A few years before the NES and a little after Donkey Kong, Nintendo (and even Shigeru Miyamoto) worked on Popeye. I saw it last time I went to the Carolina Arcade Museum but it was broken. This time it was working. They have it in their gamer basement as I call it.

I had never played the original game ever. I had always wanted to.

Since Popeye was a game based on a work Nintendo didn’t own, you never see any re-releases of it. The NES version is a pretty crude version of the arcade original.

But just look at the Atari 2600 version, what am I looking at?

But honestly I found the game way too difficult and the ways to beat the levels rather unclear. It apparently works like Donkey Kong where levels will repeat over and over if you survive. But I never made it past the first one.