Kid Klown in Crazy Chase
Kid Klown in Crazy Chase was the second video game my family owned.
I’m pretty sure I found it in a bargain bin at Kay Bee Toys in Springfield Mall, circa 1995. I knew it wasn’t Mario or Zelda or whatever. But I don’t think I fully appreciated what a “bargain Super Nintendo game” was - how hard it would be or how esoteric the world-building truly was. Why was I, a child clown, trying to jump over oil barrels on fire? Everything about Mario made ten times more sense, and in that game, I was a human plumber riding on an invented dinosaur species that could grow wings if they ate the right koopa shell.
Anyway, Kid Klown was hard. Harder than Mario. This always struck me as a little unfair, because each level progression only delievered more questions without payoff. Why was Kid Klown sometimes in a forest and then in a city? What was the transition logic there? There was none.
As such, my second video game ever became my first Video Game DNF. And it really kind of marked me with this sense of incompletion for video games for the rest of my life.
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Kid Klown’s developer, Kotobuki Engineering & Manufacturing Co. (Kemco), was founded as a subsidiary of its larger corporation in the mid 1980’s. The brand allegedly shambles along to this day, focused on developing games for smartphones.
Crazy Chase was, in fact, the sequel to “Kid Klown in Night Mayor World,” which was a reskin of a Japen-exclusive licensed game, “Mickey Mouse III: Balloon Dreams.” Baloon Dreams was itself part of a franchise known as “Crazy Castle,” which would license a variety of internationally popular characters like Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Garfield, and The Real Ghostbusters animated series.
From this brew of strange capitalist intellectual property rights came Kid Klown, but the world-building would dramatically shift between games 1 and 2. Night Mayor World opens in Kansas on a nuclear family of clowns. These clowns either never take the makeup off or are actually some kind of clown species, distinct form humans. Regardless of their biological constitution, the parents work as clowns in the cirucs until the day they and their infant clown child are kidnapped by the rather transparently named antagonist, Night Mayor. In your first Kid Klown adventure, you are tasked with trying to save your family by navigating Kirby-esque side scrolling adventures.
The Crazy Chase sequel does not care a lick about continuity, rebooting the entire concept. Instead of a recognizable American landscape the second Kid Klown game opens in a different solar system, on Klown Planet, which is a monarchy. The antagonist is BlackJack — also a clown — whose megalamonia drives him to kidnap the Princess Honey. You can see the Mario influence taking shape in the SNES era. Kid Klown may or may not be a literal child, but regardless of his age, the King of Klown Planet entrusts him with the mission to save his daughter and use a highly-dangerous space laser to do so. Given that Kid Klown’s brain isn’t fully developed, he ends up crash landing in some random forest instead.
What follows is inherently frustrating gameplay for my seven-year-old self. Rather than reach the goal from left to right, Crazy Chase introduces an “isometric view” in which you’re basically navigating from top to bottom in pursuit of a lit fuse. If the fuse reaches Blackjack’s bomb before you do, it’s game over. If you reach the bomb before the fuse, but fail to get enough collectibles, you start over.
I never got past level three.