Data East's Karnov

The second to last video I have from my trip to The Pinball Wizard Arcade in New Hampshire...god I wanna go back again. Today we're looking at one of the many obscure games that owner Sarah has in her collection. This is Karnov from Data East. This game was released back in 1987 and was a big hit for the company. So much so that Karnov became the company's mascot and was featured in a number of other games. Mostly he'd be in the game as a villain, he was the boss in the first stage of Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja, the final boss in the Neo-Geo game Fighters History and was the title character in the game's sequel, Karnov's Revenge.

In the game you control Karnov though nine stages, running, jumping and spitting fireballs in order to collect treasure. The game has a unique item system where you can get items like ladders to reach hard to get items and a mask that works sort of like an X-Ray vision to find hidden power ups and items. This game was ported to a number of home computers and of course the NES where I played it to death and never really beat it.

The machine in Sarah's collection is damn near mint. The control panel is near perfect and the joystick works really well. One of my major pet peeves if you haven't seen many of our videos is I really dislike Data East and Atari brand joysticks. Most of the games I find out in the wild have terrible joysticks and it makes them next to impossible to play. The one on Sarah's Karnov was perfect and it was great to be able to play it again.