Today, when you say Bigfoot, people think Yeti, sasquatch, samsquanch, or Derek Bieri of Vice Grip Garage (or in some circles me). But back for a time from about 1978 to 1999, you said Bigfoot, and people thought of a fleet of massively lifted Ford pickup trucks (and 2 vans, one on tank treads) that were the originators of the "phenomenon" known as Monster trucks. So let's start this page with some BIGFOOT history....

In 1973, Bob Chandler, his wife Marylin, and his friend Jim Kramer started a shop called Midwest Four Wheel Drive & Performance Center. Bob had a 1974 Ford F-250 Highboy pickup in midnight blue metallic, and Jim Kramer had a Squarebody Chevrolet. One day, they parked both trucks out front for sale, and the Chevy sold, while the Ford remained - that Ford was the truck that would become the famous Bigfoot #1 monster truck. Bob and his family would take the truck out for fun on the weekends, and constantly break the parts he installed from his shop on the truck to promote his business. Over time, the truck grew as Chandler started to have military surplus parts and various agricultural equipment parts put onto the hot-rodded Ford pickup. He got bigger tires, axles started to break, so he got bigger axles, now he needed a bigger engine and stronger Transmission to drive them - a chain reaction effect of constantly upgrading one thing to help one of the other upgrades.

In 1979, Bigfoot got a role as the primary "hero vehicle" in a movie called "Take this Job and Shove It", which put the big blue Ford on the map, but also warranted more upgrades after shooting the movie damaged the truck a bit. Also, around the same time, Bob took his truck out on some rural Missouri farmland and crushed some direlict cars with it as a promo for the shop. A promoter saw this and asked if he wold do it in front of a crowd. It took a whole 3+ years before this would actually happen, and when it did, the Monster Truck craze started. Soon, Bigfoot was helping others build their own trucks, to bolster competition and drive innovation in the "monster truck industry" and a whole slew of motorsports arose, with Bigfoot top-dead-center of the attention. By 1983ish, we now had them doing exhibitions - they'd pull out onto the track, crawl over the cars and show off. Occasionally they would also be seen at Tractor Pulls and mud races. Then the standard form of racing would take domination by the mid 80's with the first comeptitions coming around 1986. Trucks improved in performance and safety, Bob Chandler + some others in the scene started the MTRA (Monster Truck Racing Association) sometime in the late 80's to create standards for the industry, and the sport was really taking off. Mind you though, this was still the "Stage 2" where trucks were largely still factory pickup trucks put on big tires with huge engines and drivetrain parts - on leaf springs, with sometimes up to 16 shocks per wheel. The upside was it was cool you were seeing what esentiallly was a upgraded factory truck-type vehicle doing amazing feats, but it also was taking it's toll on teh drivers. Guys were breaking their backs in these things....until...

In 1988, Bob started creation of the modern monster truck - Bigfoot 8. He took inspiration for the design from Baja desert race trucks with long-travel suspension and tubular subframes - and the change lead to a softer-riding, lighter weight (9000LBS vs 24,000LBS), faster (70+ MPH), more maneuverable, and nimble monster truck. So much so it got BANNED from the 1990 championships because it was beating the crap out of everything on the circuit at the time in a way that both members of the MTRA and NHRA felt was unfair to other competing trucks that had not caught up to Bigfoot #8's creation. Id' say that period from 1988 to 1996 was the PEAK of Monster Trucks. They had high speed races, engineering was getting more complex. Bob designed Bigfoot 8 using a CAD program - instead of classic, somewhat-improvised off-roader and hot-rodder methods.

So what happened to Bigfoot? Well, in 1998 TNT came up with their own racing series called "Monster Jam" - you probably heard of it. Well, in 1999 or 2000, IIRC, Bigfoot 4x4 and Monster Jam had a falling out because Bigfoot would record their own footage, and Monster Jam argued that the footage was Monster Jam's property. Add to it, there were issues with merchandising. Basically, full blown corporate bullshit of the proportions that have left me to side with Bigfoot on this arguement ever since. Since the dawn of Monster Trucks, the company (Bigfoot) has recorded their own video footage, not just for those cool VHS tapes we had as kids, but also as Driver debriefing and recon. If there's a mechanical failure, an accident, or a problem with the truck, Bigfoot wanted to know what was happening with the vehicle or the driver - so they would gather in a conference room and discuss races and issues so they could improve the trucks, driving, or both. THIS Is how you run a Monster Truck business. To add insult to Injury, Bigfoot is one of the few original independant trucks left - EVERY truck at Monster Jam except on rare occasion is OWNED by Monster Jam, which makes it entirely fake, like Wrestling. Basically - suits and ties ruined the sport turning into a B.S. drama show. After this falling out, Monster Jam has tried to retcon Grave Digger as the Original monster truck ever since, and nobody in the know is having it, because we all know who the first was ;)

So today, Bigfoot still exists, still races - just not in Monster Jam. Sometime in the 2010's they relocated to Pacific Missouri and hold a yearly open house where the old trucks restored (#2, #3, #4, #8, Ranger, and Shuttle have all either been restored are in progress of being restored). They have run other brand bodies including a Dodge RAM and a Chevrolet - stirring some controversy with Ford fans, but most are the "Desert Race Truck" bodies that look like a Ford F-250 Raptor. #5 is still around with the same 10 foot tall rubber we all remember, #8 was restored in 2019-2020 to it's former 1991 era gory, and Bigfoot still throws #1 into exhibitions, parades, and the periodic "old School" competition with old-schoolers like Earthquake (who has an awesome YouTube series on building/fixing/maintaining Monster Trucks in the 1970's/1980's style).

Anyway - I know this is LONG - but it should bring you up to speed to understand this game enough. It seems creation started in 1987 and finished up by about 1989 - during the PEAK of Monster Trucks in general. It was done by Beam Software and published by Acclaim.

In the Bigfoot game you race as Bigfoot against either a second player (red) or a series of computer-generated trucks such as the "Growler" "Crusher" or "Terminator", in a points-series of events where he who has the most points after the championship in New York City wins the championship. It goes to actual cties such as Pueblo NM, Yakima WA, LA California, Pueblo NM, Reno NV - oddly leaving out Missouri - and each city has a different event you go to by racing your monster truck through the countryside, in a quasi-melee fight with the opposing monster truck, to gather money and points. Then you upgrade your truck before each heat of the main events (car crush, tractor pull, mud race, hill climb, drag race) to out-perform the other guy, and win points for that. IF you win **SPOILER** you get a framed picture based on a real-world picture from Bob Chandler's office of him standing with Bigfoot #5.

Despite the hype around Bigfoot at the time, the game failed to really make that much of an impact in the NES library and is one of those games that tends to just get lumped with all the other **Sports** stuff like Bases Loaded or Blades of Steel. A lot of this is because it suffers from the same problem that plagued E.T. for the Atari 2600 - controls that require actually reading and understanding what's in the manual to use them. It seems mostly the only people who revisit this are those like me who are old-timer, long-time, nostalgic Bigfoot fans.

I started getting into these when I got "Bigfoot Strikes Again" in my stocking on Christmas when I was 8. My neighbor was into these trucks long before me, and I did not know what it was all about, until I got this video, and holy crap. I watched the VHS to DEATH. I mean, first off, we had Bob Chandler, Jim Kramer (mr. head-out-the-window), Andy Brass, Ken Keolling, Marilyn Chandler, and I think Gene Patterson detailing EVERY truck of the time, #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Shuttle, Ranger, and Fastrax, and how they were built, why they were built ,the safety features, the modifications to the engines from nitrous to superchargers, explaining why they have planetary axles, what kinds of axles, all in layman's terms (heck, this may be where I got the ability to do that mysyelf from). Then footage of the trucks at various times up to that point, doing everything from mud bogs, to hill climbs, crushing cars, some pretty killer air from Ranger, the little V6 shuttle keeping up with #7, and Fastrax vs. Bigfoot #7 between Kramer and Chandler. No contests, no cheesy characters, just pure technicals and performance. And I was drawn in to this, big time. Joined the fan club, had the Hot Wheels, the whole nine yards, built the models from AMT. And of course, that christmas in 1990, I got my Nintendo, and the first of three games? This one - Bigfoot.

At first, this game was aan utter dissappointment. I could notfigure out the side-scroller events, but this was probably the first "crappy" game I was hardcore DETERMINED to beat. The manual stated to hold the ccontroller and press with your thumbs back and fourth on the D-Pad, but this did not leave fingers free to use the B and A buttons for nitrous (which the AI uses), and the gearshift (whcih AI never uses and is key to beating this game). So on my 9th birthday, I asked to go to Peachtree mall, got an InterAct Joystick, and I started to master this game like a monster. And for decades, that was the only way I thought you could play Bigfoot, with a joystick, because some "genius" at beam software thought button mashing like Activition's wrist-breaking Decathlon game for the 2600 was a good idea.

Furthermore, learning to drive a REAL Manual transmission vehicle (my truck) gave me an idea how theh transmission in this game works. Basically, RPMs go up about 1/2 the way to 3/4th of the way, shift, both to prevent damaged engines, and to gain some speed over your opponent. It's pretty amazing how fast you can go in this game if you actually bother to use the shifter.

Then as a 20-something guitarist, I got an idea. See, I learned how to play guitar in the style of Edward Van-Halen. Edward Van-Halen has this technique called "right hand hammer ons", where you tap with one finger to do fast trills of multiple notes. Add to it, you had Jeff Watson of Night Ranger doing something similar, but using multiple fingers on his right hand. So I adopted those techniques to the NES gamepad. I would hold the left of the D-pad with my index finger on my left hand, and then "fan" my right over the right D-pad, with my ring finger and pinky on B and A respectively. This allowed me to then "right-hand-hammer-on" the D-Pad, and then introduce the B and A buttons for shifting and nitrous using the A and B buttons.