This article has a talk page!The Famicom Battle City is an enhanced port of the arcade game Tank Battalion. Despite never officially releasing outside of Japan until 2020, it's managed to grow a sort of cult following internationally (especially in Russia) thanks to being included on tons of bootleg multicarts and famiclone plug & plays.
Easter Egg#
At the title screen, select "CONSTRUCTION" on the menu. Press Start on Controller 1 to enter the mode, then press it again to return back to the title screen. Repeat this seven times. After the seventh enter-and-exit, hold Down on Controller 1 and press A eight times on Controller 2. Finally, hold Right on Controller 1 and press B twelve times on Controller 2.
After all of this, press Start on Controller 1 to activate a secret message from a programmer with a little animation, showing the otherwise unused "tear drop" sprite.
"OPEN-REACH" most likely refers to the late Ryoichi Ohkubo1. "Reach" sounds a bit like Ryoichi, as well as "Reach" and "Open" being moves in the board game Mahjong.
Memory Watch#
Game Genie code IIOKYXAZ enables an in-game memory watch function at the upper side of the screen. It allows you to watch the CPU's zero page memory area, i.e. the first 256 bytes of the RAM. Although there are two three-digit hex numbers, the left one is never used. B and Select increase and decrease the address, respectively.
Pressing A should increase the address by 0x10, but as a side effect of this Game Genie code it instead results in permanent stage completion. There were CHR fonts for the lowercase letters "a", "b", "c", and "d" after the numbers, but they were rewritten with some other data and only "e" and "f" remain. As a result, some numbers are displayed incorrectly.
Unused Graphics#
When a powerup spawns, it has an ID value which determines what it is, where value 0 to 5 are standard powerups (star, grenade and so on). However, value 6 changes the powerup into a pistol which has no effect. Judging by its design, it was presumably going to upgrade your tank's shot somehow. Also, value 7 shows the tear drop in the aforementioned easter egg (but with different color), but picking it up resets the game.
Unused Text#
Present near the beginning of the ROM:
COPYRIGHT 1981 1985 NAMCO LTD.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
RYOUITI OOKUBO
TAKEFUMI HYOUDOU
JUNKO OZAWA Hidden Kanji#
Present at the end of the PRG-ROM is some small ASCII art. The art has six kanji combined in two groups by three kanji: two small ones at the top, one large one at the bottom of each group. The two groups of kanji read "大久保" ("Ookubo") and "宇田川" ("Utakawa"; can also be read as "Utagawa", "Udakawa", or "Udagawa").2
The first one is the last name of the game's programmer, Ookubo Ryouichi, while the second is a street name in Tokyo. It could also be Haruhisa Udagawa, who was a developer at Namco.
Revisional Differences#
Vs. Battle City#
Battle City would later be brought to the arcades via the Nintendo VS. System as Vs. Battle City. To accommodate for an arcade setting, the difficulty was made a bit harder and the Construction mode was removed.