Soviet Jump Game (Dendy Hoax)
Summary:
The "Soviet Jump Game" advertised on the Game Grumps channel is 100% a newly created game, and the story of its origin as an unreleased game for the Dendy console is a marketing hoax.
Reasons:
- The footage shown that's supposedly from a Dendy isn't something that could run on a Dendy, and it's not glitching in the way that a Dendy/Famicom game would.(source: Brad Smith)
- The game was supposedly made in 1987: The Dendy was released in 1992. In 1987 there was no Dendy to develop this game for.
- Thom Glunt, the game developer the Game Grumps are working with, previously worked on the 2017 game Strafe, which similarly pretended to be a vintage game (the website for the game was "strafe1996.com")
- An internet adapter for a Dendy, if it did exist, wouldn't connect the way the one in the video does. Instead of adding a serial port, you'd have a cartridge with the modem inside it, and it would connect to phone lines, not Ethernet.
- There's no Dendy Modem known before this video. The Famicom (which the Dendy is a clone of) had a modem add-on, but it wasn't compatible with the Dendy or connected the way the "Dendy Modem" does. (it's a cartridge)
- The accent and editing in the Dendy commercial are incorrect for the time they supposedly come from. (Source: My legs are OK)
- The official trailer says it was "discovered" by the game grumps, with "discovered" in quotes.
Backstory:
Through November and early December 2019, the Game Grumps channel posted a series of videos where Arin Hanson plays bootleg games on a Russian Dendy Jr console.
In all of them we see a cartridge with a hand-written cyrillic label, which fails to load. In the 3rd video, this is revealed to be an incomplete unreleased game that requires an internet adapter.
Video 1: Russian BOOTLEG Nintendo Games!
Released on November 16th 2019, this video has Arin Hanson try to play several bootleg Dendy cartridges on a Retron 5, with most failing to work.
One of the included games was this cartridge, labeled in hand written Cyrillic.
When booted, it showed only an error screen, showing a Dendy console and what looks like an acoustic coupler, with a blinking red X between them
Video 2: MORE Bootleg Russian Games!
The next video was posted on November 24th, 2019, and has Arin & Danny play some more games for the Dendy, again showing the Cyrillic cartridge and the error screen.
Video 3: Lost piece of gaming history UNCOVERED
The main video for the hoax was released on December 3rd.
In this video, Arin finds out that the game needs an Internet Adapter, discovers a serial port inside his Dendy, buys a serial-to-ethernet adapter, shows a russian commercial for an internet-enabled Dendy, gets the game to partially boot, gets his friend Thom Glunt to dump the ROM, and is told it's an incomplete battle royale online multiplayer game for the Dendy, and then announces they're gonna revive the game and provides a site to sign up for the beta.
Video 4: Soviet Jump Game OFFICIAL TRAILER
On December 4th, the trailer for Soviet Jump Game was released.
The description is:
Originally developed for the Russian Dendy console, Soviet Jump Game was "discovered" by Game Grumps and brought to modern machinery by Fantastic Passion. This game is a piece of Soviet history: the first ever Battle Royale! Snag powerups and battle against your other comrades to declare yourself the best shock worker this side of the wall.
This shows the game footage for the revived version of the game. The shown footage definitely doesn't run on a Dendy (there's parallax scrolling, the resolution is both too big and the wrong aspect ratio, etc) but also they're not claiming it runs on a Dendy.