Guest Feature: Bio Force Ape

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Madeline Blondeau. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

In 1991, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were poised for battle.

The much-mythologized console wars were in their infancy, as Sega of America positioned itself to usurp Mario’s cap. On the sidelines, however, the Nintendo Entertainment System enjoyed a slow sunset period with a steady stream of new releases. But NES owning readers of Nintendo Power couldn’t believe every word of their usual trusty source on new releases during this period. A list of known canceled games for the platform shows many of these titles were snuffed out sometime between 1990 and 1993 as developers and publishers shifted focus to newer consoles. Players could get excited for months over screenshots and preview coverage, only for the game to never see the light of day.

One such game is Bio Force Ape. Under development at one point as Crack Buster(!) Bio Force Ape is centered on Naughty, the pet chimp of a scientist and his daughter. The game was canceled by Seta in 1992, despite being mostly finished and beatable; there was never a public reason given for its cancellation. In America, the only physical traces of it are two issues of Nintendo Power — a brief tease with screenshots in August 1991, followed by this three-sentence mention of its cancellation in the Gossip Galore section of Pak Watch near the back of the April 1992 issue:

Searching for the title in Katakana reveals that it also showed up in the May 2, 1991 issue of Famicom Tsūshin, slated for an August release. However, it later shows up in the December issue of Famicom Computer Magazine (aka Famimaga) as an upcoming title. The write-up here plays up the pro wrestling aspect quite a bit — the game is described as “action using professional wrestling techniques,” and the fixed sport is mentioned several times. Both spreads show off quite a few screenshots, giving readers a look at what essentially resembles the finished game.

These appearances of Bio Force Ape are the most detail the public got about the game for almost 15 years. Until October 2005, when Digital Press user PaulB812 uploaded a photograph of a NES cartridge with a plain label. It read, “BIO FORCE APE; 6/91; Property of SETA INC.” Though users were quick to congratulate him on the find, subsequent uploads took a strange turn. They showcased bizarre, almost eerie cutscenes and even stranger monster designs than previously shown. Naughty was revealed to have super-powered flatulence “so powerful it messes up the game’s graphics.”

One cutscene showed a yellow blob with beady red eyes taunting the player — “JA I AM MADE OF DUR BUTTER UND YOU ARE WORTH 2K MONIES.” Naughty responds in the next frame by punching the creature in the face as he yells, “EAT COMMUNISM!!!”

The forum had become bedlam. Some users stressed that PaulB812 should dump the game for the sake of preservation. Others argued that dumping the cartridge would decrease its value. Users bickered among themselves as screenshots continued to roll in, until one last post. Overwhelmed by the fevered debate, PaulB812 smashed the cartridge to bits and uploaded the gore to the forums.

“Having seen the anger that revealing this game's existence has caused, I have decided to destroy the cartridge,” read the post. “It is too powerful like that ring some m****ts had to throw in a volcano. Please everyone calm down now. It was just a game.”

By this point, though, most users realized they’d been had by an elaborate prank. By the 11^th page of replies, posters were calling for the thread to be locked. Eventually, PaulB812 was revealed to be a forum regular having a laugh, and order was as restored as it can be on a gaming forum. That was the end — at least, it seemed to be.

But in 2010, the unthinkable happened – a prototype Famicom cartridge for the actual, factual Bio Force Ape surfaced on a Yahoo! Japan auction. Future Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi was quick to action. He rallied money from both friends and forum members, then placed a bid; the auction ended at $2,700 USD. Within the year, the game had been dumped by retro gaming fixture Chris Covell, with a complete playthrough uploaded on YouTube by Cifaldi and the ROM hosted on Lost Levels. For just $700 north of “2K monies,” Bio Force Ape had been saved.

Now anybody can play it for free. It takes about 30 minutes to beat, and showcases what NES developers were capable of doing with the platform near the end of its life cycle. There were still untapped depths to the system, apparent from the moment the game boots up. Through a short animation on the title screen, we see Naughty’s family kidnapped by a green-clad mafioso type, complete with zoot suit and fedora. He stows them away in his car, then kicks Naughty to the curb and leaves him to his own devices. Big mistake — as fate would have it, Naughty has a vial of a chemical concoction in his pocket on hand.

The little guy takes one big sip, then hulks out into what can only be described as “if Ultimate Warrior was an ape.” Naughty’s got more moves than Warrior ever did, too. Through three levels, he delivers crushing suplexes, giant swings, and piledrivers that would make the pumped-up primate prime main roster material at any respectable wrestling promotion. The unique animations for these moves are tied to each enemy, and are more fluid than many actual wrestling games on the NES or Famicom.

Which is to say: Ape is a technically impressive NES game. Its momentum-based gameplay is in conversation with higher-powered contemporaries like Sonic The Hedgehog. More so than its enduring spiky mascot, the classic Sega platformer was formative in popularizing slopes and kinetic movement mechanics in gaming. While Ape is obviously not on that same level of polish or technical achievement, the dash-to-sprint flow of Naughty’s movement down semi-round slopes is still commendable for a system in its twilight years. It’s easy to see how the game got so far in development – it’s just a really good looking title, one that feels great and offers an almost unparalleled degree of speed from the platform.

Combat is straightforward but flighty, as players jam the punch button until Naughty lifts a foe and tosses him out of sight. It’s touchy but overall uncomplicated — the focus here is on that kinetic movement, and the combat reflects that. Dash to top speed, bash a foe’s brains in, show him your moves, keep grooving. Most sections of the three levels revolve around platforming and movement challenges, with a few enemies peppered in for flavor. Navigating the busy, sprawling levels is one of the most satisfying aesthetic aspects of the game. Dingy steel girders of a multi-story maze, deadly crushers slicked in brick red, a striking city skyline with no less than three Empire State Buildings… these are some of the most memorable elements of Bio Force Ape, more so than the actual gameplay.

That said, the second level is all killer, no filler when it comes to fisticuffs. Naughty is hurdled between arenas by rail, three years before Donkey Kong cornered the market on apes in mine carts. It makes impressive work of slopes, with steep hills that take the player to blistering speeds between rooms. In each area, the player has to make the most of the minimal combat and do away with the game’s strange enemies. This gives the quirky character designs and detailed animations of Bio Force Ape their time to shine outside the context of platforming challenge, which is only a good thing. It’s a rogue’s gallery of certified weirdos — musclebound bee-human hybrids and killer kangas with humanoid upper halves. My personal favorite is a man-alligator, with a human face perched atop the reptile’s rear end. Tail stuck in the air, it walks on open jaws, which it also leaps forwards with to attack Naughty. It’s akin to the alligator girl from Tokyo Gore Police, only instead of a cackling murderous sexpot, a burly 8-bit beefcake.

The most obvious lack of polish is in the final level. It’s a complicated, sometimes frustrating level built around a series of transporters. Players warp back and forth across the level, with certain platforms later in the area capable of sending them back to the very beginning. Once the player has bested the level, they come face to face with the green goon who kidnapped Naughty’s family. In a twist, he downs a chemical concoction of his own and transforms into a darker clone of Naughty. But there’s no fight in this sequence — the player can simply walk up to the final enemy, punch him once, and finish the game. After this, the family is reunited with their super-powered simian son in a cute ending sequence.

15 years later, Bio Force Ape has been playable for about as long as it was missing in action. Yet even with the game found, preserved, dumped — and even reproduced as a physical copy — there’s still so little we ultimately know about. Most egregiously, the actual developers of Bio Force Ape are still unknown. Though the game is credited to Seta Co., LTD, most of Seta’s output was outsourced to other developers. This included notable releases like The Wizard of Oz (Manley & Associates) and Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Winky Soft), among many others. Of course, it’s not impossible, as Seta would develop and publish the ambitious SNES horror platformer Nosferatu just two years later.

The game is mentioned, in fact, in that same 1992 Nintendo Power paragraph about Seta:

Is it possible that Bio Force Ape — another technically advanced game built around complex character animations — was shelved in favor of the more expensive title on the more current platform? Regardless of whether or not it was developed in-house, that explanation would make some sense. At the very least, it does appear that these games could have been in development simultaneously at one point. There’s nothing concrete, of course, to make this theory anything more than an educated guess.

My strongest (but still tenuous!) hunch about Bio Force Ape, though, lies in its eye-catching promotional art. Its number of subjects, dynamic action poses, texture detailing, and color palette evoke the work of Wizardry illustrator Jun Suemi. Suemi’s early 80s work on action movie posters and experience with strange monsters makes him a strong contender. From a compositional standpoint, it bears passing resemblance to his cover for Seiken Acho. The Guin Saga artist, too, worked with Seta through his contributions to Nosferatu. Is there a chance this is a Suemi piece, produced before Nosferatu entered development or within the same time frame?

After poring over Gen and Haku – two art books which cover Suemi’s career from this era – and several online galleries, it’s nowhere to be found. While this likely debunks my theory, it would also make sense that Suemi didn’t want to include work from a scrapped project. There’s also the fact that Suemi has a number of speculated, but several “to be confirmed” contributions to games as per VG Densetsu. Is there a chance it is one of his pieces, then? Maybe! Probably not, though. Because even then, this hinges on the idea that the game was a Seta in-house project, not one of their many outsourced titles, based on a loose connection to an unrelated game for a different platform! It seems improbable, but not impossible.

But even the closest guesses about Bio Force Ape are just that: guesses. Until such a time that a developer comes forward and claims ownership, or any Japanese employees of Seta from around this period give an interview, a shroud of mystery will likely remain over the title. The hunt to prove its existence was, perhaps, the most anyone ever cared about Ape outside of the people who worked on it. Tucked away in forums and on blogs is a compelling “lost media hunt” story, woven several years before those took on the wider prevalence they have since. Partly because of this timing, partly due to the game’s overall lack of cultural impact, Ape is not a commonly remembered title among retro game among enthusiasts.

“I think the main reason Bio Force Ape isn’t talked about much because of how niche the search for it was,” wrote Reddit user FSLordon in a thread about the game’s relatively unknown status. “The game was found back before Lost Media was even in the public consciousness as well. And given how the search seemed to stay within relatively obscure forums, that’s probably why.”

A reasonable explanation. Yet Bio Force Ape’s remaining mysteries still entrance. Most-known for their shogi simulations and racy mahjong games, Seta was absorbed by Aruze in 1999. They withdrew from gaming altogether after 2004’s GameCube exclusive Legend of Golfer to focus on amusement and gambling. But after a fraudulent accounting scandal in 2007, the company was delisted from the stock market in 2008 and liquidated the following year. With no Seta to protect the copyright, and no developers to claim it, Bio Force Ape is essentially an abandoned property.

Still, the questions remain. Who made this game? What gave them the idea? Was it an overt, cynical way to cash in on both the pro wrestling and anthro crazes of the early ‘90s? Or was there something more ambitious, more meaningful at play here? Who was responsible for the bizarre art direction, or behind the impressive character animations? The fact that we may never know the full answer only makes me want to know more. It’s tantalizing — as tantalizing as knowing whether or not the game even exists.

Because games aren’t just bits of memory flashed to a storage medium. The actual software can’t be spun out of an algorithm or assembled on a factory line. Games, at their best, are expressive pop art which rearrange cathodes on a picture tube into interactive images which mean something to us, to their creators, to the culture at large. They are created by human hands and human minds, with human hearts. Bio Force Ape meant something to someone, at some point. It was an idea, a deadline, a regret; those stories still have yet to be told, before they’re lost forever — like fragments of a smashed cartridge in an overgrown landfill.

Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for additional information – and for the original Bio Force Ape playthrough that turned me into a preservation enthusiast.

Sources

- Bio Force Ape – Seta (https://web.archive.org/web/20060519121745/http://64.53.95.207/ujap/ape/bfa.html)

- Chris Covell’s Japanese Magazines (https://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/jp_mags/Japanese_Magazines-famitsu.html)

- Digital Press – “Bio Force Ape” (https://web.archive.org/web/20160210232152/http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?71891-Bio-Force-Ape)

- Hardcore Gaming 101 – Bio Force Ape (https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/bio-force-ape/)

- Gallerix – Jun Suemi (https://gallerix.org/storeroom/2000726542/)

- Hidden Palace – UWC (Prototype) (https://hiddenpalace.org/UWC_(Prototype))

- Lost Levels – Bio Force Ape (http://www.lostlevels.org/bio-force-ape/)

- Nintendo Power 027 & 035 (accessed via The Internet Archive and VGHF)

- Famikon Chuuken Blog (https://famikonchuuken.blog.jp/archives/27855260.html)

- Reddit – [talk] Why is the topic of Bio Force Ape so unpopular in video game lost media? (https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1nwdrv9/talk_why_is_the_topic_of_bio_force_ape_so/)

- Satoshi Matrix (https://satoshimatrix.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/top-100-nesfamicom-games-list-100-90/)

- The Cutting Room Floor – Bio Force Ape (https://tcrf.net/Bio_Force_Ape)

- VG Densetsu – Jun Suemi (https://vgdensetsu.net/junsuemi/#tobeconfirmed)

Madeline Blondeau is a writer and podcaster. Her novel, Penitents, is due out August 11, 2026 from Ghoulish Books. She’s appeared at Mothership, The A.V. Club, Paste, Anime News Network, Anime Feminist, and too many others to get into. You can support her work or follow for free on Patreon.

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