I have a fondness for Popeye! My PB is around 700K, which I think is good (?) but only like five people have ever tried to seriously play it, and I think I'm in fifth place among that group. I bought a PCB over a decade ago to play in my DK cab.
It's not a great game, and I understand why it doesn't have a following. Like TSF said, I think it starts with the premise, which is off-putting and disempowering and demoralizing right off the bat. It's in that category of games like Pac-Man or Burgertime that are very popular among casual CAG fans, but not so much among hardcore CAG competitors, because it has that deadly combination of being tedious but lacking in real gameplay depth. You have to put in some work to develop the muscle memory and timing, but once you've done that, it just kinda comes down to not screwing up, and there's no real point-pressing to speak of. Having said that, Max Haraske is great at maximizing points per screen and definitely deserves the 3.2M record that he has on MAME. If someone like Jason Vasiloff were to turn their attention to it, you could see that broken. Barra could do it too, but I think he would rather die than try.
