Kung Fu (NES)

Kung Fu is a classic port of the arcade game. It's notable for being an obscenely rare (if not the only) instance of an in-house team at Nintendo porting an arcade game they did not develop. Also notable for being the origin of Soda Popinski's infamous laugh from the NES Punch-Out!! game, as the laugh of the fourth boss, Black Magician was reused for Soda Popinski in that game.

Version Differences#

In Japan, the game was released for the Famicom as Spartan X, named after the Jackie Chan film of the same name (though the story is much more in line with the Bruce Lee movie Game of Death). When Nintendo lost the Spartan X license in Japan, the Famicom game was re-released as Kung Fu; this version is identical to its NES counterpart.⁵

Spartan X	Kung Fu

The logo was changed, the font color was changed from orange to blue, and two dragons were added. One odd detail is that, unlike practically all licensed games for the system, the Japanese version does not credit the copyright holders of the property (Paragon Films Ltd. and Towa Promotion) anywhere in-game, even though the original Japanese arcade game did (and Nintendo had previously credited King Features Syndicate on the title screen of the Famicom/NES port of Popeye).

References#