Last week’s update to the Nintendo Switch Online service was pretty lackluster, adding Congo’s Caper and Rival Turf for the SNES alongside Pinball for the NES. Par for the course at this point, but I noticed something strange. With the addition of Congo’s Caper, the total number of games about cavemen for the SNES on the service has now risen to four. You’ve got Caveman Ninja (aka Joe & Mac), Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics, Prehistorik Man, and now, Congo’s Caper. What’s the deal? None of these are exactly classics — they’re the kinds of games you’d rent back in the day when the big-name titles were out.
Well, there were a lot of cavemen games in the 16-bit era. Arguably the fascination can be tied to the dinosaur revival of the 90s, fueled by films like Jurassic Park. There were a lot of dinosaur games back then too, and while humans and dinosaurs didn’t co-exist, the image of a guy running around in a fur pelt trying to fight a tyrannosaurus rex with a wooden club is evidently a powerful one in the collective consciousness. For the record, the rest of the games featuring cavemen not yet on the SNES Online service are: Super Bonk, Super Bonk 2, Chuck Rock, The Flintstones, The Flintstones: Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the oddball of the bunch — the only one that’s not a platformer — The Humans.
Back to Congo’s Caper. It isn’t a bad game, and weirdly is actually supposed to be a sequel to Joe & Mac, but it’s pretty much the definition of nothing special. Congo’s sprite is cute, and he turns into a monkey when he gets hit, which is kind of a neat idea. (That also makes this a monkey game, of which there is no shortage on the service either.) But there’s no co-op mode, which is what makes the two Joe & Mac games worth playing, and the level design is uninspired. It has some ok music, but unless you’re a kid in the 90s and there’s nothing else you haven’t played at the video store, then there isn’t much to recommend it. So why did it end up on the Switch Online?
Well, aside from some kind of pro-caveman bias at Nintendo, it’s the same reason anything ends up there — the rights were cheap enough and the rights holders didn’t think they could get a better deal re-releasing the titles on their own. That’s why you see so many Data East games on the service, because the company went under in the early 2000s and the rights to their library were bought up by other publishers. A Japanese mobile game company owns the Data East trademark as well as most of their library, though Kadokawa Games and Arc System Works own a couple of their series, and an asset management company called Tactron Corporation has a few to their name, too.
So, are we going to get any more cavemen games on the Switch Online service? It’s unlikely that we’ll see either of The Flintstones titles anytime soon due to licensing issues, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Chuck Rock and The Humans made an appearance in a future update. The Bonk games, being a little more highly esteemed (Bonk was the defacto mascot for the TurboGrafx-16) are a little less likely, but the way things are going, it’s definitely possible.
Oh, and Rival Turf sucks.
