Astyanax slices through the 8-bit competition on December 21, 1989


Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the late 1980s video game industry lies a small, underestimated company called Jaleco, which decided to release a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System entitled The Lord of King—known in the Western world as Astyanax. This event occurred on December 21, 1989, a date which, had it been chosen for any logical reason, might have commemorated the winter solstice or the invention of something useful, but was instead dedicated to launching a side-scrolling platformer into the unsuspecting homes of gamers.

Now, the plot of this game is one of those affairs that makes one wonder if the writers had been indulging in too much fermented sake, or perhaps reading one too many fairy tales backwards. Our hero is a perfectly ordinary sixteen-year-old schoolboy named Astyanax (a name which, in the annals of parental cruelty, ranks somewhere between "Sue" for a boy and naming your child after a minor Trojan War footnote). One fine day, while trudging to class and doubtless pondering the infinite improbability of passing his math exam (very likely, given that he is still in the freshman class at age 16), he is abruptly whisked away to the fantasy realm of Remlia by a pixie named Cutie—who, despite the name, is mercifully not as irritating as one might fear.

Cutie informs him that he is the Chosen One (a designation which, in pop culture's vast catalogue of bad ideas, seems to fall disproportionately on teenagers with no discernible qualifications). His mission: rescue Princess Rosebud from the clutches of the evil wizard Blackhorn. Armed with nothing more than an axe called Bash—which sounds less like a legendary weapon and more like something you'd use to chop firewood—he sets off, swinging away at an assortment of monsters that appear to have been designed by someone who had recently discovered Greek mythology and decided to throw in everything but the kitchen sink (though, knowing these games, a kitchen sink monster was probably cut for space reasons).

For an NES title of that era, the sprites are gratifyingly large, and the music appropriately epic. For gamers lacking the bucks and good fortune to receive a TurboGrafx-16 a few days later for Christmas, it was a poor man's consolation prize substitute for The Legendary Axe.

In the end, after much bashing and spell-casting, our hero triumphs, rescues the princess, and returns home—only to discover Cutie reborn as a human girl, leading to the sort of ending that makes one suspect the whole adventure was an elaborate setup for a high school romance. A happy ending as believable as unlikely heroes being summoned from algebra class to save kingdoms with names like Remlia.

Location: Japan

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