Psycho Fox
Eternal Cuddly Game #1
Type of Game
The origins of my addiction to nostalgia, set against a backdrop of parkour at breakneck speed, where transformation goes hand in hand with the consumption of various substances—some more, some less hallucinogenic and anabolic.
Release date on our machines
In 1989, almost everywhere you could find a Master System, except in Brazil—which didn't get it until 1995—and Japan, which never got it at all! Brazil has certainly caught up since then.
Developer
Vic Tokai Corporation. A company that has always had its fingers in many pies, including video game development. It’s still around today!
Publisher
SEGA, plain and simple. Oh, really? Or rather, SEGA Enterprises Ltd., as the company was called until 2000, and headed by a certain “The Rich Man” in the game's credits.
Psycho Fox: available on... uh, never mind, nowhere actually (nothing official, anyway). In the depths of an asylum, perhaps.
It turns out that for everything and anything—all topics and projects—we all had to start somewhere. As for what led to the Big Bang or the acceptance of socks with flip-flops, I couldn’t explain it. But as for the beginning of my small and trivial existence, there was Psycho Fox. I mean, as far back as I can remember—let’s say around age four or four and a half. And that’s strictly in the realm of video games. Actually, no—not even that; I’d played a good handful of other video games before it. But! When I think about the one that tipped me over into the obsessive side of passion, when I try to figure out what made me the pathologically ecstatic, compulsive nostalgic that I am today, only one game keeps coming back: Psycho Fox. So naturally, I always say that I held it in my hands before any of the others, that it was the first one to come to life on the TV screen. Factually incorrect, but emotionally accurate, because who would want to hear me explain that, in reality, uh, before I was even four, well, I’d fiddled a bit with the keyboard on Fruity Frank, struggled like crazy to make a ball bounce in Pop-Corn, and bitten off more than I could chew on Rocky or The Ninja a few weeks before Psycho Fox on my dad’s Master System? Oh well, I said it anyway. There you go. But I feel like the console was already up and running in the apartment before I was old enough to press the buttons on a controller. That’s what I’ve always believed, anyway—that my father bought it when it came out in 1987 or shortly after—but maybe things actually went differently. There’s no way to know—my old man doesn’t remember either—so I’m left trying to piece together the missing bits of my memory. There’s also no way to know why he bought the Psycho Fox cartridge.
Turbulent introductions
So I could have a blast with him on the SEGA machine, or so he could take an hour to himself to do some crossword puzzles? I loved animals, so it was only natural being introduced to these creatures… who were completely nuts! Well, in the end, they weren’t any crazier than the characters in cartoons like Looney Tunes or Heathcliff Heathcliff No One Should ! That said, the mental health issues of the characters in Psycho Fox are still glaringly obvious from the moment you see the box art. Which wasn’t a problem for either my dad or me. We were both hooked within five minutes, just like that! This game entertained us like no other form of entertainment ever could have. Well, entertained… Psycho Fox did much more than that, since, as I mentioned earlier, it cemented video games as the source of my greatest joys in life—forever. More or less, barring the birth of a child and two or three other things, if push comes to shove. And I know it’s not called Heathcliff Heathcliff No One Should! I’ll never call that cartoon Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats, okay? My whole childhood would come crashing down.
Looney discovery
Since I only had a vague idea of what a video game was back then, I knew even less about platformers. Psycho Fox introduced me to both concepts—as everyone knows by now, that’s where my adventure began. Setting aside Hang On, Bomber Raid, and the others, of course. But what I mean is that while some people dove into the world of video games with Super Mario Bros. or Alex Kidd, well, I got to play Psycho Fox. And I have absolutely no regrets, since I loved it more than I should have. Since I want to say a lot of good things about this game, I’ll quickly gloss over its most commonly criticized flaw, so we can move on. The controls, yeah, um… well, you have to admit they’re a little off. Back then, I learned to live with them, just like all kids put up with the flaws in their video games. Especially since I didn’t see them as problems, but just as the only control mechanism I knew.
But if I were to discover it today, I’d have a really hard time with that kind of exaggerated sluggishness, that slow start followed by a massive burst of velocity, and those frustrating jumps at low speeds. Especially with the pink hippo! I tried it again on an emulator much later, using my computer keyboard as a controller, and man, I didn’t find it enjoyable at all! Ugh! But why am I talking about a hippo when it actually says “Psycho Fox” on the cartridge? Well, the transformations! Yeah, I’m done bashing my favorite virtual buddy. Now it’s time to praise and cuddle it. So, our sly little devil can simply morph into different forms by using a specific item he picks up during his wanderings. The monkey jumps higher, the hippo moves at a snail’s pace but can break stone blocks, and the cheetah runs super fast. The tiger, alright.
But I called him the cheetah, and I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world. He runs fast, so he’s a cheetah! Hey! Oh! I had a book ranking animals by speed, and well, the cheetah was number one, right! Calling the tiger a tiger and not a cheetah would hurt my childhood memories just like Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats and Heathcliff Heathcliff No One Should. These transformations aren’t meant to make the adventure more comfortable, like the mushroom or flower in Super Mario. A bonus in the form of a little bird that clings to your back already serves that purpose. You activate the transformations whenever you want, based on your desires and needs. They let you completely change the way you approach a level and its sometimes sprawling level design. For example, by reaching an area that’s too high for the fox, but which the monkey can access with more majestic leaps.
It’s entirely possible to finish Psycho Fox without ever switching species, though I’m not so sure about the hippo, which really struggles to get its big paws off the ground. But you’d be missing out if you didn’t try it—it makes the experience even more exhilarating, and the animals even crazier. And what about the enemies? Well, they’re not much better off mentally. Between those who march relentlessly forward until they fall off a cliff, and those who jump out at you from behind a wall thinking you didn’t see them, it would take some work to set them straight, poor things. The little yellow, puffy things really made me laugh, while I harbored a certain fear of the jumping mushrooms, the bouncing skulls, and the animated statues. But I loved smashing them even more! Especially since, in that regard, you’re given a choice of four actions.
Jump on them twice to slam them into the ground, land some punches on them that are as nonchalant as they are devastating, run right through them after drinking an invincibility potion, and send our little pet bird flying right into their faces. Oh wait, five actions—since there’s a specific item that lets you clear all the monsters off the screen. Strangely enough, I hardly ever used it. Well, and then you can also just wait for those idiots to fall into a hole all on their own. Once you’ve figured out each one’s behavior, it becomes pretty easy to get rid of them. As for the bosses, aside from making us laugh with their absurdly large size and priceless faces, they don’t offer much else. Just for them, the game provides us with some really cool items: a sort of little cannon for one, a giant mosquito repellent spray for the other. I actually found the design of the latter very satisfying.
No, the real challenge lies elsewhere—especially when it comes to mastering the gameplay and the many obstacles standing in our way. In fact, there’s a lot of talk about the frenetic pace set by the Sonic games, except that two years before Sonic was even born, a slightly wacky little fox zipped around way faster (especially in cheetah form), took wild leaps off giant springy poles, bounced off flying drums, skimmed across the water with his butt, and split the sky open to uncover secret passages. He was already skidding with a screeching tire sound to make a U-turn because he was racing so wildly, and could even walk a little in mid-air to try to reach a platform he’d accidentally gone off of. So, the blue hedgehog didn’t invent the wheel—just the spin and dash and vertical loops, sure.
wild atmosphere
And as a welcome little break between two sessions of completely unrestrained parkour, the special challenges offer a brief moment to catch your breath—provided you’ve collected at least one small purse in the level you just finished. This currency lets you send a character to brave a maze that takes them wherever it pleases—either toward a reward or down a chasm leading to absolute nothingness. I think this game was meant to be a direct competitor to Mario, since Alex Kidd had already more or less given up the ghost. I don’t think I’m telling anyone anything new when I say that Psycho Fox didn’t succeed, and Sonic eventually took over. But there was a lot of potential in those amphetamine-fueled animals. I really wonder who made the decision to let them fade into obscurity—the poor things. That probably didn’t help their situation.
Even in the “sequel” Decap Attack, which takes place in the same universe, you don’t see even the tiniest bit of mustache. Sob. Despite the fact that all the creatures in there seem completely out of their minds, the overall tone remains cheerful and good-natured. Most of the time, anyway. At least that’s what I told myself, despite the occasional spikes of fear in certain areas that were particularly dense with monsters or riddled with other deadly dangers. No matter how many lives I racked up by the dozens in Psycho Fox, the prospect of being devoured by a fox skull with eye sockets glowing with a demonic red light terrified me. But nothing could overshadow the beauty of the landscapes I traversed throughout the journey. The beauty of the Master System—you have to put in a little effort for it to reveal itself to you, but it’s truly there. The white trees of the early levels, the red bricks of the underground world...
The desert with its palm trees, little concrete pyramids, and giant Garfield boss; the temples built in feudal Japanese style standing side by side with pipes spewing rocks; the ice world and its slippery cubes… I especially loved the floor textures in the second world, Skull Land. They reminded me of grilled cheese, or puffed crackers named Tuc Soufflés in France. The Cloud World holds its own too, with its blow tubes (and not puffed Tuc crackers, huhuhahahihu) that propel our whimsical avatar forward. All this chaos gave off an atmosphere as improbable as it was magical, enchanting my eyes every time I inserted the cartridge into the console. It’s a premise that would actually work for plenty of other games, but I want to associate it with Psycho Fox—and no one else. Come to think of it, I consider Psycho Fox a fully-fledged individual now. Well, just one more neurosis to add to the rest.
A madness of a Soundtrack
I know I’m starting to ramble, but I can’t help it if I’m telling the truth, right? The Psycho Fox OST was the first soundtrack I listened to on repeat, the first one I became obsessed with, and the one that’s the reason why, today, video game music evokes the strongest sense of nostalgia in me. When I decided to embark on an archaeological quest to gather all the video game tracks from my childhood into the ultimate playlist, the Psycho Fox compositions were the first ones I wanted to revisit. Heck, I’d even go so far as to say that the idea to create this playlist came from my love for these works. I find this soundtrack sometimes joyful, sometimes melancholic or unsettling, but always a little cheeky and slightly over-the-top—in the best possible sense. The only thing I hold against it is that it often reuses a single track for two different worlds, when we could have been treated to even more awesomeness! I recommend that newcomers dive in slowly, but for everyone else, there’s no need to hold back. Thinking back to the context of 1989–1990–1991 and even later, nothing made me believe in my own invincibility more! Kids can really take a lot of this stuff, though! I’d sing during games, then between gaming sessions, then before the next games… nonstop—it really did get to my head, after all. I wonder if it was wearing on my dad’s patience, because I don’t remember him begging me to stop, the way he might have done with Slider on the Game Gear or Lemmings on his computer. I was probably hopping around and singing at the top of my lungs, but I must have been doing it quietly. I should go subject myself to some more of Fumito Tamayama’s creations, just to see if they make you feel like you’re tripping on acid as much as Psycho Fox does. Or maybe I’ll go listen to those insanely crazy bangers I know so well again. Yeah, I’ll do that. The one that takes us to Skull Land or Ice Zone. I found it—and still find it—perfectly balanced in terms of positive neurasthenia and transmission of energy. And you can hear one of those little signature sounds from the Master System that I love so much: the “krt krt krt” that serves as percussion, a mix of the sound of a velcro shoe being taken off and an egg being crushed. Come to think of it, that’s funny—Psycho Fox is full of eggs to crack open and drums to jump on. The characters must be wearing shoes with Velcro on them, right?
insane, eternal nostalgia
This game captures the essence of those weekends I spent at my father’s house in Rouen, about once every two weeks—from the moment he picked me up from school on Friday afternoons until I returned to my main home on Sunday evenings. A world very different from Mom’s place in Le Havre—one filled with dozens of toy cars instead of G.I. Joes or Cosmix figures, walks in the forest with Gribouille the dog instead of staying cooped up in my refuge of a bedroom, a super-nice dad as opposed to a perverse, narcissistic stepfather and a mother as cold as Pluto’s ice… and of course the frozen crêpes while we watched Thalassa on TV. Crêpes that were so delicious back then, so disgusting today, but still better than the awful quiches lorraines eaten in silence in Mom’s kitchen. That Thalassa theme song, you know… with those drawings that changed shape to the sound of a lullaby that gave me a strangely pleasant sense of gloom. I loved it, even though I didn’t understand a thing. Just seeing Georges Pernoud’s friendly face was enough for me. RIP, my buddy. Anyway, I had to go to sleep after the first segment—not easy when liters of dopamine were still coursing through my body thanks to Psycho Fox. In the end, the difficulty wasn’t too much of a problem, and the ultimate challenge was to beat the final boss with as many lives as possible—and without using the hidden warps scattered throughout the uniformly blue sky, especially the one that could send us straight to the last world. But our gaming sessions really helped build a bond that did me a world of good. And BAM! Right in the middle of that cliché of a father and son bonding while going fishing—but with a Master System controller instead of a fishing rod. Much cooler, and kinder to the real wildlife that actually lives on this planet. Psycho Fox represented a kind of freedom, the promise of a forty-eight-hour breath of fresh air—almost essential for coping with the stifling atmosphere of daily life at Mom and Stepfather’s house.
That said, this idealization may have made Psycho Fox responsible for my tendency to cling to nostalgia for my childhood… let’s just say in a somewhat exaggerated way, to put it mildly. In reality, many other games played a part in getting me hooked, including at my mom’s house, but if I had to pick just one, it would have to be this one I have to say, it obsessed me for a long time, even by the standards of the era. How long exactly? I’m not really sure, but several years, without a doubt. Until the PlayStation arrived at my dad’s house in 1997? Possibly. Quite a feat for a kid who lived on nothing but café liégeois bought at the local Continent hypermarket. Yeah, even the Continent brand gives me a rush of nostalgia—I’d pay a fortune to go back there, to find it just as it was in the very early ’90s, even if just for a few hours. Do I have issues, or what? Nah, I’m fineeee! Or maybe I do?
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