I recently covered the glorious '90s relic that was the Barcode Battler on this very site, and it apparently inspired one of our "readers" to do something a little out of the ordinary.
Not long after our piece went live, a package arrived at Time Extension Towers from a mysterious individual named Zack Joseph Zanin, who claimed to have worked at Tomy (the UK distributor of the Barcode Battler) in the early '90s.
Zanin's letter was bundled with a set of awesome Super Metroid Barcode Battler cards, and he claimed that these were a prototype set printed in the 1990s with the goal of convincing Nintendo to allow them to go into full production.
This story isn't actually as outlandish as you might imagine, especially if you know the history of the Barcode Battler; in Japan, Zelda and Super Mario cards were produced for the system, as well as a Street Fighter deck.
Leafing through the cards, I was struck by how well-made they were; the artwork all matched up, the text was spot-on and they looked just as good as 'real' Barcode Battler cards—could this deck really have been kept in storage for decades, waiting for the right moment to be revealed to the world? They looked a bit too 'fresh' for my liking, but perhaps they'd just been stored well?
Zanin was insistent that I contact him before publishing anything about the deck itself, and even included an email address. Just when I thought I was sitting on a pretty significant scoop, it transpired that Zanin doesn't actually exist—he's the construct of video game historian and Time Extension contributor John Szczepaniak (Zack Joseph Zanin is an anagram of John Szczepaniak), who, when he's not giving academic talks, fixing classic games and documenting the history of Japan's games industry does a convincing sideline is fooling his editors with Barcode Battler sets.
The set had been painstakingly assembled over many hours, using high-res artwork found online and barcodes lifted directly from the Zelda set. "Barcode Battler Museum provided me with high-res scans of the Zelda cards," Szczepaniak tells me when I probe him on the origins of the venture, before adding:
"I did the English version of those first. I figured printing them would be cheaper than buying a deck off eBay. Then I thought: there were Mario and Zelda cards, officially, but no Metroid? Would that work? Hookshot to grapple beam. Pegasus boots to high jump. Ganon to Mother Brain... maybe! And then I found there's like a 95% overlap! The Zelda deck had Link as a wizard using MP to cast magic. So I swapped that to Samus' ship using Metroid Power to do special attacks. The 10 spells are stuff like drain energy, which feels very Metroid-y. For me, the most fascinating thing here is how similar Zelda and Metroid are in terms of gameplay ideas. In terms of health upgrades, projectile weapons, footwear to increase movement, enemy variation. There's a surprising degree of overlap."
The thing is, almost being fooled by these cards makes me wish that Tomy and Nintendo had released more of these video game-themed decks in the '90s. The Barcode Battler wasn't a commercial success in this part of the world, but had it been accompanied by Zelda, Mario, Metroid and Star Fox decks, who knows what its fortunes might have been like? It did well in its native Japan, after all.
Szczepaniak says he has no plans to make his set public, but if you're interested, drop a comment below, and who knows what might happen...