Mikie: High School Graffiti

Mikie puts you in charge of Mikie, a high school student who likes to win hearts of every girl that he can lay his eyes on.

There are several classrooms to explore like the Quantum Physics Room, Locker Room, Canteen, the Aerobics Dancing Class, and the Playground. In each classroom, Mikie has to collect all the hearts that are found in each classroom to form a message. In order to collect these hearts, Mikie must stand somewhere near them and shout out. There are two type of hearts: small and large. Mikie needs to shout out only once to collect the small hearts, and multiple times to collect the large ones. When a message is formed, Mikie can exit the classroom through a door marked OUT.

Stopping him from collecting the hearts is the teacher, the chef, and the janitor. The teacher is the worst one. When he is unable to catch you, he works up a sweat, and eventually, throws his teeth at you. When his teeth hits Mikie, he loses one of his three lives. In later classrooms, Mikie can throw stuff at his enemies in order to stun them for several seconds (for instance, the basketballs in the locker room, and the chickens in the canteen). The janitor isn’t as bad because he walks much slower than the others.

In between levels, you have to enter the next classroom through a door marked IN without being caught, but you can do at least two things to pass time: Steal some lunch, and open one of the unmarked doors to receive a punch, a kick, or the chance to see a naked lady with breasts. Beware that if you take too long in the hallway and don’t travel between floors, a bucket slides across the screen real fast and attempt to slip you.
If you’re good enough at the game, you can enter a high score, and if you fail to enter anything, the game will assume that you are Clint Eastwood.

Konami chose not release Mike as is in Japan due to the game’s premise of having a protagonist sneaking out of school after incidents of school violence at the time. As a result, an alternative version was produced for Japanese arcades titled Shinnyū Shain Tōru-kun (新入社員とおるくん, “Freshman Employee Toru”), which replaces the school setting with a workplace. The classroom in the first level becomes an office and the teacher into a manager; the dance studio in the third level becomes the OL office; the other levels (the hallway, the gym, the restaurant and the outdoor garden) are mostly unchanged aside from a few graphical modifications, but the football players in the final level are instead security guards. The game’s soundtrack, which features chiptunes rendition of The Beatles songs “A Hard Day’s Night”, and “Twist and Shout”, had permission granted by JASRAC in Japan, with a license displayed on the instruction card and printed circuit board.