The Goonies
Introduction
The Goonies is a 1986 platform game produced by Konami and based on the Richard Donner film of the same name, released for the Family Computer in Japan in February 1986 but never officially published outside the country on cartridge, though Nintendo did bring a US-exclusive arcade conversion, VS. The Goonies, to PlayChoice-10 and Vs. System cabinets. Players control Mikey working through side-scrolling levels set in a restaurant, caverns, a waterfall area, and a pirate ship, using a slingshot to fend off enemies like bats, rats, skeletons, and octopuses while searching each stage for three keys needed to free one of his captured Goonies friends. Many of those keys are hidden behind doors that have to be blown open with bombs rather than simply walked through, giving the game a light puzzle-platforming rhythm on top of its side-scrolling action. As a fairly straightforward but solid film tie-in from Konami’s strong mid-80s console output, The Goonies offers a glimpse of one of the more obscure corners of Japan’s Famicom library that Western NES owners largely missed out on at the time.
