The Adventures of Bayou Billy

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The Adventures of Bayou Billy
American cover art.
Developer(s)	Konami
Publisher(s)	Konami
Platform(s)	NES/Famicom
Release date	^JPN August 12, 1988 ^NA June 1989 ^PAL January 24 1991
Genre(s)	Beat 'em up/First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player
Media	Cartridge

The Adventures of Bayou Billy is a 1989 action game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Konami. The game is an English localization of the Famicom game Mad City (マッド・シティ, Maddo Shiti^?), released in Japan during the previous year, with alterations to the game's graphics, presentation and difficulty setting. The game is primarily a side-scrolling beat-em-up with driving and shooting segments.

It consists of three distinct playing styles used over nine levels: shooting (optionally allowing the use of a Zapper) for Levels 2 and 7, a third-person driving section for Levels 4 and 5, and a side-scrolling beat 'em up for the regular levels. During its release, Konami hyped the game, including a commercial with a live actor playing Bayou Billy, and went as far to sign a deal with Archie Comics. Part of the game's unpopularity was due to its extreme difficulty level, making the game very hard to beat. The Japanese version featured a much easier difficulty.

Bayou Billy is one of the few NES games to feature DPCM-coded voice samples. During the game's opening screen, a male voice declares the title of the game and says "bye" to the player at the end of the game. Also, the villain of the game Godfather Gordon ends all his taunts to Billy with a smug laugh between stages.

The box art for the original Japanese release featured a hero who looked a lot like Paul Hogan, the star of the Crocodile Dundee movies. The American box art is redrawn, likely to avoid a lawsuit. The plot of the hero rescuing a kidnapped girlfriend from a mobster is also similar to that of Crocodile Dundee II. Another similarity to the Crocodile Dundee films is that Bayou Billy starts out fighting in a Louisiana swamp for the first few stages, which presumably the hero is well familiar with, then progresses to an urban scenario where he then fights hoods on Bourbon Street, then the final stage is the luxury mansion of the gangster and game's antagonist Gordon, who kidnapped Annabelle.

[edit] In other media

Archie Comics published a comic book series called "The Adventures of Bayou Billy". It used some characters from the game and added some new characters. Billy was made a widower (as his first wife was murdered), and his girlfriend's name was changed from Annabelle Lane to Annabel Lee. Another character introduced was an elderly man, presumably of Haitian or Creole heritage, who teaches Billy who to survive in the swamps, such as using a salve which bears an aroma repugnant to alligators, thus repelling them. The series does not fit into the game's continuity or backstory and is considered an alternate universe. It ran for 5 issues.

The game also received some amount of exposure on the popular video game-themed cartoon series, Captain N: The Game Master, where Bayou Billy (modeled somewhat like Crocodile Dundee) appeared in two episodes, the first of which, "How's Bayou" was devoted to him. Playing on the difficulty of its real world counterpart, Bayou Billy was said to be the one game even Captain N was unable to conquer.

One of The Unicorns' earlier songs is entitled "Adventures of Bayou Billy", and is presumably inspired by the NES game.

On Homestar Runner, one of the Strong Bad Emails, "bedtime", features The Cheat playing the game with Moses Malone in one of the email's Easter Eggs, with the latter saying, "Bayou Billy? I hoped you saved the receipt!"