Sports video games are weird. For every given game, you’ve got two drastically different takes on each sport. There’s the more realistic take which tries to emulate the gameplay as close to the real life equivalent as possible. Think of the Madden games or even the Gran Turismo racing games. On the opposite end of that there’s the arcade sports titles. These ones take the general concept of the sport in question and video gamify it to the extreme, resulting in ridiculous games like NBA Jam and Punch-Out!!. I’d even make an argument for a third style being the video game that creates its own sports game, with games like Rocket League coming to mind, but we can save that discussion for another day.
One of the earliest games I remember getting totally hooked on was Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64. The combination of simple golfing mechanics with that arcade wackiness, along with a healthy dose of the Mushroom Kingdom, made for a game I rented a few times while growing up. The developers of the game, Camelot Software, would go on to make just about every Mario Golf and Mario Tennis game, with their distinctive style coming through in each iteration. However, before they were swinging for the greens on Nintendo’s consoles, they actually hit the links first by initiating rival Sony’s very own golfing series: Hot Shots Golf.
Quick aside, because I always thought it was funny. Hot Shots Golf is the series I know of here in North America. Overseas in Japan it’s called Minna no Golf, which loosely translates to Everybody’s Golf, which just so happens to be what the European market calls the game. My thinking for why Sony didn’t feel “Everybody’s Golf” would fly in North America as a title is that golf itself wasn’t cool enough, so adding something fun and dynamic like “Hot Shots” was needed. The dichotomy of that image of badass golfing combined with the actual games visual style just makes me laugh. But anyway, I digress.
Hot Shots Golf on the PS1 was technically the game I played first over Mario Golf, having first played it probably about 2 years prior at a friends house down the road. He and his brother had a Playstation at the time, and I think we had our SNES and Genesis, so a disc-based console was something totally bizarre and new. I remember him popping it in and thinking, “Why would I want to play a golfing game?” At the time, I hadn’t played any golf game, so I didn’t know what to expect. Nowadays just about every golf game seems to have a club select, swing meter, wind forecast, and more, but back in 1998 or something like that I had no idea what to expect. After seeing how colorful the game was, and how fun, AND how simple it all was, I was kind of hooked. We played all 18 holes straight.
Much like NBA Jam before it, Hot Shots Golf solidified my liking of arcade sports games WAY more than simulation sports games. Why would I want to stress about my putts on the green when I could just drive the ball as far as I could, then chip it in directly and not have to worry about fully realized physics and player skills? It was just a simpler way to play and enjoy the game, and it’s the way I prefer to play these types of games to this day. I can respect there are gamers that want their PGA Tours, but give me a color cast of characters and a driver any day.
Okay, so what made Hot Shots Golf stand out? If I’m being honest, it wasn’t much aside from that initial play through at my friends house. After that, we never really touched it again. However, upon finding Mario Golf a year or so later, instantly connecting the dots to what this game was, I came to appreciate what came before it. It’s probably worth noting developers Camelot created the first Hot Shots Golf game, and no others. After it’s release in 1998, they directly went over to Nintendo and created the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis series’ just a year and two later. As for Hot Shots Golf, it was taken over by development studio Clap Hanz, who have made every subsequent Hot Shots Golf game since (and taking a note from Camelot they even made a Hot Shots Tennis spinoff).
Being the only game in the franchise from Camelot and being the first game in the franchise as a whole, Hot Shots Golf is also probably the least feature rich and realized game in the series. The games would go on to get more modes, more characters, and more silliness. Despite all this though, it seems branding stuck with pushing out the original game more and more, as you can still find this game readily available to download on PlayStation Network. I think it was even available on the PS Vita’s and PS3’s network when they were up and running too. This leads me to believe a few folks were just like me and grew up, at least to some degree, playing this first game.
That, or Sony is really trying to milk Camelot’s development of this first game, and are trying to take jabs at Nintendo by releasing basically Mario Golf Zero over and over again.
Laters,
Jsick
