Bandai Golf Challenge:
A Monolith in Memory
by David Cole
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Have you ever had some little inkling of a memory locked so firmly in your head, but you couldn’t quite pull it back out? Something like a personal Mandela Effect, a shadow of an idea that you can’t share with anybody because you don’t know how to express it. I’ve got one of those and it all centers around a golf game I first played in 1996.
When I think back to the 90s, I think it was perpetually autumn. Maybe it was the flannel. Maybe it was the somber music dominating the airwaves. And maybe, just maybe, it was the fact that when it was autumn, I’d go along with my dad and Pops on golfing trips during the day and return home to a waiting NES and the few games we ever had for it.
A lot of us share this classic bit of video game backstory: back in the mythical Childhood Times™, it was rare to get “new” games. My playtime was ruled by the games my parents already had, most of them sports-related. I wasn’t particularly interested in most of them. Golf only held any of my interest because I could play in the sand traps and ride in a cool cart that I’m 95% certain was manufactured by a company called Kool Kart.
And two adult men in my life enjoyed it immensely. I wanted them to be proud of me, so I tried to enjoy it too. You know the drill.
In our limited collection, there were three different golf games. Jack Nicklaus’ Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf, Nintendo’s barebones attempt we now affectionately refer to as the “black box” Golf, and the last and most dear to my heart, Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach.
Bandai Golf Challenge is the video game equivalent of looking at a map of a golf course and determining how many strokes one can make before eventually lucking into putting the ball in a hole. Imagine the distance/power meter we’re all familiar with from Mario Golf, only with no discernible way to control it. That’s the entirety of the game.
There’s only one course, based on the famous Pebble Beach Golf Links, the site of the US Open multiple times since 1972. It is, perhaps, the greatest golf course in the world. My father, having given up on his one-time dream of joining a pro tour by the time I came along, had picked up the game believing it to be the closest he’d ever get to playing on those fairways. But, like every other game, he was quickly bored by the simplistic nature of the thing and let it gather dust in a box, sandwiched between copies of Tecmo Bowl and Aicom’s Ultimate Basketball.
Then I found it.
The story goes that the NES had originally lived in this box in some closet and I had eventually discovered it on one of my many expeditions therein. My parents, curious to see my reaction, hooked that old baby up and let their young baby play. Every experience from that first session feels like a blur now. Some cocked-up herdy gerdy mess of pixels and sound. But there’s a distinct possibility that the first game I ever played was Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach.
I have a vague memory, colored by that growing haze that comes with age, of sitting on my knees, staring at the NES controller on the ground. I had discovered that not looking at the screen was the optimal way to play sports games, a theory that goes unacknowledged by the community at large to this day. And I remember my dad taking the controller from me at points in an attempt to show me how it was really done. But I wouldn’t have it.
No, I was always fascinated by the greater world of Pebble Beach. Whenever a shot is made, a graphic of the player character appears over the power bar. I remember thinking that this unnamed man was on the same level as Mario, having seen both of them in the same number of games. When Super Mario Bros. 2 entered our household, I wondered when Mr. Pebble Beach would make his return.
The game was almost ritualistic after a point. When I accompanied my dad and Pop on golf trips, dad would have to sit with me afterwards to play Bandai Golf Challenge so I could shoot some as well. He explained to me, tirelessly, the basics of the game. Simple as it was, I kept having to have the central point repeated to me: take as few shots as possible.
There was one point when my dad had to be away for a business trip, the first time it had happened since I’d been born. It was surreal to suddenly not have a parent around and not really grasp the reason why. At that age, when someone looking at you the wrong way could throw you into a fit, I was sad enough to play Bandai Golf Challenge alone. It was a comfort of a game, mostly because of the title jingle.
This track is an absolute bop. The NES sound chip was utterly smashed by relatively unknown composer Akihito Hayashi here. The song demonstrates an almost stacatto kind of energy, with a shimmering melody that sounds like rain coming down over a drum loop doing its best to fill out the rest of the space. This guy, with work in the even more obscure Pinball Quest and Dodge Boy, never got the credit or acclaim he deserved for this one song. Sure, the rest of the soundtrack is dull. Sure, I can’t even point to another example of his work that is noteworthy. But this one song? It was my security blanket. It kept me safe when I was troubled. It will play at my funeral.
In my adult life, I live alone and a decent distance from any family. My Pop is gone and my dad physically cannot play golf anymore. I never got into the sport proper. But when Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition and some enterprising individual added additional games to its lineup, I made sure that Bandai Golf Challenge was among them.
You’d think it’d be easier to grasp at this age, with a college education and professional experience under my belt. It isn’t.
Truth is, the game is mediocre at best. It always was, even among its contemporaries. And after revisiting it so long after the fact, sitting crosslegged on the hardwood floor of my family home, I think I might hate it. The “retro” feel isn’t enough to carry it for more than a single hole or two and the fact that one song plays on every single part of the course, a much more downbeat tune than that title track, is maddening. When I visited home and booted it up to play, both my dad and I lost our patience and turned the whole system off.
We sat in silence for a while, him perusing a copy of Golf Digest and I opening random apps on my phone. There were leaves falling onto the roof hard enough that you could hear them in that quiet. It was Autumn again. That’s when he said it:
“Turn it on again.”
So I did. But he stopped me at the title screen, saying “This is the part I always liked best. Once when you were little, you had this song playing when I came home from my first business trip. I haven’t heard it in forever, but it reminds me of home.”
We both went back to doing what we were doing, just as quietly as before, but with that one song playing under it.
It’s funny how these flashes of an experience get imprinted in our memory. It’s the media equivalent of the atom bomb vaporizing objects and leaving only vague imprints of what once had been there. Somewhere in the annals of my mind was a golf club-shaped sillhouette, waiting to be resdiscovered. When I finally braved the fallout of years’ worth of growth and development, when I finally found what was left of Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach, it had been reduced to rubble. But of course it had. Nothing can escape time unscathed, let along a Konami golf game from thirty years ago.
Bandai Golf Challenge: Pebble Beach isn’t a good game. I don’t think even think it’s an okay game. But it has this ONE THING about it that makes it worth keeping around. And sure, it can be difficult to explain how a looping theme song is the only thing that “sparks joy” in me when I look at that cartridge. But that doesn’t mean that the ONE THING isn’t incredible or that the little bit of joy it does bring isn’t entirely genuine. The title song from Bandai Golf Challenge is the best thing about it, and frankly, I think that’s good enough. It’s all that’s left of something that once stood tall in my mind and memory, but now is but a shadow of itself, imprinted forever along a wall somewhere.
