main game display (similar to Nintendo's Multi-Screen Game & Watch titles and the Nintendo DS) with the gameplay and power meters (representing stamina) for each fighter. Apart from this, the game is more or a less a standard upright. The game has a joystick and three buttons. Two buttons control left and right punches, one for each arm (denoted by "Left!", or "Right!" when hitting the head, or "body blow!" when hitting the body with either arm). A large button on the console allows the player to deliver a powerful uppercut or right hook, but only when the "KO" meter on the display is completely full. The meter increases when the player successfully lands a punch, decreases when the opponent lands one, and drops to zero when the player is knocked down. Once the meter is full, the corner man's digitized speech encourages the player to either "Put him away!" or "Knock him out!" Development and release The game was developed in 1983, and released in February 1984. Genyo Takeda from the Integrated Research & Development Division was the lead developer, and Shigeru Miyamoto designed the characters. It was released in the first quarter of 1984, when Nintendo was making several coin-operated arcade machines. Nintendo had an excessive number of video monitors after the success of the Donkey Kong series, basing the purchases on the estimate for the demand for arcade games. They were offered a proposition to make an arcade game that used two monitors. They chose to make a boxing game, which utilized the ability to zoom in and out of an object. This was a feature more commonly found in games that involve flying such as flight simulators, but the developers chose boxing because they thought it would be a different way to use it. Miyamoto and Takeda discussed an earlier arcade game created by Takeda: EVR RACE, a horse racing game from 1975, which used a video tape. It was a mechanical game, and was hard to maintain after it was released and had many breakdowns. While they were developing Punch-Out!!, laserdisc-based games were considered to be the next major advancement in the arcade industry. However, the maintenance requirement would be very large if they released laserdisc-based games worldwide. Despite this, domestic sales people wanted something like laserdisc, so they tried to find if it could be done with semiconductors. Miyamoto explained that that's why they