Wow.
There's no need to explain why this cover is freakish and disturbing, but things are wrong aside from the eerily grinning dragon sticking a limp maroon...tail...between his jaws. Why can we see through the skin of the reddish dragon? And just what the hell is going on the bottom right-hand corner of the picture? Perhaps the last question is best left a mystery, since finding an answer would require someone to stare at the cover of Tagin' Dragon for more than a few seconds. That's not a good idea.
Some may wonder how art like this could end up on a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, given the Nintendo empire's notoriously uptight policies of the era. While the company may have missed the implied sex scene ten minutes into Golgo 13 or the exploding head of Hitler during Bionic Commando's finale, there's no way that something like Tagin' Dragon could have made it past Nintendo. So how did it get to the market?
The lack of a “Nintendo Seal of Quality” on the box of Tagin' Dragon provides the answer. This game didn't have to meet any scrupulous Nintendo standards, since it was an unlicensed title published in America by Bunch Games, which was reportedly affiliated with Color Dreams, itself a source of many amusing NES releases that never carried Nintendo's approval.Tagin' Dragon was actually programmed by another unapproved company known as Sachen, a fascinatingly strange Taiwanese entity better known for NES games like Jovial Race and that inadvertent monument to game-borne sadism, Little Red Hood.
What sort of game did Sachen create with Tagin' Dragon? Is it really as repulsize as its box illustration implies? The answer, fortunately, is no, although the title screen could possibly frighten small children who haven't already been inured to horrendous dragon artwork by the cover. When Tagin' Dragon is started, a lumpy, marginally reptilian creature appears next to the title and starts changing colors. It's hard to watch.
The game that lies beyond, however, proves blessedly drab. I played very little of it, but from what could be surmised, it involves a ratlike dragon scurrying about blocky mazes, trying to devour other dragons by the tail before they can do the same to him. This, of course, brings us back to the all-sullying box art, and the one respect in which Tagin' Dragon's packaging can't be faulted. Awful as it is, it fulfills its duty of depicting the game within.
Sachen may be guilty of many things, but the company can be safely absolved of any responsibility for the game's cover. According to The Red Eye, America's premier Sachen scholar, Tagin' Dragon was originally known as Colorful Dragon, and Sachen's version of the game, released before Bunch Games licensed it, featured “original (and actually better) artwork.”
And so Bunch Games must be held fully accountable for what may be the worst box art I've ever seen applied to a video game. I can name some covers as artistically egregious as the original Mega Man's and others as confusing as Phalanx's, but nothing nears the absolute monstrosity of Tagin' Dragon. And with that dubious honor awarded, let's move on to box art less likely to infest our nightmares.
The author is indebted to The Warp Zone and “Zedocon” for allowing the use of the above Tagin' Dragon scan. Their contribution spared the author from being near an actual Tagin' Dragon box.
Next: The travails of Trouble Shooter.
