Totally Rad Gravity

The year is 1991, and the first two issues of Nintendo Power each featured gnarly snippets for NES games with ‘rad’ in the title.

January’s ‘Mega Man III’ issue had a small bit on The Adventures of Rad Gravity, a fun jumping and shooting platform game about a space adventurer on a planet-hopping mission to destroy an evil super computer.

The game shadows in comparison to the other games featured in this issue, like Mega Man III and The Simpsons: Bart Vs. The Space Mutants, but it kicked the year off with a radical tone.

Just around the corner in February’s ‘Star Tropics’ issue was a bodacious preview for Totally Rad, a righteous platformer chock full of valley dude lingo.

It’s the story of a most unprecedented regular dude (Jake), a very righteous babe (Allison), and a gnarly old magician (Zebediah) who used to live in a most bodacious spread inside the San Andreas fault!

Jake battles monsters from the core of the Earth while learning totally rad magic from the Zebster. Jake has totally gnarly potential, so like, lets get it done and catch a wave or two!

This game is way radder than The Adventures of Rad Gravity, and it’s not just because of the awesome game play and totally rad 80’s surfer talk. It’s because the original Japanese game, Magic John, featured two anime-style teenagers that spoke straight forward dialogue and the American port went the extra mile to incorporate ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ vernacular over the same game. Totally copacetic!