Ep.296 – Tee It Up: How Golf (1984) Set the Template for an Entire Genre

About this episode

The episode explores the history of golf and its influence on video games, particularly focusing on Nintendo's 1984 release of Golf for the Famicom.

In 1984, Nintendo released Golf for the Famicom, a game that almost never existed. Every developer Nintendo approached to build it turned the project down, convinced that fitting eighteen holes of course data into a Famicom cartridge was simply impossible. A twenty-three year old programmer at a tiny Tokyo company called HAL Laboratory said yes, invented his own data compression method from scratch, and delivered a game so elegantly designed that the two-click power and accuracy swing mechanic he built became the foundation every golf game since has borrowed. But the story of Golf begins long before 1984, on the windswept linksland of medieval Scotland, where a game that kings tried three times to ban slowly became a global institution. Dave and Rob trace the sport from its debated origins through the British Empire's global spread, the moment a working class caddy cracked open golf's exclusive culture on a September afternoon in 1913, and the early video game attempts that inched toward something that worked before Satoru Iwata finally got it right. Join them on the green for the full story, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane. Read transcript

People in this episode

Hosts: David Kassin, Robert Kassin

Topics covered

• golf history
• video game development
• Nintendo
• data compression
• cultural impact of golf

Keywords

• Golf
• Nintendo
• HAL Laboratory
• video games
• data compression
• golf history
• Satoru Iwata

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: HAL Laboratory

Products: Golf

Places: Scotland

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