Griffin is the name of the tank that was created by a genius scientist. He’s been kidnapped by an enemy nation, so it’s up to his granddaughter Mint to take the helm of his creation and rescue him.
Developed by Telenet for the Game Gear, Griffin is a pretty basic vertically scrolling tank game in the vein of Iron Tank. You roll forward, and you shoot bad guys. You have three weapons, which you can switch between with the pause menu – beyond your default cannon, you can also use missiles and explosives. While these are generally more powerful, they’re also harder to aim, and can only be fired upwards, while your main weapon can be fired in any direction. You also have a limited number of bombs to scorch the whole screen. The tank can take a few hits before being destroyed, plus you have multiple lives. There are only four stages, with the third being an auto-scrolling sequence where the Griffin takes the form of a jet.
This is all functional albeit very simple, but the reason anyone remembers Griffin is for its sexy protagonist. You’re rewarded with a picture of her after some of the stages, including some very pin-up style poses that show off her swimsuit-style uniform and white stockings. It’s much sultrier than anything you’d find on the Game Gear, which is why Griffin became a cult classic and ended up as one of the most expensive titles on the system. To the game’s credit, at least it’s showing off the heroine, rather than a kidnapped damsel-in-distress. However, there are only four images total in the entire game, the last one unlocked only after beating the game twice, so ultimately the rewards are just as skimpy as Mint’s outfit.
Griffin was resurrected in 2025 by Edia, the company that owns many of Telenet’s properties. While other games were released in compilations (Valis, Cosmic Fantasy, the Telenet Shooting Collection), Griffin was released standalone. It includes all of the basic emulator functions like display options and rewinding, plus some cheat codes if you just want to blast right to the end. The animation is a little jerky, but that’s the way the game was programmed and not a result of the emulator. It also includes packaging scans, some slightly blurry (and untranslated) pictures of the manual, and a sound test for the game’s five meager tracks. The manual has some extra artwork of Mint, so fans of cute 1990s anime girls will find some added enjoyment, but otherwise there just wasn’t much supplementary material created for this acceptable but rather rudimentary game.
