No. Power Punch II wasn’t going to be a sequel to Punch-Out!!
Punch-Out!! was one of the games I played for the first time, later in my life, that saved retro gaming for me. I still haven’t beaten it. I’ve reached Super Macho Man, I think. Progress is just so slow at that point that I eventually get distracted and move on to something else.
That has nothing to do with Beam Software’s Power Punch II. Well, not nothing. You would have to be blind to not look at it and see it as having lifted Punch-Out!!’s formula. That’s nothing new for the industry, though. Power Punch II just happens to have been catapulted to notoriety due to a rumor and its uncanny resemblance. It’s a rather strange game, but it’s one where the ability to judge it by its own merits has been lost.
The pervasive story about Power Punch II is that it started life as an intended sequel to Punch-Out!!. According to the tale, Nintendo commissioned the game as a follow-up but dropped it once the scandals around Mike Tyson broke out (and also because of the quality of the game, as some tell it). This never made sense to me, and hear me out: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! was reissued as Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream in 1990 after Nintendo lost the license to use Tyson’s likeness, so they obviously didn’t have any interest in maintaining it. Power Punch II was released in mid-1992. Super Punch-Out!! was released in 1994, and while that leaves time for development to stop on one title and start on another, the actual bears the name of the arcade game from 1984, as one would expect.
Now, the boot screen does say that Nintendo owns the trademark to Power Punch II and that it was licensed to American Softworks. Strange. So, for clarity, I reached out and asked Power Punch II’s programmer and character designer, Andrew Bailey (now
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