Mariner's Run: A True Sea Dog

You know what I always like discussing? Well, yes, Trouble Shooter. Oh, and Gravity Rush too. And don’t get me started about Angel Cop. I could go on for days. 

However, I also enjoy talking about canceled stuff: games and movies and other creations that never saw the light of day. And it’s especially fascinating when those projects are effectively finished and qualify as lost media. That’d be actual lost media, the sort that is possibly gone forever, and not just something that you can’t find on YouTube or the Internet Archive after an intense eleven-second search. 

Mariner’s Run, or Sea Dog in Japan, might be one of these. It’s a rare sort of genre-hybrid video game, mixing an RPG with oceanic explorations. Vic Tokai announced it for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Famicom in 1991, and screenshots appeared in a few publications. It was to follow The Krion Conquest (Magical Doropie in Japan) on release schedules, but Vic Tokai decided to join those companies pulling out of the Famicom/NES market once it was clear that the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were taking over. Cowards, all of them. 

So Mariner’s Run was canceled everywhere, leaving behind some vague descriptions, a few images, and speculation about whether or not it was even finished. Games from the NES era had short development times, remember, so it wasn’t out of the question that a completed and market-ready title would get the axe.

 

Well, Mariner’s Run at least existed as a working game. Here’s some very brief footage of it running at what was probably an exhibition in Japan, as the game has the title of Sea Dog. We get short glimpses of a ship navigating ocean depths, plus artwork of a half-cute mecha-submarine with arms, a missile-launching mouth, and a helmet that Metroid’s Samus Aran might have worn. 

I’ve mentioned Mariner’s Run before, and I still think it’s among the most interesting unreleased and as-yet-undiscovered NES games, right up there with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey. For one thing, it has few direct relatives. The blend of submarine expeditions and RPG features sounds unique; the aquatic dives were apparently side-view action, while the other half of the game involved wandering towns with an overhead view. There are other games with similar mixes, including Deep Sea Adventure on the PlayStation, but there was nothing like this on the NES back in 1991. 

I wish I could credit whoever shared that video on Twitter back in 2022, but the account no longer exists. I saved it at the time and uploaded it to YouTube just this month, so let me know if you’re the one who originally posted this video…or the person who shot the footage in the first place.

At least I can properly credit this clearer scan of a Mariner’s Run screenshot. It was posted by Frank Cifaldi of The Video Game History Foundation, and it shows one of the few known images of the game in welcome detail. We can see the layout of a town that the player would visit to…um… 

Wait. Is that shopkeeper a dog?

 

Perhaps it’s just a trick of the pixels, but that looks like an apron-clad merchant with the head of a dog or possibly a cat. Yes, an actual sea dog in Sea Dog. While it might just be a typical white-bearded vendor (as implied by another, blurry town screenshot), the figure has a wide grin and an actual nose that none of the other human townspeople possess. One of the neater elements of Mariner’s Run is the implication that it takes place in some futuristic world of rising ocean levels and lost technologies, and perhaps mutant animal-people were part of that mix. 

Even if I’m wrong and Mariner’s Run possessed a more mundane setting, I’d keep calling it a standout among unreleased video games. Vic Tokai has a very intriguing catalog, from Clash at Demonhead to those Trouble Shooter games I always bring up, and a submarine RPG would fit right in there. So I hope we’ll one day find Mariner’s Run or Sea Dog or whatever else it might have been called. It would show the world a promising, perhaps unfairly canceled game. Or at least it would solve the mystery of that shopkeeper.