Town & Country Surf Designs: Thrilla's Surfari

Town & Country Surf Designs: Thrilla's Surfari is an unusual surfing action game released for the NES in 1989 by Kemco. The game draws on the then-popular Californian surf fashion of the Town & Country Surf Designs brand and takes the player across a series of islands, where they face not only riding the waves but also battles against strange enemies lurking both in the sea and on the beach.

The game's structure combines short surfing segments, in which you need to keep your balance and pull off tricks on the waves, with land-based sections in the style of a simple action platformer. This hybrid approach was unusual for its time – most sports games stuck to a single genre, while Thrilla's Surfari forced the player to constantly switch between different skills and pacing. Visually, the game relies on vivid colors and a light, almost cartoonish atmosphere matching the beach-party aesthetic of the eighties, complemented by breezy animations and a touch of humor in encounters with opponents. The transitions between the water and land sections are smooth, so the player never has to wait through long loading between the island's individual segments.

Although it was never among the best-selling NES titles, Thrilla's Surfari earned a reputation as a curiosity thanks to its unusual genre mix and distinctive visual style, which set it apart from the flood of platformers of the time. For collectors, it represents an interesting glimpse into genre experimentation in the late eighties, when publishers were still figuring out how to turn a licensed fashion brand into a functional video game.

Why play it: its fresh mix of surfing and action offers a refreshing change of pace compared to classic NES platformers.