2002, October 6th
The Life Story of Orange Whale – The Past
(c) 2002 J.D. Turbeville
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It was a little known character in
a famicom game. It was the orange "thing" that banged
its fork over and over telling you about a new area. How did
such a creature get so popular with the fans? How does a simple
pixel graphic get well known in the NES community? The real
question is, "Are you ready for this article? Yeah!"
We go back into history. It's around
the early to mid 90s and Technos Japan released its latest
famicom game, Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki Dayo. I can't pronounce
such a title, so we'll call it, Technos Samurai. The game
is based off the popular Kunio series in Japan. You might
remember River City Ransom being released in 1991, starring
Alex and Ryan. Your goal was to go through a series of gangs,
defeating each of them, culminating against a final boss.
Becoming americanized from its original version, Alex was
Kunio, and Ryan, his brother, was Riki. In Technos Samurai,
you are out to do pretty much the same thing. Any fan of River
City Ransom could say that game was a follow-up to RCR. When
you enter a new region in Technos Samurai (the game is similar
to Zelda II and its map), you are greeted with Orange Whale
saying (in translated english), "Are you ready for this
new area? Yeah!"
This is the only quote that Orange
Whale speaks in the entire game, but what makes it so meaningful?
Are we truly ready for this new area? What does this new area
lie for Kunio and Riki? Why doesn't Orange Whale tell us these
things?! Why must he be such a mysterious creature? Before
we can answer these questions, we must look into how he was
introduced into the fandom.
Around 1997 or so, the NES Triforce
was born on Brinstar, the predecessor to Tom Lowrie's disflux.net.
One of the webmasters, Linque, decided to make a Technos shrine
telling people about the history of the company that attained
such a cult following. One of the characters Linque decided
to make visible in his shrine was "that orange thing".
It didn't have a name, so Linque decided to name it Orange
Whale, and thus, a hero was born. Later in 2000, the webmaster
of LameNES (lamenes.myrmid.com), aWinnerIsYou, decided to
become the father of Orange Whale. Although his shrine was
small, he would make various references to it in IRC chat
that would be hilarious and amusing to users.
Where did he go after that? Read onto
the next part to find out how he got commercialized and become
a hot commodity!
