I feel like I should have gone in with Godzilla instead of Mothra, because Mothra got quite low here.

After I was sent back to the board, I sent Mothra up to the gray square icon to investigate this new tile.

This new level had a blue, rocky ground with blue, cracked pillars on the background. The level also had a roof, so I couldn't fully fly upwards. The music, if I could call it that, was merely a low rumble. After about a half minute of flying, I was met with... an egg on a pedestal. Mothra's egg. When the egg appeared on screen, the low rumbling stopped. Without my input, Mothra moved forward and landed next to the egg. No matter what I pressed, she wouldn't move.

Slowly, Mothra's palette turned darker and darker, to the point where her sprite disappeared. The level and health bar also disappeared. The egg cracked open and disappeared, leaving behind a larval Mothra. After the larva hatched, the game went back to the board. Mothra's sprite was replaced by the larva. With nothing else left to do in this world, I proceeded to the base. The larva sprite moved on its own, so I assume it's going to be an AI monster that will fight or move automatically.

After getting the last monster to the base and advancing to the next stage, I was once again met with the "STAGE CLEAR" screen with the same loud sound as before. This stage had quite the interesting changes in it, and I'm interested to see what happens in Jupiter, or the third stage.

Wow, would you look at that! A minigame! This is definitely a change from the side-scrolling gameplay. How this little minigame works is somewhat like a cat-and-mouse game. The monsters move around the board, and you have to walk on their tile to defeat them. When a monster was defeated, a new one would appear. The music here was the music that played when you entered in the Ghidorah cheat in the password screen. The last one was Varan. This little minigame was fun and easy.

...What the hell. This random Godzilla sprite keeps showing up in each stage that I go to. How bugged is this prototype?

Anyways, moving on to the next part of the stage. The next part of the stage was a rotating puzzle. The text above the jumbled Godzilla instructs you to "RE-ARRANGE GODZILLA!" There is also a five minute time limit below the puzzle. I could maybe guess Toho and Nintendo left these little minigames out of the final product so as to not interfere with the game's overall sidescroller action. A shame, really. I think some puzzle and mini-game aspects would have made the game a bit more enjoyable, to have a break between those boring side-scrolling levels.

One thing I found funny was after a couple minutes of solving the puzzle, Baragon showed up and looked at the camera with this goofy look on his face. A couple of the other in-game monsters also showed up, like Moguera and Gezora.

All done. It took me a little bit longer than it should've, but Godzilla is now all back to normal. Every now and again, sprites would glitch out and random sounds would play. I think I'm approaching the end of this prototype soon. Moving on to the next stage.

A quiz mini-game? The first question asked me when the first movie was released. Knowing that Toho movies weren't really localized by 1988, only appearing in TV guides every now and again, I could see why they left out this mini-game. Music here was the password screen music. Here are the questions that appeared in order:

It seems the pictures give a little hint to those who don't know the answer already.

...Oh god. The game glitched out again and that whited-out Godzilla was back, but it wasn't long before the game took me to the next stage, the final stage.

The final board was quite different from any other world in the game. Mose of the board was base levels. The bosses in this board were Baragon and Ghidorah. I'm guessing this was some early version of Planet X, because the title theme was playing on the board screen. There was also an empty tile at the top where the main base should be. I moved Anguirus over to Baragon to fight him.

This fight was truly a battle of the underdogs. Even with healing and dodging abilities, this was still a pretty even-matched fight. Eventually though, Baragon went down.

After I returned to the board, I noticed that Baragon did not have a gray square icon at the top right. He just completely disappeared. Mothra was heading towards Ghidorah, and so I began to move my piece towards Ghidorah to start a showdown.

Ghidorah was definitely the hardest fight, even with the help of Mothra. The situation got so bad that even Rodan flew in to attack Ghidorah with his energy beam. With the combined power of three monsters, however, we were finally able to take down Ghidorah.

When I defeated Ghidorah, I thought the game would've taken me to the ending, since I defeated the last monster on the board, and there was no base. Instead, the gray square tile appeared once again. When it appeared, all the monster pieces moved to clear the path between me and the square. The game wants me to go to the gray tile. I took Godzilla's piece and moved it onto the gray tile and started the level.

When I entered the level, there was only black with a dark gray bar at the top of the screen.

After... THAT unnerving scene, it took me to the ending screen, with Godzilla missing. There was also text saying "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING GODZILLA MONSTER GAME." After pressing A, the game took me back to the title screen.

Wow. This prototype ended on a really unnerving note. At first, the game's content intrigued me with the unused monsters and new levels and all, but this Godzilla figure left me with a feeling of uneasiness. At first, I thought it was a glitch, but the last few times I saw it, it definitely did not feel like a glitch. I think now I know why they didn't include these changes made to the game.

Overall, I think it would've been nice to see some of the unused monsters in action, especially Anguirus, but as I said before, I think now I understand why this content went unused. It's most likely for the better. For collection's sake, I'm keeping this game to myself and to also not let this game stumble into the wrong hands.