Mr. Splash

Overview

Mr. Splash is a homebrew promotional game that was developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Hiroshi Inukai and Project F in 2007. Unlike other games developed in this fashion, Mr. Splash has remained highly elusive to collectors, and has received no official online distribution, nor been published on a large scale physically.

Release

Initially limited to a run of 100, Mr. Splash was first distributed as a ROM burned onto CD which was packaged within a Japanese documentary boxset named ゲーム・ジェネレーションX ~8ビットの魂~ ("Game Generation X: The Spirit of 8-bit") and bundled with a NES emulator and a kit that allowed consumers to construct their own cartridge to house the game and be played on the console itself.

Omake Books, a French publisher later arranged for the game to be released as a second run of 50 in the PAL format in 2011, though under the further restriction placed by Inukai that it could not be sold directly, or as its own product. The final copies of the game were given out to winners of competitions Omake would run over time and were pre-built with full cartridge and box-art included.

While still scarce and hard to find, Mr. Splash finally began to see widespread distribution through the internet in late 2011 when a copy of the ROM leaked onto the NintendoAge forums and has since been hosted elsewhere. Despite this, physical Mr. Splash cartridges still remain a highly sought after collector's item, and remains one of the rarest and most talked about homebrew releases for the system.

Gameplay

Mr. Splash is a two-player-only competitive sports game that takes place on top of bodies of water structured within differing arenas. The objective is to pick up and throw rocks at angles into the pools in order to carry a ball, or balls, into the opposing player's goal through the waves created by the impact. The player with the most goals wins.

Although not confirmed because of the limited sources of information from owners of the game, many of the different versions of the game come with edited or modified arenas, though most are believed to carry 10 in total. The following are from the "Columbia" version.