Back in the 80s, video games were notoriously difficult; partly a hangover from the extreme challenge of arcade games (which were purposely designed that way to separate players from their coins), but also because designers and publishers believed that it’d increase the longevity of games if players struggled to get through them.

Sometimes the difficulty was dialled up to an almost comical degree, and that was certainly the case with Konami’s NES title, The Adventures of Bayou Billy, released in 1989. A multi-genre title at a time when that was a true novelty, it’s a shame that it was so punishingly hard that players may not have seen much beyond its initial stages, as having a beat ’em up, racing game and lightgun shooter in a single game added some real variety to the proceedings.

Though Konami went quite far in promoting The Adventures of Bayou Billy – I distinctly recall seeing ads for it for ages in a huge array of comics – it never received a sequel, and didn’t make much of a mark for video game fans at all. That’s even with an LCD game tie-in, an appearance from the main character in NES-based animated show Captain N, and a short-lived Archie Comics adaptation.

In fact, I didn’t even know there was a comic book adaptation until I happened upon the first and third issues while rifling through a bargain box on a stall at Portsmouth Comic-Con. Of course, me being the retro game and comic book fan that I am, I had to pick them up as soon as I found them!

The titular Bayou Billy (aka William Jackson West) is a bounty hunter in the comic, protecting the locals from a powerful gang headed up by Giles Gordon and his sons. When District Attorney Annabelle Lee is kidnapped by the Gordon gang’s thugs, Billy calls in his old military friends to help him rescue her and take on the gang in the process.

It takes a lot of liberties with the source material, adding in characters, changing names (Annabelle’s surname is Lane in the NES game) and just generally making stuff up for the sake of it. Licensed properties weren’t so heavily scrutinised or subject to approval by game publishers back then, and it meant that writers and artists put their own stamp on things just because they could, it seems (see also Malibu’s disastrous Street Fighter comics), and The Adventures of Bayou Billy is no different.

It’s a really rough comic, in all honesty, with awful art that would have felt dated even in 1989, and writing that’s just so clumsy and bereft of anything approaching logic or charm that it’s almost laughable.

Even with the game not leaving much of a mark, it’s not really a surprise that this adaptation only lasted for five bi-monthly issues; it’s a truly awful comic with little in the way of redeeming features, though I suppose it does have a certain so-bad-it’s-good vibe.

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