Bonk's Adventure is the platformer with which Hudson Soft and Red Company tried to give PC Engine (and its Western counterpart, TurboGrafx-16) a mascot capable of competing with Mario and Sonic: a caveman with an oversized head who attacks by headbutting, chews meat to heal himself, and, in his "furious" form, flattens everything in his path. It came out in Japan in 1989 as PC Genjin and reached the United States the following year under its new name.
It became one of the pillars of the console's catalog in the West, where NEC desperately needed a recognizable face to fight the 16-bit mascot wars. Today it's remembered fondly, somewhere between clumsy and endearing, as the banner-bearer of a console that never got the place it deserved in that fight.
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