Yeah Yeah Beebiss I - imagine what it is about... | Forums - The Lost Media Wiki (2024)

Yeah Yeah Beebiss I could possibly be the most mysterious video game of all time... there have been many theories about what it could be... is it another name for the game Dweebers? Is it Super Pitfall II? Is it Zexyz? Is it Bashi Bazook?

A tumblr user, richasapo, once wrote a fictional review on it... unfortunately, he closed his account and no one seems to have saved the full article!

"YYBI comes in a taller cartridge than any other game on the market, owing to a spool of telephone cable built in at the top. This, when unspooled, fits directly into the phone socket on your wall. Make sure you do that. The manual is very clear and direct that YYBI needs to be plugged into the phone, and in fact not on much else. Besides that little detail the YYBI manual is a confusing collection of signs and symbols in a fake alien language. As it turns out, you won’t need to rely on it anyway, YYBI will tell you what you need to know."
This is all of the text that has been saved. Even the Web Archive doesn't have any saved pages of his tumblr. Looks like we got another piece of lost media in our hands...

I think, when I read it back then, that it was about an alien lost on a planet...

As for you... Just imagine... what could Yeah Yeah Beebiss I be about?

So, there is this Anonymous commenter in the article who claims that Yeah Yeah Beebiss I was actually the American release of Hebereke aka Ufouria: The Saga, a 1991 NES game.(which was never officially released in the USA until 2010 on the Wii Virtual Console)

He said he bought the game through the flyer because he found the name catchy, and threw it away after the cartridge stopped working.

The flyer dates from 1989. Ufouria was originally released in Japan in 1991!! There was a planned release in 1992 for the USA, but it never officially happened.

It DOES look, however, like the kind of game you'd call Yeah Yeah Beebiss I! ("The Saga" could be interpreted as the same way as the Roman numeral "I", a hint to other sequels!)

Of course, Anonymous Commenter's story can be seriously put in doubt; ordering a game's American version two years before its original release in Japan?

YEAH YEAH BEEBISS I: A REVIEW

by Steve Houbiko
(originally printed in YOUR NES, January 1990)

The first thing you’ll realise when you unpack Yeah Yeah Beebiss I (okay the second thing after that crazy name) is what a crazy cartridge it is. YYBI comes in a taller cartridge than any other game on the market, owing to a spool of telephone cable built in at the top. This, when unspooled, fits directly into the phone socket on your wall. Make sure you do that. The manual is very clear and direct that YYBI needs to be plugged into the phone, and in fact not on much else. Besides that little detail the YYBI manual is a confusing collection of signs and symbols in a fake alien language. As it turns out, you won’t need to rely on it anyway, YYBI will tell you what you need to know

The moment you see the title screen for YYBI you know you’re onto something unique. The opening screen isn’t just a gameplay demo, it’s a miniature movie, albeit one interrupted regularly by the highscore. We timed it; it lasts a straight twenty seven minutes, complete with continuous, ever-changing music. Perhaps the best music I’ve ever heard on a NES game. Perhaps the best I’ve ever heard anywhere. YYBI sets a new standard in videogame composition

Showing off your game with a half-hour movie built into the title screen doesn’t come cheap as far as cartridge space is concerned. In fact there’s almost nothing else *on* the YYBI cartridge. Unplug the telephone cable and start the game and you’ll be thrown a splatter of basic sprite data before the whole thing blacks out. We had to reset the whole console and start over, this time with the game securely plugged in. NOW we were getting somewhere! The NES gives a weird mix of beeping and squeaking noises at first, then suddenly a new animation begins playing. We figured out quickly that the animations cover the time it takes for the cartridge to ring out to somewhere and, as far as we can tell, load the game data from there. That has the downside of making them impossible to skip over, which is no fun for repeat playing as it can take upwards of a minute between levels

The first animation establishes that you’re Beebiss, a weird sort of alien creature resembling a blue tennis ball with eyes and living in a vibrant, candy-coloured world. Beebiss is from the planet Glov’robaxatp’anan (which, thank god, the game always shortens to Glov afterwards), whose inhabitants all share the appearance of a tennis ball with eyes. And you want to go to see your girlfriend Oobuss (we think she might be a pink tennis ball with eyes). That’s the premise for the first level, and it’s a boring one, but don’t worry, you’ll soon find out it’s just an excuse to make you go exploring. Because Beebiss’s alien town is GIGANTIC! The level that the cartridge has downloaded quickly turns out to be about a quarter of the size of Super Mario Bros. Not level one of Super Mario Bros. The entire game. The gameplay alternates between an RPG setup in the village itself, complete with shops and conversations with dozens of characters, to a more action-packed platform setup on the outskirts, even to a top-down Zelda-style adventure in the regions outside the city. The countryside is full of weird, exotic aliens full of protruding spikes and horns and snouts, which makes you wonder why they settled on a tennis ball for the hero

Beebiss bounces around his little corner of the world, getting into monster-scrapes and having conversations and all sorts of other things that a blue tennis ball might get into, but with no sign anywhere of Oobuss. You find yourself in increasingly worried conversations with everyone Beebiss meets, up to and including the village elders, but there’s just no sign of her. The level ends out of nowhere with some serious fire and brimstone (we tried it a few times, and we think having the right conversation with the council of elders sets off a timer but we’re damned if we know for sure)

So far, so crazy. Then the NEXT thing you see is an animation establishing Sgt. Marcer, an elite space marine in the Delta Sector. Suddenly everything’s hard, grimy iron and Alien knock-offs, and at first everyone in the office was convinced YYBI was dialing out for the wrong game code. Eventually, after getting the same space marine plot half a dozen times we got sick of playing through level one again and decided to just go with it

Sgt. Marcer’s level is basically level one again, except replace Oobuss with a stowaway alien lifeform and Glov’s weirdly adorable monsters and generally pretty landscape with a grimy distopian spaceship. Otherwise all the gameplay mechanics are there in full, and Marcer, for all his huge muscles (and he has some serious guns on him), cannot find this thing he’s meant to be tracking down. Fortunately the spaceship is full of malfunctioning droids that ensure you still have something to shoot at (just as well, because those guns are both literal and figurative)

Like Beebiss, Marcer’s interactions with others in the RPG sections of the level nudge things along in the kill-all-monsters sections. Parts of the ship become accessible that weren’t before, odd things start turning up in crates and hidden in corners. But it’s when you stumble into a hidden storage bay not listed on the ship’s maps that things get strange again. Out of nowhere, kicking through crates and boxes in a top-down room, Sgt. Marcer is overcome by a bright white light, and the next thing we know he’s passed out on the floor. All very strange, yes? Stranger still when the next level animation begins with Marcer in a black space being confronted by - you guessed it - Beebiss

Now everything gets more baffling than ever. After initial hostility from Marcer to the polite Glovian, he thaws enough for Beebiss to explain that they are temporarily in a psychic void together. Something’s happening, something that will threaten both their worlds, but Beebiss doesn’t know the specifics yet. There are hints about time travel, parallel dimensions and a lot of other things that, honestly, I think the coders might have cooked up at random to explain why our tennis ball friend is suddenly much more clued up than he was at the end of level one. Whatever the answer, the game finishes loading and Beebiss wakes up or rematerialises in his town, which is now a flaming ruin. Now he has to cross the countryside to the nearest city to contact someone who might be able to help

And all that’s just up to the third level. Over the course of the game Beebiss and Marcer are “psychically transplanted” into each other’s worlds (so you get to send Beebiss bouncing through the increasingly desolate spaceship and Marcer shooting his way through bright pink and purple space dinochickens) and pilot a spaceship through an extended shoot-‘em-up break (the bit when Marcer travels to Beebiss’s world for real). But perhaps the most eyebrow-raising sections are the tennis matches

Yes, tennis matches

I think somebody on the team must have said “hey wait, Beebiss looks kind of like a tennis ball with eyes so…” and they went from there. At irregular intervals Marcer and Beebiss will find themselves in the psychic void again, suddenly thrust up against an emissary of the mysterious darkness they’re battling to understand and destroy. Starting with a glass, sphere-headed ballerina whose head swells with each point you gain. Beebiss, clearly, is the tennis ball in this scenario. Marcer makes do using the butt of his lazer-rifle as a tennis racquet, which would surely contravene health and safety laws even in a surrealistic void, but thankfully he never shoots his own foot off

The tennis matches are the most frustrating part of the game, because the number of matches needed to win goes up every time. From 2 out of 3 (the ballerina) up to 6 out of 11 (a black-robed goat creature that appears to move on a wave of caterpillars) at the penultimate match. Or at least, we think the penultimate match. After the goat is finally defeated the next level begins to load. Rather than the animations we’re so used to, only two lines of glowing text appear: “FINAL LEVEL - YOU AGAINST YOU”. This all sounded like a very ominous set-up for a level in which Marcer and Beebiss must battle one another, perhaps revealing one or the other as the hidden nemesis all along? But after five minutes of nothing but text glowing, Colin (our tea boy) noticed that the YYBI cartridge had begun to smell funny. Some electronic DIY later and we’d all agreed that, yes, YYBI’s cable had fritzed out inside the case. Funco has declined to send us another copy to finish the review and nobody wants to try their hand at soldering another cable onto it, so you’ll have to play it yourself to find out

PROS:

- ambitious gameplay
- groundbreaking technology

- easily a new standard in videogame soundtracks

CONS:

- lengthy loading time between levels
- renders normal phone use impossible; YYBI will either hog the line or, if you’re already on the line, interrupt your call with a lot of high-pitched squeals
- cable easily damaged but not easily repaired

- phone bill showed YYBI had rung up over $100 in one day dialing a premium line for game data

- tennis rounds become a drag very fast

richasapoDeactivated

In retrospect there are undeniable flaws in the writing, but overall I like it still

Thank you a lot for recovering it! Where did you find it?

So that was the imaginary review, huh? Almost creepypasta-esque...

Among a few other pieces of lost media, this one has particularly piqued my interest lately and a lot of the discussion online about it is more speculation and theory, rather than actual hunting.

For anyone not in the know, I made a pretty nifty video covering it extensively, including some of the more popular theories:

Point being, while it will probably be very hard to track down anybody who would know anything factual about this (that we don't already know), I'm interested in giving it a shot. And if ADWSS has taught me anything, it's that people who seem impossible to contact have ways of being contacted.

So consider this the start of the search for answers regarding whatever this game is supposed to be.

Congrats on your video, Radiant Lloyd Firefly!
I have recently discovered your videos, and you present your lost media subjects quite well! You got yourself a subscriber.

Yeah, I was a bit reluctant about contacting staff that worked on the Coolsville CD-ROM game, thinking it would be pointless. But what do you know, they replied to me!! And at least I got a bit of information from it.

Also, I noticed that there was an old French TV children cartoon block from 1990, called Allô Bibizz! (aka Chut! Les parents se reposentmeaning "Hush! The parents are resting")
"Bibizz" sounds like "Beebiss"... and funnily enough, it's also got cute small alien characters with antennae, like what we imagined...

Also, here is the cool catchy opening theme song:

How do you like that early 90s kid-oriented wavey rap? And that early CGI mixed with 2D characters?
It kinda feels a bit "vaporwave"... a e s t h e t i c s?

Thanks for the complement Reynard

And D. BrOkEn it doesn't surprise me that Nintendo didn't respond. Or, even if they did, I highly doubt they'd know anything about it. The ads that Beebiss appeared in were run by 3rd party companies and not Nintendo themselves. It's also likely that Nintendo didn't even produce Beebiss.

There are a couple people I found on different boards who seem like they know quite a lot of information, so I think just checking in with them to see what they know would be a good place to start, maybe even in regards to who they've contacted before and whatnot.

So I'll make some rounds and see what I come up with.

I totally regret commenting like a complete psychopath on my comment above, but anyway, I thought that Nintendo has something to do with it besides YYBI being on NES. Then again, seeing as it's an NES game, it probably has a seal on it's (unknown what it looks like) cover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, when checking out Ufouria on Wikipedia, I noticed that if you break up it's Japanese name Hebereke, you get He Be Reke, which almost sounds like Yeah Yeah Beebiss. So the chances of it being Ufouria are not far from true.