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Golf was the best-selling sports game on the NES/Famicom, and was re-released across many years for different Nintendo consoles. It was hidden in the Nintendo Switch firmware as an Easter egg as a tribute to the game's programmer, the late Satoru Iwata.[8]
Gameplay
The main player wears a white shirt and shoes with blue pants and uses a white ball, while the second player wears a red shirt and shoes with black pants and uses a red ball. The player selects either single stroke play or the two-player selections of doubles stroke play or match play. The player is then placed at the tee of the first of 18 holes.
In 1991, Nintendo identified the golfer as Mario in a gameplay guide book.[9] Nintendo's Wii game Captain Rainbow identifies the golfer as Ossan,[10] which happens to be one of the generic hero names during the development of Donkey Kong.[11] The Game Boy conversion would feature Mario on the Western cover art, but not the Japanese version.[citation needed]
Development and release
In 1983, the Famicom had only three launch games, and its library would soon total seven, including Golf. Shigeru Miyamoto said he was "directly in charge of the character design and the game design",[5] and Satoru Iwata said he was the only programmer.[6]
The game is a hidden Easter egg in the pre-4.0 firmware of the Nintendo Switch, in tribute to Satoru Iwata. Iwata was the sole programmer of Golf (as one of his first projects for Nintendo) and later became Nintendo's CEO. It can be accessed on the Switch home menu if the system clock is set to the July 11 memorial of Iwata's death, and then the user moves Joy-Con controllers to imitate the "Direct" hand gesture that Iwata popularized during his tenure as main host of Nintendo Direct presentations.[15][16][17] This version exclusively has the option for motion controls.
Golf was successful during its initial release, with positive reviews from critics and was the tenth best-selling game released on the system. Sales were numbered at over 4 million copies in total, with the Famicom version alone yielding 2.46 million copies sold in Japan.[19]
Golf's 1989 port on the Game Boy received a positive review from AllGame, who rated the Game Boy version with 4 out of 5 stars.[18]
Legacy
Golf is the first golf video game to feature a power and accuracy bar for swinging the club, which has been used in most golf games since.[20]
The player-controlled character Ossan appeared in the 2008 Wii game Captain Rainbow where he is portrayed as a smelly middle-aged man who is terrible at golf. Players must find his lost golf club as well as help him play well again.[10]
