Popeye (2021)

“’Ja Think I’m a Cowboy?”

Key art for Popeye on Nintendo Switch.

In my younger years, I used to have to deal with debilitating bouts of insomnia. There were stretches of two or three days at a time where I could not get a good night’s sleep to save the life of me, and I’d spend all of my school days in a daze — entirely unable to tune into my classes, and kept on constant edge by auditory hallucinations. When it came time to “head to bed” back at home, my mother would kick me off my computer at a designated hour (additionally hiding away its power cord to discourage my sneaking back onto it), and send me to lay down for what felt like endless hours of fruitless tossing and turning. In this restlessness – tortured by my inability to peacefully slumber – I sought distractions to keep my mind occupied: Some nights, I’d manage to sneak my Game Boy up into my room, but I could only barely make out the screen with the benefit of a desk lamp pointed directly at it. Other nights, I’d sit and read books under that same light source; but my sleep-addled brain would usually lose focus pretty quickly, and rarely ever finish anything from cover to cover. My greatest escape from my late-night doldrums, then, was a 20″ inch CRT television, with a basic cable package to pair. I’d flip through the channels catching snippets of whatever reruns the stations filled their time slots with, until I’d inevitably settle on the same programming block night after night: Cartoon Network’s line-up of classic animations, dubbed “Late Night Black & White.” You younger readers might not remember a time before Adult Swim, but CN used to use that time slot to air cartoons with vintages dating back to the 1930s and 40s. And as I recall, the block was typically bookended by America’s favorite sailor man — the one and only Popeye. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I have a history with the Spinach-chomping scamp, and a certain affection for his animated adventures by way of Fleischer and Famous Studios. (Though truth be told, I’m really more of a ‘Merrie Melodies’ gal.)

Of course, Popeye has starred in more than just cartoons: Between his origins as a comic strip character and his side hustles hawking branded spinach and candy cigarettes, the stubborn sailor has made several attempts at breaking into the video game market. Surprisingly, there’s a ton of fascinating history attached to his 1982 debut arcade title, which has since gone on to be regarded as something of a classic. Unfortunately, it’s been mostly downhill from there in the span of the forty years to follow; between the license falling into some shaky hands, the best follow-ups only being Japanese-exclusives, and decade-long periods of total inactivity in the market. It’s not surprising then that Popeye’s latest game (as of the time of this writing) is an attempt to harken back to his arcade glory days — a full 3D re-imagining of his most beloved digital adventure. The problem is, the company responsible for its production is something of a notorious “shovelware” developer: England’s ‘Sabec Limited,’ whose previous console credits comprise titles the likes of Chess, Checkers, and Calculator. Not exactly the sort of back catalogue that inspires confidence. And yet, King Features Syndicates saw fit to bequeath them a crown jewel, in the form of their most iconic license. Did they perhaps spot a potential in Sabec that no one else had? Did the team win them over with their passion for the property? Or is it simply a case of the studio putting in an obscenely low bid on an open call to develop a Popeye game, and proceeding to put an equally low budget towards producing it? Yeah, it’s probably just that last one, if we’re being honest. But I suppose we won’t know for sure until we actually play and review it here, huh?

Before we get to reviewing Popeye for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, we’ll provide a brief biography of the character and his rapid ascent to comic stardom. From there, we’ll cover some of his earlier video game hits and misses — by which I of course mean covering every other official Popeye video game ever released. Maybe we’ll even find a couple titles along the way that are arguably lousier than the actual subject of this article? While we’re at it, we’ll also rehash the story of how Nintendo’s Donkey Kong arcade cabinet was very nearly a Popeye title, since that’s a fascinating (if not already well-worn) bit of history in itself. Then, we’ll do our best to document Sabec Ltd.’s transition from developing quiz games for British pubs, to flooding digital marketplaces with some of the most disposable software ever seen. Only then can we fully appreciate their take on Popeye, and determine for ourselves if it’s truly the worst of the sailor’s virtual voyages. And after this article goes up, we’ll have to wait and see if Sabec threatens to sue us into taking it down, as they once attempted to do in the case of a YouTube video criticizing their product! Lucky for me, I have a Whiffle Hen on hand that I can rub for good luck, so I’m sure that everything is gonna turn out alright. So hoist those sails and pop open those spinach cans, folks: It’s high time to take this show out on the high seas.

“Every Girl Loves a Sailor.”

Popeye’s debut appearance in Thimble Theater, published January 17th, 1929.

The story of Popeye begins way back in the year 1919, with a newspaper comic strip by the name of Thimble Theatre. Written and illustrated by one E.C. Segar for King Features Syndicate, the comic initially centered around a cast of “actors” who’d portray different roles in every strip, allowing Segar to play around with a range of different one-off scenarios and comedy set-ups. This initial stable included Harold Hamgravy typically playing the role of underdog hero, Olive Oyl as Harold’s love interest [who generally proves more clever / competent than him], and Willie Wormwood as a mustachioed villain-type who’d get his comeuppance by the end of a given strip. You may notice that the name “Popeye” is conspicuously absent from that roster. That’s because he wouldn’t be introduced as a character until ten years later — after Thimble Theatre had already had its concept reinvented multiple times over, as Segar struggled to find a working formula for success. For starters, the stage play-esque gimmick got dropped within just a few weeks of the comic’s debut, in favor of more consistent characters and continuity. Next, Segar would introduce Castor Oyl: Olive’s diminutive brother, who was initially portrayed as being “off in the coop” (an era euphemism for unspecified mental illness), but eventually got reworked into a more straightforward and stable-minded adventurer type — always on the lookout for money-making opportunities. In time, Castor would eventually overtake Ham Gravy (having dropped the “Harold” from his name) in popularity, leading to his stealing the role of main character away from the previously established lead. This paired with another creative shift toward longer-running storylines for the strip; where Segar had quickly burnt out most of his bits in the “gag-a-day” format, and determined to take the comic in a more adventure-focused direction. This made Thimble Theatre particularly unique in its era, as the concept of continuous story-telling was rarely attempted within the conceit of daily newspaper publishing.

Popeye’s creator E.C. Segar (1894-1938).

Most of these initial stories centered around the trio of Castor, Ham, and Olive seeking their fortunes across a variety of enterprises; including digging for gold in Africa, making shady real estate deals in Mexico, and raising birds for cockfighting competitions. Naturally, these foreign cultures were treated with all the “sensitivity” you’d expect in the 1920s, and most of the trio’s money-making schemes now read as morally dubious with the benefit of a century’s worth of hindsight. But for their time, these premises proved exciting to the newspaper audience, and started to establish a growing readership around the comic. And then came the big break: In late 1928, Segar began to pen a storyline which has come to be known as the “Dice Island” arc; in which Castor acquires a luck-granting ‘Whiffle Hen’ (a fictitious species of “African escape hen”) named Bernice, who is sought after by a scheming casino-owner by the name of Fadewell. Castor enlists the aid of Ham (and is secretly followed by Olive) in traveling to Fadewell’s private island where his casino is situated, as they plan to use Bernice’s magic luck in order to break the bank and leave with all the money they can carry. Of course, they first need to rent a ship in order to get to the island, and hire a skilled mariner to steer it for them. And it is here where readers were first introduced to Popeye: Originally intended as a one-off character for this story, who aids the protagonists in their adventure by beating up Fadewell and his goons — going on to survive being shot fifteen times in the process, thanks to the power of the Whiffle Hen. Following the conclusion of the Dice Island plot, Segar had begun to pen a new one without plans to include Popeye in it; but was quickly convinced to reconsider once reader mail started pouring in, inquiring as to when the invincible sailor man would stage his return.^[1] Eager to please his audience, Segar found a way to bring back Popeye as a recurring character: By having Olive Oyl fall in love with him, and breaking up with Ham Gravy for the last time. (Poor Harold just couldn’t catch a break in what was supposed to be his own feature.)

Things started to move pretty quickly after this: Popeye soon rose to become the new main character of Thimble Theatre, eventually prompting the strip to be rechristened as ‘Thimble Theatre… Starring Popeye’ in 1931.^[2] (The comic wouldn’t come to be titled simply as ‘Popeye’ until the 1970s.) Along the way, Bernice was eventually retired as a character / plot device, as Popeye took to eating spinach as his new source of superhuman power — the result of Segar reading contemporary studies on the health benefits of the vegetable, which accidentally indicated it as having an iron content ten times its actual nutritional value.^[3]** It’s also during the early 1930s period in which much of Popeye’s new supporting cast was established; including the hamburger-loving Wimpy, Popeye’s adopted child Swee’pea, and a running antagonist in the form of the witchly Sea Hag. Popeye’s rival Bluto was also introduced to the comics in 1932, but as it turns out, he originally didn’t really play much of a recurring role in Thimble Theatre; where Segar initially only envisioned him as just another one-off “villain-of-the-week,” and quickly moved on to other foes for Popeye to face. But in 1933, Fleischer Studios (responsible for the original Betty Boop and Superman cartoons) began producing a series of ‘Popeye the Sailor’ theatrical shorts, in which Bluto was cemented as Popeye’s most iconic foil in popular culture. Of course, when the United States entered into World War II, the stories being told in the animations soon pivoted to propaganda; as Popeye began battling German and Japanese soldiers (you probably don’t need me to tell you how offensively these depictions come across today), making him something of a symbol for the US Navy. What’s more surprising is the fact that Popeye also became something of an icon in post-war Japan? (Put a pin in this point for now: We’re gonna get back to it in just a minute.)

Thimble Theater, published June 11th, 1929.

To avoid making the bulk of this article a comprehensive history of Popeye, we’re just gonna cover a few more essential tidbits here in speedy fashion: E.C. Segar passed away in 1938, and duties illustrating / writing the comic strip would be taken up by roughly a half-dozen different cartoonists in the decades to follow. And when Fleischer Studios went belly-up in 1942, the Popeye theatrical short license was similarly placed in new hands, in the form of ‘Famous Studios’ (established as a direct successor to Fleischer) under the ownership of Paramount Pictures. They took charge of the theater-run cartoons through to 1957, when diminishing returns eventually compelled them to cease production after Popeye’s 234th animated outing. These collected cartoons eventually started airing on television at a point in the late 50s – Paramount having sold the syndication rights off to Associated Artists Productions – which King Features Syndicate were somehow removed from directly profiting off of [owing to contractual and licensing stipulations]. This prompted King to establish their own television production division, and to green-light development of a new ‘Popeye the Sailor’ cartoon series intended for the small screen, which aired between 1960 and 1963. There was a bit of trademark confusion during production of this new show though, where King Features believed that Paramount had the rights to the ‘Bluto’ character — having apparently forgotten that the character actually was first introduced in their own Thimble Theatre strip!^[4] Because of this misunderstanding, they invented a “new” character ‘Brutus’ for the 60s TV series, who was effectively Bluto in every way but name. Eventually realizing their mistake, King would go back to using the Bluto name in all Popeye media moving forward, barring some wink-nod references / revisionism in more recent comics where Bluto and Brutus both simultaneously exist [as twin brothers]. Skipping ahead to 1980, we see the release of the Popeye live-action movie; directed by Robert Altman, and starring the late Robin Williams in the title role. And while the film went on to prove something of a notorious flop critically, it still inspired a renewed interest in the broader Popeye property in at least one country.

As alluded to earlier, Popeye had already established a presence in Japan’s popular culture in as early as the days of Allied occupation (beginning in 1945); where Americans stationed in-country continued to import and consume Popeye media, and Japan’s own citizenship likely couldn’t help but absorb it through a sort of cultural osmosis. This newfound admiration of Popeye in Japan was likely aided by the fact that US Navy men would wear their military-issue sailor suits (not to be confused with the ‘sailor fuku’ style of school uniforms worn by Japan’s female students) during their business around town, and inadvertently help to establish what has come to be known as the “City Boy” style / subculture: A Western-inspired aesthetic and sensibility which came to be adopted by male youths in the 70s. And the go-to magazine in Japan for those who followed the fashion would be branded as none other than ‘Popeye’ — taglined as the “Magazine for City Boys.” This magazine would eventually spin off into other ongoing publications such as ‘Brutus’ and ‘Olive,’ clearly establishing that the naming conventions here aren’t a matter of coincidence. Of course, you could also gather that from the fact that Popeye himself often adorned the pages and covers of the publication, where he served as a sort of embodiment of the City Boy style. So, yeah: It’s safe to say that Popeye had become something of an icon in Japanese pop culture by the turn of the 1980s, a mere forty years out from starring in cartoons where he prominently pummeled caricatures of the population to death! Time truly heals all wounds, I suppose. Which finally brings us to the subject of video games, as a little company by the name of Nintendo sought to take advantage of Popeye’s popularity.

As the story goes, Nintendo were in negotiations with King Features Syndicate in the early part of 1980 to acquire the Popeye video game license, where they planned to leverage it in an arcade title. This was also around the time that Nintendo had attempted to break into the North American market with a cabinet game by the name of Radar Scope, subsequently failed to make a dent in the region with it, and were now looking to repurpose that game’s hardware in developing a new vertically-oriented title. This was a critical moment for the company, where they believed that the benefit of a licensed property could help them to turn their fledgling fortunes in the games industry. It was with this mission in mind that a young Shigeru Miyamoto pitched his concepts for a Popeye game to his superior in Gunpei Yokoi, and got the stamp of approval from the company’s president (Hiroshi Yamauchi): “The basic concept of Popeye is that there is the hero and his rival who he manages to turn the tables on with the aid of spinach. […] So I sketched out a few ideas for games using Popeye. At that point, [Gunpei Yokoi] was good enough to bring these ideas to the President’s attention and in the end one of the ideas received official approval.”^[5] The approved design concept took its cues from a classic Popeye theatrical short by the name ‘A Dream Walking,’ which centers around Popeye and Bluto attempting to rescue a sleep-walking Olive Oyl from an untimely demise — to catch up to her as she ascends the steel girders of a construction site, battling each other all the while. You can picture in your head how this concept might’ve translated to a video game: Ascending the beams on foot as Popeye, jumping over hazards that Bluto tries to toss your way – perhaps collecting spinach as a power-up in order to gain a temporary invulnerability against them – and ultimately reaching Olive at the top and to win the game [and her heart]. (Funnily enough, the original cartoon ends with Olive safely making her own way back to her bed, and mistaking a concerned Popeye as being a peeping tom who she promptly rejects.)

As it turns out, you don’t really need to imagine too hard as to how that theoretical game might’ve looked: Obviously, the design in question became the foundation for 1981’s Donkey Kong, following a failure between Nintendo and King Features to come to terms on the Popeye license. Gunpei Yokoi would confirm this origin for the game as part of an interview conducted for his 1997 book ‘Yokoi Gunpei Game House,’ where he additionally speaks to how the game’s redesign from a Popeye title to Donkey Kong effectively amounted to just swapping out the featured characters: “We figured by using a construction site as the setting, there would be all kinds of things we could do, and thus chose that as the setting for our Popeye game. Once we had established that the game would be set at a construction site, Mr. Miyamoto suggested, ‘Let’s make it a game where there are barrels falling from above, and the player has to dodge them.’ […] Pretty early on we had decided that Popeye would go on the bottom of the screen and Bluto would be on the top, thus establishing the framework for the game, but we would later discover that we wouldn’t be able to get the rights to use the characters after all. With no other options, we decided to keep the content of the game as it was and just change the characters. And so it was that those characters became Mario, Donkey Kong, and [Pauline].”^[6] It’s been further speculated that in designing the character that would come to be known as ‘Mario,’ Miyamoto may have taken another cue from Popeye — by which I mean the magazine, in this case; where a March 1980 issue featured a photo of a mustachioed construction worker-type on its cover, sporting a red shirt and blue overalls. From here, the designs were handed over to the Ikegami Tsushinki Corporation, who had developed several of Nintendo’s previous game concepts into functional arcade titles in their role as “ghost developers.” And the rest, as they say, is history.

Actually, that’s only half the story here, as Nintendo did eventually get a proper hold of the Popeye games license. You’d presume that following the successful launch of Donkey Kong, King Features Syndicate were more inclined to take the company seriously, thereby leading to terms finally being agreed upon between the two parties. Only, this doesn’t match up with the fact that Nintendo had their first Popeye game ready to go less than a month out from Donkey Kong‘s arcade debut (July 9th, 1981): The simply-titled Popeye, released as part of Nintendo’s ‘Game & Watch’ line of individually-sold handheld games on August 5th, 1981. Granted, we’re not talking about a particularly complex game design here that would’ve taken substantial time to turn around: As with most G&W titles, it’s a single-screen affair; wherein Popeye collects food and drink items being tossed by Olive Oyl from the top-left corner of the screen, and dodges strikes from Bluto coming from either the left or right sides. The handheld gives you a grand total of two buttons with which to move Popeye right and left, and offers nothing in the way of the ability to ingest spinach and defend yourself from Bluto’s attacks. In the history of Game & Watch titles, Popeye certainly rates as “one of them.” (It’s certainly no Spitball Sparky.) Of course, Nintendo would’ve already been cooking up something a bit more substantive by the time the handheld hit shelves — planning for a proper arcade Popeye title, as was becoming their primary enterprise in the games industry. While less is known about the development of this game [compared to Donkey Kong], it was confirmed that Miyamoto had a hand in designing it once again, along with veteran R&D staffer Genyo Takeda.^[7] We can also speculate that Ikegami Tsushinki likely helped in bringing the game to fruition in their role as programmers — by taking Nintendo’s concepts and sketches and realizing them as actual code. What can be said for certain is that Popeye would launch in North American arcades in November 1982, and debut across Japan and Europe a month later

North American promotional flyer
for Popeye (1982).

Now, I’ll get into what the title entails in just a minute here, but there’s a lot more to be said about Popeye ’82 than I have the space to write about in this particular article. As such, I’m gonna hit y’all with some additional reading if you’re so inclined to hear more about it: Drew Mackie’s excellent website ‘Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games’ has a thorough write-up on the Popeye arcade game and its legacy, which posits the argument that the Popeye cartoons are directly responsible for inspiring the concept of “power-ups” in video games; beginning with Popeye’s influence on Pac-Man, carrying over into Donkey Kong, and coming around full-circle with the implementation of spinach in the character’s debut arcade game. That’s certainly some food for thought, eh? (Cue up the sound of Popeye chuckling.) For our purposes here though, we’re just gonna provide a more straightforward description of the ’82 game, as we’ll be having to reference it later when we get to reviewing the 2021 title. With that in mind, here’s the premise: You play as Popeye across three stages of gameplay, in which you’re made to collect various items / icons that Olive Oyl drops from the top of the screen. In the first level, you stand below her house collecting falling hearts, presumably representing her undying love for the sailor. In the second, you travel to the city where Olive produces musical notes, which come together to compose a short song. And in the third stage, you find yourself aboard a ship where Olive is trapped on the top of a masthead (having been scooped up and dropped off by the Sea Hag’s pet vulture, Bernard), and construct a ladder to rescue her by collecting the letters that spell out “HELP ME.” I’m sure this all reads as fairly abstract in the way I’ve described it here, but it all makes for a straightforward gameplay loop in actual execution.

Of course, there’s a complicating factor here in the form of hazards that appear in order to harm Popeye. The foe you’ll primarily have to contend with is, of course, Bluto… or as he’s known again in this game, Brutus. (For whatever reason, the Brutus name stuck in Japan over Bluto. Maybe something to do with easier pronunciation?) Whatever name you may choose to call him, he doggedly pursues you across all three of the game’s stages; instantly knocking Popeye out if he comes into contact with him, and demonstrating some rather advanced artificial intelligence for a baddie in a 1982 title. Not only will Brutus follow you up and down the stairs that divide the stages into multiple floors, but he can also swipe at you from either above or below as you cross under / over him, as well as suddenly jumping down from higher floors to lower ones in pursuit of you. Other times, he’ll stand and toss bottles at you from a distance which you’ll have to punch out of the air, before quickly turning tail and running away as Brutus charges in after them. Much of his behavior appears unpredictable to the casual player, as he defies the conventions of typical video game enemies for the era. At the same time you’re having to contend with Brutus, the Sea Hag will make appearances in order to toss additional hazards at you — using her magic to appear in two places at once, or standing at the top of the screen to drop a steady stream of bouncing skulls your way. On top of all that, the third stage adds yet another complication in the form of the vulture Bernard, who swoops at you from above and does his best to get in the way of your collecting the letters that Olive is dropping. Naturally, you are given a means of defending yourself against these dangers: Picking up a can of spinach will grant you a few precious seconds of invulnerability, with which you can knock out Brutus and put a temporary pause to the other incoming hazards [as well as the items that Olive drops]. Only, you’ll have to use the power-up sparingly, as it only appears once per stage (or per life).

It should be noted that each screen in Popeye has its own gimmick mechanic attached to it, similar to the way in which each stage of Donkey Kong has a unique bit of design to differentiate it: In the first stage, you can punch a hanging bag into a barrel to land on Brutus’ head, and temporarily remove him from play. In the second, you can jump on a see-saw operated by Wimpy in order to quickly launch from the bottom floor to the top, as well as collecting bonus points from a balloon-holding Swee’pea. And in the third stage, there’s a single moving platform on the top floor, which you can steer in order to pick up Olive’s falling letters for their maximum point value. None of these novelties are quite as elaborate as seen in Donkey Kong – where they dictated the pace and approach in every stage – but they do demonstrate Nintendo’s eagerness to experiment with the format. Also of note is Popeye‘s presentation, which utilizes technical trickery to achieve a 512×448 pixel resolution (compared to an era standard 256×224) in order to deliver some impressively high-res character sprites for the time — rendering the likes of Popeye and Brutus with a level of detail that most games of the era couldn’t compete with. (Nicole Express provides an in-depth analysis of how Nintendo / Ikegami Tsushinki pulled this feat off, for those interested.) Unfortunately, this seems to come at the technical expense of the stage backgrounds, which read as noticeably blockier and simplified by comparison. But all told, we’re looking at a fairly impressive arcade game for the era here: One which does the Popeye license justice by incorporating all its key characters, attempts to iterate on Nintendo’s previous successes, and delivers on an immediately interpretable gameplay loop that proves just as quickly addicting. It’s safe to say it was for the best that history played out in such a way that Donkey Kong came out instead of Popeye’s originally envisioned arcade title; not just because of what that game meant for Nintendo’s presence in the industry, but for the fact we ultimately wound up with two classic arcade games here as a result of it all.

North American front cover for Popeye on NES.

Naturally, Popeye proved to be something of a success in arcades, selling through an approximated 20,000 cabinets.^[8] (Sadly, I don’t currently have a source that speaks to its coin-op revenue.) Sure, it might not have gone on to top Donkey Kong‘s behemoth count of 60,000 cabinets; but that game is an outlier, and the comparison isn’t quite fair. The point is, Popeye had proven a hot commodity in the video game market, and conversions of the title to home consoles would soon follow. Parker Brothers are credited as bringing the game to the likes of the Atari 2600 and 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey²; not to mention versions for personal computers, including the Atari 8-bit line, Commodore 64, and TI-99/4A. As is to be expected, all of these versions have their own technical restrictions and drawbacks to contend with, seeing as none of them could quite match the power of the original arcade hardware. (The Odyssey² version is particularly egregious, featuring a bare minimum of graphics and only including a single stage.) Of course, it was Nintendo themselves who would author the definitive home version of Popeye for their debuting Family Computer in 1983, serving as one of three launch titles for the new system [alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr]. On Nintendo’s 8-bit machines, the gameplay remains largely intact; save for a lack of Sea Hag attacks from the sides of the screen, and the added ability to climb up the ladder in the first stage (where you could only descend it in the arcades). Unlike Donkey Kong‘s conversion though – which manages to retain nearly “arcade perfect” graphics – Popeye had to be completely redrawn for the system, and drop its higher resolution sprites. That being said, the game is still leagues ahead of its contemporaries in the presentation department, and plays the best of all the bunch to boot. It should come as no surprise that the cartridge later made its way stateside as well on the Nintendo Entertainment System, where it hit shelves as part of the “second wave” of releases for the console in June of 1986.

But that still wasn’t quite the end for Popeye on the Nintendo front: 1983 brought with it two more releases from the big N, the first of which being another Popeye Game & Watch model. Despite sharing the same name as the last one (simply titling itself ‘Popeye’ again), this is actually a completely different game, which plays something like a proto one-on-one fighter between Popeye and Brutus. It’s almost like a sort of test run for Urban Champion on NES, where the goal is to punch your opponent over to the other end of the screen in order to knock them out and score a win. In fact, I’d dare to speculate that Urban Champion might have even been envisioned as another Popeye game at a certain point — a planned console re-imagining of this very game, even. But that’s a rabbit hole for someone else to travel down, as we’re just gonna move right along to the next game on our list: The Japanese Famicom-exclusive Popeye no Eigo Asobi — translated as ‘Popeye’s English Game.’ As you might gather from the title, this program was intended as a piece of English-language learning edutainment, recycling its assets from the previous Popeye cartridge. Olive Oyl will start each round by providing a word for you [from one of six selectable categories] written in katakana, before you’re prompted to select the letters that comprise the English equivalent of the word. It’s sort of like ‘Hangman,’ where each incorrect guess will result in Brutus punching a bag into a platforms carrying Swee’pea, ultimately knocking them off of it if you guess too many letters incorrectly. (Of course, Popeye will catch the baby in the nick of time to save him from falling into the sea below.) An alternate game mode provides a two-player game where Popeye and Brutus compete against each other onboard the ship stage, in order to collect falling letters that spell out English words. All in all, it makes for a novel little language lesson for Japanese players, and Nintendo would continue down this edutainment path with Donkey Kong Jr. Math in the following month.

But Japan wasn’t the only part of the world getting exclusive Popeye games: If we were to take a trip to a European game shop [and additionally travel back in time thirty-something years], you might find a copy of Popeye for the ZX Spectrum; designed by teacher-turned-developer Don Priestley (who became something of a legend in the UK programming scene), and published under the DK’Tronics label in 1985. And while it may not look like much to our modern eyes, it was considered for a time to be one of the most technically impressive titles for the Speccy, owing to its large and colorful graphics. This had apparently been a direct request on the part of King Features themselves, who were reportedly “at pains to point out that any game had to include fair representations of the central cartoon characters.”^[9] Or to put it in other words; the character graphics had to meet a certain quality standard set by King, and couldn’t just conform to the typical style of monochrome 16×16 pixel sprites that most Speccy games at the time would’ve leveraged. In order to meet this requirement, Priestley “sat down with a large grid and came up with a figure of Popeye which was seven characters high and six wide – 42 characters to move for each frame!” By applying this technique to much of the rest of the game’s cast, Priestley managed the feat of driving some of the largest characters the system has ever seen… even as it comes at the expense of smooth animations, acceptable game speed, and responsive gameplay. But y’know, that’s honestly all pretty par for the course on the ZX Spectrum, so what was the game really giving up here? (British readers, feel free to leave your comments naming a dozen Speccy titles that you swear “play better than anything on the NES,” and I’ll definitely get around to giving them a look.)

As to what Popeye on ZX Spectrum actually entails in terms of gameplay: Your quest is to collect twenty-five hearts scattered across the game world, representing Popeye’s undying love for Olive Oyl. If you manage to nab them all, you can return them to Olive, and be rewarded with the insinuation that Popeye gets to engage in some roof-shaking sex? (Remember that this game got a direct stamp of approval from King Features, folks!) You’ll travel the screens from a side-view perspective, unlock new areas by means of keys, and nab cans of spinach that act as your health / allow you to survive attacks from the likes of Bluto and Bernard [among other hazards]. Popeye doesn’t actually have a means of attacking his enemies in this outing, and instead has to avoid them as best he can, by weaving back and forth between the foreground and background planes. (This mechanic would later be adapted and refined for 1986’s Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase, along with its presentation of extra-large multi-colored graphics.) Unfortunately, there’s little in the way of scaling or forced perspective to indicate what layer you [or the hazards] are currently occupying, making the game more difficult to effectively read and react to. On top of that, there are some simple platforming elements to contend with that are overcomplicated by the game’s unresponsiveness / how slow Popeye’s vertical leap is. All in all, I just don’t understand the appeal of this particular Popeye game, even accounting for its novel presentation. But y’know, I never was much into this style of adventure game to begin with, so I’m really not the best judge here. If there are Speccy-heads out there who still contend this game is a “classic,” who am I to tell them they’re wrong?

As was the practice back in the day, ZX Spectrum cassettes that debuted at full price (typically between £7 and £10) would get re-released a few years later by budget labels (usually for £2 or £3). In the case of Popeye, the company that distributed its cheaper release in 1987 was Alternative Software, who took it upon themselves to commission some new follow-up titles to it — taking advantage of the acquired licensing deal, and the fact that the original game had experienced a new wave of popularity under their distribution. (That said, it did end up taking them four years to actually turn those sequels around.) The studio who got the gig were known as Bizarre Developments, and boy howdy, did they ever live up to that name in the case of at least one of their Popeye sequels. First up is the aptly-named Popeye 2, initially released in 1991 for the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64; with later conversions in 1992 to the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS. It’s a fairly standard platformer, where you have to jump over obstacles and beat up baddies across four vertically-scrolling levels. There are also randomly-activating bombs that you’ll need to defuse on your way up, which is as simple a process as making contact with them before they explode. In playing the Amiga version for my own point of reference, I found that the game is decent enough: It suffers in the sense that it’s slightly sluggish and sometimes unfair with its forced damage, which doesn’t always pair well with the fact you have just three lives to clear the whole game with. Also, Popeye’s punch is downright pitiful, and makes the handful of fisticuff fights in the game a bit of a chore. But it looks decent enough (perhaps by the mandate of King Features again), controls to an acceptable enough degree, and routinely sees baby Swee’pea plummeting to their death if you fail to catch and collect them in time. So, y’know: If you’re looking for a middling 90s licensed platformer for your vintage computer, you could probably do worse than Popeye 2?

Now, I promised y’all something bizarre from Bizarre Developments, and here it is: 1992’s Popeye 3: WrestleCrazy; released across the Amiga, Amstrad, C64, and Speccy. As you might’ve gathered from the title, this is ostensibly meant to be a Popeye-themed wrestling game, which makes enough sense as a concept given the character’s propensity for punch-outs. Where it flies off the rails though is with its backstory and setting, which sees Popeye and pals abducted by aliens, as the salty sailor is made to compete in an intergalactic wrestling event with the fate of the participants’ home planets at stake. So, instead of brawling with Bluto or making the Sea Hag submit, Popeye grapples with a series of five random aliens invented for the game, who are all as generic as they come (save for one particular opponent). This represents an absolute bare minimum in selling a game as a licensed tie-in, where it’s clear that Alternative Software / Bizarre Developments had an original sci-fi wrestling title in the works, realized they still had the Popeye license on hand, and hastily inserted the character into this otherwise unrelated game; either in an attempt to sell copies based on brand recognition, or to meet some sort of contractual obligation set by King Features. In either case, the end result is still the same: WrestleCrazy winds up making for probably one of the most lacklustre wrestling video games ever released, and most certainly a contender for Popeye’s worst virtual outing. In this instance, I wound up playing the versions on both the Amiga and Speccy in order to do a bit of comparing and contrasting, and each was bad in their own unique ways; to where they’re both equally as dire as one another, but for completely different sets of reasons. That being said, the ZX Spectrum release has a unique opponent in the form of a Xenomorph from the Alien movies (referred to in-game as ‘Torqos’ from the planet ‘Czykel’), which clearly makes it the definitive version in terms of sheer gall.

Gameplay consists of whittling down your opponent’s health bar until they’re unable to recover from pin attempts, while avoiding seeing Popeye succumb to a three-count on his end. You have a bare minimum arsenal of punches, grapples, and Irish whips at your disposal (actually, you don’t even get to run the ropes on the Speccy); with nothing in the way of top rope maneuvers, or the ability to take the fight outside of the restrictive ring. Real sticklers for wrestling tradition, those aliens. Getting tangled up in grapples / pins requires mashing the button and waggling the joystick (or tapping keys on your keyboard) to either overpower your opponent or escape their grasp, depending on who has the advantage. So far, so standard. The problems start to surface though from the second the bell rings: On Amiga the game runs at a snail’s pace, whereas the ZX Spectrum version runs at a decent clip with absolutely busted controls. So, pick your poison here between sluggish gameplay or inexplicably blocked inputs. Now, throughout the match, Popeye’s friends (comprising Olive Oyl, Wimpy, and Bluto) will cheer you on, and toss cans of spinach and hamburgers into the ring to either empower you or help you recover your strength respectively. Here’s the kicker: In the Spectrum version, grabbing a spinach can out of the air will effectively grant you an immediate win; as it’ll allow Popeye to hit his special move (the “Turbo Typhoon Technique”), and instantly drain his opponent of all their health, setting them up for a guaranteed pinfall. So, really, you might as well just spend the entire match running in circles around the ring, until the spinach starts flying and you can put a quick end to the match. (It’s like chasing after the power-up orbs in Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E.) Alternatively, you can also just corner your opponent and hold down the attack button in order to immediately stunlock them with shin-kicks, until they are subsequently exhausted and pinnable. Whichever strategy works best for you.

Japanese front cover for Popeye on Game Boy.

The Amiga version may have the benefit of an extra move on offer, but it is nonetheless as easily cheesed: It turns out that in this take on the game, the most devastating attack in your arsenal is actually just going for repeated pin attempts. While you have your opponent down on the mat (which usually only necessitates a few consecutive punches), going for the pin will rapidly decrease their health for as long as it takes them to escape from it. At this point, they’ll knock you down as they throw you off, which you’ll be able to escape from far quicker if you start waggling the joystick before they reach you. This in turn will knock them back over again, allow you to go for another pin attempt, and repeat the cycle until they have no stamina left to resist you with. In this way, you can easily win all five matches without having to engage with any of the game’s other “superfluous” mechanics. It renders every other move available to you a triviality — downright ineffective compared to the ease and foolproof-ness of this most basic tactic. It doesn’t help that trying to engage the game “how it’s meant to be played” typically results in the CPU roundly stomping you, as they can quickly overpower and outmaneuver Popeye in the ring. It leaves you to wonder if the developers were actually aware of how busted the pinning mechanic was, and if they ultimately intended for players to leverage it in beating the game? It certainly renders WrestleCrazy‘s two-player mode a total farce, as every match will inevitably devolve into just trading pinfalls back and forth. Alternative Software really screwed the proverbial pooch (or Jeep, if you prefer) with these entries, and it’s no wonder that this third installment in their trilogy marked Popeye’s final appearance on European computers.

What makes this timeline all the more wild is the fact that Japanese developers were still pumping out the most polished Popeye titles, and often keeping them exclusive within the nation. For a character who seemed to define Americana, it’s surprising to see that the United States were kept out of the loop for a number of years here — as if other countries were staking a claim on the sailor for themselves? Take 1990’s Popeye on the Game Boy, developed by one Sigma Enterprises. (So many games sharing the same singular title is starting to get a bit confusing, to be honest.) It’s a relatively simple maze game, where Popeye has to dodge Brutus [as well as smaller enemies he spawns] and collect Olive and Swee’pea on his way to the exit. You’ll also have to contend with burgers dropped by Wimpy blocking your paths through the narrow passages, which can get to be a real pain. Naturally, picking up flying cans of spinach will allow you to overtake Brutus in a fight (like picking up power pellets in Pac-Man), as well as granting a boost to your speed and allowing you to bat away burger blockages. The game’s generally sparse presentation is supplemented by comic-style insert panels, appearing when you collect items or get into confrontations. There’s even a link cable-enabled multiplayer mode where a second player can take on the role of Brutus, and compete against Popeye to clear the stages first. All in all, it makes for a totally competent little Game Boy title, and it’s curious why it was never released outside of Japan: It doesn’t seem like it’d have taken too much work to translate / localize, since there’s a bare minimum of text present in it in the first place? The only guess I can land on is that the Popeye brand was going through a bit of a lull in popularity in the States by the early 90s, and that Sigma were unsure if they’d be able to recoup cartridge manufacturing costs on a North American production run?

In 1991, Sigma Enterprises released a follow-up to their first Game Boy Popeye game, titled – you guessed it – Popeye 2. Unlike their previous entry, this one here belongs to the platformer genre, as you navigate Popeye through four themed worlds containing four stages apiece, rescuing his pals and defeating bosses along the way. You might assume it plays similarly to something like a Super Mario Land, but it’s actually more like a Wario Land in execution; as Popeye powers up his punch attack by collecting multiple cans of spinach, and is able to break through blocks through his sheer force of strength. As you add to your spinach meter (and avoid taking damage reducing it), Popeye’s arm continues to grow in size and power, until you start launching spinach cans as additional projectiles at max level. This’ll aid you immensely as you progress through the stages, knocking out every enemy in your way, and collecting diamonds for score / additional lives as you negotiate the platforming and block-breaking. It’s actually quite the enjoyable little platformer, as its stages incorporate elements of verticality and multiple paths, without being too overcomplicated or difficult to track within the system’s minimal frame. The weakest element in it are the boss fights, which are a bit too easy to cheese with obvious “safe zones” where you can’t be struck, or by simply allowing you to tank damage if you’ve got the cans for it. All told though, it makes for a totally competent handheld title, and would’ve been worth checking out in its time. Oddly enough, it appeared to be another Japanese-exclusive at first, until Activision took up publishing it two years later in North America and Europe. Curiously, the English-language releases are still branded on the box as ‘Popeye 2,’ despite the lack of a Popeye “1” on Game Boy in those regions. Maybe they were cheekily attempting to insinuate here that it was a sequel to no less than Nintendo’s original arcade / NES release?

Japanese front cover for Popeye Beach Volleyball on Game Gear.

Come 1994, Technōs Japan (they of Kunio-kun and Double Dragon fame) were next in line to get hold of the Popeye license, and contribute two titles to his video game canon. Both titles would release on August 12th, 1994, though they were markedly different from one another in terms of content: Popeye Beach Volleyball for Sega’s Game Gear, as the name implies, is a beach volleyball title starring Popeye and pals. I guess Popeye’s ties to the sea is supposed to make this premise make some sort of sense? You play the sport in pairs – selecting from a roster of seven partner characters (five of whom need to be unlocked) – and embark on your mission to dominate the sandy court. There are some proper deep cut characters who appear here, including Alice the Goon, Dufus, and Pappy; but you somehow still wind up playing against Brutus in every match, where he’s paired with a different character depending on the stage. It’s also a bit trickier to play than you might expect, owing to limited screen real estate and unforgivingly specific positioning, but I’ve certainly played worse simulations of the sport. (I’m not even thinking of Dead or Alive Paradise here, mind you.) Where the game really shines though is in its presentation, which is top-notch as per Technōs’ standards: All the characters pop with bright, lovingly-rendered sprite work, complete with unique animations conveying each of their personalities. The backgrounds are all fairly elaborate as well, with each stage going so far as to have unique graphics for the scoreboard that fit the setting. There’s also versus multiplayer [by means of the system’s Gear-to-Gear cable], and a variety of six minigames to play between matches, so it’s clear that Technōs poured a ton of effort and love into realizing this ridiculous thing. Unfortunately, the game never made its way outside of Japan, despite its in-game text entirely being written in English. I’ve seen speculation contend that this was either due to some stipulation of the license at this point in time, or owed to Technōs’ own financial woes, but never seen sources to back either claim.

Which brings us to the last of the Japan-exclusive Popeye titles, and Technōs’ second entry to the franchise: Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Sea Hag no Maki (or ‘Popeye: The Tale of Sea Hag the Wicked Witch’) for the Super Famicom. The premise this time centers around the titular Sea Hag casting a spell that turns Popeye’s allies into stone, and splits their hearts into pieces that must be collected in order to de-petrify your pals. At the same time Popeye embarks on his quest, General Bunzo – another deep cut character from the Thimble Theater comics – spots the hearts as they appear in the sky, and determines to nab them first (thinking that “they look like something the army should have”) — placing a bounty of one hundred million pieces of gold on the organs, and spurring various other fortune-hunters and villains into action to pursue them. Naturally, Brutus is one of several characters to take note of the bounty (along with the boxer Ox and the brutish Bolo), and so you’ll have to contend with the likes of them while questing to save Popeye’s friends. The genre this time around is a hybrid platformer / board game, where dice rolls dictate your progression through five maps; landing you on spaces that’ll either take you into side-scrolling stages, give you a chance to win items, or impart some other positive / negative effect on you. At the same time, the bounty hunters move freely across the map, and challenge you to duels as they run into Popeye. (Think of the Hammer Bros. encounters in Super Mario Bros. 3., but if they freely roamed the full range of the screen.) Clearly, there are a lot of different ideas at play here all at once, but Technōs pulls off marrying them together to produce a surprisingly cohesive Popeye adventure — maybe even his best ever virtual voyage.

Looking past the beautiful pastel presentation and love for the Popeye lore, the real heart of the game is in its action platforming. In an inspired bit of design, the sailor man carries a ship’s anchor on him as a weapon, using its chain to get extra range on his attacks. Not only that, but it can be powered up to convey a range of benefits to Popeye, including temporary flight and… transformation into a frog? (Have I mentioned yet that this game takes more than a few cues from Super Mario Bros. 3?) All told, most of the action stages are actually pretty brief – lasting as long as a couple minutes or as little as a few seconds – which could be something of a negative for folk looking for more substantive levels to conquer. Same goes for the confrontations against bosses and mini bosses, which only last as long as it takes for a can of spinach to appear and grant Popeye the ability to punch his foe into next Tuesday. But I, for one, kinda dig this style of “short but sweet” stage design, where Technōs seemed to want to make sure that players are constantly being treated to changes of scenery and shifts in gameplay style. On top of all that, there’s a split-screen multiplayer mode where both players operate completely independently of one another — rolling the dice and tackling stages as if playing their own individual games! I don’t even know how Technōs managed to pull this off from a technical perspective, with nothing I noticed in the way of slowdown. In any case, this game rules, and I’m actually sort of angry now about it never making its way stateside. A genuine hidden gem on the Super Famicom / SNES, and a title that’s absolutely worth trying out for yourself. (You can even find it translated into English, if you know where to look.)

Perhaps King Features recognized the greatness of Ijiwaru Majo Sea Hag no Maki and decided to end this run of Popeye released on a high note, because the games license would suddenly go dormant for the next ten years. (Technōs Japan actually had a Genesis title in the works, but were ultimately made to cancel it for unknown reasons — likely due to those aforementioned financial troubles.) I reckon the Popeye brand as a whole wasn’t really getting put to use much during this time either; with the Popeye comic strip having been reduced to a Sunday-only feature in the newspapers in around 1994, and no new animated features put into production during this period. There was a bit of hub-ub in 1999 around Popeye finally becoming a proper husband to Olive Oyl in a one-off comic book (made to celebrate his 70th anniversary as a character), but even this development has been written off as non-canonical in the years since. About the only real presence the character might’ve been maintaining were a water ride at Universal’s Islands of Adventure (‘Popeye & Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barges’), and that ‘Late Night Black & White’ Cartoon Network programming block I mentioned earlier; to be later supplanted by ‘The Popeye Show’ in 2001, which would focus full 30-minute episodes on running the same old theatrical shorts. It’s only in around 2004 when business started to pick up again, as Popeye’s 75th anniversary brought with it a new computer-animated television special (Popeye’s Voyage: The Quest for Pappy), and seemed to reinvigorate the flagging franchise by some measure. Most pertinently [for our purposes], it encouraged King Features to briefly play around with video game licensing again; giving us Popeye: Rush for Spinach on the Game Boy Advance, by way of Bandai Namco and developer Magic Pockets.

Rush for Spinach plays out across a series of foot races / timed platforming stages; in which Popeye, Olive Oyl, Wimpy, and Bluto compete against each other to be the first to reach a given level’s goalpost. To achieve this, you’ll have to engage in running, jumping, skateboarding (complete with impromptu wardrobe changes), driving cars, and occasionally interacting with the environment in order to open up paths. Naturally, there are all manner of roadblocks and slowdowns in your way, which you’ll have to circumnavigate by whatever means are available to you — typically by finding elevated routes above them, and doing a bit of Popeye parkour. While you don’t have to deal with conventional enemies in your way, you will have to butt heads with the other three racers, who you can knock down with your attack button if you’re right behind them. Otherwise, you can utilize a small range of kart-racer style item boxes; which will let you drop mines, bring down lightning strikes, turn your opponents into chickens, and so on. Naturally, the most desirable power-ups are cans of spinach, which grant you temporary speed boosts which’ll help you to either close or widen the gap between you and the other racers. The game is all about maintaining momentum, and memorizing the stage layouts to an extent so that you can determine the most optimal routes through them. I wouldn’t call the end product anything special, but it seemed to debut to some particularly harsh reviews, which I’m not necessarily sure it warranted? I dunno: My brain might just be broken after having played so many Popeye games by this point.

This short-lived resurgence of Popeye video games was capped off with a pair of cellphone titles released in 2007 and 2008: Namco Network’s Popeye, and Mayhem Studios’ Popeye Pinball. The pinball title is somewhat interesting for the fact it adapts a number of real-life vintage Popeye pinball tables to the digital format, but I’m not really equipped to discuss the finer points of flipper games. Instead, I do wanna focus a bit on the Namco release, as it was intended as an enhanced remake of the original arcade title (as well as including a more straightforward reproduction thereof). As such, it plays like you might expect; carrying over the same mechanics from the original ‘82 cabinet, with the benefit of more detailed and colorful graphics. What’s of particular interest though is the fact that it also adds a new stage to the gameplay loop: A riff on the ‘A Dream Walking’ cartoon that inspired the original design pitch for the Popeye arcade game, and went on to become the basis for Donkey Kong! This is honestly a really neat nod to Popeye’s video game legacy, and serves as something of a “What if?” scenario where we get a glimpse at the arcade title that could’ve been. It’s the cherry on top of a top-quality arcade-to-mobile conversion, and a reminder that this oft-neglected facet of games history really does have a few gems hidden within it. Of course, it’s not as if King Features really cared how well these Popeye games actually turned out, just so long as they were making them money. And judging from the fact that King promptly put the [games] license back to rest for another thirteen years following these releases, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that they didn’t meet their projections.

Thirteen years is a long stretch of time to go without so much as a single Popeye video game release. (And no, his old cartoons featuring in 2007’s The Darkness doesn’t count.) That’s enough time for two generations of consoles to come and go, and for a planned Genndy Tartakovsky movie to languish in development hell for a little over a decade. This also coincides with another lull period for the Popeye brand as a whole, where the only output during this time were the continued run of comic strips and comic books — hardly anything that the broader public would’ve been tuned in to. But there may have been a reason why King Features were reluctant to make any major moves for so long: As it turns out, they’d been working behind the scenes to acquire the film rights to Popeye, which had been under the ownership of Sony Pictures for a length of time. Only owning the comic rights during this time would’ve limited what sort of projects and properties King could’ve produced, and probably left them in a position where other companies were benefiting more from licensing than they were — similar to the scenario they experienced back in the 50s. But with Sony having thoroughly bungled the animated feature deal, King were finally in a position to pounce on the rights, and take back what they felt was rightfully theirs. It should also be noted that King Features had picked up the rights to distribute licenses for a video game property in 2017, having reached an agreement with StudioMDHR to represent Cuphead in cross-media and merchandising ventures.^[10] So, we’re looking at a company here now ready to embrace the future — looking to modernize their portfolio, and recognizing the value of video games in propagating a brand. The only question is, who would King commission to develop the next great Popeye title? Perhaps they’d contact their partners at StudioMDHR, who could bring the style of the classic Fleischer cartoons to life again? Maybe someone like a WayForward, who specialized in similarly lively 2D art? Nah: They wound up handing it off to a developer previously known for their “quiz machines” in British pubs, who had pivoted to console and mobile shovelware in the last few years.

Enter Sabec Limited: A British developer and publisher of digital products, first established in 1993 [according to copy on their promotional materials]. Given how long they’ve apparently been around for, precious little is actually known about their operations in the first seven or so years of their existence. You can follow a paper trail of corporate filings dating back to September of 1991 – where they briefly branded themselves as ‘Inlaw Thirty-Five Ltd.’ – but these do precious little to illuminate what kind of business they were actually conducting during this period. From what I can gather, they changed over to the Sabec name after acquiring a New Zealand-based software house [also established in 1991], and inducting a new director Saj Muzaffar in around 1993, who has remained in a leadership role ever since — practically the only name you can consistently find attached to Sabec across their thirty years of operation, as a matter of fact. (There’s also Saj’s relative [or potential partner] Moeen Muzaffar, who has been credited as being a ‘Secretary’ for the company since ‘93.) But again, it’s not until around the turn of the millennium where we begin to find traceable / tangible output from the company, in the form of license-based trivia arcade machines designed for British pubs. And even then, it’s hard to actually find much information on these so-called “amusement machines” (as Sabec chose to brand them); as they occupy a largely undocumented niche of cabinet games, and seeing as Sabec’s name doesn’t seem to appear prominently within them. But there are a handful of dots we can connect here in order to figure out just what these games were, which Sabec were primarily trafficking in so many years ago.

Now, I’m going to assume that even my British readers might not be familiar with this style of pub-based arcade cabinet, as they’ve become something of a dying art form in the last decade or so. Basically, they’re a style of mechanized trivia game intended to be placed in pubs and bars; where players can pay anywhere between 20 pence and £1 per play, for a chance at winning a £10-40 jackpot prize. It all started with a machine by the name of Quizmaster in 1985, which inspired a small range of copycat machines in the years to follow, until a ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ licensed cabinet hit the market and opened up a proper floodgate. This is where Sabec seemed to enter into the industry, at least in terms of pumping out cabinets based on popular properties. (It’s possible that one of their ventures in the pre-2000s may have been producing a more generic variety of quiz machines?) Among the recognizable licenses they were able to finagle were the ‘For Dummies’ brand of reference books, MTV’s Pimp My Ride, Comedy Central’s South Park, and the Trivial Pursuit board game; all being adapted as themed experiences presenting the same range of generic questions. To be clear, the trivia never had anything to do with the licensed properties in question: Their South Park machine, for example, wasn’t gonna quiz you on how many times Cartman had dropped racial slurs over the course of the show’s history. All the questions belonged to general categories of historical, scientific, and pop culture; where the potential to get hit with total stumpers were always on the table, and keep you from hitting the jackpot. Because that was always the real point of these games: To build up a drunk bar patron’s confidence with softball questions, delude them into thinking they were geniuses, and then watch them blow all their banked earnings with an arcane bit of knowledge from out of left field. If you wanna talk about arcade games being “quarter-munchers,” this is the real deal right here.

Of course, this market wouldn’t remain viable forever. For one thing, the emergence of smartphones went and made all the world’s collected knowledge accessible from a device in your pocket, which sort of takes the challenge out of playing low stakes trivia. For another, it’s been reported that these machines didn’t really translate into significant profits for pub owners; where the machines may well have brought customers through the doors, but didn’t seem to convert them into paying patrons at the bar. Then there’s the fact that as the machines dried up in popularity, they didn’t always have the available cash housed in the machine to actually pay out winnings, to where someone who managed to score the jackpot might still get shafted on the prize money. And finally, there was that whole global pandemic that seemed to drive a final nail in the coffin, as the very concept of “going to the pub” fell sharply out of fashion for a few years — long enough for the quiz game manufacturers / distributors to all go out of business, it’d appear. Luckily, Sabec had gotten out of the business well before that point, and realized there were more profitable ventures for them to pursue. Take the smartphone market, for example: The debut of Apple’s App Store and their range of iOS devices presented an lucrative opportunity for all manner of software developers, who quickly set about selling their downloadable wares on the virtual storefront. And sure enough, Sabec joined the party in 2011, with a range of three digital-only titles based on Hornby Hobbies’ product lines of model aircrafts, racecars, and military tanks.

Their debut effort in this department would appear to be 2011’s Airfix Dogfight [released across iOS and Android]: A loose adaptation of the 2000 PC title Airfix Dogfighter (originally developed by Unique Development Studios and Paradox Entertainment), in which ‘Airfix’-branded model planes are made to combat each other within the confines of middle-class housing. And compared to that decade-old Windows release… Well, let’s just say that Sabec’s take on the property would’ve been better suited for the previous century. It’s an over-simplistic, quickly tedious, and altogether clunky version of the game; utterly devoid of any of the charm and personality seen in the original iteration. Playing with touch controls makes for a particularly frustrating affair, as your turn radius falls well short of what it feels like a plane should be able to pull off, and as you’re unable to undertake advanced aerobatic maneuvers like rolls and loops. (These issues might be remedied somewhat by switching to the accelerometer-aided control scheme, but I couldn’t test those out on my end. Switching over to an ‘Expert’ flight control mode certainly didn’t seem to have any impact on my available maneuvers.) It doesn’t help that seemingly every one of the household objects that populate the environments have gigantic boxes of invisible collision around them, which will send you immediately careening into the ground if you come within ten feet of them. Add to that a selection of unfitting stock music selections, visuals that feel more dated than those seen in PC original, a lack of available content (comprising a scant six stages, including its tutorial), and a tendency for missions to become unreasonably difficult in their final stretches [resulting in having to replay them from the very beginning upon failure]; and you’ve got a recipe for a miserable little flight sim. But hey, for its budget launch price of 69 pence (Nice), at least you wouldn’t have been parting with too much money for it. Still, it’d probably have been best to keep saving up for a proper model kit, if that was your inclination.

As mentioned earlier, Sabec followed Dogfight up with further Hornby Hobbies tie-ins covering their Scalextrix and AirfixTanks product lines, before their licensing arrangement seemed to come to an end. From here, they ventured into producing some independent offerings for the App Store / Google Play, all attempting to latch on to various social zeitgeists and popular fads. For example: Their ‘Life in Seconds’ application attempted to cash in on the trend of “Man Takes Photo of Himself Every Day for X Years” videos that were briefly in vogue in the early 2010s. When 3D TVs started popping off, they capitalized by hawking a ‘3Dplus’ peripheral for iPhones that would ostensibly facilitate viewing 3D media on your device. Then they tried [and failed miserably] to start an IndieGogo campaign for an Xbox 360 title leveraging further plastic tchotchkes, in the form of a buzzer quiz game by the name ‘Fastest on the Buzzer.’ This resulted in them raising a grand total of $200 USD against a $40,000 dollar goal, and so the world was spared a bit of worthless E-waste. Instead, they just released a different trivia game for smartphones titled PartyTrivia, which sold itself on a patent-pending ‘SYNC TV’ technology, that effectively just meant that the game would synchronize its questions with a server providing the same set to players opening up the app at the same time. Of course, the HQ Trivia app would take a similar concept and run with it two years later; becoming something of an overnight sensation, while Sabec’s no-frills offering was left to languish and die. Then came the attempts to cash in on early VR devices (most notably in the form of ‘Google Cardboard’), with wildly unique titles such as VR Tanks and VR Pool (“pool” referring to “billiards,” in this case). And then another attempt at selling a peripheral device in the form of the ‘BeatWare’ wearable: A wristband which purported to allow you to “Feel the Music” playing on your smartphone. In other words, a cheap bit of plastic that would’ve vibrated a bit when certain frequency ranges were triggered. Real cutting-edge stuff here, all around.

Now, look: It’s easy [and entertaining] to poke fun at a company for trying so hard to follow fleeting market trends, and routinely failing at every turn. But it’s genuinely unfortunate when the hard-working developers along the way – folk just trying to make a living for themselves – wind up losing their jobs as these projects never materialize or wind up being duds on debut. And the impression that I get is that Sabec burned through a lot of contract hires during this period — never bringing on steady staff, and never crediting the outside studios / freelancers who put the work in for them. I was hard-pressed to find anyone able to list their contributions to Sabec on their portfolios; either owing to projects that ultimately fell apart, or to NDAs preventing them from indicating released products as part of their work experience.*** There’s an air of “likely scumminess” that permeates every aspect of Sabec’s business, and leads me to believe they probably prey on desperate software developers who are willing to work [without credit] for pay that surely isn’t competitive. Of course, I have to state for the record that I’m only speculating here; since Sabec are so guarded about their business practices, and have been known to threaten lawsuits against folk who speak about them in an unflattering light. Who knows? Maybe it’s actually Saj himself programming all these games and applications on his lonesome? I guess we just won’t know unless they decide to respond in some form to this article. My e-mail inbox is always open, Mr. Muzaffar! Incidentally, it’s also open to any formerly contracted developers willing to speak about their time with the company, where I am more than happy to grant you anonymity if you should want to see the details of your personal experiences published.

Of course, Sabec persisted in the tech sector, and eventually found a niche that seemed to work for them: Developing shovelware games for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4’s digital storefronts, and charging $9.99 a pop for them. As of the time of this writing, they currently have no less than forty-nine software offerings available on the Nintendo eShop alone, released in the span of just four years. (That averages out almost perfectly to a rate of one new application going up for every month across that length of time.) Their debut offering in this new product category would be POOL, released February 20th, 2018: An absolutely no-frills billiards simulator, made to take place in a dingy bar environment. This would be followed up just a few days later with Spot The Difference — a digital take on those old magazine puzzles and picture books where you have to “spot the differences” between two otherwise identical images. Evidently, this rendition of the game had previously existed as one of Sabec’s prior amusement machines, which I guess means that not all of their arcade cabinets were exclusively quiz machines? It also means that further “reimaginings” of previous Sabec products were soon to come; the likes of Party Trivia (no longer tethered to their SYNC TV service), a version of Scalextric now rebranded as ‘Trax – Build it Race it’ (since they no longer held the Hornby Hobbies license), and a version of Trivia For Dummies with a minor update to reflect the contemporary look of that brand’s mascot. (They also got rid of the pay-per-play monetization hooks, obviously.) But to their credit, the bulk of titles they’d release on these storefronts would appear to be “original” products — not just ports of prior mobile apps and arcade machines. Unfortunately, almost all of them are as generic as can possibly be, and bear the most uninspired single-word titles relevant to their respective contents. Let’s go through a few of them, shall we?

These single-word titles from Sabec come in two distinct flavors: Incredibly basic games, and incredibly basic utility apps. In most cases, you can easily picture what the program in question will probably consist of from its title alone, so long as you limit your imagination to the basic-most interpretations of these broad concepts. We’ll start with some of their game products first: Take the likes of Air Hockey, Basketball, Bowling, Darts, Golf, and Tennis Go, for examples. Just visualize the cheapest-looking 3D takes on these sports imaginable, and you’ll probably land somewhere close to what their screenshots display. Titles along the lines of Battleground, Bomb, Car Mayhem, Dogfight (not actually a conversion of Airfix Dogfight, surprisingly), Monkey Business, and Survival might not be as easily discerned; but rest assured, they’re still as basic as video games can acceptably be. Perhaps Sabec’s most “inspired” output came out during a three month period between June and September of 2019, where they seemed to be on a bit of a horror game kick; publishing a series of first-person titles comprising Hidden (a blatant rip-off of Outlast similarly set in a “mental asylum”), Neverlast (a half-baked attempt at a roguelike with randomly-assigned starting weapons and spells), and ZOMB (a blatant rip-off of Unturned, down to the voxel graphic presentation). And then there are games which simply exist as reskins of one another — recycling the core gameplay seen in previous releases, but swapping out assets and theming in order to sell them as “new” products. By all indication, Teddy Gang is just a slight cosmetic retooling of Robox (definitely not named as such in an attempt to confuse parents trying to buy “Roblox” for their kids, nosireebob), whereas Sniper shares an identical arsenal [if not similar gameplay] with their previous title Hunt. That’s without getting into how games the likes of Checkers and Chess should be sold as part of the same package (if Sabec had any decency), where they instead choose to sell them individually with frankly obscene $9.99 price tags.

But the most egregious output from Sabec – by my estimation – comes in the form of their utility and gadget apps. Without having to deliver on even the most minimal pretense of gameplay, Sabec takes the opportunity to monetize some of the most basic programs imaginable, the likes of which can just as easily be found for free on your smartphone’s app store / with a simple Google search in your web browser of choice. Take Calculator, for example: It’s exactly what it says on the tin, and not a damn thing more than that. You’ll remember that the old Nintendo DSi eShop was similarly lousy with these sorts of calculator and alarm clock apps too – sometimes developed by no less than Nintendo themselves – but at least on there, they’d only typically run you 200 points (the equivalent of $2.00 USD) instead of the $9.99 Sabec sees fit to charge for all their wares. And then there are apps like Night Vision and Spy Alarm, which leverage camera and infrared functionality on the system in order to deliver on the most rudimentary of pseudo-spy gadgetry. Sabec also offers a range of digital coloring books in the forms of Paint and Rainbocorns, for those who can’t afford a proper paperback product and a box of crayons… even though most physical coloring books actually tend to retail for $5.99 or less (often with their own colored pencils / crayons included). And then there are the musical instrument apps; the likes of Drums, Guitar, Handpan, Piano, and Xylophone. These at least come paired with rudimentary “music lessons” intended to teach you the basics of their respective instruments, so maybe there’s a modicum of value to these? But I doubt they’re particularly effective / translatable to their real world counterparts, it’s more likely that kids will just wind up using the apps as glorified noisemakers to drive their parents up the wall.

Now that we have a pretty good idea of what Sabec’s software output largely consists of, it’s time we come back to the matter of Popeye. In reading and watching reviews of Sabec’s Popeye game, folk seem surprised to find that King Features were willing to “trust the company” with the license; as if rights holders only ever seek out the best of the best in developing games for them, and have a vested interest in how the end product is received critically. It’s a very romantic view of how the industry operates, which of course means that it’s pretty far off the mark from reality. In actuality, the game most likely came about in either one of two ways: In the first, King Features puts out an open call for developers to bid on the license, and sells to the studio who puts in the lowest offer — entirely unconcerned with their previous output / prior reputation in the business. In the second scenario, Sabec are the ones to suggest the idea to King about developing a game around the Popeye license, likely looking for a way to bolster their own sales by means of taking on a recognizable [but reasonably affordable] intellectual property. If I had to wager on which case was more likely, I’d go with the latter: A company like King Features generally puts out contract biddings when they have a larger media project in the works — something like a new movie or TV show they wanna raise awareness of. Seeing as the release of the latest Popeye game didn’t coincide with anything of note, I’d reckon that it was Sabec who got the ball rolling, and who made an offer (an estimate on what sort of budget they were looking to secure) that King felt wasn’t too steep. And so, you wind up with a game that probably had a budget in the lower end of five figures, where Sabec would’ve further sought to pocket as much of it as they could — to allocate the bare minimum allotment of it to the game itself, and to deposit the remainder directly into their own holdings. (Again: I’m only speculating here.)

Popeye’s imminent release was first announced on November 1st, 2021 — just three days before it was set to launch on the Nintendo Switch on November 4th.^[11] Now, when I say “announced,” what I mean is that several news sites took notice of the game’s store page going up on the Nintendo eShop a few days in advance, with just a handful of screenshots to pair. Immediately, news writers began combing Sabec’s back catalogue and taking note of their typical fare, making sure to reflect their company history in their headlines: “The Developers Of Hit Switch Game ‘Calculator’ Are Making A Popeye Game,” wrote Nintendo Life’s Kate Gray. Nintendo Soup’s ‘Gala-Mos’ would similarly report that “An Official Popeye Game Is Heading to Switch, From the Publisher of ‘Calculator.’” Destructoid’s John Friscia would more openly mock the product by penning the headline “Popeye game is set to launch on Switch, but it looks like it had zero budget.” There are dozens of articles along these lines from writers who seemed to smell the proverbial blood in the water, and who all wanted to be among the first to report on what might be the next contender for “the worst game on Nintendo Switch” — a title which was largely considered to have been held by 2017’s Vroom in the night sky up to that point. (A future article candidate, to be sure.) Of course, none of this negative press served to deter or delay Popeye’s Switch release on its appointed date; or to further prevent it from coming to the PlayStation Store on December 1st, when it would be made available on the PlayStation 4 and 5. It should also be noted that Popeye retails as something of a “premium” product in Sabec’s catalogue, priced at $12.99 (USD) as opposed to their standard $9.99. And seeing as Sabec don’t appear to be in the business of sending review codes [or even press releases] out to news outlets, it looks like all those writers would’ve had to pony up the thirteen bucks themselves if they wanted to publish their follow-up pieces.

** A couple of notes on Popeye’s spinach habit here: An alternative theory as to why the sailor was written to favored the vegetable is owed to food rationing during the Great Depression / through World War II; where Americans were encouraged to increase the vegetable quotient in their diets, and to can their own crops in their home gardens. As such, his love of the green stuff could’ve been seen as a sort of promotional campaign — an effort to raise awareness of the particular veggie, and tout its status as a superfood. With that being said, Popeye actually flocked to the vegetable for its Vitamin A2 content, and never actually highlighted it for its iron. As a matter of fact, Popeye rarely actually consumed spinach in the Thimble Theater comics in the first place (even after Bernice was dropped from making regular appearances), where that aspect of his legend is owed more to the Fleischer / Famous theatrical shorts.

*** I found a grand total of one person on LinkedIn who cites work experience as part of Sabec Limited (outside of Saj and Moeen Muzaffar): A John Phillips, who contributed graphic design to Sabec’s Bullseye on Nintendo Switch, representing another license property for the publisher. Phillips’ role as a self-proclaimed “3D Generalist Artist” was in rendering the 3D environment the game takes place within. (From his LinkedIn profile: “I modeled, UV’d, textured and animated parts of the environment, optimising it for Unity game engine.”) Phillips also discloses that he performed this job in capacity as a “freelancer”; indicating that Sabec probably prefers to recruit developers on this sort of temporary basis — likely scouring sites such as Fiverr and Upwork for artists / programmers willing to work on the cheap. On the one hand, I suppose it’s nice that Sabec is giving these sort of inexperienced folk opportunities in the industry? On the other hand, it’d be even nicer if they could actually be bothered to properly credit them in any capacity within their games!

“Find and Eat the Spinach and Get the Special Powers.”

Nintendo eShop listing for Popeye.

It’s been nearly one hundred years since Popeye first met Olive Oyl in the pages of Thimble Theater. And yet, the two love birds still haven’t lost their passion for engaging in gratuitous displays of public affection; as Olive will still take to the highest point in any city they may visit, in order to toss bloody red hearts down to her beau below. (#RelationshipGoals.) You also can’t help but admire the sheer perseverance on the part of Bluto, who’s spent the better part of a century attempting to convince Mrs. Oyl to break it off with Popeye and get with him instead. Talk about a dude who’s well and truly incapable of taking a hint. And so, here we are revisiting a scenario first played out forty years prior, as Popeye seeks to demonstrate his affection for his girlfriend in that classic time-tested manner: Catching those symbols of Olive Oyl’s love, dodging his unyielding rival, and swallowing up spinach by the can. Or, as the game’s description attempts to summarize it in a single run-on sentence: “The objective of the game is to get the highest score by completing as many levels as you can by collecting hearts and letters thrown down by Olive all while trying to avoid the dangers of the witch, vulture and Popeye’s rival Brutus.” Just another day in the life of an immortal sailor man.

So, yes: Sabec’s Popeye is an unofficial 3D remake of the 1982 title produced by Nintendo, as officially sanctioned by King Features Syndicate.** The game attempts to mirror the beats of what they refer to as “the classic arcade game” by sharing the same core gameplay concept, cycling through a series of three repeated levels, and even going so far as to name Bluto as ‘Brutus’ again. That last point is certainly a bit curious, since they surely weren’t bound to the “off-brand” name by some manner of licensing stipulation? If we wanna be charitable, we can pretend that Sabec were looking to make their homage to the original arcade game as close as possible, right down to the detail of referring to Bluto as Brutus. But I think we know the real truth of it: The folk at Sabec had never consumed a piece of Popeye media for themselves before, and only knew about the characters as they’re presented in Nintendo’s take on the license. You’d think that King Features would’ve sent them something to help educate them on the subject — an informational packet or style guide, maybe? Well, it turns out that they might have, judging from the game’s title screen background: A page from a blueprint describing how the characters are meant to look in official renderings, right down to identifying Popeye’s “hot dog torso.” So, Sabec absolutely had the materials made available to them here, and simply chose to ignore Bluto’s properly established name — to assume that the style guide they’d been sent was just a piece of artwork that King really wanted them to put in the game. Either that, or there were degrees of separation in place between the contract hires they assembled to put the game together for them, and Bluto’s name got lost somewhere in the chain. In either case, I guess we’ll be calling him Brutus again from here on out.

Being inspired by an 80s arcade game, Sabec’s Popeye doesn’t present players with much in the way of options in its sparse menu: You can adjust the game’s volume, enable or disable controller rumble, and look at the game’s controls [which you’re unable to remap]. This is actually fairly standard for all of Sabec’s releases, which are all so simple in their designs as to not really lend themselves to any sort of variable adjustments on the part of players. In the case of Popeye though, they might’ve thought to at least give players the option to set their number of starting lives, and increase it from the set value of three if they so choose. Because as it turns out, those three lives are all you get in playing the game, with no opportunities to accrue more as either pick-ups or score bonuses. This almost makes a sort of sense from the perspective of wanting folk to chase high scores like in a proper arcade game, and as highlighted in the game’s description… until you remember the fact that most 80s arcade games – including Nintendo’s Popeye – were totally willing to grant you extra lives when you reached score milestones! And then there’s the fact that Popeye‘s high score table isn’t actually an online leaderboard, so the only point values you’ll be trying to top are your own [and the placeholder ones the developers included]. Not that I’m much of a score-chaser in the first place (even when it comes to games I adore), but it’d certainly be nice to have an idea of how far other players are able to get in this game, if only for a point of personal reference. (Good luck beating my high score of 60,575 points, if you’ve got the patience for it.)

It’s about time we jump into the game itself. In starting up any one of the levels, the game will inform you of your objectives with a pop-up text box; letting you know how many hearts you’ll need to collect, which enemies will be active, and attempting to contextualize the gameplay with a loose bit of narrative. In example, your description of the first stage reads as follows: “Collect the 15 hears Olive throws down, but be careful as Brutus is on the prowl! Find and eat the spinach to punch Brutus into the sea and collect the hearts faster.” As the game progresses, the number of hearts you’ll need to collect will increase by intervals of five and ten, while additional baddies in the form of Bernard the Vulture and the Sea Hag will eventually start to appear as well. But your main objective will always boil down to collecting either the hearts or letters that Olive Oyl tosses to you, depending on the stage. Curiously, the musical notes seen in the original game’s second stage are missing in action here; likely due to the fact it’d require the developers to incorporate a couple of additional songs into the game, necessitating them writing and composing new music. And clearly, that just wasn’t in the budget here: Throughout almost the entire game, you’re treated to a single looping instrumental — a rendition of the public domain track “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” (🔊), curiously performed without a hornpipe. To be clear, versions of this song were used in a number of the classic Popeye theatrical shorts, so it does have a connection to the character beyond its nautical origins. (For an added bit of history, a British rock outfit by the name of The Tornados recorded a cover of it in 1962 titled “Popeye Twist.”) The problem here is just the fact that the song becomes so quickly grating in this repetitive context; where the only things to break it up are silent loading screens, and a six-second instrumental version of the Popeye theme playing when you acquire a can of spinach. Other than those brief reprieves, it’s all Sailor’s Hornpipe… sans hornpipe, of course.

The beginning of each level will also treat you to a brief cutscene of sorts, where you’ll see where Olive Oyl is perched within the stage. This is a largely irrelevant piece of information, all told; since you don’t actually have to reach her in order to complete a given level, and seeing as you can’t collect the items she drops before they hit the ground (unlike in the arcade game). You can angle the camera upward during gameplay if you want to get a sense for the trajectory / potential landing areas for the hearts and letters, but this isn’t really necessary, since you’re just as well off running in a circle around the map and stumbling on the pick-ups naturally. In fact, it’s probably best not to waste your time looking to the sky, as it’s likely to blind you to your enemies on the ground. But that’s not really why I wanted to bring up the cutscenes in the first place: I’m more interested in the wasted potential here, where there are no end-of-stage animations or vignettes between levels to reward you for a job well done. At the very least, I’d expect the game to have a brief scene of Popeye climbing up the ladder on the ship stage in order to rescue and embrace Olive Oyl [like in the original game], but no such luck. As it stands, all you get is the ten-or-so second intros to the stages, where Olive Oyl exclaims “Popeye, catch!” — one of only four lines of spoken dialogue in the game, incidentally. To quickly run through the others: The second is a dude pretending to squawk like a bird (representing Bernard), the third is the Sea Hag’s cackling, and the fourth is an oddly eerie voice made to announce your “Game Over.” (🔊) Again, there’s another missed opportunity for Popeye to deliver some of his iconic catchphrases during gameplay, the likes of “Blow me down” and “Shiver me timbers.” I’m just looking for anything here that’d stand to give the game some sort of personality, but we’re quickly gonna find out that’s in short supply ‘round these parts.

Where it comes to actually playing the game, you don’t have much in the way of inputs: The left analog stick controls movement, right analog controls the camera, the ‘A’ button will allow you to pick up cans of spinach, and the ‘Y’ button will unleash Popeye’s punch. True to the original game, there’s no jumping here to concern yourself with, which can actually become something of an issue in certain situations. (More on those later.) So, here’s a question: Why is punching bound to the Y button instead of ‘B’? If we’re going for this whole “retro throwback” sort of deal (what I assume they were going for, anyway), why not just use the A and B buttons like every other video game? Now, I know that the Y button is nearly equidistant from A [as B is], and so this isn’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I think it goes to show how out of touch Sabec are with conventional game design — with what players have come to expect / been trained to intuit from nearly forty years of standardized control schemes. In any case, that’s your full range of inputs here, and 95% of the game will just amount to running and adjusting the camera anyhow; which should probably speak to just how basic the game is gonna wind up being. And if it feels like I’m overanalyzing every miniscule aspect of Popeye here in a desperate attempt to fill out this review section… Well, I reckon that’s because there’s honestly not too much to say about this thirteen-dollar product. So, guilty as charged, I guess!

The game’s first stage is set in an island town, with a large manor situated in the center for Olive Oyl to toss her hearts from. You’ll have to weave between houses and stalls, check behind rock walls, and sweep the beach in order to collect the required amount of icons. (You’ll need fifteen to progress the first time around.) The second stage then skips directly to a take on the third stage of the original game, putting you onboard a ship at sea as you collect letters dropped by Olive from the masthead. Only the goal this time around isn’t to build a ladder by repeatedly spelling out “HELP ME”: Instead, you’ll be filling out the blanks to construct sentences; including “Oh Popeye I Love You,” “Every Girl Loves a Sailor,” “It Is Okay To Be a Glowstick” (the first half of an obscure motivational quote, which is meant to be followed by “sometimes we need to break before we shine”), and “Face it Tiger You’ve Hit the Jackpot” (an odd reference to one of Mary Jane Watson’s catchphrases in Spider-Man). Past the fourth loop, the game just starts repeating that last line, so we don’t get to see Olive Oyl quoting the likes of Confucius or Hemmingway or whoever the hell else Sabec would’ve seen fit to quote. For that matter, we don’t get any actual Popeye quotes or catchphrases either, which you’d think the developers’ first thought would’ve been to look up and pull from a list of? In any case, clearing the ship stage takes you to the third and final level seen in the loop: Another island town, with a bit denser of a neighborhood for you to zig-zag through as you collect more hearts. As a matter of fact, the geometry in this map would appear to be so dense, it actually consistently causes the framerate to drop down to fifteen frames per second in the Nintendo Switch version, as the game struggles to render all of it on-screen simultaneously. This also results in tangible input lag, delaying your attempted actions by as much as half a second. (These performance issues aren’t present when playing on the PlayStation 4 or 5.)

As alluded to, the game does just wind up cycling through this series of three stages ad infinitum, scaling up the difficulty with every loop. In an attempt to mask this repetition, each loop is made to take place during a different time of day: While the first cycle takes place during a sunny morning, the second takes place “in the midst of night,” while the third occurs “in the blistering rain.” Of course, these conditions don’t affect your playability in any way, but they at least serve to mix things up in a superficial capacity. That being said, getting past the third loop will just restart the cycle from the morning variants again, so the novelty only lasts for so long. It’s just as well, seeing as you’re not really intended to make it too far past the third loop — much further than the eleventh or twelfth level, by my estimation: That’s around the point where the enemies get to be a bit too much too handle, as they increase in both numbers and in speed with every successive loop. When you begin the game, you only have Brutus to contend with in the first stage. By the second level, Bernard the Vulture starts to follow after you as well, and will continue to do so for the rest of the game (including repeats of the first map in future loops). Come the third stage, bouncing skulls summoned by the Sea Hag will begin materializing as well — sometimes out of thin air right in front of you. And with the sixth stage, the Sea Hag herself will start to make appearances, in order to toss bottles at you from afar. Of these hazards, only the skulls and bottles can be effectively batted away with your standard punch. Brutus and Bernard require being powered up with spinach in order to effectively knock out (the Sea Hag straight-up refuses to appear while you’re powered up), and are consequently removed from play for roughly thirty seconds. You’ll get brief camera cut-aways to let you know when they swim or fly back to shore, and can begin to dog you again.

Brutus’ persistent presence is really the primary factor in giving the game any semblance of depth / difficulty, so we’re gonna have to focus in on him for a minute here. If you’ll recall the original arcade game, Popeye’s adversary is quite clever in the ways he can launch attacks from adjacent floors, and has a number of tricks up his sleeve in order to catch you off-guard. Seeing as the stages in Sabec’s Popeye all take place on a single plane though (albeit one with differing elevation areas), Brutus’ behaviors are a bit more straightforward: He’ll simply run after you in as close to a straight line as he can manage, attempting to circumnavigate whatever structures might be in his way. And when he gets in too close, Popeye will freeze up as Brutus uppercuts him into the sky, costing you one of your precious lives. As the game progresses, his running speed will too; starting from a light jog that you can handily outpace in the first set of levels, and gradually increasing [with every loop] to the point of overtaking you with ease. The only ways to avoid him at that point are hoping that he randomly stops for a moment to seemingly ponder his next course of action (imitating a similar behavior from the arcade game), slowing him down by climbing stairs (sort of like how the ghosts in Pac-Man can’t take turns as quickly as Pac-Man can), or resetting his position on the map by crossing one of the invisible borders on his path-finding. That last trick is a bit of a jarring one, as it results in his suddenly disappearing and reappearing in a completely different location — often right in front of you, like a teleporting Jason Voorhees. It actually allows for Brutus to mount some genuinely unexpected surprise attacks, as he’ll seem to pounce on you from behind corners just when you think you’ve lost him. It’s honestly one of the most effective bits of design in Popeye, and yet I can’t shake the feeling that it only comes about as result of a total accident on Sabec’s part?

As mentioned, there is the matter of other enemies / hazards to deal with, all of which instantly deprive you of a life on making contact with Popeye. Bernard seems to have similar routines as Brutus in how he pursues you across the stages, but is held back by the fact that he needs to constantly adjust his elevation in order to effectively hit you, thereby rendering him largely toothless most of the time. The bouncing skulls appear and disappear so briefly as to be a non-issue in most cases, unless they happen to appear immediately in front of you while you’re being chased by someone else. As for the Sea Hag, she only has one or two spots in any given stage where she’s able to spawn (usually in narrow passages), and you can easily deal with her by simply walking around her before she’s able to toss a bottle at you. Past a certain point in the second loop, Brutus also starts to toss bottles at you, which actually renders him less effective as he needs to stand still in order to pitch them. It’s implementations like this which lead me to believe that Sabec were mostly just imitating elements from the arcade game without a real understanding as to why they were present in the first place — of how Nintendo used them to establish a delicate balance, where there are counters you can employ and deliberate holes you can exploit to evade each threat. By comparison, Sabec’s Popeye really just boils down to evading Brutus in his chase state, and being careful not to inadvertently trip over any one of the other hazards that might appear in your way. And even then, Brutus only really gets to be a threat past the third or fourth loop, where his increased speed becomes a real issue.

That reminds me: I neglected one more option available to you in dodging your foes! In the island stages, you can hop into the ocean and go for a swim, where all your pursuers seem to not know what to do in that scenario — as if Sabec didn’t account for their pathfinding extending beyond the shoreline, despite the fact that you as the player are able to freely wade through it. Brutus may attempt to follow you for a short time if he’s right behind you, but he’ll eventually seem to lose track of you and just start standing still in the water; sinking below the surface past a certain depth, to where you can literally stand on top of him and somehow not be at risk. Granted, there are no hearts for you to collect while out at sea, and your safety is no longer guaranteed the moment you land back on shore. As such, the swimming trick isn’t really especially useful in normal gameplay, amounting to more of a brief reprieve from the constant chases. Of course, you could just as easily choose to simply pause the game, and spare yourself the swim back to shore. Just don’t make the mistake of relying on the Switch’s ‘Home’ button to return you to the console’s system menu: Doing so doesn’t appear to actually pause the game, often resulting in players returning to it and finding themselves immediately knocked out by either Brutus or Bernard. (This issue was apparently remedied with a quickly-issued patch for the Switch release – for what it’s worth – and wasn’t present in the PlayStation release at its launch.) Maybe even worse than that: The game also fails to properly pause during those brief camera cut-aways where you see enemies returning to the stage [after being knocked out]. So, you can be getting chased by Bernard one moment, cut to Brutus swimming back to shore for a couple seconds, and cut back to gameplay where Bernard is suddenly within striking distance of Popeye! Luckily, the game at least seems to give you a second or two of lee-way time on this transition, so that you don’t take an immediate hit — almost as if the programmers were aware of the issue, but couldn’t quite figure out how to actually stop your pursuers from moving during the cut-aways.

Naturally, these “broken pauses” aren’t the only anomalies present in Sabec’s Popeye: The map geometry on the island stages is riddled with inescapable ditches and holes, which you’re likely to stumble on if you veer too close to the rock walls. If there were a jump button in the game, you could probably negotiate your way out of these sorts of jams. Unfortunately, Sabec were probably dissuaded from allowing it after seeing players leap out of bounds in previous games such as Hunt, and sought to prevent similar situations from occurring in Popeye. The end result leaves you with zero recourse if you should happen to get Popeye stuck in the scenery, as well as leaving the map littered with all sorts of invisible walls intended to keep you from falling into those traps. Mostly though, those invisible barriers will just keep you from accessing what look like possible escape routes from Brutus (between buildings and bystanders), and wind up costing you lives. Another glitch likely to get you killed involves Popeye’s punch animation locking up, and getting him stuck [for the remainder of a stage] in a static pose; where you’re able to continue to move and collect hearts, but are unable to actually successfully launch punches and defend yourself against your enemies. Even if you lose a life or try to take Popeye into the water (where you’d think the change of player state might reset his animation), he’ll continue to be stuck in that pose as you glide him across the map. I’d usually describe an issue like this as “game-breaking,” if not for the fact that punching out your pursuers isn’t strictly necessary here, and that getting to the next stage will magically resolve the issue.

The game’s camera itself is also something of a general nuisance, as it doesn’t tolerate any obstacles getting between its virtual lens and its line of sight on Popeye. And so, rather than ever allowing Popeye to be so much as briefly obscured from view, the camera will instead choose to suddenly cut to close-ups — pressing its back right up against whatever geometry would’ve otherwise blocked it, and depriving you of your ability to see your surroundings. In maps littered with tons of tall props and buildings, this can get to be a frequent occurrence, as you struggle to find an angle on the action that doesn’t constantly trigger these camera moves. It wouldn’t have to come to this if there were hooks in place for partial transparencies on obscuring objects (allowing you to see through them when they’re in the way of seeing your character); where the camera’s distance could just remain properly fixed, and not have to jump around so frequently and jarringly. Other bugs present in the game are luckily less likely to affect your ability to progress: There are a number of graphical errors related to viewing the map from angles the game doesn’t expect, where you’ll be able to see through the map or break the rendering on the surface of water. While you have to deliberately trigger some of these glitches by moving the camera right up against map geometry, some visual issues are inadvertently triggered for reasons I can’t even begin to guess at, and will pop up at seemingly random during standard gameplay. Now, for an instance of a potentially helpful glitch, it’s possible for Brutus and Bernard to spawn outside of the play area and seemingly get stuck there. (Thanks to Rerez for letting us borrow his footage here!) I wanna believe there’s some method for reliably triggering this glitch that folk might somehow be able to use in running the game competitively.

Of course, for as many unintended bugs may be present in Popeye, there are just as many issues that you can chalk up to outright laziness — the simple result of carelessness on the developer’s part, rather than programming problems outside of their [clearly limited] abilities. Arguably the most egregious example of this is the game’s sound design, which is truly terrible from top to bottom. We mentioned earlier how the game loops “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” across nearly every moment of gameplay, but neglected to mention that the looping isn’t seamless: Whether Sabec pulled it from a stock music repository or commissioned someone to record a rendition of it, they neglected to source a version of the track that lends itself to actually playing continuously; where there’s a clearly audible end point to the track, followed immediately by the song restarting from a discernible start point. The end result makes the track sound something like a broken record — a warp in the grooves of a theoretical vinyl, which leads to a very noticeable “skip” as the needle drags back to the top of the track. When considering the fact that the song is only 41 seconds long, this means that you’ll get to experience that oddly discordant moment dozens of times over in the course of gameplay. Luckily, the music is actually very quiet in the audio mix, so there’s the chance you might not even notice it playing back in the first place! Just don’t make the mistake of turning your speakers up to try and hear it, as the game’s sound effects are deafening by comparison — a full twenty-four decibels louder than the background music, on average. Of particular offense is the punching sound effect: A quarter-second bit of foley which clearly peaked its original recording device, and which might as well be a gunshot for as loud as it sounds in Popeye.

It doesn’t help matters that the rest of the soundscape in Popeye is so sparse; with nothing in the ways of ambient audio, character chatter, or really any sound effects at all outside of the punches and some occasional barks from the rogue’s gallery. (Bernard will occasionally squawk, the Sea Hag will cackle, and bottles will break on colliding with either Popeye or the level geometry.) This all contributes to the game coming across as decidedly empty and lifeless, despite the fact that the island stages actually appear to be quite bustling: You’ll find a number of generic characters populating the first and third maps, who appear in a style somewhat distinct from the Popeye cast; all standing completely still as they occupy shacks, silently converse outside of buildings, and plant themselves like statues by the docks and in boats by the shore. Where this could’ve represented an opportunity for Sabec to hide a couple more recognizable characters in the levels and maybe have them provide power-ups / extra points to Popeye (like Wimpy handing out burgers, or Swee’pea serving as a collectible in and of themselves), they instead choose to populate their world with bland, stock actors. And at that point, why even bother to populate the world at all, if they add absolutely nothing to the game? Clearly, this is a case where they already had the models on hand (either from some previous project or asset pack they owned), and decided to utilize them here in a misplaced effort to increase their perceived production value. Either that, or they believed that leaving the island uninhabited [outside of the Popeye posse] would be read as “unbelievable” — as if a game where your objective is to collect cartoon hearts and consume spinach for temporary superpowers was otherwise grounded in reality.

About those hearts and spinach cans: Their appearances here deviate from the game logic / rules seen in the original arcade game, in subtle ways which render them less “special” (for lack of a better word). In Nintendo’s Popeye, you earn more points for collecting hearts the quicker you’re able to collect them; awarding the most points if you nab them at the top of the screen, a minimum if you collect them from the bottom floor, and actually going so far as to cost you a life if you fail to grab them before they disappear into the waters below. It’s a mechanic which served to encourage riskier play at the top of the screen, and to penalize passive players who might try to pool them at the bottom until the coast seemed clear. By comparison, hearts in Sabec’s Popeye never disappear, depriving the game of any sort of timed element or urgency. Not only that, but the points awarded for picking them up seem completely arbitrary — ranging anywhere from 25 to 200 points without any clear explanation as to why they deviate in value? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how quickly you collect them, since I routinely saw myself getting the least amount of points possible even as I managed to grab them from mid-air shortly before they actually landed. If I had to speculate here, I imagine that Sabec attempted to tie some manner of timer to the scoring assigned to hearts, but broke it so thoroughly as to effectively render it a random number generator. As for the spinach cans, you’ll recall that they only appeared once per stage / per life in the original arcade game, making them a rare and valuable resource. Naturally, Sabec’s Popeye eschews this rule, as it’s sometimes possible to chain spinach boosts back-to-back with how frequently they reappear. I think there might be some attempt at balancing in place here where they start to show up less frequently as you endure multiple loops, but it’s an ultimately ineffective measure when faced with how inessential they actually prove in moment-to-moment gameplay anyway.

I do wanna take some time here to address each of the three maps, and how they all encourage slightly different approaches to how a player might engage with them. Actually, allow me to amend that statement slightly: I wanna address how the island maps both play more or less the same as one another, and how the Ship stage is the only real challenge the game is able to provide. See, on the islands you’ve got all this room to roam, and after a while you start to learn where the enemies are liable to appear from and how to avoid them. Popeye isn’t particularly quick on his feet in this game (not necessarily sluggish, but he’s not exactly a sprinter either), so having the rows of buildings to weave through and staircases to ascend definitely helps you to avoid the likes of Brutus. The only real struggle in these stages is how big they are, and how many laps you’ll often need to run around them in order to find hearts to collect. Sure, you can get to a point where you memorize the pre-ordained spots the pick-ups are programmed to land, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that these sort of open stages are entirely antithetical to the game’s own design: The chases lack tension when you have 360° degrees worth of directions to move in, and the ability to literally run circles around your pursuer in open space. The single-screen stages in the original arcade game may have been relatively simple, but they were designed very deliberately with limiting a player’s escape routes in mind, resulting in a challenging (but ultimately fair) little game. But as we’ll get around to explaining shortly, Sabec’s team put literally no thought into designing their maps, seeing they weren’t actually the ones to design them!

Before that big reveal though, there is the matter of the Ship stage to discuss: Another map Sabec didn’t actually craft for themselves, but which they can at least be said to have made a conscious decision in implementing into their game. It’s an altogether claustrophobic arena, with precious little in the way of open space or pathways to escape through. Consisting of a main deck, a small elevated platform at the bow, and two small floors you can climb [via two adjacent sets of stairs] at the stern; this stage proves to be a true test of Popeye’s agility, and a player’s ability to negotiate cramped corridors. With the letters Olive Oyl drops only coming down in sporadic sets of threes, it also makes for something of an endurance gauntlet as well, since there’s a lot of downtime between the pick-ups where you’ll have to be actively dodging Brutus and Bernard. On top of all that, the camera is particularly uncooperative in this confined space, and liable to get caught on the sails or surrounding woodwork. It is by far the toughest map in the game, where you will inevitably lose the bulk of your lives… and yet, it’s also arguably the best stage in the game, for the simple fact that it presents a genuine challenge. It comes the closest to actually recreating the tension of the original arcade game, and plays the best with the mechanics as Sabec chose to implement them. There’s an argument to be made here that all the game’s maps should’ve taken place in similarly cramped quarters, while still acknowledging that there’s a fair share of issues that come with it. (The Sea Hag’s skulls popping up immediately in front of you and outside of the camera’s view can get to be quickly frustrating, for one thing.)

Even with one of the game’s three maps ranking as “serviceable,” we’re still talking about a quickly repetitive game here — a remake of a forty year old title that manages to rate as a downgrade in almost every conceivable way. In terms of depth of play, there’s no comparison: The original does far more with far less in terms of clever AI and purposeful level design, and is a far more entertaining adventure for it. In terms of variety, Nintendo’s game has it in spades compared to Sabec’s one-note stages and simplified mechanics. The lack of multi-floor stages, climbable ladders, and stage gimmicks (like the punching bag and see-saw launcher) all leave Popeye 2021 feeling completely charmless. You can even make an argument that the original 2D arcade title looks way better than the 3D re-imaging; where the meticulously detailed pixel art present in the classic game trumps Sabec’s low-poly environments, laughably low-resolution shadows, and stock animations tied to their cartoon models. If you’re looking for a game that captures the style of the old-timey Fleischer animations… Well, it’s hard to claim that the 8-bit arcade game could actually deliver on that. And yet, Nintendo still winds up doing a better job than Sabec could ever hope to achieve with the benefit of forty years in technological advancements. Frankly, Sabec should be embarrassed that their take on Popeye is so lacking across all these aspects, and they probably should’ve never attempted to model their game as a “remake” in the first place if they couldn’t meet those standards. It really is a wonder how they were given access to a license with a century of history to its name, and found a way to leverage absolutely none of it to their advantage — to produce a product so woefully bland and utterly generic.

Popeye is arguably the worst kind of bad game, in that it’s largely just boring. Sure, it has a couple quirks about it that might make it appear to set it apart from the standard breed of shovelware. But at the end of the day, we’re still talking about a piece of software with absolutely nothing in the way of ambition behind it. That makes it a fair bit harder for me to write about it, to be honest — to be able to describe it in detail without just resorting to calling it bland and bad. And y’all know I hate to insinuate that the developers involved in a game don’t care at all about their craft, even in the cases of the most broken and tedious titles. You wanna believe that folk put their best foot forward in producing these products for public consumption — that they would want folk to come away with a positive impression of their efforts, and an appreciation for the work they put into it. And I really try to get that sentiment across in my writing, y’know? But then again, I’ve never had to talk about a straight-up “asset flip” in one of these articles before, and so I’m really struggling here to be kind to the team Sabec assembled. Oh, did I not mention that point yet? That almost the entirety of the game is cobbled together from premade assets, and that the grand sum of Sabec’s work here was just filling in the gaps while gluing all the disparate pieces of it together? Because that is absolutely the case here, and I’ve got the sources to prove it.

For the benefit of folk who aren’t versed in game design lingo: An “asset flip” refers to a game that is largely compiled of graphics, level geometry, and core gameplay that were not originally created by the developers themselves. Instead, the credited creators will rely on purchasable packs of publicly-sold assets — digital products sold on web pages such as the Unity Asset Store and Unreal Engine Marketplace. Usually, the purpose of buying premade assets is to either put “placeholders” in a game (representing assets that a studio will eventually have to generate on their own / replace later), or for a smaller team / solo developer to skip having to produce some aspect of the game they’re not particularly well-versed in (like creating models and textures, or choreographing complex animations). It should also be noted that the folk selling these assets do generally expect to be credited for their work, in addition to developers paying the asking price for them. What the developers aren’t expected to do is to create a game entirely from these pre-existing assets, not produce a single original line of code or graphical element, and to further pass the whole package off as the supposed “fruits of their own labor.” While premade assets can prove a valuable tool in game development, they aren’t meant to fill in for every last aspect of a finished product. And yet, this has become something of a trend in the market in the last decade: Too often now, you’ll find folk spending a couple hundred bucks to assemble all the components they’d need to put a game together, dragging and dropping them together in their development environment of choice, and selling the end result for something like five dollars on Steam’s digital storefront; the hope being that casual consumers won’t recognize how the game was stitched together, or that they’ll still knowingly buy it in order to collect / sell its associated marketplace items (trading cards, emoticons, etc.) on the Steam Community Market.

Of course, this is usually the sort of grift that a single, shameless individual might try to get away with. Rarely do you find companies with thirty years of game development history trying to pull this sort of stunt, and almost never when it comes to handling an officially licensed property! But that’s exactly what Sabec has done here: Popeye’s maps are 100% confirmed to be comprised entirely of scenes taken from Synty Studios’ ‘POLYGON Pirates’ pack on the Unity Asset Store. All the character animations are clearly rooted in offerings from Mixamo’s “Motion Packs” library. I’d also speculate that all the scripting for the gameplay (the character movement, physics, and artificial intelligence) are taken from some pre-built “engine” available on the Unity Store as well, to where all Sabec had to do was supply the stages and actors in order to populate it. But perhaps most egregiously, it’s likely that Sabec didn’t even bother to commission their own 3D render of Popeye himself; where this pre-textured model produced by a user ‘3dmpro’ on Turbosquid.com is offered as a free download, and looks to match up identically with the model used in-game in terms of sculpting and features — right down to an error where Popeye’s squinted eye actually has a visible gap in it, allowing you to see all the way through it in-game. The only difference is that someone on Sabec’s team slightly recolored elements of the outfit, perhaps in an effort to throw folk off the scent? That same Turbosquid user is also responsible for releasing another pre-textured model for Olive Oyl, which roughly matches up with her appearance in the game. (In this case, someone on behalf of Sabec would’ve wisely removed an unfitting pompadour quaff seen on the original model.) And sure, there’s the chance that I might be off in sourcing the character models here — that these characters’ looks are so well-defined, it’s possible that whoever Sabec commissioned to produce them simply landed somewhere close to these existing renders. But when everything else in the game is already made up of publicly available assets, why bother to put the “extra effort” in on this one aspect?

Now, I have to be careful here again, and posit an “alternate theory” as to how these assets may have wound up in the game with management at Sabec being none the wiser: It’s possible that Sabec hired on a number of contractors with the best of intentions, expecting them to all produce original assets and code for the game in accordance with their assigned roles / departments. And perhaps those hires all individually conspired with one another to screw Sabec over, by simply buying these premade assets and passing them off as their own original products — pocketing their due pay for their “hard work,” in excess of what they personally spent on purchasing these prefabs. Of course, this scenario would still imply that Sabec sources their hires from some shady spaces in the job market: That they likely pay well below what the going rate for this sort of work should warrant, and that the only folk who’d take them up on their offers are either desperate, naive, or unscrupulous. So, which is it, Saj? Do you knowingly assemble these games from libraries of stock assets and try to pass them off as your company’s own work, or are you so stingy that the only developers willing to work for you are seeking to trick you out of your money? Since Sabec’s games never include credits, all we’re left to do is guess. But y’know, seeing as so many of their previous releases can have their assets traced to existing items on the Unity Store, I’m going with the theory that Sabec is fully aware of what they’re doing. Of course, I’m also obligated to mention that nothing they’re doing here is technically “illegal.” (Not even their neglecting to disclose where they source their assets from.) Unethical? Yes. But not against the law, as it currently stands.

So, that’s where Sabec’s Popeye stands: As a mess of disparate assets mashed together into something that resembles a video game, but lacking any real cohesive vision or conscious “design” as it were. In attempting to realize such a simple game concept – a collect-a-thon with chase mechanics – Sabec failed to put any work of their own into the level design that’d dictate the flow and pace of the gameplay. By just dragging and dropping assets into pre-existing maps, and failing to fine-tune them in a way which would actually make them compatible with one another, the end result winds up feeling like the product of some machine-generated amalgam — a computer’s loose interpretation of a video game, derived from its observations of a hundred different random data points being fed to it. And in a sense, that’s really not too far off from how Sabec seemed to approach designing the game in the first place: They trained themselves like an machine-learning model would by watching Nintendo’s Popeye being played, and resolved to reproduce it without any real understanding of why the original developers made the decisions they made back then. Instead, Sabec simply chose to pull in existing maps that they thought vaguely matched the source material, populated them with first-page Google search results for “Popeye 3D models,” and filled in the rest of the blanks with elements that approximate the arcade game on a purely surface level. What I’m trying to say here is, Popeye is the embodiment of what the inevitable wave of ”AI-generated video games” will look like, when that technology is able to facilitate such a complex undertaking. It’s almost impressive in a sense that actual flesh and blood human beings were capable of producing something so utterly soulless and devoid of craftsmanship — something so close to resembling a real video game, but ultimately missing that mark.

Y’all wanna know what the saddest part of this story is? (I mean, aside from the fact that Sabec did Popeye so dirty, and that hapless fans were deprived of thirteen dollars for this dreck.) The game is totally “fixable,” with just a few small tweaks! Like, let’s put aside the idea of Sabec actually paying developers a fair wage to produce original assets for them, and hiring on someone with an actual creative vision for the game to carefully coordinate it all into a fully-realized product: That’s just not a route that Sabec seems to have any interest in pursuing, either because it’s “too expensive” or “too difficult.” What I’m talking about here is decisions that Sabec could’ve made with the process they already have in place, that might’ve resulted in a better game. If they had been willing to spend an extra couple hundred dollars, they could’ve maybe bought a few more asset packs and 3D models, in order to give the game more variety and match it more closely to the arcade original. This “FANTASTIC – City Pack” for $59.99 on the Unity Asset Store matches the POLYGON Pirates aesthetic closely enough, and could’ve been used to approximate the classic “City” stage for an additional bit of stage variety. This “Runner Animation Pack” (for another $60) with its exaggerated motions might’ve given the characters more life, and come a bit closer to that classic cartoon feel. While they’re at it, why not buy a few more “Low Poly Cartoon Ships” for just five bucks, and see if any of them might make for a fun stage to play on? And why stop with just trying to reproduce the original arcade game: Give Popeye some “Cartoon Weapon Guns” for just $11.20, and have him fend off “POLYGON City Zombies” for the low price of $49.99. Just keep spending money until you have a game chock-full of content and variety! Who knew game development could be so easy?!

In all seriousness: There’s a kernel of a good idea in Sabec’s Popeye, in that there’s probably a way to re-imagine the classic arcade game in a modern fashion that contemporary audiences might actually enjoy. I mean, we basically already got that in the form of that 2007 Namco mobile game, but we can maybe think a bit bigger here with the benefit of the latest console hardware. I think the big thing here would be keeping the game restricted to two dimensions, and focusing on facilitating the smoothest character animations possible in order to evoke the vintage Fleischer style. Filling out the game with additional stages based on more of the theatrical shorts and enemies pulled from the Thimble Theater cast would be the way to improve on the available content and variety thereof, and compel long-time Popeye fans to want to check the game out for themselves — to maybe share their love of the franchise with their children, as they bond over the slick presentation of a simple [yet addictive] gameplay loop. Trying to reproduce that original arcade game in 3D is just never gonna work: It needs the multiple floors and limited movement options, neither of which is particularly well-served by free control over a camera or a full range of directions to travel. If Popeye is to ever make the successful leap into the world of fully-3D games – assuming King Features Syndicate are ever willing to license him out again after this whole debacle – it’s gonna have to be in the form of a completely new game concept: Maybe something like a character action game, where Popeye stylishly swats at his opponents with those anchor arms of his, and abides by the law of cartoon physics to engage in some simple bits of platforming. Let him whip around that ship anchor as a weapon again like in Ijiwaru Majo Sea Hag no Maki, and supercharge with spinach acting like a ‘Devil Trigger’ out of Devil May Cry. You know, I started typing out this game concept as a sort of joke; but the more I think about it, the more I think it could actually turn out to be something potentially cool? Just don’t let a cheap bidder like Sabec get their hands on it, and doom it from the word go.

Sadly, Popeye probably represents the best that Sabec Limited can do in terms of designing interactive software: It’s clear that they don’t really understand what makes a compelling video game, and that no one on their staff really cares to learn. Their “strength” – as it were – is in turning out the basic-most interpretations of traditional games like darts and table tennis. Of course, that really doesn’t give them a lot to work with, as they stubbornly refuse to do anything exciting or unique with those rudimentary concepts. It’s no wonder that Popeye turned out the way it did, when they clearly lack an understanding of the very fundamentals of game design. Trying to recreate a forty year-old arcade game was like diving straight into the deep end for them, without having first learned how to float in water (let alone swim). It’s honestly shocking just how out of their depth they are here, and depressing to realize that they’re likely incapable of doing any better than this — not without completely tossing out their current production pipeline, and being willing to invest in bringing on steady hires to help them develop a proper “house style” / approach to designing original games. But as it currently stands, Popeye seems to speak to the full extent of their abilities as developers. Which is to say that they clearly have no idea what they’re doing, even when they’re handed a license with as rich a history as Popeye’s to pull ideas and inspiration from. When all they can do with that gold is spin it into shit, and find themselves having to rely on pre-made assets instead of putting in the most basic amount of effort into crafting actual levels; they’re probably better off just giving up on the whole endeavor, and getting back into quiz games or whatever the hell else. And shame on King Features for not doing their due diligence in making sure that Popeye’s return to video games wasn’t handled by a more competent studio: The sailor man absolutely deserved better, and they should be downright disgustipated with how this all turned out.

** It’s important to reiterate this point here, since folk seem to think that Popeye being in the public domain in Europe means that Sabec operated without a license. To that I’d say, “Good luck selling the game in North America, where Popeye is still very much a trademarked property!” You can also see the King Features Syndicate copyright on the game’s title screen, as well as Sabec making the claim in their own ad copy that this is intended as “The official Popeye game.” A company doesn’t just make those claims without an actual agreement in place to back them up.

“It Is Okay to Be a Glow Stick.”

PlayStation Store poster graphic for Popeye.

Website-employed reviewers who wound up covering Sabec’s Popeye already knew what they were getting themselves into before ever launching the game: This is a case where news sites had showed up late to the proverbial party, and where the likes of Twitter and YouTube had already done the bulk of the work for them. It was through the @NinEverything Twitter account that most folk had even been made aware of the game in the first place, thanks to their obsessively scraping the Switch eShop for signs of new and upcoming releases. Within just a few hours of that initial tweet on November 1st [three days before the game’s release], another user @Nickireda was the first to correctly source the ‘POLYGON Pirates’ asset pack being used, who other websites reporting on the story fail to credit as originally making the connection. It’s also on Twitter where the game’s bugs were prominently showcased, the lacklustre presentation was roundly mocked, and Sabec’s Popeye as a whole really stepped into the spotlight. Now, I’m obviously not making some sort of argument here that gaming news outlets shouldn’t have covered the game, just because social media beat them to the scoop: I’m simply pointing out the fact that discovering / reporting on bad games in the modern era has become something of a “community effort,” as the major websites have become somewhat reliant on the likes of popular tweets and trending YouTube videos in order to steer them toward potential stories to cover. As we continue to cover more modern titles on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, this is gonna become something of a recurring trend, as the last bastions of the so-called “mainstream press” wind up playing less significant roles in these histories — do less to inform consumers as to what games to avoid, as they are more often the last ones to actually get around to covering them.

On that note: It actually turns out that not too many gaming news sites ever got around to reviewing Sabec’s Popeye. The likes of GameSpot and IGN were evidently content to skip it; along with Kotaku, Polygon, Waypoint, and practically every other major name in video games. As a matter of fact, if you look at Popeye’s entry on Metacritic, you’ll find that the game has a grand total of zero reviews across any of their accredited outlets! So, for everything I just finished saying about news sites chasing stories first seen on social media, this is actually a case where almost nobody bothered to cover this particular release. Rather than attributing this to some sort of restraint being demonstrated on the collective part of the press, I’d attribute this more to a matter of timing: Writers on the Nintendo Switch beat were probably more focused on getting up timely coverage for the ‘Happy Home Paradise’ DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was set to release on November 5th — just a day after Popeye‘s launch.^[12] And let’s face it: Despite how laughably bad Sabec’s Popeye may have well been, these sites were probably better served (in terms of driving engagement) by focusing their attention on what was one of the platform’s most popular titles. However, that doesn’t mean that Popeye managed to completely avoid critical scrutiny, as much as Sabec might’ve likely wanted it to. (“No press” was probably better than “bad press” in this particular instance, as it meant that potential consumers couldn’t easily access critical evaluations of the digital offering.)

Our first review of the game comes courtesy of Leo Faria, on behalf of Way Too Many Games. Scoring it as a 1.5 [out of 10], they choose to take up a sarcastic tone for the bulk of their commentary, which honestly gets tiring after about two or three paragraphs: “Popeye is a shocking Switch exclusive, a game that showed up from out of nowhere to become one of the most iconic releases of the year. It’s a game that truly defies the concept of a killer app, a console exclusive, the reason one should pick up a Switch OLED instead of a PlayStation 5. Who needs Ratchet & Clank, Returnal, and Demon’s Souls‘ remake anyway? Can the PlayStation 5 render all half a dozen polygons that comprise Popeye’s character model? Don’t think so. Can a SSD-based hardware like that one compute the epic fifteen minutes of gameplay that comprise the entirety of Popeye‘s campaign? Nuh-uh.”^[13] At the very least, they drop the irony just in time for their conclusion, where they raise a fair point about Nintendo’s seemingly total lack of curation on their digital storefront: “Popeye is… well, it’s something else. It’s a game. It doesn’t crash upon booting it up, and pressing buttons results in actions happening onscreen. That is the best praise I can give to this astonishing Switch exclusive. It makes me even wonder as to how the developers have managed to snag the licensing rights for the franchise to begin with. You know, we keep complaining that Sony rules over its digital library with an iron fist, censoring some unnecessary content in their store, but there are times where I guess Nintendo should start adopting a few of those drastic measures when it comes to their store’s curation. Or lack thereof…” (Note that Popeye hadn’t yet released on the PlayStation Store at the time this review was originally written.)

The second review I could find of Popeye would come a whole six months after its launch, by way of Destructoid’s Zoey Handley. (I call it a “review”, but it was actually written for their ‘Weekly Kusoge’ feature, and has no score attached to it as such.) In excusing why this article came so late, Zoey explains that she had apparently been waiting all this time for it to go on sale: “Seeing the name Popeye on the Switch shop caught my eye immediately. Then, I saw that it looked like a self-aware cesspool. I saw that it was based on the arcade game and was confused. How could anyone with an iota of respect for the 1982 arcade classic pervert it in such a fashion? I waited for a sale — a deep sale — to find out.”^[14] Putting aside the thought here that Destructoid apparently doesn’t reimburse their writers for game expenses, the rest of the review is written from the perspective of a fan of the original 1982 Popeye title, who is rightfully bummed by how Sabec’s “remake” turned out: “I really don’t know how you become the sort of person who would use the fantastic 1982 Popeye arcade game for evil. If someone told me they were remaking Popeye in 3D, I would think it was a strange concept, but I would never assume ill-intentions. Yet, somehow, Sabec got the license. It’s strange to say they ‘got the license.’ Popeye is technically in the public domain in Europe and will be in the U.S. in 2024. Maybe there’s a loophole there, but credit to King Features is presented on the title screen in a similar matter [sic] to the arcade classic. In any case, the developer of games like Teddy Gangs, Fight, and Calculator got their hands on Popeye and proceeded to sin.” Again, I have to note here that there don’t appear to have been any legal “loopholes” enabling Sabec to develop the game without King Features’ go-ahead, and argue that insinuating that they did absolves King of their due complicity.

… Aaand that’s it for written reviews of Popeye. (At least as far as “established” websites are concerned, anyway.) I usually have a little more to work with! But of course, we’re talking about a 2021 release here, and written reviews are so last decade. Why would folk waste their time reading about a game when they could be watching footage of it in action instead? And so, we turn to YouTube, where we can find plenty of folk making their opinions of Popeye known. Most videos on the subject are about what you’d expect: Live commentary of folks’ first times playing the game – their face in the corner of the screen in a performative state of disbelief about how bad it is – where they either give up or lose all their lives by the third or fourth stage. Personally, I don’t pay much mind to videos of this variety (they’re just not my cup of tea), so I’m instead gonna highlight a handful of more substantive takes on the subject. Naturally, James Stephanie Sterling was one of the first on the scene to cover Popeye; ranting in their typical fashion, and declaring the whole endeavor “a scam.” They actually miss a trick on this one by being completely unaware of its being an asset flip — a term they were the first to coin, if I recall correctly? AntDude briefly addresses Popeye in a video titled “Spending $100+ On The WORST Switch eShop Games…AGAIN!”, and takes the opportunity to issue a message directly to Sabec: “Sabec? Stop. I don’t know if you thought getting the ‘Popeye’ license somehow was gonna be the thing to make you seem a whole lot more credible in the eyes of the everyday gamer? It didn’t. And if you wanna know the industry-wide secret to get that job done? Just start making good games.” (Because it’s just that simple, folks.) Rerez would cover the game in significantly more depth as part of their ‘Just Bad Games’ series, and be the first to correctly identify where Sabec sourced their 3D model for Popeye from. So, shout-outs to Shane for putting in the work there.

But there’s one video that stands out among the bunch here, for the waves it would go on to make: John Riggs’ upload [originally] titled “Popeye is the WORST Game on Nintendo Switch.” To be clear, the video itself is nothing particularly special, embodying the low-effort style of “live reaction” content I described earlier. (Though it’s admittedly cute when John’s kid overhears him saying “Popeye,” and immediately assumes they’re about to go get fast food.) What’s notable here is the fact that the video actually released on November 3rd, several hours before the game had gone live in North America and Europe. (Riggs pulled this off by buying the game from the Japanese eShop, where it launched a bit earlier than the rest of the world.) And this would appear to be where the troubles began for the creator, as they would detail in a follow-up video posted on November 16th: “Popeye for Switch Team threatened to SUE me.” And from what I can gather, this isn’t just a clickbait title or fabricated anecdote: As John Riggs goes on to explain in the video, a representative for Sabec Limited (likely Saj Muzaffar himself) sent an email to him shortly after his original video went up, containing some of the following language: “We’ve recently learned you’ve been spreading disparaging remarks [regarding our game]. The remarks are untrue and malicious, and constitute slander against our reputation and credibility. This letter will constitute notice that unless you immediately cease and desist from making such remarks, we’ll notify our attorneys to institute legal proceedings against you, claiming the full amount of damages suffered by us.” Needless to say, Sabec’s legal claim here is completely without merit, and was clearly intended to simply intimidate the uploader into taking their video down.

To his credit, John Riggs would correspond back and forth with Sabec, with the goal in mind of de-escalating the situation. As it turns out, Sabec’s primary umbrage was less to do with the content of his commentary, and more to do with his video’s original title and preview thumbnail; the latter element of which included the message “DO NOT BUY” in big, bold text. And so, the issue was resolved with John’s simply retitling the video (to where it currently reads as “Is Popeye on Nintendo Switch the WORST Game of All Time?”), and swapping out the thumbnail image for one with a less charged message overlaid on it (now simply reading “THIS HAPPENED”). And while it’s great for John Riggs that he was able to cool tempers and negotiate his way out of this potentially sticky situation, the fact still remains that Sabec threatened to sue a YouTuber for disparaging their game. And naturally, once word of that fact got out, folk were quick to spread the news of it; condemning Sabec for their bully behavior, and pointing out how badly their conduct reflects on the company. A ‘Connor’ writing for MMO Fallout would raise the following point in their coverage of the situation: “Threatening critics over their video game reviews never goes well for developers. In some cases it has bankrupted smaller teams through the ensuing fallout. And if the folks at Sabec know what’s good for them they’ll chalk this up as a case of misjudgment, apologize, and never do it again. But that’s only if they know what’s good for them. Don’t buy Popeye, if anything because the people behind it are disgusting bullies.”^[15] So, yeah: All this probably didn’t play out in quite the way that Sabec had intended, to say the least!

Some might try to argue that all this negative publicity around Sabec and Popeye might’ve actually helped them in the long run — put a spotlight on the game that may have translated to some additional sales. And while there might be a couple of historical instances where a game’s infamy winds up translating directly into profitability (see Death Crimson, for example), I kind of doubt that’s the case for Popeye here: The nature of the press around Sabec’s legal threats isn’t the sort that spurs folk on to put money in the company’s pockets, even as a joke. And for their part, Sabec probably weren’t looking to attract much attention to their game in the first place, well aware that the bulk of it was gonna be negative [even before they started issuing legal threats]. Their entire business model at this point centers around flying under the radar, seeding digital storefronts with the most generic titles possible, and hoping that casual consumers will buy their wares without the benefit of reviews to consult. This tactic is aided by the fact that the Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store lack anything in the way of user ratings, which could serve to potentially warn folk off of their games. I mean, Sabec could just as easily port their titles to PC and sell them through Steam (seeing as they’re all built on Unity), but choose not to knowing full well that the user reviews would tear their games apart. This is also why they don’t bother announcing their games to the press or sending out review codes to established outlets: What good would that do them if it all just amounts to jeers about how they previously released Calculator? The less is known about Sabec and their catalogue, the better for their bottom line.

And so, Sabec has slowed their operations significantly in the wake of the Popeye fiasco: Over the course of 2022, they only went on to launch a grand total of three new games — a significant decrease from releasing well over a dozen games in a given calendar year. For historical reference, these three titles include Trivia For Dummies (another one of their licensed quiz games), Pet Rock (a Tamagotchi-style simulation of raising a sentient stone as a pet), and Boxer (a thoroughly basic simulation of boxing). Needless to say, none of these releases are particularly remarkable, nor do they represent any “lessons learned” from the critical responses to Popeye. Just about the only interesting thing to be said about any of them is the fact that Sabec attempted to market Pet Rock on TikTok, by means of fabricated testimonials starring a paid actress. While they were evidently busy working on these three releases, Sabec allowed their website to fall into a state of complete neglect; allowing an update to their WordPress theme to completely break its formatting (rendering the title of their webpage as a headline reading “Page Not Found”),** which took them over a month to notice before pulling it down and serving a “403 Forbidden” error in its place [as of the time of this writing]. Don’t take this as a sign that Sabec are ceasing their operations, though: As of just a couple weeks ago, Saj has been wheeling and dealing in order to make their PS4 release of Checkers an official category in Ghana’s ‘Esports Association’s “PS4 Esports Tournament Project.” There’s no telling what lies ahead for Sabec after that. All we can hope is that they eventually go on to change their ways, and stop relying on such a shady business model to make their profits in the market? Either that, or they go on to fold outright once their current model stops proving financially tenable. Whichever comes first.

Which brings us back to the subject of good ol’ Popeye himself, and what his future in video games might look like. This is to say that it’s currently looking pretty bleak, if not downright non-existent: Clearly, King Features got burned by entrusting the license to Sabec, and allowed their own brand’s reputation to suffer by association. Of minor interest / amusement is the fact that the official Popeye website has an entire “Timeline” page chronicling brand deals and corporate collaborations – including the original 1982 arcade game and 2005’s Rush for Spinach (which they conflate the details / description of with the 2007 Namco mobile game) – but which goes on to totally ignore the 2021 Popeye game, as if they wish they could erase it from their history. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the sour experience with Sabec scare them away from video games again for another whole decade, as the sailor man’s sailor fans are left wanting and waiting. But without any major media projects currently in the works either, it’s unlikely that King Features will feel so compelled to promote the brand with further software products in the interim. The closest we’ll probably get is more in the way of “Partnerhsips” [sic] with the likes of existing franchises; such as Rovio’s Angry Birds, who they collaborated with for a week in early 2022 in order to develop a “Popeye themed tournament” in support of ocean conservation efforts.^[16] And while that’s all well and noble enough, it still leaves me wishing that a standalone Popeye title was secretly in the works — something to properly redeem him after the Sabec debacle.

In researching and detailing the whole history of Popeye video games for the earlier portion of this article, I was struck by just how many of them were genuinely entertaining, and reminded of my own fondness for the franchise as a whole. In observing his long-running history with / larger impact on the games industry, my take-away here is that Popeye is a property positively ripe for interactive adaptation — which could and should be leveraged to produce all manner of potential genre titles. I think a key thing in ensuring their success though would be to stop trying to remake the original arcade game: We already got what is probably the best possible version of that with the 2007 mobile game, and this 3D experiment in 2021 goes to show there’s no blood left in that stone. I get that we’re dealing with a century-old character here whose primary appeal is rooted in nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean that his games have to keep on drawing from a forty year-old well as well. After all, the strength of a character with such a simple premise should be the ability to build a variety of different types of games around it, as seen in some of the best of Popeye’s past virtual adventures. Of course, this plan also relies on King Features to be a bit more discerning in who they’re willing to license their property out to — to not just accept the first / lowest bid that comes their way, and do their due diligence in evaluating a prospective developer’s past portfolio. I reckon that’s really the toughest part in all this: Convincing the execs at King Features that the endeavor would be worth the investment, and to partner with a studio whose ideas might seem a bit “unconventional” to them at first. I promise to any company heads who may be reading: It’s worth taking the gamble.

On the subject of speaking directly to companies, I wanna close out this article with a message to Sabec Limited: Howdy! If you’ve made it this far into my article, y’all are probably upset over the unflattering ways I’ve described your products, and shone a spotlight on aspects of your company history you’d probably prefer to remain in the dark. I guess I can’t necessarily blame you for that: You’ve done a pretty solid job in ensuring that most folk have had a tough time tracing it all, up until now. And maybe your first instinct here is to try issuing another one of your threatening emails to me, hoping that I’ll take this whole article down. But I wouldn’t recommend it, especially after seeing how badly your last attempt at this tactic went for you. Instead, I’d suggest maybe taking an opportunity to self-reflect a bit — figure out why folk are so quick to criticize your output, and how your development pipeline is prone to scrutiny. Maybe you’re already fully aware of those facts, and simply don’t care so long as it keeps your company afloat. If that’s the case, then I hope you also realize how precarious your place in the industry is — how one small change on the part of Nintendo or Sony could potentially undermine your entire operation, if they should ever decide to more carefully curate their digital storefronts. And even if they don’t, this strategy of yours can only work for so long; before casual consumers learn to recognize your branding, and you run out of hapless fools to separate from their money.

So, before either of those scenarios play out, maybe consider fundamentally altering the way you conduct your business? Start putting a bit more care into your craft, or at least hiring on folk who do (even if you have to pay them a little more). Stop trying to seed storefronts with an endless array of generic games, and start focusing on quality over quantity. Find a unique voice or vision as a company, cultivate a “house style” that doesn’t just revolve around buying pre-existing assets, and put in the work producing games that you’ll actually want to attach your names to. Develop some sort of empathy for the folk you’ve been tricking into spending ten bucks a pop on your sub-par games, and try to make some sort of amends by putting out new products worthy of that price tag. Most importantly, try taking pride in your work and your thirty years of history, and leverage that to develop something y’all can actually be proud of. Because I know that deep down, you can’t be happy about how folk routinely criticize you, and the fact that your current legacy amounts to hacky jokes about your calculator app. If you wanna change that perception, you can’t expect to get there by silencing critics and hiding your brand in the shadows: You have to actually make the effort to rehabilitate your image, and to change the conversation by putting out something worth paying compliments to. To paraphrase a famous catchphrase: You yam what you yam, an’ that’s all that you yam. I just wish I remembered who originally said that line. I think it might be Spider-Man? A shame there’s no way to double-check on that. Anyway, that’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more.

** Stupidly, I neglected to capture a screenshot of Sabec’s website in that temporarily broken state, which I would’ve loved to show here. I guess I had just assumed that Sabec weren’t keeping tabs on their own company website, or that Wayback Machine would archive it. Let this be a reminder to you all to be diligent in capturing moments in online media for yourself, since you can’t always count on other folk doing it for you. On that note: I’ve since installed the Wayback Machine’s official browser extension, so that I can be more active in preserving webpages relevant to our articles.

[1] Langer, Mark. “Popeye From Strip to Screen.” Animation World Magazine. July, 1997. Web.
[2] Grandinetti, Fred M. Popeye: A Illustrated Cultural History (Second Edition). McFarland Inc. July 29, 2004. Print. (Partial scan available)
[3] Harris, Karen. “Popeye Ate Spinach Because of a Misplaced Decimal Point.” History Daily. September 21, 2019. Web.
[4] ‘Ian.’ “Is Popeye’s nemesis named Bluto or Brutus?” The Straight Dope. Page accessed February 28, 2023. Web.
[5] Iwata, Satoru. “Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros: Volume 1.” Nintendo.com. November 13, 2009. Web.
[6] Yokoi, Gunpei, and Takefumi Makino. ‘横井軍平ゲーム館 [Yokoi Gunpei Game House].’ ASCII. 1997. Print.
[7] Iwata, Satoru. “Iwata Asks: Punch Out.” Nintendo.com. July 13, 2009. Web.
[8] Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games. Three Rivers Press. September 6, 2001. Print. (Scan available)
[9] Scolding, Bill. “Terry, Arfur and ‘Im Upstairs.” Crash, Issue 34. Newsfield. November, 1986. Print. (Scan available)
[10] “King Features to Represent Cuphead for Licensing.” King Features Syndicate. April 12, 2017. Web.
[11] Gray, Kate. “The Developers Of Hit Switch Game ‘Calculator’ Are Making A Popeye Game.” Nintendo Life. November 1, 2021. Web.
[12] “New DLC! Expand your horizons with the Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Happy Home Paradise DLC.” Animal-Crossing.com. November 5, 2021. Web.
[13] Faria, Leo. “Review – Popeye.” WayTooManyGames. November 4, 2021. Web.
[14] Handley, Zoey. “Popeye might be the most insulting adaptation of a classic arcade game.” Destructoid. May 9, 2022. Web.
[15] ‘Connor.’ “Rant: Do Not Buy Popeye On Switch.” MMO Fallout. November 16, 2021. Web.
[16] “Popeye comes to Angry Birds Friends.” Rovio. January 31, 2022. Web.