Monster Party - Legacy

Legacy

Monster Party is infamous in the retro gaming community for prototype images released in Japan before the game's release in the US. The images reveal a different original concept for the game that was much darker and more graphically complex than the version eventually released. Originally, the title screen was to be covered in blood, and the enemies designed to look much more horrific than in the final game. The first level's setting, presently an abstract black-and-pink pattern, was originally an elaborately drawn mountain range at sunset. Other changes revealed by these images is a change to the first boss, a large plant, which was shown to have a microphone and speaker in the original.

The game is remembered for its bizarre premise by both fans and critics alike. The horror content that was permitted to remain in the game—notably large amounts of blood and the use of the word "hell"-- have puzzled gamers, as Nintendo was notorious for enforcing censorship policies in the late 1980s and early 90s, when the game was released.

In the latter 2000s, following the release of beta images, gamers realized that an invisible platform inside the man eating plant's chamber was in fact the "deleted" speaker system, and that programmers had simply covered the sprite in black pixels rather than outright remove it. This led to the establishment of a restoration project, in which gamers began searching through the game's source code in attempt to discover if other "deleted" content had in fact remained on the cartridge, and reinsert it into a "restored" version of the game. As of 2011 the project is still underway. Amongst discoveries made by those working on the project was the revelation that many of the game's more incongruous bosses may have originated as copyrighted characters that had to be altered for the game to be released in the United States: The pumpkin ghost with the spinning head was originally an ape from Planet of the Apes, while the giant cat inside of the box seems to have originally been one of the Gremlins.