Updates & Acquisitions

March 24, 2025

This time around, I've received a gift of a particularly special provenance. More on that in a bit.

A relic of forty years.

The object in question here is Super Golf (スーパーゴルフ) for the Epoch TV Game Super Cassette Vision. Epoch are technically no newcomers to Golfshrine; they have previously appeared on the Golfshrine website by way of the No Golf List, where their other cartridge based systems - the Cassette Vision, and the Game Pocket Computer - were found to have zero golf games available for them. While I have done no developmental work on any of these consoles myself, I could safely presume that their technical limitations would rather get in the way of making a decent game of golf.

Why would it be so important for there to be a golf game on every video game platform? It was a question I hadn't actually stopped to ask on a serious level. But earlier this month, RndStranger's excellent video series, PC Engine Power, sought to answer it in its 32nd episode. I'll helpfully embed it below for you. Watch it if you like, but I'll do my best to summarize the relevant point below as well.

Winning Shot, incidentally, is also present in Golfshrine.

Golf was evidently something of a widespread mania throughout Japan in the 1980s. Their economy was at its apex in ways that genuinely worried people, and this manifested in hundreds of golf courses being commissioned and built. Not all of them would be built, as The Bubble was fit to burst at any moment, and not all of the courses that would be built are still operating. (Hell, not all of the companies that commissioned those courses are still operating, either!)

But of course, like any other fad, mania, or cultural cornerstone, there'd have to be a lot of video games about it. As soon as computer technology was capable of them, golf games would be developed. I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to say that a computer or game console needed to have a golf game on it to succeed. Super Golf alone would indicate otherwise. But why take my word for it? I can't even play it - I don't own a Super Cassette Vision! But I can show you somebody who does.

Along with two other things beyond the scope of this website. I'm sure somebody's itching to start Baseballshrine or Mahjongshrine some day, so consider this caption a statement of interest.

Anyway, the game covered in the video above is the same game I have here. Like, specifically the exact game I have here. I can't bury the lede here any further - I have Jeremy Parish's copy of Super Golf. Literal, actual Jeremy Parish mailed me this golf game. That is just extremely cool and awesome of him and I am extra thankful of that.

I didn't realize, either, just how small the Super Cassette Vision cartridges were. It's just about the size of a Game Gear game, and about 3 times as thick. And the instructions are printed on the label.

And what became of Epoch after such a golf game? Would they never show their faces in the genre, ever again? Not exactly - there's at least one more notable golf game in their release timeline, though it would take them roughly 11 years to get to it, and it would be in a vastly different video game landscape altogether, in more ways than one.