The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1989) NES Game Review

Back in the 90’s, there was a strange “pawn shop” in my hometown. “Pawn shop” has finger quotes around it because it was more of a junk store than anything else; the place was literally filled from floor-to-ceiling with borderline garbage. It was dark and dingy with no internal lighting to speak of, likely to save money on electricity. If you visited on a day that wasn’t sunny, you were likely to trip on a stray wire and impale yourself on a nearby broom handle. How a place like this managed to stay in business for years baffles me to this day.

One of the only parts of the shop that was vaguely organized was the desk where you went to pay the crotchety owner for his grimy wares. There was a glass case on top of said desk, filled to bursting point with all sorts of weird NES, SNES, Genesis and Game Boy games I’d never heard of. Sometimes I daydream about jumping back in time with adult finances and going to see what sort of rarities he had before people were wise about that sort of thing…but alas, hindsight is always 20/20; this intriguing death trap of a shop has been an empty lot for over 20 years now.

Anyway, my dad took me to the death trap one day, and I laid eyes on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the NES. Something about this strange little cart reeled me in like nothing else had at this point in my short life. As a kid, I used to daydream about what playing Tom Sawyer might be like. No joke. The day I had finally managed to save up enough money to buy it for myself (5 whole Canadian dollars!) was an exciting one. What wild adventures were in store for me?!

Tom Sawyer is a strange little package. Gameplay-wise, it’s a standard platformer. The rock projectile fires in an awkward arc. The sound effects and music all sound a bit on the dopey side. And you die in one hit, because of course you do. But it’s many small, strange details that add up and make it stick out in my mind, even all these years later.

The most memorable part of the experience has to be the crazy aesthetic choices throughout. Remember the part of the classic story when Tom fights a giant anime octopus in the brig of a ship? Or when he went to a funky land filled with mushrooms as big as trees, eventually finding himself in a rainbow-filled heaven? The way the game explains all of this away is that Adventures takes place inside of Tom’s dreams as he dozes off in school, only waking up if you get a game over. In other words it has next to nothing to do with the Mark Twain novel.

I’ve always wondered why it was a Tom Sawyer game when you could swap Tom with just about any character in existence, and the game would feel the exact same. Now that I’m older and have the internet at my disposal, I’ve got a theory behind the creation of Tom Sawyer that I think holds water. My guess is that Seta’s Tom Sawyer was rushed into production to beat a different Tom Sawyer Famicom game to store shelves: that being Square’s Tom Sawyer. By 1989 Square had made a real name for themselves in the industry, with Final Fantasy debuting two years prior to wild success.

Surely seen as hit makers by their competitors, Seta probably speculated that Square’s Tom Sawyer would be a smash hit because, hey, Square made it. As a platformer is much simpler to cobble together than a full-blown RPG, it’d make sense that Seta managed to beat Square’s title to market by a full month. Granted, there’s no real evidence to support all of this outside of release dates, but I think it makes sense; suspiciously similar rip-offs sharing shelf space with blockbuster titles is hardly a new phenomenon in the entertainment industry. To my knowledge, neither Tom Sawyer game was a huge hit, with Square’s version never coming out in North America for…reasons you can probably guess by carefully observing the boxart above. Yoikes.

Anyway, I’ve thought enough about Tom Sawyer to last the average person several lifetimes, so let’s wrap up this entry already. Objectively speaking, Seta’s Tom Sawyer is nothing to write home about. Its interesting visual quirks are just about all there is to it. In terms of nostalgia though, this one holds a lot of sentimental value. Not only was it the first game I ever bought with my own money, but I used to play it every single day before and after school; it ended up being one of the first games I ever finished thanks to that incessant practice. Finishing it again for the first time in 20+ years was a nostalgic treat, but it surely won’t be that way for everybody. I don’t think I could easily recommend it to just about anyone else, but it’ll always mean a little something to me.