Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular

Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular!, known in Japan as Donald Duck (ドナルドダック) and based on the British home computer game, Alternative World Games, is a child-oriented sports game that was released by Kemco for the Nintendo Entertainment System on September 22, 1988 (March 1990 in North America).

Summary


This video game is a collection of six events that uses various characters from the Peanuts series (Donald Duck in the Japanese version) as opponents. Events include boot throwing (similar to hammer throwing), pizza balancing, and sack racing, among others.

In the background, landmarks unique to Italy are shown (i.e., Leaning Tower of Pisa) and the structures using Roman architecture (i.e., the Colosseum) are shown while the player competes at the six events. Playing the "River Jump" event requires impeccable timing; like in the long jump event in the Track & Field video game Dewey (in the Donald Duck version), always pushes the lagging player ahead of the leader, allowing him to catch up. A majority of the game seems to be ported from the Commodore 64 video game Alternative World Games by Gremlin Interactive.

The graphics in the game tend to flicker while the color palette can be weird for certain events in the game. For example, the Japanese version had Donald Duck developing green skin or his trademark blue hat suddenly becoming black.

Development
Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular is a loose port of the 1987 Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum title, Alternative World Games. Kemco had signed a deal with British developer/publisher Gremlin Graphics for the console rights to several of their computer games (such as Monty on the Run). However, this was the only title of theirs to be re-released back to the West.

Licensing
After the release of the Family Computer Disk System title, Roger Rabbit, Kemco still had the rights to release Disney-based video games in Japan, while the Who Framed Roger Rabbit licensed expired, making them choose Donald Duck and release a video game starring him in Japan. As Japanese video game company Capcom USA held the Disney license in North America, Kemco decided to license Snoopy instead for the North American version.