A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1988 platformer for the NES, Hudson's Adventure Island.

The first game of the long-running Adventure Island series is a conversion of Wonder Boy, an arcade game published by Sega in 1986. Hudson sought the rights to develop a port from the original arcade developer, Escape. Escape, however, only held the rights to the game itself, with Sega retaining sole legal ownership of the featured characters. Sega went on to publish Wonder Boy completely intact on its own home systems and subsequently granted Activision the rights to publish home computer conversions, while Hudson, after changing the title, the music, and replacing the main character sprite, released their reskinned version on the NES as Hudson’s Adventure Island.

Adventure Island stars Master Higgins, a tubby little orange dude based on the company's 80s front man, Takahashi Toshiyuki, who was famous in Japan for his starring role in a Toho film that featured Hudson’s Star Force, for singing in the band Runner, and for being able to hit a controller button sixteen times per second. Capitalizing on his fame, Hudson redesigned Wonder Boy‘s main character as Takahashi Meijin (lit. Master Takahashi, renamed to Master Higgins for the west), a caricature of Takahashi.

Tina, or Princess Leilani (as she is called by the box copy and the manual), has been kidnapped and taken to Adventure Island by an evil witch doctor, and Master Higgins must save her by hopping and bopping across thirty-two stages of tropically themed platforming action.

The game's primary innovation is its timer. The row of constantly depleting hash marks at the top of the screen represents Higgin's "vitality" which must be replenished by grabbing pieces of fruit and hidden milk bottles.

To even the odds a bit against the island's wildlife, Higgins can break open eggs to find weapons (stone axes and flaming bolas), skateboards (a speedy wonder of stone age technology and a deathtrap), keys (for bonus stages), and fairies (for temporary invincibility), but he has to be careful about which eggs he opens. Some hide an evil eggplant that will quickly sap the vitality gauge.

Things are relatively easy-going in the early levels, but make no mistake: Adventure Island is a prime example of a game that is "Nintendo hard." There are several massive difficulty spikes in its latter half as stages turn into trap-filled gauntlets and fruit becomes increasingly scarce. It requires a ton of practice and memorization to make it to the end, but it's pretty satisfying to see the effort pay off when you finally manage to decapitate the last boss and save the girl.

Adventure Island is punishingly old-school, but anyone that loves the purity of 80s platformers will enjoy gnashing their teeth at this NES classic.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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