That One Time I Finished A Power Rangers Game In 45 Minutes

My mom wasn’t super thrilled about it

A ghostly Rita Repulsa looms large over the Power Rangers. This makes it look like she somehow set the entire city on fire, but I don’t remember her ever doing this on the show. Game screenshot captured by the author.

Ah, 1994. I was ten years old. My favorite TV show was Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. And it was about to get real big.

Like any nineties IP looking for further avenues of business, Power Rangers had to expand into other media — like video games. Its first digital gaming adaptation hit shelves in November of 1994 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and my lucky tiny self got a copy thanks to an early Christmas gift purchase from my Mom.

I got home with the game, opened that bad boy up, dutifully read the entire manual in a couple of minutes, then started to play. Just under an hour later, I had finished the game’s seven stages without dying — or really without facing too much difficulty at all. I marched into the family room to proudly boast of my accomplishment to my mother.

She was horrified. “Oh no, I bought you this game and you finished it so quickly! That’s not great! You got ripped off!” At the time I wasn’t super aware, but I’m now sure that the ‘You’ in that sentence actually meant ‘I, your mother.’ I didn’t see it this way at all. I’d had a great time. I got to play as my favorite television characters and see some decent pixel art, all while sample-landen synth versions of music from…