The Life Story of Orange Whale – The Past

By: J.D. Turbeville
LordJD The Life Story of Orange Whale – The Past

It was a little known character in a famicom game. It was the orange “thing” that banged its fork over and over telling you about a new area. How did such a creature get so popular with the fans? How does a simple pixel graphic get well known in the NES community? The real question is, “Are you ready for this article? Yeah!”

We go back into history. It’s around the early to mid 90s and Technos Japan released its latest famicom game, Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki Dayo. I can’t pronounce such a title, so we’ll call it, Technos Samurai. The game is based off the popular Kunio series in Japan. You might remember River City Ransom being released in 1991, starring Alex and Ryan. Your goal was to go through a series of gangs, defeating each of them, culminating against a final boss. Becoming americanized from its original version, Alex was Kunio, and Ryan, his brother, was Riki. In Technos Samurai, you are out to do pretty much the same thing. Any fan of River City Ransom could say that game was a follow-up to RCR. When you enter a new region in Technos Samurai (the game is similar to Zelda II and its map), you are greeted with Orange Whale saying (in translated english), “Are you ready for this new area? Yeah!”

This is the only quote that Orange Whale speaks in the entire game, but what makes it so meaningful? Are we truly ready for this new area? What does this new area lie for Kunio and Riki? Why doesn’t Orange Whale tell us these things?! Why must he be such a mysterious creature? Before we can answer these questions, we must look into how he was introduced into the fandom.

Around 1997 or so, the NES Triforce was born on Brinstar, the predecessor to Tom Lowrie’s disflux.net. One of the webmasters, Linque, decided to make a Technos shrine telling people about the history of the company that attained such a cult following. One of the characters Linque decided to make visible in his shrine was “that orange thing”. It didn’t have a name, so Linque decided to name it Orange Whale, and thus, a hero was born. Later in 2000, the webmaster of LameNES (lamenes.myrmid.com), aWinnerIsYou, decided to become the father of Orange Whale. Although his shrine was small, he would make various references to it in IRC chat that would be hilarious and amusing to users.

Where did he go after that? Read onto the next part to find out how he got commercialized and become a hot commodity!