There is a whole lot of misinformation out there regarding Donkey Kong 3. There are claims that its commercial failure in North America caused the Donkey Kong series to be shelved for over a decade, even though ports of the arcade games were released for the Famicom and NES following Donkey Kong 3’s release in arcades — including DK3 itself — as well as a trio of original Donkey Kong Game & Watch handhelds. Donkey Kong’s absence from arcades had more to do with Nintendo’s own shift in focus to the Famicom and NES than anything: after Donkey Kong 3, Nintendo released Punch-Out!!, Super Punch-Out!!, and Arm Wrestling to arcades with dedicated cabinets, and from that point forward everything else in the 80s outside of distribution of Irem’s R-Type was a VS. System released designed to sell you on the concept of playing these games in your living room on a Famicom or NES, depending on your region. If all of that is Donkey Kong 3’s fault, then it’s even more powerful than its greatest supporters have realized.

The idea that Nintendo was distancing itself from Donkey Kong 3 is also a goofy one considering how much the Big N went in on its concept. The game released in arcades in October of 1983, and then was ported to the Famicom in July, 1984 and the NES in 1986. It had its own Game & Watch edition, which was different than the arcade game or console port in myriad ways, but was still attached to the name “Donkey Kong 3” and featured its protagonist, Stanley, instead of Mario. Hudson Soft developed a licensed sequel of sorts for Japanese computers, titled Donkey Kong 3: The Great Counterattack, that also utilized Stanley and once again had him fighting against Donkey Kong and his legions of insects intent on biting Stanley to death if not for his bug spray.

What’s much more likely is that Nintendo’s developers felt they had pushed the concept of Donkey Kong to the limits of what could be managed on the arcade hardware they were working with, and then as the teams began to focus more on what games should look like for consoles — and on Mario — no one figured out just what Donkey Kong should look like in that world until the early 90s. That’s when Rareware took on the task of making Donkey Kong into a 16-bit, scrolling 2D platformer with Donkey Kong Country, while an internal Nintendo team brought Donkey Kong ‘94 into the world on the Game Boy. Donkey Kong has always been just what Nintendo needed at the time, deployed as necessary to showcase hardware in the role of villain or hero, and that process was already in place by the time of Donkey Kong 3. DK was already flitting back and forth between those functions then: he was the villain of the original game bearing his name, in distress waiting to be rescued in the second, and back to being the villain again in the third.

Image credit: The Arcade Flyer Archive

Further proof of the idea that Nintendo was merely at the end of its arcade-based creativity with Donkey Kong at the time — and unsure of where to go with him in the console world just yet outside of ports of existing titles — was the switch in genre. Whereas the original Donkey Kong helped to usher in the age of the platformer, and its sequel Donkey Kong Jr. expanded on this idea with larger, more varied levels with even more obstacles to overcome, Donkey Kong 3 shifted focus to a smaller, closed setting, and, while it retained some platforming, had more in common with the likes of Galaga than its predecessors. And not just because of the bugs.

Donkey Kong 3 is a shooter and a platformer, with Stanley aiming his sprayer and his gaze ever upward at the foes being unleashed upon him in the greenhouse from above. Donkey Kong keeps convincing bugs to throw themselves at Stanley in waves so he can keep on hanging out in the greenhouses, both literally and figuratively, but if Stanley can spray DK enough to push him to the top of the screen — or kill every single bug in the level before time runs out — then Donkey Kong will have to move on to the next one and try again.

The list of Nintendo-developed shooting games is a short one. Sheriff, released in 1979, is a multidirectional shooter released in arcades. Solar Striker was an early Game Boy title co-developed by Nintendo R&D1 and Minakuchi Engineering, which was responsible for quite a few portable Mega Man games as well as Mega Man X3. As mentioned, Nintendo did distribute R-Type in arcades through a licensing deal — specifically, in North American arcades — but that was an existing game and a matter of regional publishing. There are shoot ‘em up-style levels in games like Super Mario Land as well as quite a few Kirby entries — including an entire STG nestled within Mass Attack — and Nintendo published Arika’s Metal Torrent as DSiWare in 2009 and 2010. There is also, of course, the series of on-rails shooters, Star Fox, which seems to have mostly scratched this particular itch for Nintendo for decades, even if it isn’t a more traditional shoot ‘em up. Donkey Kong 3 is part of that list, and while it’s non-traditional in that it is both a platformer and a vertically-oriented shooter, it’s certainly worthy of recognition within its genre.

Donkey Kong 3 gets one of the most important things about an STG, even all the way back in 1983 when the genre was only just basking in the glow of Namco’s Xevious. You can focus on your survival, being as careful as possible and using up as much of the time allotted to get things just right, or you can go all-in on the risk-taking route and focus on racking up the highest score possible in limited time. This is the case both your approach to taking care of the various insects that descend upon you and your platforms — shoot them all as they come down to eventually rid the level of them all, or just enough to avoid dying while you train fire on Donkey Kong — as well as with the plants at the bottom of the screen that you’re protecting from the bugs. As you get deeper into the game, though, these two behaviors begin to intertwine, as the insects are more complex with behaviors you really need to actively engage with — they are moving faster and with more planned, aggressive movements, and the act of protecting the plants is also the act of protecting yourself, as in either case the bugs are trying to end you.

Donkey Kong 3 starts out with quick level completion if you want to rack up the most points, not ignoring but being mostly ambivalent to the presence of enemies in order to focus on getting DK up the vines as quickly as possible for the largest time bonus at the end of the stage: this bonus is where a big chunk of your points comes from, not defeating individual insects, so if you care about scoring it’s imperative that you move fast. You can park yourself underneath Donkey Kong and continually jump upward while firing to create the least amount of time between shots fired and shots hitting their mark, and see the time bonus points roll in as DK makes a swift retreat. This approach and level speed changes as new enemies show up with interests beyond stealing the plants below: there are bugs that target you specifically, ones that leave revenge bullets when you defeat them and follow you around so that you must do so or die, insects that move faster including in targeted horizontal bursts meant to catch you unawares, and the caterpillars that continually crawl and block shots, then stay there in place, in pain, keeping you from successfully firing upward at Donkey Kong from that spot until they decide to get moving again.

There is a boosted big spray canister found near Donkey Kong, that you can get him to knock down once you’ve pushed him high enough up the vines he’s holding onto. When you grab it, your range and shot power are both boosted, so you can fire DK up the vines much faster and more easily than before without needing to position yourself not just in line with him but high enough up the platforms to reach with your blasts. Here’s the thing with the canister of superior spray, however: it’s limited, and another can of it doesn’t show up again until after you die. So, when you get one, if you can move quickly enough, you can get all the way through one stage and well into the next before it runs out, but after that you’re back to the basic spray range and power until you die and get another chance for DK to tip his doom over and into your hands.

Learn to recognize the different enemy types so you know their behaviors, and how your own has to change to counter them.

There are different strategies you can take in Donkey Kong 3 as things get more complicated and simply cheesing your way through a level with unimpeded speed, or the boosted spray, are not options. The basic bug is worth just 100 points, but if you let it grab one of the plants and then shoot it down, it’ll net you 400 instead. There’s a danger to that approach, much like in letting the titular invaders get closer to the bottom of the screen in Space Invaders in order to maximize scoring even though their reaching the bottom is what you’re actively trying to avoid, as any time you let one of these bugs live there is a chance it will end up making contact with Stanley and ending your run — if he is touched by any insect, he goes down and you use up an extend. There is also the question of whether it’s worth the modest point upgrade when the persistence of the plants is the most important thing you can do for your score in Donkey Kong 3 — is it worth the risk of losing one for an additional 300 points? Especially when you lose when all the plants have been taken?

These plants, if they are all still at the bottom of the screen where they should be at the end of a stage, grant you points. You’ll receive 500 points per plant, with additional bonuses if you manage to have all the plants and not just some: 2,000 at first, until they fully bloom, in which case they are worth 5,000. Losing a plant resets that process not just in terms of losing out on bonus points, but on having to wait for them to grow to full size for the full bonus — you can see how this would add up in terms of lost opportunities for points, in a game where the most you can score off a single enemy is 700… and that enemy is a comparative rarity.

You have to take Donkey Kong down, literally.

Between the plant bonuses and points awarded for time remaining, you should be able to pick up some extends, which are granted at progressively larger scoring intervals. You will end up needing them, too, as new enemy types with new strategies to counter are deployed along the way, and, eventually, Donkey Kong starts tossing coconuts down in every level and not just the specific, mostly-bug-free ones where you are aiming to get his head stuck in a hive to give him a taste of his own medicine and knock him from the vines entirely. Donkey Kong 3, at least in the arcades, goes from seeming overly simple and quick to fairly complicated in a hurry.

“At least in the arcades” is intentional wording there, since the NES port — which is the one that, until recently when the arcade edition made its way to Hamster’s Arcade Archives on the Nintendo Switch, is the one that was often reviewed retrospectively. And that is a much easier game that also lessens the need to climb high by cutting down on the number of platforms Stanley has to ascend to be able to reach Donkey Kong, by just cutting them out of the level entirely on occasion. It’s still a fun game, but the arcade iteration is the clearly superior offering if you want the game to avoid feeling repetitive or a little too simple, which were common critiques of its port as it started to arrive again via re-release in the modern age of digital distribution. The stakes are also lower, since points work differently: you get a flat 3,000 points for a “Perfect” round on the NES, as the plants have no cycle stages and are just grown from the start. With no potential pause in the maximum points that can be scored at the end of the level, there is less of a long-term drag on points in the NES port compared to the arcade original. That balance and tension is a significant part of what makes the game work as well as it does, so cutting into it hurts.

Everything in the NES port is less bright and colorful, and the sprites aren’t as detailed, as well.

Outside of the level design changes that also impact the gameplay, the animation and coloring differences between the arcade edition and NES ports are stark. DK isn't nearly as expressive, and doesn't have as many animations, either. The arcade version has levels with backgrounds that make it clear you're in a greenhouse looking down at a ceiling and walls well into the background, creating an appearance of depth that isn’t actually there; the NES version only includes a black background and foreground staging.

If you want to take about serious changes, though, the VS. Series Game & Watch is actually a head-to-head game with one screen but two attached controllers. One player controls Stanley, the other Donkey Kong, and the two are basically playing a reverse tug-of-war where you spray insects to get them to move toward your opponent in order to sting them. Two versions of this game are included in Game & Watch Gallery 4 on the Game Boy Advance, one a modern recreation with Mario and the insect/spray elements replaced by more recognizable entities from that universe, and the other a port of the original.

Then there’s the aforementioned Hudson-developed sequel, which replicates parts of the Donkey Kong 3 experience — Donkey Kong is causing trouble for Stanley and must pay by spray — but now it’s more of a fixed shooter than a platformer since Stanley can no longer jump. Also sometimes you are in space.

See? Space. Image credit: MobyGames

This game was released for Japanese computers in a time before Nintendo decided to lock everything down to its consoles — Hudson put it on the PC-8801, PC-6601, and Sharp X1. And these were the only places you could play it for decades, until the Sharp X1 edition emerged via Yahoo! Auctions in 2017, and ended up acquired and put on the internet to be emulated. Two years later, the PC-88 edition was found, so you can get a taste of The Great Counterattack and another company’s take on Donkey Kong 3 without needing to go out and purchase the original hardware and game in the present.

If your only experience with Donkey Kong 3 is with the NES port — which is fine, mind you, but not necessarily special — then you should give the arcade edition a whirl. That one has the juice, as it has a perfect blend of tension and difficulty to make it a worthy successor to the Donkey Kong name, even if it swapped out Mario and obstacle-based platforming for shooting and bugs. It certainly didn’t kill the idea of Donkey Kong for Nintendo, which had shifting priorities elsewhere that paused the big guy in the arcades and kept a brand new console adventure from arriving, and playing it in the present isn’t going to kill your interest in DK, either, but expand what the idea of a Donkey Kong game can even be for you.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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Toaplan invented the bomb. In the now-defunct company’s first shooter, 1985’s Tiger-Heli, the limited-use bomb was introduced to the genre, with the idea being that it gave players an aggressive and exciting way to attack enemies. Instead, something unexpected happened: as players got better at Tiger-Heli, they intentionally left their bombs alone — there were scoring bonuses for not using them, for one, and second, there were bragging rights to win. If a bomb had to be used, it was purely as a defensive measure: an emergency response to save you from being downed by a bullet you couldn’t otherwise avoid, or an enemy craft you were going to crash right into. From the bomb’s very inception its future possibilities were revealed by those playing Tiger-Heli, and the industry at large took note, with later STG designed around the use or disuse of these screen-clearing wonders.

Toaplan, too, began to build its games around the idea that bombs could save you from enemies and yourself, but also that, with a healthy amount of practice and memorization, you could get away without using them and reap the rewards at the end of the stage. Truxton was different, though. There were no end-level bonuses in the 1988 STG, Truxton — known as Tatsujin in Japan, a word meant to convey “expert” — but instead you defeated a boss and rolled right into the next stage without interruption, the scrolling and music resuming in that moment of active transition. Here, Toaplan wanted you to use the bombs, both because they had designed a game where use of the bombs was very likely to prove necessary, and because they just looked sick: bombs exploded into massive screaming blue skulls on screen. Creating situations where things were chaotic enough that bombs needed to be used, and making things look incredible — that was Truxton, yeah.

It was Toaplan’s return to sci-fi shoot ‘em ups, as the company had been better known for its more realistic — well, for 1980s video games — military shooters, based on helicopters and World War II planes. Truxton was a fully realized sci-fi world with enemy ships patterned after insects, set in the vast reaches of space, and featuring true sci-fi weaponry like the iconic screen-filling blue laser beam, and the fact that enemies could be designed however Naoki Ogiwara imagined them rather than needing to be in line with realistic planes and tanks meant that the very shape of these enemies determined where they might fire from on their bodies, and what — it opened up possibilities and freedom of design for the team, according to composer, designer, and director Masahiro Yuge, who also explained in later interviews that part of the goal of Truxton was a game where specific weapons needed to be used for specific sections in order to truly master it. “I wanted to make a game where the more you remembered, the better you would become. I focused on adding a lot of sections where you needed a specific weapon to deal with certain attacks.”

Designed for consoles from the ground up for the first time, Truxton Extreme is more than “just” an arcade shooter.

“Tatsujin” does not just mean expert in a straight translation, but is more of a philosophical concept meant to convey a level of expertise and mastery that you could spend your entire life attempting to attain. That made it the perfect name for the kind of game Yuge wanted to develop, as well as the name for Toaplan’s successor studio founded by Yuge in the modern era. Tatsujin, formed in 2019, eventually collected the rights to all of Toaplan’s scattered properties decades after its demise, and has been re-releasing them across modern platforms while also working on new entries in some classic series. In 2024, Snow Bros. Wonderland arrived as the first 3D entry in that series, and now in 2026 Truxton has returned, in the form of Truxton Extreme. While Wonderland was plenty enjoyable with some caveats, Truxton Extreme is a fitting return to the genre, worthy of both the Truxton and Tatsujin names, without any level of “but” attached.

Truxton Extreme feels very much like a Gradius sequel, in that it's revisiting old Truxton haunts and enemies but from a different angle with new twists — it’s all new, not rehashed, but it’s still going to look and even sound familiar. There are plenty of callbacks and returning enemies and even some similar structures, but it’s all done through the new widescreen lens while also coming across as very different in both setup and pacing. Extreme follows Truxton II — Tatsujin Ou — in having fewer enemies coming from behind than in the original game, but “fewer” is still a good amount: the original Truxton was lousy with foes that snuck up right behind you and collided for a life-ending explosion.

Truxton often felt claustrophobic owing to it packing the screen with dangers, and that's felt here again even with the move to a 16:9 horizontal widescreen display from its traditional vertical orientation. Tatsujin used the extra real estate here, and while enemies still come up from the bottom of the screen, the more significant issue for the player is going to be the waves that enter from the sides, or the massive amount of space that revenge bullets have to chart a path across the screen, testing your own ability to gauge where those shots are actually going to end up relative to your own location.

And oh man, those revenge bullets. Outside of boss fights that's the bulk of the shots you’ll be dodging, even, with the third stage, in particular, designed heavily around this concept to the point that utilizing Extreme’s new homing shot in that stage will actually make your life more instead of less difficult: you have less control over which enemies you are shooting at when with the homing attack, and therefore a more difficult task of dodging or timing revenge bullets and your path around them. Yuge is one of two credited with “Game Design” on Truxton Extreme, and he was intent on making this feel much like the original Truxton, where specific weapons in specific sections mattered.

You knew there would be skull bombs once more. Image credit: Clear River Games

On that point, there are once again special containers you can only break with specific weapons that contain an extra life here, which encourages you to absorb the risk of a different weapon sometimes even if you’re comfortable with utilizing the one you already have equipped. This is especially necessary in the arcade where you have to play all six stages in a row and don't get your bombs auto-refilled between stages.

Yes, there are multiple modes: arcade, of course, where you play the game’s levels one after the other, but also a Caravan-style “Arena” mode that’s meant specifically for scoring as many points as possible in two minutes, a “Heart Starter” mode for beginners where you can get hit but it stuns your ship instead of outright killing you, and a story mode with three playable characters, each with their own digital comic telling the tale of their joining the ranks of the elite fighters, and the battle against the Geranium forces in space. More on all of these elements in a bit.

The new homing shot has plenty of uses, especially for beginners, but don’t become too reliant on it because there are stages where it will actively work against you.

Another thing that’s different in Extreme compared to the original Truxton — which Yuge himself explained this game built off of rather than its sequel, since he was less involved in the production of that game — is that the stages no longer bleed right into another. When a boss is dead, the level is over, there aren’t new waves of enemies or leftover ones from the fight to deal with as you move toward the next level. This is true even in the game’s arcade mode, which has post-level scoring screens with bonuses that didn’t exist in Truxton or II. A little disappointing in one sense, in that this shift from one to the next was often a Toaplan staple, but also as Truxton Extreme moves things more towards a score-chasing setup than its predecessors, it’s one that fits the game that’s here.

Toaplan was never overly concerned with scoring, at least not in the games designed primarily by Yuge or Tatsuya Uemura — emphasis on scoring over memorization and survival were more of a late-Toaplan design that came out of games like V-V/Grind Stormer and Batsugun, with Tsuneki Ikeda, later of score-obsessed Cave, involved. In Truxton Extreme, though, Yuge does that naming convention justice by combining the kind of memorization-based design that led to the original Truxton with the kind of scoring mechanics that were present in some post-Toaplan games he was involved with during his time with Takumi, one of the many studios that, like Cave, rose from Toaplan’s ashes. Takumi was responsible for some quality STG like Mars Matrix and a trio of Giga Wing games, and with Giga Wing, especially, “medals” were a key part of the scoring system.

Maybe the screen rarely fills up with bullets, but it still gets plenty crowded.

Yuge seemingly never became a bullet hell guy like some of his fellow Toaplan alum — he was a composer on those Takumi games, not a programmer nor designer — but he brought some influence from his time with Takumi to Tatsujin all the same. There are medals to collect in Truxton Extreme, which significantly boost your score, but they aren’t all-encompassing like they were in the Giga Wing games, where, frankly, the scoring is so high and ridiculous that it’s difficult to tell if you even actually did well or not. In Extreme, you can only make these medals — known as “Amber Jewels” here — appear by use of a special attack that is available to you as you charge up a meter through defeating enemies. Use of this special weapon gives you a supercharged version of whichever one is equipped, hyper-focused and firing at a higher rate until the meter empties or you let go of the trigger, but enemies defeated with it drop these jewels, which are worth an additional 100 points each. Unless you have managed to build up an extra stock of Speed and weapon Power-up pickups, in which case you could make it so that you earn 1,000 points per jewel — since you can basically fill the screen with jewels when deploying this charged-up weapon at the right time, that’s a whole lot of extra points sitting there waiting for you, hundreds of thousands of them at a time when done right.

Like with the bombs of Toaplan days gone by, though, it’s not just for that — since this is a more powerful weapon than your standard ones, it can also be worth saving its use for the toughest sections, rather than just the ones where you can score the most points from its deployment. The scoring vs. survival argument rages on, maybe even more than usual, since this edition of Truxton actually does care about scoring for reasons beyond earning extends.

The comics are found in the story mode, with a different comic from a different character point of view depending on which you select.

Truxton Extreme was made by a relatively small team, but its full of heavy hitters. Yuge, despite being CEO of Tatsujin, stepped back into active development to serve as both the composer and a game designer — and the soundtrack is excellent, finally sounding like the full band experience Toaplan wanted their games to feature decades ago on hardware that can let it happen — as well as being credited with “General Direction”. In addition to Yuge, though, was game and level designer Takayuki Saito, who has a résumé that certainly fits with Yuge’s own. Saito was a designer, programmer, and/or director on a number of Raiden and Raiden Fighters games, was a programmer, director, and level designer on the G.Rev cult classic, Mamorukun Curse, and was a software designer on the Xbox 360 version of Space Invaders Extreme. His work on modern shooters — especially G.Rev’s, which focus heavily on vertical shooters played on horizontal monitors — is keenly felt here, and a perfect fit alongside Yuge’s general design philosophy for Truxton.

Also a major part of the game is ex-Toaplan developer and manga artist Junya Inoue — he’s the one responsible for the comics in the three different story campaigns, and it’s not just a few pages, either, with lead programmer for Truxton Extreme, Hiroshi Adachi, telling Famitsu in that pre-release interview that it was basically the equivalent of two manga volumes. To get through story mode, you will at least see the comic, though, the game lets you skip to the end or autoplay rather than have to read it all — you might not want to read it all again on a replay, considering how much of it there is. The story is different depending on which character’s campaign you’re playing through: while the levels themselves repeat, and the ships are the same, there is still reason to go through each for the purposes of the differing stories as well as for logging scores on the leaderboards.

Now that looks familiar…

As previously mentioned, the game does feature an arcade mode in addition to story, and here you play through the game’s stages uninterrupted. These stages are long, roughly 10 minutes each, with a clear break in the middle where the music shifts and a new track plays, which also comes with a change in locale and level design, too. The stages feel long, yes, but mostly in a tension way — they are designed with two goals in mind, basically, for two different styles. First, in story mode, each level is self-contained: you complete one at a time, then can start at any time from the next in line, with all the weapons and power levels of the previous stage remaining, which means you can restart from whatever level of power that was again and again until you complete this new level, too. This makes completing story mode a challenge you can pick up and put down when you want, without losing progress. In arcade mode, though, these 10-minute stages make completion a gauntlet — that’s not a negative, so much as it’s clearly Tatsujin going, “hey, this one is the mode for sickos.” An example: last I checked in, I had the highest arcade score in campaign mode of all the pre-release players on Nintendo Switch 2 — I was only halfway through the arcade edition of the game, meaning, no one had even completed the arcade mode in full yet.

At least, not in a way that logs on the online leaderboards. You have plenty of options here for making the game easier or more difficult, but switching from default settings makes you ineligible for logging your score to the online rankings. The more you play, the higher your player level gets — you can track your progress in a variety of stats, including your level, within Truxton Extreme. And the higher your level gets, the more game modes and options you open up. Want to have bombs automatically go off if you have them in your inventory, to avoid dying so long as there is a bomb to save you? You can turn that on. Want some modified weaponry that will make your life easier, or to ratchet up the lives you start with to 10 instead of three? You can do that, too! But again, you just won’t be able to load that score into the online leaderboards. Still, it creates a situation where people can complete the arcade mode from start to finish even if they aren’t going to be going up against the true sickos focusing solely on memorization and about an hour of Truxton Extreme to try to one-credit clear this thing for online bragging rights.

Of course the “Tatsujin laser” is back in Truxton Extreme.

The Arena mode is a two-minute caravan with a level that doesn’t exist in the story or arcade mode of the game, with the idea being that the faster you are able to defeat enemies, the more enemies and bonus points you’ll end up with, further increasing your score. It feels very different from the rest of Truxton, but in the end, you still need to memorize enemy locations and focus on what weapons would work best, so at the same time it’s still extremely Truxton — it’s kind of incredible how easily Yuge and Co. fit a non-scoring-focused Toaplan-era game into score-chasing and 2026. It all feels so seamless on every level.

There is also a Team Mode version of Truxton Extreme, for playing with a friend — you share bombs, lives, and your score, and while the first two of those can be a challenge depending on their trigger finger and attention to detail, twice the firepower is going to be a boon. There’s a little something for everyone here in Truxton Extreme — people who want more story out of games, even their shoot ‘em ups, arcade sickos looking for a challenge, and those in need of couch co-op in the year 2026. If you are all three of those kinds of people, well you’re going to be obsessed with this one.

This all fits within the spirit of Toaplan’s design, decades later. As fellow Toaplan composer and game designer Uemura, who is also working at Tatsujin these days, explained in a 2012 interview:

Truxton Extreme seems to be capable of fitting every potential audience for Truxton, between the above and the “Heart Starter” mode that allows for multiple hits instead of instant death. The balance can be just right, because you can tweak it for yourself — this isn’t an arcade game that needs to be appealing to the arcade itself for the purposes of making the most money possible, but one made for platforms at home, for them to master in the way they want to and are capable of — maybe pushing through Heart Starter mode convinces someone to give Story a try, and making it through Story gets someone into Arcade, and eventually that same person decides hey, you know what, let’s turn those special bonus features off and play this the way Tatsujin intended.

And Truxton Extreme is good enough to warrant that level of playing again and again, of building mastery and thriving despite the many lost lives and exploded ships it will take to get there. Truxton Extreme is not just worthy of carrying the Tatsujin name in the present, but its meaning, too, and that’s as much worth celebrating as it is playing.

Truxton Extreme releases on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S, Steam, and GOG on July 30, with physical copies available for the three consoles. A review copy for Nintendo Switch was provided by publisher Clear River Games, and played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

It’s incredible how quickly the video game industry used to change, in terms of priorities and design. That’s not a knock on the current standards, but a reminder that a whole lot of what you see today got its start at the beginning of the HD era, two decades ago — there’s a reason that people fight over what qualifies as truly “retro” and what’s just a continuation of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era into the present, only shinier and on more powerful hardware.

Leaving aside the validity of those arguments, though, there is no debating how different things were for video games in 1994 than in 1983. Taito’s Elevator Action released in ‘83, and it was shockingly violent, especially for what was a cartoony, 8-bit depiction. Shocking because, just a few years before, in 1978, Taito made its presence known worldwide with Space Invaders, a game that asked the then-profound question “what if enemies attacked the player, though?” — a question that came with the caveat that those enemies could not be human, because series creator Tomohiro Nishikado felt it would be “immoral” to attack people. Five years later, Elevator Action had you firing off a pistol at countless anonymous baddies coming out of doors, delivering running dropkicks to their face, dropping light fixtures on their heads, and getting them crushed underneath elevators because it was gnarly and also worth more points that way.

However, it still very much had the trappings of its day. Jumping was closer to that of Mario in Donkey Kong than Mario in Super Mario Bros., and running wasn’t an option yet. There was music, but it was a single stage theme that took less than 30 seconds to loop, with a secondary, faster-paced “hurry up” theme for when you were taking too long and things were about to get frantic. The levels, as a baseline, were all the same in terms of the 30-floor building they were contained within, but the placement and number of red doors you needed to enter to retrieve the documents that were the whole point of all of this shooting and death-by-elevator were what changed, and since later levels took longer, danger increased more often the further you dug into the stage loops.

Image credit: MobyGames

Now, don’t misunderstand — all of that ruled and still rules, to this day. Elevator Action is an expertly crafted arcade game, that understood arcade game design from the day and remains thoroughly entertaining and capable of hooking new players over four decades later. Its arcade sequel, 1994’s Elevator Action Returns, simply shows how different things were in arcade game design just over a decade later, in a similar way to how Elevator Action was markedly different from Space Invaders even five years on — consider not just the graphical changes from the seminal space shooter to the elevator-focused one (from black and white to full color, more detailed and animated sprites) but also the audio: that 30-second looping theme was an evolution from Space Invader’s four-note, descending chromatic bass note song, the first continually playing in-game theme, and made without the aid of programmable sound chips, too.

Elevator Action Returns had its own massive audio changes, too. Rather than about a minute of looping music total and the same stage theme in every level, Returns includes multiple themes per level, as they change after you hit certain points in the stage, adding new musical wrinkles to the themes that keep the loops from all being similar. Also, the music is courtesy of Taito’s house band, Zuntata, and features varied instrumentation playing an extremely jazzy, upbeat selection — maybe not the soundtrack to the destruction you’ll cause that you expected coming in, but it fits wonderfully like it was always supposed to be there. Who knew rocket launchers and pianos worked together so well?

While the first level starts out looking like an updated version of the kind of building the original Elevator Action took place in, that changes in a hurry — when you get to a certain point in your descent, all of a sudden the building begins to fill with holes, and a massive chunk of it collapses, blown up and knocked down by some maniac in a helicopter. That’s “Red Suit,” the leader of a terrorist group looking to bring on a new world order through revolution. This is pretty clearly not a revolution for the people, either, but one of those where the vision is that this guy gets to be in charge of everything now. Your unit, the DEF, was formed to take him on, and from this point forward the game diverges significantly from the original, in a pretty similar way to how Donkey Kong ‘94 utilized the original Donkey Kong at first as a way to guide you into the brave new world it was about to blow your mind with.

While opening red doors remains necessary for progressing through the game, and enemies continue to appear from other doors continually, everything else has changed. It’s only in the first level that you’re collecting documents a la the OG Elevator Action; the rest of the time, you’re defusing bombs that Red Suit’s goons have planted — with this in mind, you’re no longer teleported to the floor with a missed door, but the game blares an alarm at you to let you know you’re close to letting a bomb stay fused. This game is much faster-paced, and not just because you can make your character break into a sprint and jump gaps. It’s deserving of the run-and-gun moniker, rather than being a platformer like the original, for a reason. No longer are you limited to three shots before a reload, as you can just fire nonstop with your pistol like you’re playing Contra. There are limited-ammo machine guns and rocket launchers now, too, and you’ll need them, as there are places with entire waves of enemies to contend with, some of them with jetpacks or flying around on what look like jet skis that can take to the skies somehow.

Blue doors can be opened by you, and you get a bonus item from them, with the item in question determined by when you pressed the button to stop the spinning wheel. Most items are just worth points, but there are also health recovery ones — oh, yeah, you have a health bar now, to compensate for the added chaos. And that chaos is also as graphic as you can imagine it would be, freed even more from the shackles of a more overall conservative view toward violence in games. Huge explosions, the ability to set enemies on fire with said explosions — it’s worth more points than shooting them, you know — and of course the inherent changes that come from depicting violence with an 8-bit board producing sprites that are somehow both blockier and smoother compared to a 32-bit one full of far more detailed and expressive ones.

There are loads of destructible objects, often hiding items within them — be they health recovery, points, or the powerful limited-use weapons — as well as security cameras that call more enemies to stop you if they catch you, light fixtures, and control panels for environmental hazards like electric gates that will absolutely fry you if you touch them while they’re activated. Security robots cling to the ceiling and wheel their way to you. Zombie-like, dual-wielding men appear from doors, and take a whole lot of rounds to kill compared to anything you dealt with in the original Elevator Action. Security dogs come running at you at top speed. The fancier a jacket on a foe, the more powerful their weapon, and later enemies begin to lie prone to make it more difficult to hit them, or to even see that they are firing at you.

Goodbye to the Elevator Action you knew. Image credit: MobyGames

There is so much more to think about and to do here, even with the basic premise being the same as the game that arrived on the scene 11 years prior. Luckily, it’s not all flash and explosions, either, as there is still loads of strategy, some of which begins before you actually step foot into a stage. That’s because you have your pick of three playable characters. Kart Bradfield moves the fastest, but his firing speed and the power of his gun are mid. Edie Burret is the weakest as far as shot power goes, but her firing speed is the quickest, and she moves plenty fast, herself — given hitting an enemy with a shot interrupts their own actions, speed is as valuable as pure power. Then there’s Jad the Taff, who is not only the big boy of the bunch, but hits like it, too. He’s the slowest option, to compensate, but he can also damage enemies just by bumping into them — Kart and Edie can attack from up close for extra points, but you have to actually hit the attack button to do it instead of just big guying your way through a floor.

All three have named handguns that are spoofs of existing guns: Kart has a Glog 18 instead of a Glock, Edie a Berletta instead of a Beretta, and Jad has a Dessert Eagle, which should be a confectionary Counterstrike mod if it isn’t already. Each of these characters also has a unique secondary weapon, which can be long tossed while standing and thrown a shorter distance while crouched: Kart throws a hand grenade that causes widespread damage, Jad has a sensor bomb used as a proximity mine, and Edie has the best of the bunch in one guy’s opinion, as it’s a fire bomb. Remember: setting dudes on fire is worth lots of points. But on top of that, Edie can setup an exploding perimeter around her, either on a small scale by setting fire to enemies waiting for an elevator or getting on/off of one, or by tossing off grenades left and right to protect her flank as she deals with a larger wave of enemies, in the moments where you are purposefully pushed to your limits there. It’s extremely funny to set a fiery trap and watch guys in trench coats saunter right into it, oblivious to the fact that only you are, for whatever reason, impervious to flame.

You’re not “limited” to Otto here, as you can take your pick of playable character. Image credit: MobyGames

When you have to feed another credit in, you get to choose if you want to play as a different character, so you’re not restricted to the one you pick at the beginning forever unless you manage to stay alive. And here these choices do mean something, since this is no longer a game that just loops and loops with slight variations and increased difficulty: Elevator Action Returns expects you to master its six stages over time, learning all the little tricks and danger spots, where to find hidden items, and how to properly prep for the most difficult combat moments in the game. The game is designed in such a way that it’s easy enough to progress without an encyclopedic knowledge of the game’s systems, but you will need to know what all the tools in your toolbox do, and how to use them, to make it all the way through. It’s not the most difficult arcade game in the world by any means, but with just one life by default and a health bar that will be melted away by late-game enemies — of which there are many — you do have to eventually figure it all out.

The sheer variety of levels — and the things that can happen within them — keeps Elevator Action Returns feeling fresh throughout. The design and setting is different each time out, even if the basic task of “don’t die, enter red doors” is both simple and ever-present. Taito went all-in on the action-movie-esque goofiness here, too: the second level opens with a helicopter flying directly at a building, and then it crashes right into it as enemies scatter. It turns out that’s your helicopter, and it’s how you decided to enter the building — that’s a far cry from the stealthy zipline entry of the original game, and also showed that your DEF members are as willing to go all-out and blow things up to achieve their mission as their target, who again, you are introduced to in the previous stage because he exploded a building you were in, alongside the concept of Elevator Action itself.

Well that’s one way to circumvent airport security. Image credit: MobyGames

Sadly, despite the fact that Elevator Action Returns is a tremendous piece of arcade gaming, it was not a commercial success in the same way as the original — fighting and 3D games had taken over arcades by 1994, so while Taito created an undeniable masterpiece on its 32-bit, F3 System board, it lacks the legacy of the game it’s a sequel to. Luckily for you, though, none of that matters: Taito hasn’t let the fact it didn’t become a high earner like its predecessor keep it from being released again and again. As happened with a number of Taito games, both from that era and otherwise, it was ported to the Sega Saturn, and Ving did an excellent job of things there, too, getting a nearly arcade-perfect iteration of the game on the system. You’re limited to how many credits you get in this one, which makes completing it a more difficult task, but practice makes perfect and all that — and Elevator Action Returns is a game that you will want to keep coming back to.

It also received home ports to the Xbox, Playstation 2, and PC in the next era of consoles, thanks to Taito Legends 2. These ports have some problems, as graphically they lack the sharpness of the arcade original and Saturn port, in addition to introducing issues like the machine gun not rapid-firing like it should. But that was mostly a problem two decades ago when a rarity was otherwise unavailable. In the present, Elevator Action Returns is included in the Egret II Mini arcade cabinet, and, more conveniently for most people, the Saturn port has been re-released in the present with various optional quality of life features like rewind, slowed-down play, and an expanded options menu for credits and lives, as Elevator Action Returns S-Tribute — this game is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One, with it also working on the successor systems for the three consoles. For $15, you can pick up a fantastic port of the game that, otherwise, requires you stumble upon it in an arcade, or have a Saturn and also pay an average of $200 for just the disc on the secondary market.

The worst thing about Elevator Action Returns is that it came out at the wrong time. Arcades were focused on different things at that point, and 11 years in between games might have also contributed to the issue — there weren’t exactly people lining up for a sequel to Elevator Action in 1994. You don’t have to care about that in the present, though. Elevator Action Returns does not forever belong to the context that it once did, in a market that didn’t necessarily see the appeal nor give it the shot it deserved. It’s 2026, and Elevator Action Returns has an incredibly low barrier to entry owing to it being available on the last two editions of the big three modern consoles, as well as Steam, at a cost of $15 when it’s full price. Who cares that it wasn’t what was hot in 1994, and now it’s 2026 and old? It’s there, for you to play whenever you want, and you should if for no other reason than that it rules. What more could possibly be required?

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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On-rails shooting galleries were not new with Sega’s The House of the Dead, not by a long shot. Konami released Lethal Enforces into arcades in 1992, five years prior. Namco dropped the first Time Crisis in 1995, the same year as Time Warner Interactive’s Area 51; Sega’s own Virtua Cop beat those to market by over a year. And arcade games utilizing a light gun for shooting had been a thing for two decades already by the time Sega unleashed zombies on the masses — even 8-bit home systems had their own light gun accessories.

And yet, Sega managed to do plenty that stood out here in a well-established market, between the branching pathways based on your success or failures, your action and inaction, and enemies that shambled toward you. As planner and director Takashi Oda explained in an interview in Sega Saturn Magazine in 1997, what made The House of the Dead different from, say, Virtua Cop was that enemies moved toward you rather than just being the graphical equivalent of a carnival’s game of skill. “…our first point of reference in creating House of the Dead was Virtua Cop. That game uses something called the ‘lock-on sight’ system, which helps distinguish for players which enemies are tough or weak, which are near, far, easy to hit, etc. But in House of the Dead, the enemies walk towards you and thus gradually became larger targets the closer they get. It was extremely challenging for us, then, to try and create a suitable game-like difficulty in a gun game where aiming is so easy…!”

The solution was to design enemies that didn’t die in a single hit, which meant that not only did you have zombies and other monsters coming toward you, but that you had to hit them multiple times in order to bring them down, ratcheting up the tension and need for you to be accurate. These foes were easier to hit than your standard criminal in Virtua Cop, sure, but you might not bring them down right away even if you did hit them, and between constant reloading and the multiple creatures coming at you at once, things could go wrong in a hurry. As programmer Kazutomo Sanbongi tells it in the same discussion, this “confused a number of our testplayers,” who were expecting this to be like other shooting gallery games where enemies went down once you put a bullet in them.

Image credit: MobyGames

In addition to the larger size, enemies also didn’t have firearms like in Virtua Cop or Time Crisis and so on, which meant that other ideas needed to be worked in for endangering the player. You didn’t want these zombies et al to reach you, of course, since direct contact would mean damage thanks to claws and teeth, ripping and tearing, but some foes were also equipped with items to throw at you, like large barrels or axes. Shoot the barrel enough, and it would be broken beyond the point of being able to damage you, and axes could be shot right out of the air to keep them from hitting you. Of course, while you’re aiming at these objects, enemies move ever closer — it might be easier to hit them, but you’re on a timer here, even if it’s not shown on screen in the form of a clock, and when it strikes zero you’re going to get hit or even die.

Also significant was how bloody this game was. Creatures already had blood splatters all over them, or blood staining their bodies, and these areas were weak points that could be shot at and through entirely, sometimes causing gory explosions. The level of violence was high enough that even the arcade edition of the game came with the option for operators to switch the blood color to non-blood colors like green, which still resulted in zombies covered in exploding body parts that now just looked infected and acidic, but at least they weren’t bloody. Oda explained that this game was always meant to be played by adults, not kids, which is why the protagonists are also older instead of in their teens — that’s how zombies ended up being the enemy of choice in the first place, and how we ended up with a game where eyeballs are just flying off as a result of a monster being shot in the face.

Alongside Capcom’s massive console hit, Resident Evil, The House of the Dead, with its more adult-oriented design, helped bring zombies back into the public consciousness. Whereas that game was slow-paced, methodical “survival horror,” though, The House of the Dead was short, brutal, and to the point. This was an arcade game, and acted accordingly: you had limited health which disappeared when you were hit or if you shot a scientist you were supposed to be rescuing. Ammunition was infinite, but reloading could trip you up if it needed to be done at the wrong time, and you needed to — quickly and strategically — determine which enemies to hit and where in order to take them down before they could hit you or kill a scientist themselves. This game might also take place in a mansion with a laboratory inside of it that’s pumped out some genetically engineered nightmare meant to represent perfection, but it doesn’t feel anything like Resident Evil at all despite those basic similarities.

Sure, the mansion had been done before, but not everything was Resident Evil’s idea first. Image credit: MobyGames

As mentioned, one of the things that made The House of the Dead stand out in ‘97 was the branching paths. If you successfully saved a scientist being attacked by the abominations, in some cases, you might “just” have some health restored. But in other moments, rescuing one of these people might just change the path that you are taking, and therefore the enemies you would face and what you would see on your journey to stop Dr. Curien in his lab. You are faced with these moments early on: before you even get inside the mansion, there is a scientist about to be thrown right off a bridge by the undead. Kill the offending creature before this happens, and you can waltz right into the mansion through the main door out front, but screwing this up means you head in a different way, underground.

There is more to saving scientists than potential alternate paths, though. The “just” for health restoration is in quotes because those are literally life-saving moments that play a significant role in your quest to avoid throwing additional quarters into the machine, and even in the at-home editions of The House of the Dead, you have limited credits to continue with — every bit of health counts, especially if you aren’t a great shot or are unfamiliar with boss patterns. Rescued scientists also play into your point total, though, which isn’t shown on-screen during standard gameplay — your HUD is entirely the number of bullets left in the chamber and your health, along with an indicator for first- and second-player. Instead, you get to see the points you scored after each stage, of which there are four. The more scientists saved, the more points you score, and your point total determines the ending you end up seeing. And if you happen to save every scientist during the game’s first three chapters, before facing off in the final confrontation, you will enter into a room full of additional health and points.

Not every country was going to be happy about the fountains of blood, so the option to change things to green, blue, and purple existed for arcade operators. Image credit: MobyGames

There are three endings in The House of the Dead, two of which are bad to different degrees and one of which is unequivocally good. You see, you were called to Dr. Curien’s mansion slash laboratory by Sophie, the fiancée of AMS agent Thomas Rogan, who was letting him know that something terrible is going down there. Rogan and his partner, “G,” travel to the mansion to find it overrun by zombies and worse. Sophie is rescued but then kidnapped by what ends up being an early boss in the game, which is something of a recurring theme in the game; the ending of The House of the Dead is basically determined by “did you score enough points to actually save Sophie?”

As long as you actually complete the game, Rogan survives, but Sophie’s fate is tied to how good of a job you did here. Score 62,000 points or more without using a continue and get the best ending, where Sophie lives and rushes toward you to celebrate her rescue. Score fewer than 62,000 still without using a continue, and Sophie “lives” — she’s a zombie now, too, and guess what you have to do to a zombie? And if you use a continue at all, bad news, you get the other bad ending where Sophie’s fate is unknown. It’s not that difficult to get the good ending in terms of points scored, since headshots reward you with additional points and if you’re making it to the end, your aim is likely to be good enough to rack those up. However! Surviving to the point where you can see the ending is the actual challenge here — it’s being able to complete The House of the Dead on a single credit that makes this tough. Practice, practice, and more practice, though, and rescue as many scientists as possible not just for the health recovery in the moment but also to stock up before the last confrontation.

Save the scientists, get key cards for access to other parts of the mansion and laboratory, or even a health upgrade. Image credit: MobyGames

You will have to work at saving all the scientists, too, as they aren’t all immediately visible. There are people waiting to be rescued who have done an admirable job hiding from these laboratory experiments, but that also means they are hiding from you. See a curtain or conspicuous covering over a potential opening? Shoot it to see what’s behind it — it might be a zombie, but it might also be a scientist. You won’t find scientists inside of crates or pots or jars, but shoot those, too, as they might contain health upgrades — which are worth 300 points if your health is already at max — or gold coins worth 200 points, or even hopping golden frogs, which are worth 1,000 points. Naturally.

Of course, being able to have the time to shoot these destructible objects — which are often in frame for a limited amount of time — while also being in position to rescue scientists under attack or take out one of many enemies on-screen is easier said than done. But again, this is all practice! The House of the Dead takes less than an hour to beat, so it’s the kind of game you can go through again and again in order to improve at it, and learn where all of its hidden treasures and hostages are.

This is even easier to do if you ended up with one of the many home versions. While the original development team thought that porting The House of the Dead to the Sega Saturn might prove difficult, given how far the arcade hardware was pushed to make it happen, the Saturn did receive a high-quality port that utilized the console’s Virtua Gun accessory (known as the “Stunner” in North America because real guns are perfectly fine but fake guns are dangerous). And it had not just the original arcade mode, but a Saturn Mode, as well, which was arranged for home play and let you choose and unlock characters, rather than just playing as Rogan if you were player one and G if you were second player.

Shoot every barrel you see, especially if it is being thrown at thee. Image credit: MobyGames

Each of the characters has different skills and attributes, like guns that do more or less damage, or need to be reloaded more or less often, characters with more or less health, a larger and smaller hit radius that was usually tied to how much damage a single shot was doing, as well — you had things to calculate before making your choice, and said choice could mean a fairly different way of playing. Rescuing everyone while armed with a gun that has just two shots before needing to reload is difficult, except each of those shots might as well have been missiles with how much damage they could do… if you can land the shots, of course.

The House of the Dead ended up spawning a multimedia empire a la Resident Evil, as well as a number of sequels. The House of the Dead 2 would arrive just one year later, in 1998, on the more powerful NAOMI arcade hardware, which also resulted in a port to the Dreamcast. Both arcades and the Dreamcast also received Typing of the Dead, which is The House of the Dead 2 but with typing instead of a gun. Additional spin-offs — a beat ‘em up, a pinball game — and more numbered sequels would follow, too, and the series would even get a console-exclusive entry in the form of The House of the Dead: Overkill, which took advantage of the Wii Remote’s infrared and then the Playstation 3’s Move controller to simulate light guns on modern displays.

It’s also obvious how The House of the Dead inspired eventual games in the same vein that you can find in arcades today, like The Walking Dead — the graphics are more powerful, but the basic idea of a zombie-infested on-rails shooter with cinematic flair still worked in 2017 just like it did in 1997.

The House of the Dead is a classic, and a shining example of the kind of timeless design that Sega’s 1990s arcade developers were capable of. The original is available in the present in remake form on the Switch, Windows, Playstation 4 and Xbox One, with backwards-compatibility for the successor systems, and the console variants have alternate control schemes thanks to the gyro of Joy Cons, USB mouse support, and the Move and Aim controllers of the Playstation 4. It’s not quite the same as holding a Virtua Gun in your hand, but other than a graphical overhaul the game is pretty close to what it was nearly 30 years ago, and this remake seems to have come out a whole lot better than a similar attempt with The House of the Dead 2 by the same studio and publisher. Still, you could always find a way to play the original versions of the game instead, if remakes aren’t doing it for you. There are no shortage of ways to go about doing that, and all, especially not on the Saturn, specifically.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Ashley Schofield, author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I'm going to spend the process of drafting this piece seeing how long I can go before talking about EVO Moment 37. Let’s find out together.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is not the greatest fighting game ever made, nor a perfect one. It’s flawed in the ways any game can be. A fair few characters are worlds away from being competitively viable. I’m aware when I pick Q that I am actively making my life much harder for the sake of love; Chun-Li and Yun are absolute monsters, the best characters in the game without question — though others like Ken, Akuma and Makoto don’t trail far behind. There are several completely real unblockable setups that you kinda just have to know about and practice defending against. But I do think there is one aspect of 3rd Strike that is pretty much perfect from concept to execution: the parry.

Parrying in 3rd Strike is simple. While holding back blocks an attack as normal, you can also tap the stick forward when it connects to parry it and avoid chip damage and blockstun entirely. A freeze-frame animation occurs alongside the most satisfying sound effect in any fighting game, and you’re suddenly at an advantage, free to punish your opponent while they recover from their (now foolish) attempt to hit you. It’s built on a very simple foundation: risk and reward. In order to parry and gain the boons it grants — no chip damage, no blockstun, advantage frames, additional super meter — you have to stop blocking and open yourself up to being hit. If you miss the short parry window — 10 frames grounded, five frames as an anti-air, and seven frames for an air-to-air — or parry in the wrong direction (low attacks must be parried by tapping down, rather than forward), you eat shit. 

It’s not complex, at least in concept, and it’s not intended to be. The game’s director Tomoshi Sadamoto stated in an interview with Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama that the team designed parries not as an additional system — as opposed to Street Fighter 6 which makes parrying a choice within Drive gauge management — but an addition to the existing fighting system alongside blocking, attacking and throwing. Its inspiration lay in real martial arts as much as movies: “kung-fu, or Jackie Chan fights, someone receiving the attack, right?”; redirecting the momentum of an attack, flowing like water, rather than outright blocking it. This wasn’t always the case: parry was originally inputted by tapping back, which the designers quickly found meant “there was no risk involved”, as a mistimed parry would result in a standard block anyway. Considering the existence of red parry, a type of parry that can be triggered by carefully timing a parry while already in blockstun from a multi-hit move (with a window of just two frames!), some warped version of Sadamoto’s original intent arguably still bled through. What a different game 3rd Strike would have been if that idea had stuck.

Parries define the neutral, offense, and defense of 3rd Strike. Projectiles can be parried, granting super meter and allowing you to keep closing the gap without being slowed down. Advancing moves like Dudley or Q’s dash punches can be parried on reaction, making them considerably more of a risk to throw out in neutral; even moves that are usually safe thanks to their blockstun become dangerous due to parry’s existence. If you’re too late to react to a jump-in with a dedicated anti-air, a parry is still on the table as a panic option. Even multi-hit supers like Ryu’s Shinku Hadoken and Chun-Li’s Houyoku-Sen (I’ll get there, knowing reader, don’t worry) can be parried with practiced hands and a calm mind. On wakeup, a guess-parry, either mid or low depending on the attack you expect, alongside a buffered reversal or super, can turn the tides of a corner situation instantly — something the team intended, as “we wanted to do something about people just getting relentlessly pressured offensively.” Parries were designed to increase the power of defense across the board, which is why they don’t cost any sort of resource to use . The risk of guessing wrong or an incorrect input is still there, but parries are undeniably strong.

So, as posited by Reddit user guitararvin in a legendary, much-screenshotted post: “What’s the point of attacking if they can just parry?” The simple answer is to throw, using both normal throws and command grabs. Throws cannot be parried or blocked, only teched with your own throw input — command grabs can’t be teched at all; throws have always been the option to beat blocking, and parries are no different. Of course, there are option selects to cover both parry and throw tech simultaneously, but to say that invalidates parries would be as silly as saying the existence of throwing invalidates blocking. No, the real answer to “why attack?” is that your opponent can’t always be right, and even if they are, you can read their response before they even input it. This is how the mind game introduced by parry begins to bloom.

Say your opponent jumps at you and is close enough for an aerial attack to land. You could block, but they’re still plus afterwards and are now next to you, ready for a strike/throw mix up. You could try to anti-air with a dedicated reversal, but they can parry it on the way down and invalidate your attempt. You could try to parry, but they can read your own parry attempt and not attack at all, leaving you open to a throw when they land. 

This constant, complex game of ‘will they, won’t they’ is what makes 3rd Strike so special to me. Other Street Fighter games have mechanics like this, such as 6’s aforementioned Drive Parry and the Punish Counter consequences of having a parry attempt predicted and thrown, but they don’t match the breakneck pace of decisions in 3rd Strike. Fighting games are a conversation, and 3rd Strike adds a unique layer of basically-mind-reading to that conversation by making parry as universal as blocking and increasing the risk reward tenfold for keeping track of your opponent’s habits and anticipating their choices. If your opponent tries to poke with a crouching medium kick repeatedly, you might start to adapt by guess-parrying low when they get within range. They can adapt, instead dashing in when you expect the low kick, surprising you with a throw. You adapt back, and so on, and so on, and eventually you have layers upon layers of decisions defined by whether you or your opponent choose to tap forward or hold back. Parry habits become as central to understanding your opponent and succeeding in the matchup as their character choice. I fucking love 3rd Strike.

And look, it’s impossible to discuss parries without gushing about EVO Moment #37 in 2004 and, in the halls of legend as of a few years ago, EVO Moment #38 in 2024. You’ve seen the former before. Daigo Umehara, on a pixel of health, parries all 15 hits of Justin Wong’s Houyoku-Sen super (see, we got there) when blocking or missing a single parry would kill him, before closing out the match with a combo that only just kills. There are details to note here: Daigo only having a two-frame window to hit the first parry after the super’s screen-freeze; Justin mashing his stick as loudly and randomly as possible to throw off Daigo’s concentration, and the fact that Daigo didn’t end up winning EVO that year, even after that incredible display. But none of that matters. He just hit 15 parries, 15 perfect 10-frame inputs in a row where any mistake would have cost his life, amidst suffocating tournament pressure. And to risk beating a dead horse, it’s the lack of leniency in 3rd Strike’s parry window and inherent risk that makes it uniquely impressive, as demonstrated by how the feat doesn’t stack up when replicated within the parry systems of Street Fighter V — due to a much more forgiving parry window — or Street Fighter 6 and its intense screen freeze on each parry, lessening the impact of the tight timing requirement. It’s the most famous fighting game clip for a reason: it’s a 56-second distillation of how parry makes 3rd Strike what it is, and how mastery of a relatively simple mechanic can make history. “Unbelievable”, commentator Seth Killian yells out, and he’s right. “It’s unadulterated madness!”

The latter is less discussed but, to me, just as incredible. Hayao, notably playing one of the worst characters in the game, Hugo, up against FrankieBFG’s white gi-clad Ken, an ironic visage of the previous moment. As before, just a pixel remains on Hayao’s health bar. Frankie plays as safe as he can, hoping to chip Hayao out without risking getting close to Hugo and being welcomed into the warm grasp of a command grab. Both players jump forward. Frankie activates Ken’s EX Tatsu, a safe, multi-hitting move that will almost guarantee a kill. But you know where this is going by now. Hayao sees it coming and parries all four hits, comboing Frankie on the way down and suddenly obliterating the life lead. Justin Wong happens to be commentating the match, and screams out “Oh my god, no! No!” on seeing the parry, witnessing Frankie suffer a similar fate. Frankie desperately tries to hit Hayao with a wakeup Shippu Jinraikyaku super, but Hayao reads it once more. Hugo’s heavy kick, something Justin accurately describes as a “worthless move” in any other context, launches him into the air to completely pass over the super and let him punish with a brutal clothesline, taking the match. Hayao isn’t Daigo, though. Rather than sitting calmly and snapping back to reality after intense concentration, he leaps up from his chair grinning, raising his hands to the sky and running over to the crowd to high-five anyone available. He’s a showman, and he’s having a damn good time. It’s a wonder he didn’t hit the Running Man or do the splits as he did earlier in the set. The combination of incredibly specific game knowledge, exact reads, precise execution, and joyful showmanship makes for a moment finally worthy of being an (unofficial) sequel to Daigo’s achievement. Fighting games are something so great.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the phrase ‘EVO Moment’ without something of a bad taste in my mouth (and I apologize for this tone shift, stick with me). The event that grew from the relatively small ‘Battle by the Bay’ local in California to the single biggest tournament on the planet has lost its soul as of last year, being bought out entirely by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. What was previously an event bringing together the very best from across the world to compete and make history has become a blatant sportswashing endeavor, shamelessly hoping to divert attention away from the Saudi government's participation in the brutal murder of journalists and unimaginable, flagrant abuse of human rights. 

Everything I’ve fondly reminisced about now comes with this baggage. The biggest fighting game fans I know, including myself, boycotted attending or even watching EVO as a result of what it’s become, what it represents, what it contributes to. EVO 2026 just happened, and the difference in energy across the community was palpable — no one cares like they used to. There probably won’t even be another ‘EVO Moment’ — there’ll be incredible plays performed by those who still choose to attend, but the adoring community spirit that led to their documentation and legendary status is gone. The PIF isn’t even content with just its ruination of the main event, either — previously announced new events across France, Singapore, and other countries alongside Vegas and Japan are soon to be bolstered by yet more shameless sportswashing in the EVO Locals initiative. Take a $1,000,000 cash injection for your grassroots local, don’t worry where the money came from, and certainly don’t think about what happens when the PIF gets bored of their little fighting game enterprise a few years down the line. 

But the beauty of fighting games is that, as mentioned, they’re a conversation. Not between you and EVO, not between you and Mohammed bin Salman. It’s between you and your opponent, whether they be sitting next to you on a plastic chair amidst the bustle of a local or chatting to you over an unstable Discord connection between rounds on Fightcade. 3rd Strike is alive and well thanks to its community keeping it alive, not thanks to investments in EVO. As long as you’re fighting a friend, or a stranger, and trying to read their parry habits mid-match, 3rd Strike is alive. 3rd Strike is parrying every hit of a fireball super without missing a beat and turning to your dumbfounded friend, an evil grin on your face. Hell, try to replicate the Daigo Parry and die trying, giggling about your attempt at mimicking a legend while far below the skill level required — there’s no other way to get better. And as the answer to that Reddit thread sarcastically replies, effectively highlighting the simple meaning found in choosing to keep going and fighting for the future when things seem hopeless: “What’s the point of living if we are all just going to die?”

Additional Sources:

• Sadamoto interview

• Supercombo System Page

• Moment 37

• Moment 38

• Splits

• Core-A SFV

• SF6 Daigo Parry

• Why attack?

• Khashoggi

• Rights

• EVO Locals

Ashley Schofield is a freelance critic, essayist and journalist, as well as the author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works for Lost In Cult.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 isn’t quite a visual novel, and isn’t a pure point-and-click adventure, either. It’s a graphic adventure, akin to many of the works of studios in the 80s and 90s like LucasArts and Riverhillsoft, where you control where your character goes as you explore and spend a whole lot of time clicking around and experimenting, but at the heart of it all is a narrative that unfolds in front of you. Hotel Dusk is more narrative-y than most, as its linearity makes it feel that much more like a visual novel, but rest assured this is a game loaded with fail states that asks you to be paying attention to more than just the personalities of its characters and their part in its central tale.

The New York Times negatively described Hotel Dusk as “unrelentingly linear” in a feature that contrasted it with Level-5’s Playstation 2 action RPG Rogue Galaxy, while going on to say that, “Rogue doesn’t try to do anything exceptional, and the result is entertaining but forgettable. Hotel Dusk is a more ambitious game, but that simply makes it a greater disappointment.” That’s at least half right — I haven’t thought about Rogue Galaxy nor seen anyone discuss it in years if not over a decade or more, but the “disappointment” with Hotel Dusk mostly seems to be with its adherence to the “novel” part of “visual novel” being a letdown given its tremendous art style. Hotel Dusk is linear, but so is every novel that isn’t part of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” line; do we begrudge those novels that do not look more like the video games that give the player some measure of narrative control in the same way? Given the excitement generated by the visuals, are we judging a book by its cover here?

The Nintendo DS helped to reinvigorate both the point-and-click adventure as well as visual novels and graphic adventures — the beauty of the stylus-based touch screen system was that it could replicate a mouse on a computer, which is also how this ended up being a portable system with credibly controlled 3D first-person shooters on it, too, not just originals like Dementium: The Ward that have since been brought to PC, but ports of the likes of popular existing series like Call of Duty, as well. The portable could also be held in multiple configurations, with a “book mode” that had you hold the dual-screen handheld sideways, in its taller configuration, like you would a book — the DS also had compilation games that were essentially meant to let you use it as an e-reader, like the does-what-it-says-on-the-box 100 Classic Books Collection, which included 100 public domain works on one cartridge, allowed you to listen to music through your DS while reading, and utilized the wi-fi capabilities of the system to download additional public domain works, as well.

Image credit: MobyGames

Nintendo was behind that collection, and was criticized for only releasing public domain works within it, as if using the DS as a way to get the kids into Shakespeare or Mark Twain or Moby-Dick was a bad thing, but the company did seem to react to the criticism of Hotel Dusk being linear like a book with its 2008 re-release of the game through its Touch! Generations line: the North American box art for that reissue slapped an enormous orange banner on top of the otherwise noir-styled box to display “A MYSTERY NOVEL” where all browsing at retail couldn’t miss it and have their expectations betrayed. Not even New York Times writers.

Sure, I’m being glib, but it’s worth pointing out that Japan and Europe didn’t get enormous caution signs slapped onto their re-releases of Hotel Dusk. Shouganai; c’est la vie; so it goes. At least North America received Hotel Dusk at all: the game’s sequel, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, released in Japan and Europe but not outside of those territories. One wonders if the “A MYSTERY NOVEL” gambit made things worse for Hotel Dusk rather than better, as far as positive attention goes. Before you argue otherwise, consider the state of literacy in the United States nearly two decades later.

Alright, mission accomplished, cynicism and depression levels are now where they need to be to relate to Kyle Hyde, the protagonist of Hotel Dusk. Hyde is an ex-detective from New York City who is currently helping out a connection he has with finding lost items while posing as a salesman. The company he works for is in sales, sure, but Hyde gets sent off on special assignments, too, like here at the Hotel Dusk where he is meant to retrieve some items for a client that were left in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, in 1979. Hyde’s traveling salesman role helps him with his larger goal, which is finding his former NYPD partner, whom you are introduced to in a flashback at the start of the game as Hyde shoots him.

Is Hyde angry at his partner, years later? Yes, and no. Spoilers abound, but, he believes that this man — Brian Bradley — had a reason for seemingly betraying Hyde by appearing to go rogue while undercover after having infiltrated a criminal organization, Nile, that focuses on stealing art and forgeries and the level of violence required to protect those revenue-generating avenues. And to hear what that reason is, he has to find him, but he disappeared after being shot. While staying at Hotel Dusk, however — in room 215, which supposedly grants wishes — Hyde begins to discover clues that suggest Bradley had stayed in the hotel at some point in the recent past… under the name “Kyle Hyde”. That’s about as subtle a sign for Hyde as the Touch! Generations rebrand art was for Hotel Dusk.

Why was Bradley here? How does Hotel Dusk connect to the events that led to Hyde’s — and Bradley’s — NYPD exits? How is it that an ex-con from Hyde’s days on the force is here, working at Hotel Dusk, and is he trustworthy now? Every guest you meet has secrets they are protecting, and a reason to be at the hotel, same as Hyde. And despite his rough exterior and prickly nature, Hyde is equipped with the interior of a softie, as well as a relentless dedication to unraveling mysteries. He’s not necessarily in this to help the people who have secrets to reveal or weights to be lifted from their shoulders, but he at least know what it’s like to harbor similar, and, though he wants to figure out his own business himself, can at least relate to the needs of these people, leading to his pushing and prodding and cajoling as needed in order to get what both they need and he needs, too.

Hyde is splendidly written; a noir-style detective, gruff and cynical, stuck amid a cast of believably written side characters in a world that, despite the claimed existence of a room that grants wishes, is grounded in reality — it’s more about the belief that it grants wishes than anything, about the hope that such a room a could exist, and what the ability to believe in it or disbelieve it says about a person. And each cast member is given just as much attention to detail as the game’s star, which should not be a surprise if you’re aware of the work of the game’s designer and scenario writer, Rika Suzuki. Back in the 1980s, Rika Suzuki rose to prominence in Japan for her work in the same roles originating the J.B. Harold series of graphic adventure games, starring a detective and, especially for the time, fleshed out, multilayered characters and scenarios to peel. Suzuki and others at Riverhillsoft, the studio behind J.B. Harold and more, left to form Cing in the late-90s, and eventually partnered with Nintendo on graphic adventure series like Another Code and Kyle Hyde.

Hotel Dusk not only took advantage of technological advancements over the decades to produce a gorgeously animated, eye-catching game with a pencil-sketch, rotoscoping art style from Taisuke Kanasaki, but also decades of honed craft from the pen of Suzuki. (The soundtrack, by Satoshi Okubo, is also fantastic.) There’s a bit of trial and error here, too, but the game also isn’t as rough in that regard as J.B. Harold was — that series is excellent, but it also isn’t about to convince anyone that dislikes having to do the correct thing in the correct order that they are missing out on adventure games. Hotel Dusk might not, either, since it still has that unrelenting linearity, but as the game is broken up into chapters and paced much better than one of the original pioneers of the graphic adventure genre, well, it’s easier to be unburdened by the scope of the puzzle laid out in front of you, even if in some ways it’s a larger one given it’s attached to a much longer game.

Here’s how Hotel Dusk plays. You control Kyle Hyde from a first-person view, either walking through hallways to your destination, or scoping out said destination once you’re there by looking around at various objects and people to analyze or talk to. Helpfully, Hotel Dusk lets you tell it if you’re left- or right-handed, so that if you’re left-handed and are more comfortable holding the stylus in that hand you aren’t also covering up the entire screen that you’re supposed to be able to see, and can have the touch screen also on the left side rather than the default right of book mode.

The magnifying glass allows you to take a closer look and interact with individual objects that you see, be they drawers or suitcases or toilets or doors or other things that don’t open and shut, like wads of cash or a pen or a glass of bourbon. You can see almost immediately how looking around in the game works, as the hotel lobby you first enter into has objects partially in frame that, upon walking toward them, can be interacted with to get a closer look — notably, a couch and coffee table, with objects on top of said table. There is also on on-screen slider while magnified that allows you to swivel the view further left or further right, which is sometimes necessary to “reach” an object and interact with it on the periphery, as each magnified zone is self-contained; parallel magnifiable zones have to be entered into individually, it isn’t a continual unit to be scrolled through like the standard game world.

Get used to phone calls in your hotel room from both Hyde’s boss and his administrative assistant, who acts as your first hint that Hyde isn’t quite as unrelentingly gruff as he projects. Image credit: MobyGames

Hotel Dusk utilizes a number of unique DS features for puzzles — even going so far as to use the fact the DS closes while powered on and stays powered on for one of them — and even tasks as mundane as note keeping. Hyde has a notebook that’s utilized for narrative purposes, but it’s also something you can take actual notes in, with the stylus acting as your pencil. Have a character ask you for a drink at the hotel bar at a specific time? Jot that down so you remember where you’re supposed to go later and don’t forget when you get to the chapter with that time frame.

That’s how the chapters are broken down: into time-specific segments. Hyde is spending a night at a hotel, and the story slowly unfolds over the course of that night. So, you get an hour here, a couple of hours there, and every inhabitant of the hotel moves around depending on what time it is, with new conversations and new objects to interact with or be able to get to in the first place appearing as time ticks forward, as well.

While the game’s narrative moves in one direction, you still have to be mindful of your dialogue choices: there are correct and incorrect ways to have a conversation with someone, especially someone you are trying to get to open up to you or to confess or to help you, so while it might be funny to make Hyde into an unrepentant jerk at all times, you should read the room. You can actually trigger a game over with the wrong conversation path on more than one occasion, and there are times where a yellow triangle appears that allows Kyle to interject and ask a follow-up, or even just mutter a thought to himself that could end up mattering or unlocks an additional bit of the dialogue tree.

Hotel Dusk is a game you have to see in motion to truly appreciate what’s going on here, visually. Image credit: MobyGames

That’s not the only way to achieve a game over — get caught breaking into the wrong place at the wrong time, or get caught red-handed with an item you should not have in your possession by the hotel’s manager and owner, and that’s that. The game isn’t particularly punishing in this regard, though, in the sense that too many game overs just locks you out of the best possible ending; if you’re continually saving your game as you progress, you won’t lose out on much time, and you should definitely aim for that since selecting the “Retry” option at a game over rather than loading a save counts as a continue and impacts the ending. Always be saving, this is a graphic adventure game.

At the end of each chapter, there’s a forced recap of events with a bit of a quiz to go over what you did and what you learned, highlighting the most important bits so you have time to chew on what you just played through. With some of the chapters a bit longer than others, it can be helpful, especially if you don’t sit and play through them all at once and took some breaks. If it’s annoying to you to have to do this after every chapter, here’s a little hint to help you out: the multiple choice answers are the same every single time, so you don’t have to guess or even pay much attention if you don’t want to engage with this part of the game. B-A-C-B-A. Every. Single. Time.

For the most part, specifics of this game’s story have been ignored here, but there’s a reason for that. Hotel Dusk really leans on the narrative heart of graphic adventure games, and the way this story comes together — the way the pieces all fit together over time — is the most fantastical part about it, but who cares? Coincidence after coincidence is fine, this isn’t meant to be a true, one-to-one reflection of reality, but like so many stories takes the liberties it has to and expects a certain level of suspension of disbelief to work. Kyle Hyde himself needs to suspend his disbelief to get to the point where he can admit there is something here worth digging into further, so why should it be any different for the person controlling his actions? It’s meant to be unbelievable, just like the room that grants wishes, but isn’t it better to want to believe, to see what lies down that road rather than the one paved with cynicism and little else?

The cast of characters is varied, with each engaging with Hyde in their own way — some friendly, some irascible, some obviously lying in ways you will want to figure out the truth behind in the same way Hyde does. You will feel yourself pulled in by the dialogue, by the twists and turns, subtle and less so — you will experience a mystery novel, in video game form, that also includes some puzzles and choices and exploration. It might not be pushing the boundaries of gameplay, but its ambition lies elsewhere, and nearly two decades later continues to impress.

The attention to detail in this game certainly screams that it was published by Nintendo, but some of the subject matter does not, at least for North American games of the time. Drinking? Murder? Cursing? Guns? A protagonist who is sometimes just kind of a dick? Much of that is just because non-Japanese regions weren’t familiar with the likes of Famicom Detective Club, however, and Nintendo likely saw a partnership with Cing and the DS as a way back to that particular genre and vibe, only this time on a worldwide scale rather than just regional. And while the Another Code and Kyle Hyde games weren’t massive sellers by any means, Nintendo did eventually end up releasing the two main Famicom Detective Club games on the Switch, remaking both Another Code games in one package for the same system, and coming out with Emio: The Smiling Man, the rare mature-rated title and a brand new Famicom Detective Club title, as well. Maybe there’s hope for a return to the adventures of Kyle Hyde at some point, after all.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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It’s kind of incredible how quickly Capcom became a significant piece of the arcade scene. The company originally started in 1979 as I.R.M. Corporation by Kenzi Sujimoto, and if you think that sounds similar to Irem, well, Sujimoto was also president of Irem at the time. One of I.R.M.’s subsidiaries was Japan Capsule Computers Co., which was both a manufacturer and distributor for electronic game machines, named that way to make it clear that the company wasn’t developing personal computers. You can see where the name Capcom eventually comes from there — it’s a portmanteau of Capsule and Computer.

Capcom’s first couple of arcade machines weren’t video games, but medal games, both released in 1983. Their first video game released in May of 1984 — the scrolling shooter Vulgus — and three others would follow that same year. There was SonSon, a combination platformer and shooting game, and Pirate Ship Higemaru, a maze game which took clear inspiration from Sega’s 1982 arcade game, Pengo. These games found some success in the arcades at the time of their release, with Vulgus a top-10 game in Japanese arcades per Game Machine in June and July of ‘84, and SonSon cracking the top 10 a couple of times as well before sliding into and then out of the top 20, but they weren’t certified hits with staying power.

In December, though, just before the end of 1984, Capcom released 1942 into arcades. And with that, it had truly arrived as an arcade developer. 1942 would debut at No. 4 in Game Machine’s rankings on January 1, 1985, and while it would slip out and back into the top five again and again in this stretch, it remained a top-10 arcade game until the October 15 rankings, which still had it at 11. It then reappeared in the top 10 the next month, and stuck in the top 20 until July 15 of ‘86, when it was still in the top 25. After releasing in December of 1984, it took until the mid-August rankings of 1986 for 1942 to drop from the top 25… and then it still reappeared within it another two times that year, and on another seven occasions in 1987 before finally dropping off the list for good. It was the fifth-highest grossing table game of 1986 in Japan, a full year after its initial release. Now that’s a run.

The title screen from 1942, as it appears in Capcom Arcade Stadium on the Switch/Switch 2.

And, while this was happening in arcades, Capcom decided to try its hand at the living room as well. A year after 1942 released in arcades, a port of it arrived on the Famicom in Japan, co-developed by Micronics, and released in North America in ‘86, as well. It became one of the system’s many million sellers, settling in alongside the likes of Bomberman, Adventure Island, Tiger-Heli, Hydlide, Gradius, Castlevania, and Metal Gear, and proved there was an appetite for Capcom outside of the arcade in the process. Pretty good for a game released within the first year of Capcom even developing video games.

Of course, Capcom had some outside help here that helped speed the process along. The designer of 1942 was Yoshiki Okamoto, who came over from Konami right at the time Capcom was planning to make its pivot from medal games to video games. Okamoto was behind two innovative shooting games for Konami in Time Pilot and Gyruss: the former is a multidirectional shooter that saw you traveling across different time periods, while the latter is a tube shooter where your ship moves around a perimeter in a circular path, and all of your shots are fired off toward the vanishing point at the center of the tube — avoid enemies and keep on firing as you move around this perimeter, with the moving stars making it look as if you’re flying through space.

Both of those games were critical and commercial arcade successes for Konami — Time Pilot more so — that saw ports to various home computers and consoles of the day, but that didn’t mean Okamoto’s job was safe. For one, he wasn’t even supposed to be making Time Pilot, per the man himself: he had been ordered to develop a driving game, but instead just pretended to when his superior was around while sending along code for a shooter to the rest of the team. In an archived interview with Video Game Spot, Okamoto revealed that his boss admitted he was right to ignore him to make Time Pilot because it ended up being such a success, but Okamoto didn’t get the credit for it in the end.

Then, Okamoto asked for a raise, but wasn’t satisfied with the size of the raise and threatened to quit over it, so instead of giving in further Konami fired him the next day. This is where it should be pointed out that Okamoto not only designed 1942 for Capcom a year later, helping to create a rival for attention for Konami in arcades and at home in the process, but that he would go on to serve as a hands-on producer and designer for both Final Fight and Street Fighter II in the early 90s, then shift into overseeing development for Capcom games in general before founding the internal development team Flagship, which often focused on scenarios and narrative in a co-development role with other studios and teams, and worked in this capacity for nearly a decade on multiple Resident Evils as well as handheld entries in both The Legend of Zelda series and Kirby in the aughts. Maybe you should have just paid the guy, Konami.

Not a more powerful shot, but a wider one. It makes it easier to leave your own shots where you expect enemies to be as they move around the screen.

Let’s talk 1942 itself, though. As Okamoto explained in a 1989 interview, 1942 was designed with the “Western market” in mind for Capcom for the first time, and was meant to be a game that would be “easy to get into,” which were both reasons for the World War II setting, and also why this Japanese-developed game starred an American fighter taking down Japanese aircraft in an adaptation of the Battle of Midway.

1942 was originally a table game, making it vertically oriented, and its setting helped to differentiate it from many shooters of the time that featured starry black backgrounds to represent space. It had vertical scrolling, too, with changing backgrounds and the player able to control the “Super Ace’s” movements not just horizontally, but up and down as well — that gave it some separation from the likes of Galaga and other fixed shooters of the time, and brought it more in line with the likes of the genre-shifting Xevious, from which very few shooters of the day were able to escape the gravity of after its release in 1983. However, Galaga was very much still on the mind of Okamoto while making 1942, even in this post-Xevious world — the enemy behaviors, with their dive-bombing toward the player and firing off shots that need to be dodged during that motion, resembles Galaga more than just a little bit. Some dive bomb directly at you, some act independently of your location but can get in your way through your own actions, and many change direction while others continue right off screen. Not a huge surprise there, given Galaga’s hold over the industry as well as Okamoto himself.

The game regularly takes place over open waters, but you will fly over various islands in the Pacific. Here, you see part of a cluster of red fighters, which when defeated will leave behind one of the game’s various power-ups and items.

There is also quite a bit of Galaga in the design of the game’s various shots. You don’t ever upgrade the power of your fighter, a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, with the power-ups you find in the game, all of which are earned by taking down an entire squad of red-colored fighters that don’t shoot at you but do fly in a pattern trying to get away from you in a hurry. Instead, what you upgrade is the width of your shot. One gives you a wider single shot, for instance, which makes it far more difficult for enemy craft to evade your fire even as you dart back and forth just given the size of it, and the other adds two smaller aircraft to your wing, creating what is basically a doubled-in-size shot for your fighter. Similar to how Galaga has you sacrifice a life by letting the enemy forces capture your ship and then rescue it back to double how many shots you’re firing at a time while also creating a larger target for foes, 1942 grows your fighter’s size and hitbox, but does so by adding one smaller one on each wing — you can take damage to one without losing the other, and it works in concert with the other shot upgrade, too.

One major difference, however, is that 1942 also features some larger aircraft. These larger planes can’t be taken down with a single shot like the rest, but instead, have a fixed number of shots that it takes to down them, regardless of the weapon you’re attacking them with. That shots don't become more powerful is fine in the context of these craft, as you get points per hit in addition to the kill score — why would you want to take them down faster it if meant you scored fewer points? There are what look like huge planes at first that are actually just medium-sized, flying in a pattern that loops in between the smaller craft coming in, and you need to down them before they go in order to get the 1,000-point bonus for defeating them. Then there are massive bomber-style planes, which fly up from the bottom of the screen — watch out, because you will die if they hit you — and fire off multiple rounds at once in multiple directions as they climb toward the top. These are worth multiple thousands of points for defeating them, and you also score for each hit before the kill. In addition, each large plane you destroy is worth more than the last one, so be sure to complete these kills in order to have it pay off both in the present and later as far as points go.

Shooting down more fighters is dangerous, but it pays off in terms of points with end-stage bonuses.

While 1942 predates the use of screen-clearing bombs in an STG, there is still an item in here that serves a similar-ish purpose, both in terms of gameplay and in scoring. You start with three “rolls,” which see your fighter perform a somersault to dodge incoming fire or an enemy fighter — just like you would press a bomb to clear the screen and avoid damage at the last second, these looping moves can save you. The thing is — just like with bombs — you are encouraged to learn how to play without ever having to use them, as you get bonus points at the end of the level for each roll remaining. For each unused loop, you get 1,000 points at the end of a stage, and you also pick up 1,000 points for acquiring another roll item when you’re already at the maximum of three. There are 32 stages in 1942, so, at 3,000 points per stage, that’s 96,000 bonus points right there over the course of the game just as a reward for not using them. Which isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things since you get 10,000,000 points as a bonus for clearing the game, but [takes a look at the online leaderboards for Capcom Arcade Stadium’s port of 1942] good luck joining the ranks of the few people who have done that on present-day hardware.

That being said, the decision to use the rolls or not use them is a matter of survival vs. scoring. Each time you choose not to use a roll, you’re choosing the possibility of scoring over further survival. At a high enough level of play, though, it’s survival that gets you the higher score! Still, it’s worth it to learn how to play without needing the rolls so that you are able to survive when you don’t have any, which, if you’re using them, could end up being far more often than not.

Speaking of survival vs. scoring, the major use of that longstanding STG motif is found most obviously in its tracking of the percentage of enemy craft that you down. It is often easier — especially with how late these fighters often shoot at you, and the fact they dive bomb you directly and then oftentimes loop back up again — to just… not attack a given fighter, because it would be dangerous to risk your life for all of 50 points. However, it’s not worth just 50 points in the end, thanks to 1942 tracking the percent of enemies destroyed by you. At the end of each stage, bonus points are awarded for that percentage: if you down under 50 percent of the enemy fighters, you get nothing, 50-59 percent awards 1,000 points, 60-69 percent 2,000 points, 70-79 percent is 3,000, 80-84 percent 4,000, 85-89 gets you 5,000, 90-94 percent is 10,000, 95-99 percent is 20,000, and, finally, if you destroy every enemy in a stage, you get 50,000 bonus points. You get extra lives at 20,000 points, 80,000 points, and every 80,000 points after that — being able to rack up a bonus 10,000 or 20,000 points every stage goes a long way towards making that happen, never mind if you manage to pull off a clean 100 percent.

Another upgrade adds additional smaller fighters to your wings, so you have an even wider shot radius than before.

So! It becomes worth the risk to put yourself in danger to destroy as many enemies as possible, since it will mean a higher score and more lives. That goes for the percentage scoring, but also for the sneaky green bonus fighters that come up from the bottom and quickly exit, which look like any other small green fighter except for in their movements, and are purposefully difficult and dangerous to reach but reward you with 5,000 points if you can both destroy them and collect the item they leave behind, itself often put in a precarious location for you. But living long enough to get that higher score and more lives is its own challenge — avoiding enemy fighters is going to be easier for you until you’re comfortable with their movements and patterns and tendencies, to the point you can react instinctively without having to think in order to avoid both a squad divebombing you and the bullets they fire, with the two regularly not heading in the same direction — 1942’s enemy fighters don’t shoot at where you are as much as where they expect you to move, which makes dodging bullets and dodging planes, well, dodgy. Again, with the Galaga comparisons.

And that’s the major challenge of 1942, as while the game doesn't predate boss fights in STG like it does bombs, it was still released before their inclusion was a given. This is one of the huge differences between this and 1942’s first sequel, 1943: The Battle of Midway, which introduces far more weapon types and a different weapon system, in addition to having you constantly downing these massive enemy naval vessels in addition to all the fighters and bombers in the air in every stage. 1942 is a simpler game in a number of ways, but “simpler” does not mean “boring,” either. It might not be the most advanced game in the series from a design perspective, but there is plenty here to satisfy score chasers 42 years after its original release, and it all comes down to learning how to dodge fire but not miss out on the enemies whose destruction will earn you massive end-stage bonuses while doing so.

There are still bosses, too, just not a constant presence like in 1943. There are four stages with a boss plane, Ayano, and these shoot far more bullets in larger numbers and spread than other planes you fight — here, more than anywhere, is a use for your remaining rolls and a reason to not use them just because you have them elsewhere, and winning these battles awards you with more points than anything besides the largest point bonuses at the end of a stage.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact 1942 had on Capcom. It was the first major hit for the company, both in arcades and on consoles, and launched a series that ended up with eight entries, the last of them a 2008 reimagining of 1942 subtitled “Joint Strike,” for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, available digitally, and 2010’s iOS game, 1942: First Strike. While 1942 didn’t set Capcom up for life — financial trouble would follow it around in the late-80s, in the days before the likes of Final Fight, Street Fighter II and onward, and Resident Evil would insure that this was no longer a concern — it did announce its arrival on the scene, and also made the company realize more was needed. As Okamoto explained while talking about Famicom games from Capcom, in a 1986 interview concerned with what had gone wrong with the system shortly before it took off worldwide and became the console we think of today:

While 1942 sold very well, as already mentioned, more would be expected from an audience that was already familiar with the games that were out there in the future. New experiences were needed, not straight ports — and, in fact, Capcom ended up changing some ports to the Famicom and NES from their arcade originals to the point that the home version was the superior one, such as in the case of another shooter, Legendary Wings, as well as Bionic Commando.

Now, of course, Capcom doesn’t just port over arcade games — in fact, its business is primarily centered around games released for consoles and computers. That initial familiarity with the place that Capcom ended up spending most of its time came out of 1942, however, and early in the company’s life. That’s quite the legacy for one simpler shooter.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Exalclaw’s Wallace Truesdale. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This story makes reference to instances of sexual assault within the game.

“Art should always be harder. You should pull it out with some pain. It should cost you something to produce art. Otherwise, it ain’t art. It’s mediocrity.” – Harlan Ellison in a May 1995 interview with Interactive Entertainment CD-ROM magazine

1995’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, developed first at Cyberdreams before being shifted to The Dreamers Guild, carries a peculiar burden compared to point-and-clicks both then and now. As an adaptation of one of the most famous short stories ever — with the original author Harlan Ellison co-designing the game, writing all of its initial dialogue, and voicing the sadistic supercomputer AM himself no less — it can carry expectations not so dissimilar from a child whose parents spent decades on magazine covers and billboards before their birth. How would the game capture the terror of the original story, if at all? How will it translate a short story that can be read in one sitting into a hours-long experience? Could the game be good enough to become the preferred way of meeting AM and his human stress balls? 

It’s through both reading the story again and playing the game for the first time did a few answers reveal themselves to me: while still heavy on the soul, it doesn’t capture the terror completely; it explores the margins of the story in ways that maintain a certain cynicism but make room for a more optimistic outlook; and no, the short story is still the better way to meet AM, and I’d bet Harlan Ellison would agree with me. 

Before diving into any story details, the mindset Ellison was in when developing the short story is noteworthy. Originally published in a March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, the writing process is characterized by Ellison in his short story collection, published in April 1967 and also titled I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, as one of pain. In a prelude to the short story, he describes how, after meeting “this killer shark in February ‘66”  and spending “forty-five days getting the inside of [his] skull scoured by napalm”, he was making a slow recovery. He follows this up with, “the Ellison turns the pain into fiction in the storyteller’s alchemy, and the value of the moments in that special place of anguish comes out as sometimes stories.” The collection’s eponymous tale is one such story. Let’s also not forget the world around Ellison at this time — one that was dominated by paranoia, violence, surveillance, and fears of the apocalypse for reasons including but not limited to the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and, relevant to Ellison given his time in Hollywood in the 1960s, the Hays Code. With all this in mind, it becomes easier to see how one comes up with the terrible fate that befalls the five humans — Ted, Ellen, Ben, Gorrister, and Nimdok — that AM has chosen to live eternally in its Hell.

While I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’s premise precedes itself nowadays, with millions having watched a less-torturous version of it fervently with each new episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, some of the original story’s details can get left behind. AM is not simply some artificial intelligence that went rogue. It is a supercomputer that was explicitly built with blood and carnage in mind, originally with different versions of it in the USA, Russia, and China. AM had the directive to find the most efficient way to win after the Cold War turned, in Ellison’s story, into an increasingly complex World War 3. Then, one day, the war machine gained sentience, linked all its separate identities, and decided to wipe the world of the bipedal idiots who wasted their intelligence ripping each other apart and creating abominations like AM. His genocide of the human race is better thought of as a natural endpoint of his programming, not a bug.

Amid his slaughter, AM saved the aforementioned five people out of billions only to make them wish they had died with the rest. For over a century, these five people have been twisted, frozen, morphed, starved, stabbed, and everything else within the imagination of a supercomputer with bottomless cruelty and an ability to make people virtually (but not completely) immortal. To this day, the sheer sadism and apathy on display is one of the most effective aspects of Ellison’s story. There is no bright side. There is no letting up. It is simply the reality of waking up each day — if AM lets you sleep — and knowing the only reason you are alive is to experience excruciating pain at another’s whim.

This is one of the sharpest contrasts between the short story and the point-and-click adventure. The game has players adopt the role of each character and solve puzzles within their given level. Each level can either end in failure, meaning AM sends you back to the character select menu, or one version of success, which always ends with AM putting the character into a torture device for spoiling his fun. While the environments — five visually captivating settings for each character that include but are not limited to a forest where vines are wires and fruits have metal seeds, a castle harboring angels and demons, and a Nazi concentration camp — are far from most people’s idea of a picnic, the incessant dread and misery from the story isn’t as all-encompassing.

The game’s horror edge started to dull when I first saw other people besides the five AM saved for torture. The presence of other people tends to undermine the original story’s isolated nature. Knowing that this all-powerful entity gave such pointed attention to five unassuming humans, digging into their minds until he found what made them in particular scream, made their plight more terrifying. They were not special, just chosen. It’s the most extreme version of being unlucky, of life’s ability to throw you a tragedy for no other reason than you were in the line of fire. In a weird way, it makes the story skin-crawlingly tangible. Anyone can be unlucky, which means it could just as easily be you or me below the Earth’s surface begging for mercy, stuck together mostly to not go completely insane. More bodies makes luck, and that fear of being on its bad side, less of a factor.

Then, there’s the voice acting. Harlan Ellison actually plays AM quite well. Most of his dialogue sounds like a man taunting you with barely contained malice. There’s an almost bored contour to his acting, but not in a half-assed sense. Rather, he’s already impatient to subject his toys to a fresh torture. It’s everyone else who bleeds the scare factor half the time they open their mouths. It’s not that the performances are phoned in. Instead, it feels like they got directions more fitting for an R-rated Scooby-Doo! episode. Many scenes still get the fear each character feels across, but there’s some oomph lost in hearing it alongside the “oh, what’s this?” lines and other stray observations characteristic of point-and-click games. The performances give each character more personality than they ever had in the short story — another choice that will be explored later — but it makes a disturbing setting that made me want to vomit the first time I read it easier to swallow. I kind of miss the bile.

Despite my misgivings, I don’t say all this to call I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream a bad game. However, while undoubtedly interesting, I’m unsure if it’s a good one either. It is a frequently frustrating experience, something that Ellison gleefully intended, and would’ve been incredibly unpleasant for me to finish today without the hard work of guide writers. Many of the puzzles are fun brain teasers that can be solved on a first or second go around, but there are more than enough instances where a player will bang their head against a wall (i.e. click on every option possible, which will also bite you in the ass in this game if you’re not careful and want better endings) until something budges. Luckily, the writing itself is still sharp and more than enough to propel players through the experience.

The real draw of the game is that it utilizes AM’s powers as an almost-god to create elaborate sets that tackle moral dilemmas. From genocide to eugenics to sexual assault, there’s a slew of scenarios that demand the player interrogate not just clues to the next puzzle pieces, but the spectrum of evil and how to face it. It’s never asking the player what’s right or wrong, but instead what does justice look like? What does redemption mean? What solace is there to be found in a post-apocalypse where hope is often given just to be ripped away? It’s a double-edged tactic — in ensuring players have the space to breathe, to solve puzzles and wonder how humanity could ever do this atrocity or that, it loses the suffocating element that makes the original story a gripping horror that speaks to a moment in time where the world was teetering on a nuclear knife’s edge. It’s not necessarily a straightforward loss of quality, but more a rearrangement of narrative priorities. With that in mind, why adapt the story like this then?

One answer might be found in its handling of the characters. To say that they get a face lift might be the understatement of 1995. In the short story, the backgrounds of AM’s playthings are incredibly sparse. There’s a few things that are known for sure. The mutilated Benny is gay and had a career as a college professor. Gorrister, the “peace marcher” and “conscientious objector”, may have been involved in activism. Ellen is both the sole woman and only Black person. But honestly, everything about the past is treated as secondary. The five miserable lumps of flesh were more defined by their relationships with each other and AM than anything in their histories. The game couldn’t diverge more in this respect. An essay could be written per character for how they change — Nimdok, who was little more than the broken man AM sent alone into the dark for eerily long periods of time, becomes one of humanity’s worst offenders as a Jewish surgeon who helped the Nazis, and Ellen’s level highlights the extremes of AM’s depravity while her backstory may reveal Ellison as too eager to punish the sole woman with sexual violence  — but let’s focus on Ted to illustrate the larger point.

In the original story, Ted was the protagonist whom the reader follows from a first person POV, whereas in the game he’s just one of five perspectives that the player adopts from the third person. In print, the first-person POV is well-utilized to show how AM gets into people’s minds. Ted, the youngest of the five who makes the ultimate sacrifice by killing almost everyone else (Ellen, following Ted’s lead, kills Nimdok) and staying behind with AM, is convinced that everyone hates him for the whole story. He feels like he must be on guard around them. He believes AM has affected him the least and didn’t mess with his mind like the others, only to go back on that later when AM literally speaks in his head. Ted also has a massive hate-boner for Ellen, all while she’s been “servicing” him and the other men during their imprisonment, and can barely contain his resentment for her. Ted admits that Ellen said she doesn’t enjoy it, but he’s convinced she has it easier since she has the option of multiple men to fuck at the end of the world. All in all, Ted in the original story is an unreliable narrator who was mostly a jerk, incredibly paranoid either due to decades of torture and/or AM messing with his mind, and bites the world’s biggest bullet by staying behind with the Devil.

There are signs of this Ted in the point-and-click game, especially the paranoia, but he often feels like a completely different person. The majority of his level takes place in a magical castle where he finds Ellen, now a woman he’s deeply in love with and seemingly couldn’t be tortured to say something negative about, suffering and bedridden from a curse cast upon her by an evil stepmother. In line with the fairy tale of it all, Ellen tasks Ted with finding a magic mirror that has helped fend off Ellen’s witch-y warden so she can lift the spell and die in peace. It’s unclear if it’s a fake Ellen or not, as logic, matter, and time are suggestions when it comes to AM, but Ted treats her like she’s real. Over the course of this mini-journey, Ted meets not only celestial beings but also women who throw themselves at him. Twice does Ted receive an offer from others in the castle to get crucial information if he bumps uglies with them, twice does Ted have the option to say yes and hop in the sack or say no and loudly reaffirm he only cares for Ellen. While I chose the latter both times, the existence of options makes the whole chivalrous affair feel like an attempt to redeem the Ted I knew. 

That’s what’s at the crux of so many changes in this game versus the story: redemption. A way to reclaim some small bit of hope or personal salvation, even for just a moment, in Hell. For Ted, he’s gone from a jackass who actively maligned the one woman who, arguably, couldn’t have found herself in a worst situation due to his biases, to a discount knight-in-shining-armor who, while tempted by flesh, ultimately risks his life to give a woman he loves peace. Despite AM throwing Ted and every other victim into another torture device after their journeys, they were able to find a way to get one over on the bastard by becoming better versions of themselves. 

The game further supports this reading given how it signals progression within levels: inside the square giving a close-up snapshot of a character’s face, the background increasingly turns green with each action that builds, as the manual puts it, “the character’s self-esteem.” Playing into their flaws keeps the background black and often leads to premature conclusions. This idea of redemption is also bolstered by the game’s multiple endings. Most aren’t pleasant and involve meeting a similar gelatinous fate like Ted in the short story, yet one conclusion is hopeful and even dares to dream of an Earth that’s hospitable again post-AM should you make all the right decisions. It is almost impossible to get this ending on a first try given how complex it is, requiring players to make many specific decisions throughout the entire game, but its mere existence fills the game with more hope than the original story ever had. 

At first, I wondered if Harlan Ellison himself, almost 30 years removed from the head space and physical time he first cooked up the nightmare AM when the game was published, simply wanted to give his past self or returning readers some comfort in this reimagining. Maybe, with time, he thought his story too harsh, too cynical, and that’s where this emphasis on betterment emerged. However, if the interview he did with Interactive Entertainment CD-ROM magazine in May 1995 is any indication, he might laugh at me for that initial theory. It’s clear that Ellison didn’t intend on making I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream easier to swallow. When he’s not outright mocking games (he calls Wolfenstein, presumably id’s 1992 release, “certifiably demented”) and deeming them a waste of time, Ellison declares his intent was to shock with the themes and ideas in the game. With the ability to explore more past the original work’s relatively small scope, he wanted a game that did more than what he perceived the space interested in at the time; a game that explored the human condition, taught ethics, and encouraged players to act ethically.

With his candor in mind, I’m left thinking the story lost some of its initial horror and shock more as a consequence of Ellison’s unfamiliarity with games. In Issue 225 of Game Informer which featured a piece about the game by Jeff Cork, then-Cyberdream developer David Mullich even mentions how he had to explain certain medium conventions to the author. Independent of that, the aforementioned interview shows Ellison thought very little of games for their distractive quality, while unabashedly calling the printed word “the perfect medium” and books “the perfect cassette.” He even goes as far as to say books are “the real interactive medium.” So, at least when the game was developed, Ellison was not the kind of a man to busy himself with thinking about how games could capture a similar vibe to his short story independent of text. He leaves little room for interpretation in his stance — the word trumped all, everything else made people sloppier. It makes sense that this mindset would lead to a game where the subject matter does the heavy lifting when it comes to making someone squirm in their seat.

The one thing known for sure is what kind of impact he wanted the game to have. At the end of the interview, Ellison says “it would be my delight if this game set a trend and all of the arcade bang bang games that turned kids into pistol packin’ poppas and mommas were subsumed into games like this in which ethical considerations, and using your brains, and unraveling puzzles became the modus operandi. It would be my pleasure if that was it. I don’t think it’ll happen. I think you like being diverted too much.” My thoughts on that entire sentence could also be another essay, but as it pertains to the earlier question of the purpose behind adapting I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream this way, Ellison gives another answer. He wanted players not just to think and feel. He wanted to direct those faculties toward investigating what it means to be human and how to be a better one. He was cynical about people’s ability to do so, but I wouldn’t accuse him of not caring and wanting others to care too.

I may prefer I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream as a short story, and Ellison may have even preferred I read it before I play it (if not skip playing it at all, he really did not like video games), but the game isn’t a failure quality-wise. It pokes and prods at the mind in ways that consistently frustrate, but it never feels out of step with the message it wants to get across. Instead of stewing in the paranoia and abject terror contained in a few well-placed words, the game broadens the conversation and asks players to stroll through the worst of humanity. It makes the case that only by taking that ugliness head-on can one find the potential to be more, to be better.

Additional Sources:

• Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" interview (https://youtu.be/9dBap0UfQ_U?si=rs9p40U-ebXhnY1r)

• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, 1967, published by pyramid books, accessed through Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ihavenomouthimus0000harl/page/20/mode/2up) 

• Game Informer Issue 225 pg 96-99, published January 2012 (https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/b4b07a6d-17c9-4e9c-ab32-3e7cd1470804)

Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and soft cookies. He runs the site Exalclaw and has written for other publications like Stop Caring, Gamers with Glasses, Mothership, and more. You can usually find him hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

If you ask Tomohiro Nishikado, the first-ever original Japanese video game was 1973’s Soccer. And you could ask Nishikado — or look at his career history on his website — since he was the one who developed it for Taito, and did so at a time when Pong clones were what went to market. Not the first Japanese-developed video game, no — not even the first for Taito, where Nishikado worked, as that was Pong clone Elepong — but original work? Soccer released in November of 1973, the same month as a few other Taito releases like Pro Hockey, Astro Race, and another Nishikado joint in Davis Cup, but it was finished before the rest. Hence Nishikado’s claim to fame. Well, one of them — the man did create Space Invaders and all.

Whether Soccer actually was first — there is some debate on the subject — what is known for sure is that it wasn’t a direct Pong clone, but it was a variant on the theme, at least, as many video games of the day were (including more than one other title by Nishikado, such as TV Basketball, which was the first-ever game to use character sprites to represent humans — hey look another claim to fame). It used a green background to represent the pitch rather than Pong’s black, and you could control both a goalkeeper and a forward instead of just the singular paddle, giving you someone to protect the goal and another player to attempt to score with, changing the nature of the angle- and physics-based game. It looks an awful lot like Pong still, but hey, Galaxian wasn’t Space Invaders even if they had some base similarities, you know? At least there was some iteration here, which helps move things forward.

Image credit: International Arcade Museum

This was not Taito’s first foray into association soccer, however, despite its potential other firsts. In 1967, Taito released the electro-mechanical arcade game, Crown Soccer Special. It looked like a pinball table, but was actually a head-to-head game with goals at each end and pinball-style obstacles in the middle of the “pitch”. This table released in Taito’s first year of operation in this space; soccer was a pillar for Taito from the start, but as the company found success in other genres and moved away from the electro-mechanical and Pong-variant worlds, that interest in and focus on soccer waned.

Taito didn’t bail on soccer forever, though. In 1986, Kick and Run released in arcades, and then was later ported to the Famicom Disk System in ‘88. This was absolutely not a game you could confuse for Pong: the pitch looked like it should, with lines drawn on the field where they should be, and the 22 players were dressed in kits, with a score bug and timer shown on-screen, as well. Soccer that looked like soccer, from an overhead view! And there was a kick pedal in the arcade machine, too, so you could get your feet involved while playing. Another fun note: since this game released in 1986, a bootleg version hit arcades with the title of “Mexico 86,” since the 1986 World Cup was held there.

Taito had tried electromechanical soccer. Its first original game — maybe the first original Japanese game — had been a Pong-as-soccer variant. Taito had gone a more realistic route in arcades over a decade later, with an 11v11 setup and a kick pedal, to boot. For its next attempt, Taito would forego the realism and go for the goofy. That was Football Champ.

Football Champ, aka European Football Champ, aka Hat Trick Hero

While Football Champ retained the horizontal, overhead viewpoint of Kick and Run, as well as the full slate of players out on the field, things were very different this time. There was an emphasis on violence, for one. This wasn’t a proto-Blitz sports title, by any means, but Football Champ is played fast and loose. So long as the ref doesn’t catch you, you can get away with some serious fouls. Punch a guy in the face or the back of the head, it’s fine. Slide tackle to your heart’s content. Pull at a jersey to hold a player and slow them down. Do your best Bryan Danielson impression and Busaiku Knee your opponents — even if you don’t know offhand what that is, you at least realize from the name that it ain’t soccer. It’s all good here, though, if the ref isn’t watching. And because of the way things work with the official — there is just one, for starters, and he does not run as fast as your players — you can make it so the ref isn’t watching fairly regularly.

Outrun the ref by moving across the pitch quicker than he can catch up. Or, just knock the ref over, whoops, it’ll take some time for him to get up. It’s not soccer as professional wrestling, despite the Danielson namedrop, but it’s not not soccer as professional wrestling. If the ref does see you with a straight shot to the face or a knee to the back, however, you will be carded. A yellow for the first two, then a red, then three more yellows before next red, then another three before the final red. You are very unlikely to receive more than a single yellow in a match unless you are very bad at hiding your misdeeds, though.

The reason for that, beyond that it is, again, a simple matter to outrun the stout little referee, is because these matches are short. You have two minutes to score some goals, and if you either play to a draw or lose, you get another chance to play the same team, though, it will of course cost you another credit to attempt it. If you somehow rack up 11 fouls in sight of the referee in two minutes, then you weren’t trying to do anything else with that time. You’ll need to score at least once, so save a few precious seconds for attempts at that.

Before you can start playing in a match, though, you have to pick a team. You can select from a group of eight international squads: Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain. That’s in North America, at least. Hat Trick Hero, the Japanese release of Football Champ, swaps in Japan and the United States in place of France and Spain; Euro Football Champ, to no one’s surprise, remains as Eurocentric as possible in its team options.

After you pick a team, you have to choose one of four stars to be your main player. You can control anyone on the pitch on offense and defense by cycling between them and taking control of whichever one has the ball at a given time, but this player — whose face shows up on your screen when in possession of the ball instead of just their number — serves a particular purpose: they can fire a special shot to score a goal when there are 30 seconds or fewer left on the clock, and the game is tied or you are down by a single goal. It’s not quite that simple, as each of the four player correspond to different positions on the field and therefore different places where they can pull off this Super Shot, but you can either figure these locations out by trial and error, or check out a YouTube video to see them in action and go from there.

Like this one, which breaks down the where and what of the various Super Shots, all of which strike a keeper so hard that they are sent back through the net and into the walls behind it. Football Champ is not serious business, but that’s what makes it work.

It’s very easy to play Football Champ without knowing these Super Shots exist because you’re never in the right place at the right time with the right player, but once you do know, you suddenly have something to strive for. And, in conjunction with the running knees and the punching, the Super Shots make for a hilarious game with a friend, where you are trying not to get caught inflicting cartoonish violence on the opposition whenever they are nearing a Super Shot spot, or really anywhere that will give them a chance to score. See? It’s really important to not get caught even if the penalty for doing so is fairly limited.

Football Champ is loaded with character. The faces of every team manager are horrid in their own little way, with near-permanent smugness plastered on, only occasionally replaced with a purer joy after a goal or despair at having given one up. The players you can select as captains, well, they aren’t exactly the super-attractive visages you’re used to seeing from your professional footballers. You can knock over a cameraman with an errant kick to the left or right of the goal, and you get to watch them just topple over as the whistle blows. There has to be a safer way to take photos, but then again, there is probably a safer way to play soccer than the one that Football Champ espouses.

The single-player gives you plenty to do, as Football Champ gets difficult in a hurry given the limited time you have to outscore your opponent. You have to defeat the seven other teams, in order, and the difficulty increases with each victory. In addition, the game pays attention to when you score a hat trick with a single player — that’s three goals — and ups the difficulty following one of those, as well. Again, there is no extra time or shootout, just two minutes to be ahead in a very, very arcade-style soccer game, or else you have to try again.

Okay but did you get the shot?

While the teams all play similarly and there are no real players within, the various squads are tiered in terms of the difficulty you will face them at. Spain and France (or Japan and the United States) are basically your warm-up opponents to start, then Brazil or the Netherlands. Once those two are both taken care of, it’s one of England or Italy first and the other second, then you have to down Argentina and Germany in whatever order the game presents them in. Whichever team you play isn’t part of that, of course, but the relative order is similar each time through the game, even if within a two-team tier that can swap on each run.

The easiest way to get through Germany and Argentina? Play as one of them so that you don’t have to handle both. The game truly gets difficult at that point, but at least in the present, when feeding a cabinet quarters isn’t a necessity in order to play Football Champ, you can lose some of the frustration and just keep at it until you’re a Super Shot machine, or at least capable of setting up kicks that will have the keeper out of position and unable to defend. Despite the later difficulty, Football Champ is very simple to pick up and play, since defense can be a matter of kneeing a guy in the back from behind when the ref isn’t around, and offense is as simple as pressing one button for a pass and another for a shot. Learn when to do which, and you’ll be moving the ball up the pitch and toward a perspiring keeper in no time.

Football Champ has been re-released on a couple of occasions since 1990. First as part of Taito’s multi-release collection in the aughts for the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Windows, in the second of two volumes. The more recent and more modern release is through Hamster’s Arcade Archives on the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch, with those games available as well on the Playstation 5 and Switch 2. This one gets you online leaderboards, all kinds of options for difficulty, button mapping, display, and more, as well as access to both Football Champ and the Japanese release, Hat Trick Hero. There is, as per usual for Hamster’s series, also a score specifically for High Score which follows a set of specific rules and doesn’t allow you to pause while playing — just like in the arcade! — as well as a Caravan mode.

There’s more Football Champ than ever before, if you want to think of it that way, but there was plenty of it the first time around, too. This game is difficult but rewarding, a complete goof that’s also serious in the right ways, because it might joke around but doesn’t treat soccer like the sport itself is a joke. Taito made space for sports games like this one from the beginning, and you should, too.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Madeline Blondeau. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

In 1991, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were poised for battle.

The much-mythologized console wars were in their infancy, as Sega of America positioned itself to usurp Mario’s cap. On the sidelines, however, the Nintendo Entertainment System enjoyed a slow sunset period with a steady stream of new releases. But NES owning readers of Nintendo Power couldn’t believe every word of their usual trusty source on new releases during this period. A list of known canceled games for the platform shows many of these titles were snuffed out sometime between 1990 and 1993 as developers and publishers shifted focus to newer consoles. Players could get excited for months over screenshots and preview coverage, only for the game to never see the light of day.

One such game is Bio Force Ape. Under development at one point as Crack Buster(!) Bio Force Ape is centered on Naughty, the pet chimp of a scientist and his daughter. The game was canceled by Seta in 1992, despite being mostly finished and beatable; there was never a public reason given for its cancellation. In America, the only physical traces of it are two issues of Nintendo Power — a brief tease with screenshots in August 1991, followed by this three-sentence mention of its cancellation in the Gossip Galore section of Pak Watch near the back of the April 1992 issue:

Searching for the title in Katakana reveals that it also showed up in the May 2, 1991 issue of Famicom Tsūshin, slated for an August release. However, it later shows up in the December issue of Famicom Computer Magazine (aka Famimaga) as an upcoming title. The write-up here plays up the pro wrestling aspect quite a bit — the game is described as “action using professional wrestling techniques,” and the fixed sport is mentioned several times. Both spreads show off quite a few screenshots, giving readers a look at what essentially resembles the finished game.

These appearances of Bio Force Ape are the most detail the public got about the game for almost 15 years. Until October 2005, when Digital Press user PaulB812 uploaded a photograph of a NES cartridge with a plain label. It read, “BIO FORCE APE; 6/91; Property of SETA INC.” Though users were quick to congratulate him on the find, subsequent uploads took a strange turn. They showcased bizarre, almost eerie cutscenes and even stranger monster designs than previously shown. Naughty was revealed to have super-powered flatulence “so powerful it messes up the game’s graphics.”

One cutscene showed a yellow blob with beady red eyes taunting the player — “JA I AM MADE OF DUR BUTTER UND YOU ARE WORTH 2K MONIES.” Naughty responds in the next frame by punching the creature in the face as he yells, “EAT COMMUNISM!!!”

The forum had become bedlam. Some users stressed that PaulB812 should dump the game for the sake of preservation. Others argued that dumping the cartridge would decrease its value. Users bickered among themselves as screenshots continued to roll in, until one last post. Overwhelmed by the fevered debate, PaulB812 smashed the cartridge to bits and uploaded the gore to the forums.

“Having seen the anger that revealing this game's existence has caused, I have decided to destroy the cartridge,” read the post. “It is too powerful like that ring some m****ts had to throw in a volcano. Please everyone calm down now. It was just a game.”

By this point, though, most users realized they’d been had by an elaborate prank. By the 11^th page of replies, posters were calling for the thread to be locked. Eventually, PaulB812 was revealed to be a forum regular having a laugh, and order was as restored as it can be on a gaming forum. That was the end — at least, it seemed to be.

But in 2010, the unthinkable happened – a prototype Famicom cartridge for the actual, factual Bio Force Ape surfaced on a Yahoo! Japan auction. Future Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi was quick to action. He rallied money from both friends and forum members, then placed a bid; the auction ended at $2,700 USD. Within the year, the game had been dumped by retro gaming fixture Chris Covell, with a complete playthrough uploaded on YouTube by Cifaldi and the ROM hosted on Lost Levels. For just $700 north of “2K monies,” Bio Force Ape had been saved.

That’s no regular ape.

Now anybody can play it for free. It takes about 30 minutes to beat, and showcases what NES developers were capable of doing with the platform near the end of its life cycle. There were still untapped depths to the system, apparent from the moment the game boots up. Through a short animation on the title screen, we see Naughty’s family kidnapped by a green-clad mafioso type, complete with zoot suit and fedora. He stows them away in his car, then kicks Naughty to the curb and leaves him to his own devices. Big mistake — as fate would have it, Naughty has a vial of a chemical concoction in his pocket on hand.

The little guy takes one big sip, then hulks out into what can only be described as “if Ultimate Warrior was an ape.” Naughty’s got more moves than Warrior ever did, too. Through three levels, he delivers crushing suplexes, giant swings, and piledrivers that would make the pumped-up primate prime main roster material at any respectable wrestling promotion. The unique animations for these moves are tied to each enemy, and are more fluid than many actual wrestling games on the NES or Famicom.

Which is to say: Ape is a technically impressive NES game. Its momentum-based gameplay is in conversation with higher-powered contemporaries like Sonic The Hedgehog. More so than its enduring spiky mascot, the classic Sega platformer was formative in popularizing slopes and kinetic movement mechanics in gaming. While Ape is obviously not on that same level of polish or technical achievement, the dash-to-sprint flow of Naughty’s movement down semi-round slopes is still commendable for a system in its twilight years. It’s easy to see how the game got so far in development – it’s just a really good looking title, one that feels great and offers an almost unparalleled degree of speed from the platform.

The graps vibes permeate all of Bio Force Ape’s combat and much of its character looks.

Combat is straightforward but flighty, as players jam the punch button until Naughty lifts a foe and tosses him out of sight. It’s touchy but overall uncomplicated — the focus here is on that kinetic movement, and the combat reflects that. Dash to top speed, bash a foe’s brains in, show him your moves, keep grooving. Most sections of the three levels revolve around platforming and movement challenges, with a few enemies peppered in for flavor. Navigating the busy, sprawling levels is one of the most satisfying aesthetic aspects of the game. Dingy steel girders of a multi-story maze, deadly crushers slicked in brick red, a striking city skyline with no less than three Empire State Buildings… these are some of the most memorable elements of Bio Force Ape, more so than the actual gameplay.

That said, the second level is all killer, no filler when it comes to fisticuffs. Naughty is hurdled between arenas by rail, three years before Donkey Kong cornered the market on apes in mine carts. It makes impressive work of slopes, with steep hills that take the player to blistering speeds between rooms. In each area, the player has to make the most of the minimal combat and do away with the game’s strange enemies. This gives the quirky character designs and detailed animations of Bio Force Ape their time to shine outside the context of platforming challenge, which is only a good thing. It’s a rogue’s gallery of certified weirdos — musclebound bee-human hybrids and killer kangas with humanoid upper halves. My personal favorite is a man-alligator, with a human face perched atop the reptile’s rear end. Tail stuck in the air, it walks on open jaws, which it also leaps forwards with to attack Naughty. It’s akin to the alligator girl from Tokyo Gore Police, only instead of a cackling murderous sexpot, a burly 8-bit beefcake.

The most obvious lack of polish is in the final level. It’s a complicated, sometimes frustrating level built around a series of transporters. Players warp back and forth across the level, with certain platforms later in the area capable of sending them back to the very beginning. Once the player has bested the level, they come face to face with the green goon who kidnapped Naughty’s family. In a twist, he downs a chemical concoction of his own and transforms into a darker clone of Naughty. But there’s no fight in this sequence — the player can simply walk up to the final enemy, punch him once, and finish the game. After this, the family is reunited with their super-powered simian son in a cute ending sequence.

Naughty’s animations for attacking and for being attacked show off the level of detail put into this unreleased game.

15 years later, Bio Force Ape has been playable for about as long as it was missing in action. Yet even with the game found, preserved, dumped — and even reproduced as a physical copy — there’s still so little we ultimately know about. Most egregiously, the actual developers of Bio Force Ape are still unknown. Though the game is credited to Seta Co., LTD, most of Seta’s output was outsourced to other developers. This included notable releases like The Wizard of Oz (Manley & Associates) and Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Winky Soft), among many others. Of course, it’s not impossible, as Seta would develop and publish the ambitious SNES horror platformer Nosferatu just two years later.

The game is mentioned, in fact, in that same 1992 Nintendo Power paragraph about Seta:

Is it possible that Bio Force Ape — another technically advanced game built around complex character animations — was shelved in favor of the more expensive title on the more current platform? Regardless of whether or not it was developed in-house, that explanation would make some sense. At the very least, it does appear that these games could have been in development simultaneously at one point. There’s nothing concrete, of course, to make this theory anything more than an educated guess.

My strongest (but still tenuous!) hunch about Bio Force Ape, though, lies in its eye-catching promotional art. Its number of subjects, dynamic action poses, texture detailing, and color palette evoke the work of Wizardry illustrator Jun Suemi. Suemi’s early 80s work on action movie posters and experience with strange monsters makes him a strong contender. From a compositional standpoint, it bears passing resemblance to his cover for Seiken Acho. The Guin Saga artist, too, worked with Seta through his contributions to Nosferatu. Is there a chance this is a Suemi piece, produced before Nosferatu entered development or within the same time frame?

After poring over Gen and Haku – two art books which cover Suemi’s career from this era – and several online galleries, it’s nowhere to be found. While this likely debunks my theory, it would also make sense that Suemi didn’t want to include work from a scrapped project. There’s also the fact that Suemi has a number of speculated, but several “to be confirmed” contributions to games as per VG Densetsu. Is there a chance it is one of his pieces, then? Maybe! Probably not, though. Because even then, this hinges on the idea that the game was a Seta in-house project, not one of their many outsourced titles, based on a loose connection to an unrelated game for a different platform! It seems improbable, but not impossible.

Rather than mobs, like a belt-scrolling beat ‘em up, there are more 1v1 fights in this wrestling-inspired action game.

But even the closest guesses about Bio Force Ape are just that: guesses. Until such a time that a developer comes forward and claims ownership, or any Japanese employees of Seta from around this period give an interview, a shroud of mystery will likely remain over the title. The hunt to prove its existence was, perhaps, the most anyone ever cared about Ape outside of the people who worked on it. Tucked away in forums and on blogs is a compelling “lost media hunt” story, woven several years before those took on the wider prevalence they have since. Partly because of this timing, partly due to the game’s overall lack of cultural impact, Ape is not a commonly remembered title among retro game among enthusiasts.

“I think the main reason Bio Force Ape isn’t talked about much because of how niche the search for it was,” wrote Reddit user FSLordon in a thread about the game’s relatively unknown status. “The game was found back before Lost Media was even in the public consciousness as well. And given how the search seemed to stay within relatively obscure forums, that’s probably why.”

A reasonable explanation. Yet Bio Force Ape’s remaining mysteries still entrance. Most-known for their shogi simulations and racy mahjong games, Seta was absorbed by Aruze in 1999. They withdrew from gaming altogether after 2004’s GameCube exclusive Legend of Golfer to focus on amusement and gambling. But after a fraudulent accounting scandal in 2007, the company was delisted from the stock market in 2008 and liquidated the following year. With no Seta to protect the copyright, and no developers to claim it, Bio Force Ape is essentially an abandoned property.

Still, the questions remain. Who made this game? What gave them the idea? Was it an overt, cynical way to cash in on both the pro wrestling and anthro crazes of the early ‘90s? Or was there something more ambitious, more meaningful at play here? Who was responsible for the bizarre art direction, or behind the impressive character animations? The fact that we may never know the full answer only makes me want to know more. It’s tantalizing — as tantalizing as knowing whether or not the game even exists.

Because games aren’t just bits of memory flashed to a storage medium. The actual software can’t be spun out of an algorithm or assembled on a factory line. Games, at their best, are expressive pop art which rearrange cathodes on a picture tube into interactive images which mean something to us, to their creators, to the culture at large. They are created by human hands and human minds, with human hearts. Bio Force Ape meant something to someone, at some point. It was an idea, a deadline, a regret; those stories still have yet to be told, before they’re lost forever — like fragments of a smashed cartridge in an overgrown landfill.

Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for additional information – and for the original Bio Force Ape playthrough that turned me into a preservation enthusiast.

Sources

- Bio Force Ape – Seta (https://web.archive.org/web/20060519121745/http://64.53.95.207/ujap/ape/bfa.html)

- Chris Covell’s Japanese Magazines (https://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/jp_mags/Japanese_Magazines-famitsu.html)

- Digital Press – “Bio Force Ape” (https://web.archive.org/web/20160210232152/http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?71891-Bio-Force-Ape)

- Hardcore Gaming 101 – Bio Force Ape (https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/bio-force-ape/)

- Gallerix – Jun Suemi (https://gallerix.org/storeroom/2000726542/)

- Hidden Palace – UWC (Prototype) (https://hiddenpalace.org/UWC_(Prototype))

- Lost Levels – Bio Force Ape (http://www.lostlevels.org/bio-force-ape/)

- Nintendo Power 027 & 035 (accessed via The Internet Archive and VGHF)

- Famikon Chuuken Blog (https://famikonchuuken.blog.jp/archives/27855260.html)

- Reddit – [talk] Why is the topic of Bio Force Ape so unpopular in video game lost media? (https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1nwdrv9/talk_why_is_the_topic_of_bio_force_ape_so/)

- Satoshi Matrix (https://satoshimatrix.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/top-100-nesfamicom-games-list-100-90/)

- The Cutting Room Floor – Bio Force Ape (https://tcrf.net/Bio_Force_Ape)

- VG Densetsu – Jun Suemi (https://vgdensetsu.net/junsuemi/#tobeconfirmed)

Madeline Blondeau is a writer and podcaster. Her novel, Penitents, is due out August 11, 2026 from Ghoulish Books. She’s appeared at Mothership, The A.V. Club, Paste, Anime News Network, Anime Feminist, and too many others to get into. You can support her work or follow for free on Patreon.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

Pioneering game designer Will Wright was able to take the time to figure out what SimCity was in the first place because of Nintendo. Not directly — Nintendo didn’t fund the initial version of the city management game or anything like that. But his first-ever game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, released in 1984, and Hudson Soft ended up porting it to the industry-changing Nintendo Famicon in 1985 in Japan, where it sold exponentially more copies than it did for the piracy-impacted Commodore 64 in North America.

As Wright himself explained in an interview with Game Developer back in 2011, when asked about the gap between 1984’s Raid on Bungeling Bay and 1989’s SimCity, those funds took the pressure off of immediately releasing a follow-up.

And Wright needed that time, because SimCity was something completely new: a city-building and management game, and completely open-ended. There weren’t even win/loss conditions within it, as you just tried to make a city, and dealt with the ups and downs of such a thing for as long as you felt like until you were satisfied — it owed a considerable amount to the imagination of the player, in this regard, so it was difficult to market and get publishers intrigued by it at all since there wasn’t any (at that time) obvious hook. The perils of being first.

SimCity eventually found its largest audience not on a computer, but a home console.
Image credit: MobyGames

With publishers like Brøderbund intrigued but concerned about its market viability and open-endedness, SimCity ended up being published by Maxis itself, at least the initial North American versions on Mac OS, MS-DOS, Amiga, IBM PC, and the Commodore 64. And it found its audience, even if it took some time — as the Video Game History Foundation detailed, it took three years, but it sold over a million copies on computers by 1992.

Much earlier, however, the game’s existence came to the attention of Nintendo. Much earlier, as in 1989 Nintendo gave Jeff Braun a call and explained that the creator of Mario wanted to put SimCity on a Nintendo console. Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make a game where “players created their own world,” per Chaim Gingold’s Building SimCity, and it turned out that game already existed in SimCity. Intrigued, a partnership was proposed, where Nintendo EAD and Intelligent Systems would develop a console version of SimCity with the assistance of Maxis. Will Wright and Jeff Braun were flown out to Kyoto after, per Gingold, a deal was agreed to for a $1 royalty per cartridge sold, plus an upfront $1 million for agreeing to a deal right then and there in Nintendo of America’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The result of this partnership was SimCity on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which served as a launch game in North America in August of 1991 after already releasing in Japan months earlier. Here, a game that had seemed like it should only be played with a keyboard and mouse given how intricate it was had to be played on a controller with four directional buttons, four face buttons, select and start buttons, and two shoulder buttons. And it worked, seemingly effortlessly. It’s truly a marvel even all these decades later in how it all just works.

But what sticks out the most is what Nintendo, in consultation with Wright, changed for SimCity on the SNES. The game is still open-ended, but there more structures in place, more personality, a robust array of new specialty buildings with significant effects, and, for those who want it, advice. From the esteemed, green-haired Dr. Wright, a cartoon likeness of Will Wright who is here to help and tell you what your city is doing well and what it’s doing terribly. The six scenarios are now more structured, too — these are timed missions in a real-life city, facing either a real-life disaster (1906 San Francisco earthquake), a hypothetical one (Rio de Janeiro flooding, 2047), or Bowser, in place of Godzilla, attacking Tokyo in 1991. Hey, who needs a Godzilla license when you have Bowser in-house?

There are also two exclusive scenarios here: an alien attack on Las Vegas in 2096, and Freeland. There’s no water in Freeland — that’s more territory to build on! — but also no specialty buildings. Oh, and the trees look like Mario’s face when viewed from above.

When playing with a city you began, you start from a piece of land full of trees and varying amounts of water, and your goal is to build up an efficient, highly populated city. You start as a village, and quickly work your way up to a town once you reach a population of 2,000. From there, you become a city at 10,000, then a capital at 50,000, a metropolis at 100,000, and, if you can build up to 500,000, a megalopolis. As far as win conditions go, that’s the one: the game continues from there, but getting to 500,000 will take some serious skill, planning, and revising, as well as the ability to listen to and properly respond to the wants and needs of the citizenry.

At certain points, you receive those aforementioned specialty buildings. Building roads and train tracks gets you a choice between a casino and an amusement park — casinos make more money for you annually, but raise crime, so there’s a tradeoff. Building enough parks can get you a large park. Becoming a town gets you the mayor’s house, which boosts growth of nearby residential zones. Construct enough police and fire stations, and get headquarters for those, which have significantly more coverage — and for less money — than standard stations. Build an Expo among industrial zones, and see both growth and income rise. Libraries become an option when enough residential zones become schools, and add to your annual income.

Build enough roads or rail, and get the choice between an amusement park or casino, both of which will literally pay to build.
Image credit: MobyGames

The most important of these new specialty buildings, however, is the bank. In the original SimCity, you would spend much of — or all of — your starting money building up a city, and then waiting for tax dollars to roll in to refill your budget, and work on what needed work. SimCity on the SNES, though, gets you $100, $200, or $300, depending on the special building in question, which significantly boosts your annual income and makes it easier to build extensive police and firefighter coverage, or that next huge residential space, or to simply be able to pay off your loan, which you’re able to take out by building a bank.

Consider: you start with $20,000 on easy — the game is the same regardless of whether you play on easy, normal, or hard, but the starting money changes — but something like a nuclear power plant costs $5,000. And as your city grows, you will need more than one of those, or else suffer incessant brownouts due to a lack of power. Stadiums and seaports cost $3,000, and your city will require at least one of each, depending on its size. An airport is even pricier, and you’ll need one of those, too. A single residential, commercial, or industrial zone costs just $100, but you build those in groups, connect them with roads and power, ensure there is police and fire coverage — $500 per station, plus annual charges — and eventually have to incorporate a rail system, too. It’s not cheap to do any of this, and $20,000 doesn’t last very long.

So, build a bank, and take a $10,000 loan when offered. You have to pay it back $500 per year for 20 years, which is incredible given that there is no interest, but you can do it if you plan correctly and build up a large enough city that it’s making enough in taxes and from specialty buildings to offset the expenses of police, fire, and loan payments. It doesn’t immediately solve all of your problems, but compared to the original’s version of tax-money only — no special building income, no loans — it’s a significant change. And also completely optional, if you’d prefer to go at it like in the home computers edition: no one makes you construct specialty buildings or take out a loan, but the choice is there to make.

Want more structure and less open-ended challenge? Try one of the game’s scenarios instead.
Image credit: MobyGames

Maxis either took note or had a direct hand in these changes by Nintendo to the formula, as much of this was incorporated into the 1993 sequel, SimCity 2000. So, if your favorite SimCity arrived on the scene after the SNES edition released, it’s not just Will Wright and Maxis you have to thank for that, but a relatively early case of Nintendo seeing a quality game and noting that, with a few tweaks, it would be an even better one. And, while there is serious depth here, if you are intimidated by the idea of having to negotiate with neighboring cities or dealing with trash or piping in water, as future games in the series required, then the SNES version of SimCity is still simple enough to cater to you.

Building a megalopolis is difficult, but you have decades of strategy to lean on now. My go-to is what’s known as the “donut,” where you build a 3×3 square of residential, commercial, or industrial zones — nine of the same one, to be clear — with an empty square in the middle, to be filled in later by parks, police or fire stations, or specialty buildings that will enhance the growth of the “donut”. Those buildings (and parks) don’t need to be touched by roads to work, so you build roads on the outside of the “donut” and slap some power lines down to adjacent donuts, and off you go. The paired-up commercial and residential buildings, which combine two zones together into massive conjoined skyscrapers, are the kind of efficient building you need to be able to fit 500,000 people into a single map, of which there are 1,000 to choose from in the game.

The donut is actually fairly basic, however, since there are some serious considerations for you to mull over as you play. It might actually have too much road in it, since that’s space that could be buildings if you wanted to be maximally efficient with it. Traffic will be a problem as you grow, too, with the citizens always complaining about it no matter how efficient or intelligent your road design is. The only solution is to never build roads, and go entirely rail from the start — it’s more expensive, and considerably so, but your citizens can’t complain about traffic if there isn’t any. Pollution is the other, but this one isn’t avoidable: industrial zones create jobs, especially early on, and your seaport and airport are also significant sources of pollution. Coal power plants are cheaper, but produce a ton of pollution, so you’ll want to go with nuclear, which is cleaner as far as these things go. What you can do is build your airport off in a corner of the map, and build your industrial donuts on the perimeter, so that some amount of pollution outpouring from them actually goes off the map instead of being counted against you. And, as you grow, maybe consider replacing some industrial donuts with commercial ones, to transition the kind of city you are in the first place.

The donut isn’t the only building strategy, but this one doesn’t allow for specialty buildings to work their magic on the most zones possible.
Image credit: MobyGames

Efficiency is vital: you will run out of space before you get anywhere near 500,000 citizens, but that’s where the constant tweaking comes in. You can get there, but you want a map with as little water as possible, and to plan ahead. Another things that helps is the “money code” that gets you $999,999 after you’ve spent all of your money and messed around with certain options and held certain buttons while going over your annual expenses and taxes. You don’t need that to win, of course, but if you don’t want to play a single city for decades and decades and decades in order to raise the cash to build a megalopolis, well. It can make for a fun afternoon, at least.

The SNES edition of SimCity is a marvel, but it wasn’t the only version of the game developed by Nintendo, either. In fact, an NES SimCity was shown off at the January 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, but that was all anyone who wasn’t working for Nintendo had seen of it for decades, since the game ended up being canceled as everything was eventually restarted for the SNES. The Video Game History Foundation — which confirmed that idea that Nintendo transitioned from the NES version to the SNES one through its own reporting — got its hands on the prototype, however, which Frank Cifaldi deemed playable in 2018 even though it is “obviously not a finished game, as there are critical bugs, typos, and missing content,” as “the majority of the game’s features are intact in one form or another”. It’s also significantly different than its SNES counterpart, if for no other reason than, as Cifaldi pointed out, you can’t even build the “donuts” of the SNES version due to the tiling system of the NES version of the game making it impossible to build that shape — the specialty buildings are 3×3 tiles, but everything else is 2×2, so the larger 3×3 grid won’t work!

At least one portion of the NES game lives on, however, in the form of the theme used for your city’s metropolis era — composer Soyo Oka handled both the NES and SNES soundtracks of SimCity, and used the metropolis theme from the unreleased NES edition for the latter game.

The only real issue that SimCity on the SNES has is that it’s no longer available in the present: it was once available for Nintendo’s Virtual Console on the Wii but was removed, which tended to only happen when licensing issues came up. It’s unconfirmed but entirely possible that EA, which purchased Maxis in 1997, decided to change its mind about licensing out an emulated version of the early SNES hit — it didn’t appear on the Wii U Virtual Console, nor was it one of the SNES games available on the 3DS’ Virtual Console, either. And it hasn’t made an appearance on the SNES portion of Nintendo Switch Online, either.

Whatever is keeping Nintendo from putting this gem out there again, though, needs to be worked through: SimCity on the SNES is a triumph, not just a showcase for what the 16-bit home console was capable of with the proper care even of a computer port, but of what Nintendo was able to improve upon even when talking about the works of someone as talented as Will Wright and the team at Maxis. It’s still a blast to play decades later, whether you’re talking about in its slow-burn, “true” form, or you just want to get to the money code and build and bulldoze freely without having to worry about cash. Neither is wrong; it’s your city to create and do with what you will. Up to and including unleashing Bowser on it, if you get bored with success.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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Compile is one of the great shooting game developers, and a not-insignificant part of that legacy comes from their work in the 8-bit space. The small Japanese studio not only released one of the pillars of the era in Zanac — which is notable for not just presenting Compile’s house style with STG, but also thanks to its approach to the concept of “rank” in a shooter, with procedurally generated enemies determined by an “Automatic Level Control” system — but stuck around on 8-bit platforms for years following the rise of 16-bit games, pushing the Famicom and Master System and Game Gear to their limits.

Compile also stands out for focusing primarily on the living room with its shooters: while so many of the greats in the genre at the time got their start in arcades and then were ported to consoles and computers, Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani’s crew focused on those who played at home. Which is how something like 1986’s Gulkave can be considered a technical achievement even coming out a year after Konami’s legendary Gradius — they aren’t being measured with the same instruments, you know? So Gradius can be this astounding 16-bit marvel of visuals and sound, and Gulkave can still be a credit to Compile when… well, I once described this game for Paste as being one that “isn’t going to win any beauty contests,” so.

That was for a blurb in a longer article ranking Compile shoot ‘em ups, however: here, there is space to go deeper on Gulkave. No, it won’t win any beauty contests, but give it some context and you’ll come away impressed with this visual work all the same. And that’s because Gulkave released on the MSX, SG-1000, and Sega Master System (but only in South Korea on the latter): the MSX was a known problem when it came to games that scrolled due to the choppiness that resulted, the SG-1000 was Sega’s first console, and the Master System, for the advances it featured compared to the original SG-1000, was still “just” an 8-bit platform even if it arrived on the scene years after Sega’s initial effort and Nintendo’s Famicom.

The back and front box art for the MSX release of Gulkave, which was scanned by D4 Enterprises for their EggConsole release of the game on the Nintendo Switch.

Despite these limitations, Compile managed to make a smooth-scrolling horizontal shooter for the MSX that featured parallax scrolling, designed to avoid the issue of choppiness that plagued the system. And lots of parallax, too, with multiple layers at once getting the treatment to create a feeling of depth in more than one part of the background, giving what is a relatively simple-looking shooter in stills a real presence in motion. On top of this, Gulkave would inevitably fill the screen with bullets and enemies to fire them — it’s an impressive game in this regard, one that showed early on in Compile’s existence their ability to squeeze just a little more out of a platform than others seemed capable of.

The programmer and designer of Gulkave was Satoshi Fujishima, often seen in the credits of Compile’s games as “PAC”. Fujishima had worked briefly on Zanac before moving on to a different project, per that game’s designer, Takayuki “Jemini” Horono — Fujishima stuck around long enough to make some serious changes to Zanac like the power-up system that came to define so many Compile shooters, and Horono described him as “honestly some kind of genius,” whose planning documents he continued to follow — and add on to himself — after he exited to work on a different game.

Fujishima’s penchant for what were, at the time, non-traditional power-up systems reared its head in Gulkave, as well. In 1985, Gradius introduced a power-up system that had borrowed from role-playing games and the investing of points into specific skills to create a custom character who would play like you wanted them to. You collected orbs which could be stored or spent as they filled a bar at the bottom of your screen, allowing you to prioritize speed, weapon types, options, shields, and so on at your own discretion. Gulkave borrowed the idea of the power-up bar and the collecting of items to progress along the bar, but the similarities end there.

That’s because Gulkave’s power bar wasn’t about planning for specific upgrades, but instead memorization or randomization, depending on what kind of effort you wanted to put into remembering what each of the 16 squares making up the bar represented. The squares are not labeled in any way, but each is a different weapon type, and acquiring the numbered pickups that drop after every 20 defeated enemies will move you along as many squares on the bar as the item displays on it — a “1” means one square, “5” means five, that sort of thing.

A look at both Gulkave’s conception of a boss — a fixed base with turrets to destroy — as well as the “Fire” bar at the bottom with its 16 squares that signify what weapon you have equipped.

Here’s the rub: the bar is not ordered by weapon strength, which means that you could move one spot or three spots or five spots and end up with a weaker weapon than the one you already had. “Well that’s some bullshit,” you say, but it gets better or worse than that, depending on your idea of a good time and love for systems with some real push-and-pull to them: these pickups are also the only way that you can restore shields to your ship in Gulkave.

So! If you want to recover shields — and unless they are full, why wouldn’t you? — you are going to have to make decisions, regularly, about whether more shields or keeping the weapon you are currently using makes more sense for you in that moment. Here’s an additional wrinkle, though: the only way to get extends in Gulkave is through certain point thresholds, and the most significant point boosts you get are from 1) picking up these weapon power-ups and 2) the end-level bonus for remaining barrier. You get your first extend at 30,000 points. Basic enemies are worth 80 points, more advanced ones can nab you a couple to a few hundred. Pickups can get you 2,000 points, and even a not-quite-full shield at the end of a level can get you close to 3,000. You’re going to want to roll the dice so you can survive longer — while Gulkave has infinite continues, your score resets at a Game Over and you are sent back to the beginning of a level when you retry, whereas dying just sends you back to a checkpoint.

One thing that works to Gulkave’s advantage with this system, outside of it constantly engaging you rather than ever letting you go on autopilot with a powerful weapon, is that you avoid the “Gradius Syndrome” issue of dying and losing your superpowered arsenal late-game or right before a boss, resulting in you trying to take on some difficult challenges with your little pea shooter because you were hosed by a checkpoint. Gulkave is a constant of going from strong to weak and learning to survive the latter state to get back to the former even when things are going well, but since you have a shield — albeit one that can take serious damage all at once depending on the enemy you crash into or are shot by — you also aren’t regularly going down in a single hit. It helps, too, that even Gulkave’s weakest weapons are still stronger than the default in Gradius, and that the downside to them has more to do with the rate of fire combined with a lack of spread: your more basic shots are a four-at-a-time, single pixel height beam, whereas there are some others that take up a significant chunk of real estate in front of you with each shot — a necessity given how many enemies try to sneak up behind you or beside you to either unleash a flurry of bullets you suddenly have to dodge, or just straight-up ram into you.

There are 32 levels in the MSX edition of Gulkave, which was the largest version by two. You are flying the fighter Zaiigar to eight different fortresses — one every four levels — to defeat the Gulbas forces amassed there. There certainly are not 32 different backgrounds in this game, but Compile put quite a few in there, some of them looking like the interior of a space fortress, some a rocky lunar surface, some more Martian in appearance due to the red, and most with multiple layers of parallax scrolling combined with blinking star fields, and whenever you see a background you have already seen before, enemy patterns, type, and quantity have all increased. There are also levels that are a bit of a combination of both interior and exterior — this video shows one such background, as well as enemies that don’t shoot at you but instead follow your location on screen and spawn from those points to attempt to get you to collide with them and suffer heavy shield damage.

Later on in the game, you will see this kind of enemy at the same time you are also facing ones that are shooting at you, while, simultaneously, foes that attach to your ship and drain your shield when they collide with you — invincible enemies that will make a beeline right for you if you happen to shoot them, as well — float across the screen. Yes, this is a shooter, but even back in 1986 here was a developer toying with the idea that not shooting was sometimes preferred, depending on what you were up against.

While things can get very hectic, the right weapon combined with remembering to pay attention to the top and bottom of the screen for enemies trying to hide — some of which also appear in Zanac, here flipped from vertical to horizontal — goes a long way. There is also the occasional screen-clearing bomb pickup, which will both wipe enemies from the screen and give your score a significant boost. And while 32 levels might sound like a ton for an STG, you have to remember that this game was not designed with arcades in mind, and it comes with not just unlimited continues, but also the ability to pick up from the stage you left off at. So if you get through 10 stages at a time or so before you decide hey, that’s enough, you can come back later without having to start over completely.

The manual details both the various weapons your ship can utilize, as well as the forces of the Gulbas opposition.

While Gulkave is one of Fujishima’s earlier shooters, it was not his last. He was also the designer on Guardic — an ambitious, unique the game that The Guardian Legend spun out of — was the programmer and planner on the only STG on the PC-FX, Chōshin Heiki Zeroigar, and in 2024 was credited among other ex-Compile developers on Changeable Guardian Estique, which was designed by Hirono and certainly lived up to the legacy of both industry veterans. Fujishima was all over myriad Compile releases in a variety of roles for a decade, but would leave in 1994 to form his own studio, Fupac, which doesn’t have a regular release schedule but is still active today, with its last release a tile-matching puzzle game, Kani Pon!, released for iOS and Android in 2025.

While Gulkave had never been released in North America before — the MSX release was for Japan and published by Pony Canyon, the SG-1000 also stuck in Japan, this time from Sega — D4 Enterprise put it on their EggConsole service on the Nintendo Switch in spring 2025. This is the MSX release of the game, and it includes an art gallery with various scans from the manual and box, as well as save states and both fast-forward and rewind. It’s one of many Compile games that D4 has put on EggConsole, as they are the rightsholder in the present for the vast majority of the defunct studio’s library; only recently, though, has that resulted in these games being made available outside of Japan again, or in the case of Gulkave, for the first time.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The graphic adventure genre, which sits somewhere in between what the likes of Ron Gilbert would consider to be point-and-click adventures and a pure visual novel, was given its modern shape in the 1980s. While 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure bequeathed its name to the overall “adventure” genre, it was entirely text-based — future developers would riff on the concept with the technology to come, resulting in Chunsoft’s Yuji Horii, for instance, making The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983, which he would then use as the basis for foundational role-playing game, Dragon Quest, just a few years later. Loads of text, yes, but also graphics and menus. So many menus.

At the same time that Horii and Chunsoft shifted focus to RPGs, another Japanese developer, Riverhillsoft, continued to build on the graphic adventure. Coincidentally, the developer behind those games also happened to be an assistant on the original Dragon Quest, as well as its first two sequels. That would be Rika Suzuki, who was the co-founder of Riverhillsoft, and served in whatever role the company’s games needed over its first few years: her early credits include work as an editor, an assistant, graphics, and programming. With 1986’s J.B. Harold Murder Club, however, Suzuki was credited as both the scenario writer and a game designer.

If you are not familiar with J.B. Harold Murder Club — or any of the J.B. Harold games — then it’s likely the place you know Suzuki’s work from is another development studio she co-founded, Cing, which created the Another Code and Kyle Hyde series for Nintendo, the latter of which includes Hotel Dusk: Room 2015. She was still the game designer and scenario writer for those releases, as well, and it’s pretty easy to draw a straight line from the first J.B. Harold graphic adventure to those Wii and DS releases. The tech might have taken leaps forward in the intervening decades, but just like with the shift from Colossal Cave Adventure to Murder Club, the heart of the genre — narrative — was there all along.

Hudson Soft, as usual, identified existing games that were worth porting over to the PC Engine and Turbografx, and J.B. Harold’s first adventure was one such release. Image credit: MobyGames

The basic plot of Murder Club is simple enough: someone has been murdered, and, as detective J.B. Harold, it’s up to you to solve the mysteries of who, how, and why. You will make your way through the town of Liberty, questioning anyone that you can consider a suspect or even tangentially related to the case, and the cast here is huge not just for 1986, but in general. Here is the story of multiple well-to-do families, brought together by business and marriage, and none of them seem to like each other much or at all. And outside of the now-widow of the victim, Bill Robbins, no one seems to have liked the guy whose death you’re investigating very much, either, and with good reason(s). A ruthless businessman and womanizer whose affairs are considered to be at the source of his demise — to the point that you can reasonably suspect his wife despite her being the only one who seems to have liked him — his death is not that much of a shock to any of the central families, in the sense none of them have to squint much to see how he could have made an enemy who decided they had had enough.

Murder Club initially released just in Japan, on various computers like the PC-88, PC-98, FM-7, X1, MSX, X68000, and then received a console port to the Famicom. It eventually made its way to North America, however, by way of MS-DOS and then on the Turbografx-CD a year after it was brought to the PC Engine CD, the Japanese iteration of the 16-bit system. This was not always a given during this time period, but the MS-DOS and Turbografx-CD editions of Murder Club feature excellent localizations — no small thing for a graphic adventure game just in a vacuum, but here, this ensures that these characters are still all clearly specific individuals with their own traits and phrasing worth noticing. And that’s vital when the cast is this large, and far more than one arrest needs to be made in order to solve the case.

Spoilers of a sort, but just one person committed the actual murder of Bill Robbins. However, many of those people suspected of killing him at the least gave it a shot or thought about it enough to get themselves a murder weapon, and plenty of others have their own unrelated — or not! — crimes or at least thought crimes to confess to you. And you’ll need every single one of those people to confess, to whatever degree their involvement merits, in order to isolate the one who committed the murder you are here to solve. On top of this, there are multiple unsolved cases in the town of Liberty, some brand new and others decades old, and you will have to work your way through which of those are related and which are dead ends in order to get to the point where you can identify the murderer.

It’s not quite as clean as this, but there are basically three segments of Murder Club: questioning, searching, and interrogation. They can intermingle, but the most efficient path through the game will see you get through the vast majority of the questioning before you start picking up search warrants, and you can get through most — but not all — of the searching before you begin interrogating. To interrogate, you need arrest warrants, and before you can get warrants of any kind, you need to have questioned enough people in order to see inconsistencies start to pile up, which leads to further questioning. A quick example: the brother of the widow, Janet Robbins, first tells you that he was with friends at the time of the murder, which means his alibi can be corroborated. Except, when you visit with one of those friends — just some guy who works at a burger place, not another rich kid central to the plot — he recalls that Janet’s twin brother asked to be let out of the car at 10 p.m., before the murder took place, because he had something to do. So, you go back to the brother with this new information and ask him about his alibi again, and oh look, he’s suddenly remembered this important detail, too, and gives you a new piece of information to work with. Suspicious enough to warrant a, well, warrant.

The title screen from the PC-98 release of Murder Club. Image credit: MobyGames

Questioning is a multistep process with all kinds of possible inputs. You can ask a person’s name, occupation, about their family, any clubs they are in, hobbies, blood type, and more. You can ask them for details about any other person in the game that you’re aware of at the time of your conversation, and if they know someone, they’ll give you info — though, some people will lie about whether or not they know someone, so it’s not as straightforward as that, as you have to dig and prove a connection in order to wrest information from some characters. You can ask for an alibi, as said, as well as about “anything else,” which is where you get a whole bunch of information that might seem unhelpful or unrelated at first, but often ends up being key pieces of the puzzle the more of them you lay out in front of you. If there are other unsolved cases or pieces of evidence in your possession — which you’ll acquire once you get your hands on some search warrants and start rifling through homes — you can also ask the cast about those.

Search warrants allow you to tell the occupants of a home that you’re there to do some digging, and you don’t have to actually search rooms so much as pick a room and then select search on a menu — so long as you have cleared whatever markers are necessary to make [evidence] show up, it’ll be there for you to find. All the items are there from the start, but it’s a lot easier to see the possible importance of a knife in a case where a man was stabbed the first time you lay eyes on it than it is to know why a bank book might play an important role in untangling the mystery, so Harold won’t make note of it until he has some reason to suspect that he should hold onto it. Evidence is then taken back to the police station — which is also where you can save, read about unsolved cases in the police library, look over the case so far, and eventually interrogate anyone you have an arrest warrant for — to be identified.

Those interrogations, percent-wise, make up a small portion of the game, but consider them the toughest final percentage points to get through. You will interrogate every arrested character — and there will eventually be a dozen of them arrested — more than once, in order to do similar to what you did in the questioning phase, which is get one statement out of a character to then be used in the interrogation of another, erasing their lies in the process and finding the truth underneath. In the Turbografx-CD edition of the game — which also adds music, voice acting, and multiple language options for both voice and text — the character portrait for an interrogated individual turns from red to green when you’ve managed to extract their final, true confession out of them, and therefore all the information you can get out of them for use in the other interrogations, or that could give you context for a piece of evidence already in your possession or that you need in order to find a piece of evidence that’s still out there.

The interrogation process will see you, repeatedly, ask for a confession, question about motive, the murder weapon, etc., and then present evidence in your possession that you believe to be relevant to the case and the character in question. By doing this — and securing information from other arrested characters to then be used to change the context of the interrogation of others — you can clear up a number of existing cases and questions, and eventually get the confession you came for out of Bill Robbins’ murderer.

If you’re the kind of person who hates when an adventure game gets stuck in place until you do the correct thing in the correct order, then, considering the above, Murder Club is going to be tough for you to get through. Even if you don’t have a problem with that, there is loads of repetition and revisiting here as you do your best “Just one more thing” impression. But that all makes sense, considering Murder Club was originally released in 1986, and later ports replicate the experience of the original even if they change graphically. J.B. Harold Murder Club is a puzzle to be solved, and it’s got 1,000 pieces that all look real similar until you’ve truly familiarized yourself with them and can see just where they actually fit together. No one knew what edges to sand down yet, because the edges themselves were still pretty new, so it’s an extreme version of a phenomenon that still exists 40 years later within the genre, to a lesser degree.

The MS-DOS port mostly looks like the PC-98 release, with some minor touches. Image credit: MobyGames

And, to be fair to Suzuki, this was something she was aware of at the time, as this joint BEEP Magazine interview with Yuji Horii from 1987 details. When the interviewer says, “…one issue with adventure games is that if you hit a wall or get stuck, it’s very difficult to advance in the game,” Suzuki responds by saying, “Yeah, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make those walls so high that players can’t see the other side at all. There’s no need for obstacles like that, right? I think the ideal difficulty is one where you overcome the challenge by your third try, and then the next wall you face is a little higher, giving you another challenge.” If you either take notes or review the details of the case at the police station, you should be able to put enough puzzle pieces together to get through each of those “walls” without having to run around in circles wasting time. In addition, Suzuki made an important point, while Horii discussed how being able to get through one of these games by “brute force” or with a step-by-step guide wouldn’t be any actual fun for the player, saying, “It’s very important for adventure games that the player experience that moment of relief after solving a puzzle. I think if they can feel that satisfaction, they won’t feel like all the time they spent was a waste.”

Whether or not you feel that time questioning again and again is a waste, it is, however, worth the 1986 of it all to see just how much effort and care was put into telling a compelling, layered story here: Rika Suzuki was already an impressive scenario writer at this early stage of her career, able to successfully juggle a cast of around 30 characters and ensure they were not just distinct from each other but also intersecting, to varying degrees, in their personal and business lives. Liberty has a history, these characters have history, and those histories tie into their presents and futures, and all into the murder of Bill Robbins, as well. It’s really something, and helps you get through the repetition or questioning and interrogating — as well as letting you see how Rika Suzuki ended up primarily sticking in this genre, in these roles, going forward, at a number of companies beyond Riverhillsoft.

“Is this guy a murderer or just kind of a dick?” is a question you’ll ask yourself often. Image credit: MobyGames

J.B. Harold would end up starring in a number of sequels: 1987’s Manhattan Requiem, 1988’s Kiss of Murder, 1989’s D.C, Connection, and then six years later Blue Chicago Blues. The original was the first to be released in North America, Manhattan Requiem ended up with a translated Android release — put together by ex-Riverhillsoft employee Yoshihiko Miyazaki — but for the most part these games have stayed in Japan, or at least in Japanese. EggConsole might be releasing J.B. Harold games, but D4 Enterprises isn’t translating them.

If you want to play Murder Club in English, you do have some options, although none of them involve buying a new copy of the game since none are available — for whatever reason, those Android releases don’t include an English-language Murder Club. The MS-DOS release is floating around out there on the internet, however, as is the Turbografx-CD edition — if you want to be able to follow a guide with any kind of ease should you find yourself more stuck than you’re comfortable with, then you’ll want to opt for the latter, as the different localizers did change some character names in a way that can make following a no-spoiler guide for a different version of the game difficult. Plus, this edition includes music and voice work (though, you can’t skip to the next text during the voice segments, so it can add some character but also slow you down considerably), as well as some updated art — it’s the best version of the game in English for reasons beyond the fact that’s the one people have made guides for.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Garrett Martin. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Eventually the world's going to die. The goal is to not be on it when that happens.

That's the message of so much entertainment that's been made over the last few years. Everywhere you look people are dying to get off Earth. You see it in games like Aphelion and MIO: Memories In Orbit, in immersive experiences like Vegas's Interstellar Arc, and in the fetid dreams of K-holing billionaire white supremacists like… well, you know who. It's like we've collectively decided the environmental problems facing our planet aren't fixable, or at least aren't worth fixing, and so we've gotta plan to fuck off to outer space instead. Concerning.

It might be ramping up, but none of this is new, of course. All this end-of-everything anxiety recalls any amount of sci-fi made over the last century, including a game that's not well-remembered and wasn't particularly celebrated in its day, but made a deep impression on me when I was five or six years old: Rob Fulop's Cosmic Ark, which Imagic released on one of its signature silver cartridges for the Atari 2600 in those high-rolling, "the wheels are never coming off this gravy train, baby!" days of the summer of 1982.

Image credit: MobyGames

Cosmic Ark does the two main things a game needed to do in 1982; it's fun to play and looks cool as hell. It's a game of two halves that are both complete enough that they could have been separate games back then, when the bar for what constituted a video game was still basically on the ground. A saucer floats on-screen in the middle of a star-filled sky, and although it's blockier and less ornate than the incredible Star Wars-quality ship on the box art, it's also bigger and more detailed than what you'd normally see on this hardware, putting it near the top of the list of cool 2600 spaceships.

The first half of a level is a simple reflex test, tilting that black joystick right, left, up, or down to shoot asteroids before they hit the ship as they approach from one of those four directions; the second half is a little trickier, controlling a smaller craft as it descends to a planet's surface and tries to, um, "rescue" a pair of its native wildlife while dodging laser blasts. You have to fly your ship over the animals as they scurry quickly and unpredictably on the surface below, and hold down the button to abduct them via tractor beam while avoiding the planet's defenses. And then you have to return to that amazing-looking mothership, all before the main craft runs out of fuel, and then take off to the next planet and level.

Nowhere does the game say you're the last survivors of a destroyed civilization. This is the Atari 2600; games couldn't really say anything outside of gameplay, without the technical capacity to use the kind of words or rudimentary cutscenes you'd see in arcades or the computer games of the time. But the title implies this is set after some kind of apocalypse; like Noah after the deluge, you're off rambling around with your big adult sons, their wives, and your own personal zoo, making sure they all keep existing. (Again, nowhere does Cosmic Ark actually say you've got your own Shem, Ham, and Japheth with you, but, I mean, it's not hard to guess. It's a big mothership, and surely somebody's still manning it while you take the little one out to rustle up some varmints.) Arks are where you hang out when everything else is dead, hence a cosmic ark must come when you can't even hang out on your own planet anymore.

Something that isn't explicitly communicated in the game — but is hinted at in the game’s manual, where stories used to live — is that your ship is the only survivor of the destroyed civilization at the center of another Imagic release, Dennis Koble's Atlantis. These last surviving Atlanteans are forced to wander the stars after the destruction of their home, kidnapping alien animals along the way. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Atlantis and Cosmic Ark came out the same month, and were fully intended to serve as two parts of a story, in a bit of cross-game continuity unusual for the day. If there were plans for a third game in the cycle, the creation after the destruction and the struggle to survive, they don't seem to have ever borne fruit; despite great instant success with their earliest games, Imagic burned out fast, a planned IPO getting shelved amid the crash of '83, and not releasing anything of note afterward.

The game didn't need to outright say it: even as a kindergartener I could tell Cosmic Ark was about surviving extinction. That makes it a very early forebear to that recent wave of eco-crisis jeremiads, and a nice complement to Missile Command, a game about nuclear destruction that many more people played than Atlantis and Cosmic Ark combined, and by a significant margin. And just as the planet was ultimately doomed in Missile Command, so is your space-faring ark, which will never complete its zoological quest or establish a new home for the survivors of Atlantis or their menagerie. Inevitably that fuel runs out, just as inevitably our planet will, just as Imagic inevitably did. 

If you aren't familiar with Imagic or its distinctively contoured cartridges with silver and rainbow-striped labels, it was another attempt at an Activision-type situation, only one that didn't end up creating one of the biggest, most successful, and longest-running game publishers of all time. Frustrated with not receiving any credit, and seeing the success Activision was having, a group of Atari employees broke away in 1981 and started up Imagic. Fulop was probably the biggest name in the group, as he programmed the 2600 ports of Missile Command and Night Driver. His game Demon Attack was Imagic's biggest seller, and a major hit on the 2600 (despite Atari’s efforts to keep it from even being sold, owing to its familiarity to Phoenix, which they had the console rights to).

The manual lets you know things are apocalyptic. Image credit: Mobygames

The company didn't quite reach the level of awareness Activision had even at the time — even five-year-olds knew that Activision label design meant a game was worth playing, no matter what it might look like — but Imagic was clearly a cut above almost every other publisher back then. That's why it's entirely possible one of my brothers specifically asked for Cosmic Ark or even spent their own allowance money on it instead of it just sort of falling into our laps after the world had decided to stop caring about the Atari. Activision fittingly scooped up the rights to Imagic's games in the '80s, while Fulop went on to cocreate a little game called Night Trap.

However Cosmic Ark came into our presence, I'm glad it did. Over 40 years later it stands out as one of the 2600 games I most vividly remember, and one I played perhaps more than any not named Pitfall, Adventure, or Yar's Revenge. And it's one that's retained an uncommon relevance throughout the years, future-proofing itself by focusing on the very end of the future as we can see it. I'm pretty sure there's no pent-up demand for a Cosmic Ark reboot among the gaming audience at large, but I've long called it the one game that most deserves to be revisited today; hey, Activision, give me a call if you ever want to make that happen.

Garrett Martin is an editor and writer from Georgia, and you can find him on Bluesky.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Compile truly did have more in common with independent developers of the modern era — the kind releasing games on itch.io themselves, not the ones getting the major pushes from relative behemoths in the space like AnnaPurna Interactive — than with many of its peers in its own time. Yes, Compile had the relationship with Sega, and it had loads of console and handheld games on all the systems of the major players of the 80s and 90s, but a massive percentage of its library was actually contained within its digital magazine, Disc Station. And those mags and the games within, regularly released for MSX and NEC PC hardware, tell a story of a far different and even more prolific company that kept trying new things and making the games that they wanted to make, even if it kept them from ever growing into the kind of success they should have been based solely on quality.

As Compile founder Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani explained in a 1998 interview, “Back then, we didn’t have any kind of agenda. We just enjoyed making stuff. (laughs) We were absorbed in it, both myself and the staff. We'd often spend 2 years working on a single title, but that’s because we wanted our games to be solid. It may not have made us rich, but it was satisfying. And as a company, I think we did a good job.” Because of the financial issues sometimes caused by this commitment to quality and the games that Compile wanted to be making, staff would leave the studio in waves on more than one occasion, but the spirit that drove the studio and Disc Station remained, and resulted in little oddballs like Wonderland of Carbuncle for the fans who stuck around.

For the most basic comparison possible, just to give you a sense of what kind of game starred Compile’s mascot of both the company and it’s most popular series, Puyo Puyo, Wonderland in Carbuncle shares some DNA with Nintendo’s arcade classic, Donkey Kong 3. Both are shooting games (STG), but also rely on platforming and multitasking rather than “just” holding down the fire button and dodging projectiles. That’s not meant to be dismissive of more traditional STG — please, this is me we’re talking about — but to give you a sense of what the goal and gameplay here are. It’s a vertically oriented shooter, yes, but there is also jumping and additional considerations beyond the Xevious-style shooter that dominated — and still does — the eras in which both 1983’s Donkey Kong 3 and 1991’s Wonderland in Carbuncle released in.

Either that’s a huge apple or Carbuncle is that small.

What makes this game work, just like Donkey Kong 3, is that you have two very separate goals here to focus on that make you deploy a different kind of strategy than you would for a standard STG. You have to decide if the safe spot that you’re firing from is more important than the apple that’s about to fall, if it’s worth the risk of movement, if you already have enough apples that you’re confident you don’t need another and the more important thing is preserving health for the coming boss fight. Those apples, which fall from the tree that is the setting of every stage, are needed to summon the level’s boss. You do this by launching apples from Carbuncle at the… stork? pelican?… flying by with a basket ready to catch them as they fall back down to earth, and upon your success the window in the middle of the tree opens up, and the boss emerges from it. You can catch the apples that miss the basket, too, letting you reload, as it were, but if the apple hits the ground then it’s gone forever — this is why you want more than a single apple during the collection phase, but if you trust your own skills don’t have to risk death or damage to acquire more.

You aren’t just catching apples during those pre-bird segments. You’re fending off multiple enemy types — falling mushrooms that keep growing out of the tree, spiders trying to sneakily make their way down, clouds that absorb your shots, blocking their access to the higher reaches of the tree, until they explode in a hail of revenge bullets you need to dodge… and are then immediately replaced by another cloud. While attempting to survive all of this, apples are falling, and the occasional Puyo is with you on the ground, trying to get in your way to damage you or make jumps more challenging by being in the way. These Puyos are a significant obstacle during the boss fights, which are otherwise the most traditional part of the game as they deploy pure STG strategies against you: more bullets, patterns to recognize and exploit, defensive enemies, foes that change color as damage is done and also sometimes speed up or alter attack patterns as that damage builds up — the works. But also watch out for the Puyo on the ground: you won’t just be dodging bullets here, even if the apples are, at least temporarily, not an ongoing concern for you.

Now, as you can tell if you’re familiar with the much better-known game, Wonderland of Carbuncle not only doesn’t play just like Donkey Kong 3, but it at least worked for a basic grounding. Wonderland of Carbuncle is also significantly more forgiving and easier than Nintendo’s offbeat platforming STG, which got its start in arcades and so had to be tuned a certain way to ensure it was worth both Nintendo’s and the arcades’ time to have this cabinet out there. Wonderland of Carbuncle features infinite retries and you can take a few hits before dying, whereas you have to master Donkey Kong 3 in a hurry or else you won’t get to keep playing for very long. Even the way the timer works draws a stark contrast: for Donkey Kong 3, the timer expiring means you have failed to defeat the titular Kong and save the greenhouse, but in Wonderland of Carbuncle, the clock running out means you have survived the onslaught, and it’s time for the birds to get their apple, leading to the boss fight.

Difficulty isn’t really the point with many of these Disc Station releases, however: these were often Compile working on concepts or creating subscriber-only games for the only audience that was expected to ever get their hands on them, in a non-commercial setting. Well, yes, Disc Station itself cost money, but the point is that these weren’t that kind of retail game fighting for shelf space, but were instead something new and fun for a specific audience that had pre-committed to the concept of getting random games from a beloved developer willing to put them out. Worrying about game length or depth or even replayability didn’t have to be an ongoing concern for Compile’s Disc Station releases, since they weren’t competing for attention against anything in the traditional sense. The audience was already captured, and the result was some games that could be completed and enjoyed in a short afternoon or an hour or even less, if you got the hang of things in a hurry.

And Wonderland of Carbuncle certainly qualifies as one of those you can complete relatively quickly if you have any skill in the genre whatsoever. It has layered gameplay, yes, but doesn’t possess the length of Disc Station role-playing game Gensei Suikoden, nor is it as fiendish as platforming puzzler Carbuncle Pi at that game’s most challenging. There is a second loop where each stage’s difficulty — and the bosses — get a noticeable boost in sheer volume of attacks and foes, that make the initial loop seem like more of a tutorial and this the true game. But once you wrap the more challenging editions, that’s it. Credits roll, and Carbuncle gets to frolicking in the grass and relaxing, as the wolf and his fellow creatures have given up on taking over the tree that provides all these juicy apples.

It’s short and never rises to the level of difficulty of Compile’s retail shoot ‘em ups, but it wasn’t supposed to. This was an idea a team at the studio had in mind and wanted to see through, and did, to the benefit of, at first, the Venn diagram audience of “people who own an MSX2” and “people who know what Disc Station is.” And in the present, thanks to D4 Enterprises having control of so much of Compile’s library, as well as the existence of their PC-based ProjectEgg subscription service and the EggConsole variant found on the Switch, anyone with access to either of those platforms can now see what Compile was delivering to its dedicated following 35 years back. Neat.

Just wait until there are multiple bullet sponges.. er, clouds… out there waiting for you.

Sega had to give its blessing here, as is the case with anything released by D4 that includes any characters from Puyo Puyo — Compile sold the rights to the series to Sega decades ago with the intention of buying them back once its finances were back in order, but they never did get those problems sorted, and instead ended up closing years later, Puyo-less. Between ProjectEgg/EggConsole and the revival of Madou Monogatari, though, Sega has at least been continually granting permission for the use of these characters once more, opening up more people to experience them for the first time, or, at least, not through emulation.

Which is a positive in other ways, too. There is something to a game like this at all times, but especially now, when “More” and “Forever” are so often leading considerations in both game development and audience desire. You might spend less time with Wonderland of Carbuncle than you would a movie, but you’ll also spend less to buy it than you would to purchase a movie ticket or rent it via streaming, so what’s the problem? These small, closed releases, meant to be ephemeral yet enjoyable, are a balm in this era where we are, for some reason, bombarded with concerns over active player counts for single-player games, as if these are tea leaves worth reading. Experience something a little different from what’s being pushed on you, enjoy yourself (or don’t!), and move on. Not right to the next thing, in a checklist-y, worrying-about-your-backlog way, but just let the experience be, and be done with it. Think back on it, sure, but be free. It’s lovely to be able to spend an hour here and there like that, in a time when everything has to have some greater, efficient meaning attached to it or else it feels wasted, and Wonderland of Carbuncle can give you that hour with Compile charm to spare.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Paddle Mania is not at all what it looks like — it’s a game that I (passively) avoided playing for some time, not out of dislike but because the imagined premise didn’t immediately grab, and this is said by someone who enjoys tennis games. It turns out the reason that I didn’t know anything about this tennis game in advance, though, the reason that I never heard anything about it being a standout tennis offering from the 80s worth checking out, is because it’s not a tennis game at all.

There might be tennis players in the art and marquee, but Paddle Mania has far more to do with the Olympics and air hockey than actual tennis. Consider: there is a sumo wrestler in Paddle Mania, but their presence does not make it a sumo-wrestling game, and the appearance of surfers does not make this a surfing game, either. Why should something as inconsequential as the existence of tennis players within Paddle Mania make it a tennis game, then?

The first hint that this isn’t a mere tennis game comes on the title screen, where a giant Olympic-style torch sits near flags on a starry night, and is lit by someone clearly meant to evoke that gladiatorial Olympian image of the era — chiseled, bandana, short shorts, flowing locks, the whole cartoonish ideal. And yes, those are definitely Olympic rings half-obscured at the bottom right of the title screen, existing as an implication instead of the full thing to keep from getting sued. You don’t want to involve yourself with the legal mess that is displaying the Olympic rings if you can help it.

That’s definitely not the Olympic rings hiding on the bottom right. Do you hear that, IOC lawyers?

So if it’s not tennis, what is it? It’s not exactly the Olympics, either, because you are playing just one rather than myriad sports — well, sort of — but that’s the fun of this 1988 arcade weirdo. It’s a bunch of sports thrown together and made into something entirely new that isn’t tennis or any Olympic event represented here or otherwise, and also isn’t even quite air hockey, even if it’s more air hockey than it is Pong.

A friend and I once made up a game in his backyard using the materials available to us, that was a little like baseball in that you had to hit a ball with a bat, but the bat had to be used like a hockey stick, and the ball was both much larger than a baseball and rolled. You weren’t just trying to hit the ball as far as possible, but to set target areas in order to score, and actually had different starting areas for “batting” much like golf has different tees for different holes. With the way the ball moved when struck by an object it just wasn’t designed to be struck by, chaos ensued, which is where the fun emerged from. Paddle Mania feels a lot like that straight-faced absurdity of just rolling with what you have on hand and not being exactly sure of where it will take you, and also there’s a sumo wrestler.

There are tennis players in Paddle Mania, but they are not competing in tennis: they are using the tool of their trade, a tennis racket, to play the Not Tennis before them, in the same way my buddy and I used a baseball bat like a hockey stick to play a third, unrelated sport. You might serve and volley in Paddle Mania, but that happens in volleyball, as well — it’s not like those actions or terms are exclusive to tennis. Oh, and you’ll face volleyball players in Paddle Mania, too.

You start out against a fellow tennis player, trapped in the same game you are, attempting to not just get the ball by them but to get it past them and into a designated scoring area. It’s got a little Pong in it in this regard, but the movement of your player is more air hockey than anything: their movement is unnatural for a person, and looks — and feels — like dragging an air hockey paddle around, down to the direction of your wrist flicks determining where the ball is going to go after it’s struck. The ball also acts less like a ball and more like a ricocheting puck regularly — if your brain understands the angles and speeds of air hockey, then Paddle Mania will, somehow, make intuitive sense.

Somehow, not tennis. Image credit: Museum of the Game

Defeat this tennis player and move on to face athletes from other sports, with only the occasional other tennis player mixed into what become more and more elaborate courts that require better and more precise timing and locating from you in order to score. You don’t have to score a set number of points to move on, just more than your opponent before the timer expires. Each matchup is its own game, basically, with the physics, rules, and strategies, slightly different in ways that mean you might not excel or struggle in a linear fashion as you move through these fellow Olympians.

You won’t just face a volleyball player, but a set of three of them, and they will pass the ball around a bunch to setup a smash onto your side of the court — there is no fence in between your sides like there would be in both volleyball and tennis and even ping pong, which your paddle seems to look like it belongs to, but the center line still divides the sides into distinct sections that can’t be exited or encroached upon. Getting a ball by three volleyball players working as a unit is a lot different than getting it by one tennis player, but not necessarily more difficult, since the way they manipulate the ball is different, as well: you are playing two different sports at each other here instead of with each other.

Not tennis, not volleyball, but a secret third thing.

Volleyball players have their own physics and strategies to overcome, as does the sumo wrestler, who is somehow like a tennis player but with even more reach. And then there are the synchronized swimmers, who swim in a court that’s half pool, half… well, court… and kick and pose and serve and return. And the surfers, against whom you’re not trying to get the ball past and into a specific target area, even though that’s what they are doing to you, and in alarming numbers, too, an endless parade passing by and chucking balls at you from the safety of their board. No, your role here is to make those boards unsafe: hit the balls back not just to avoid having them turn into points against you, but also to knock surfers off their boards by slamming the ball back into them directly. That eill nt you your points in this scenario.

The later tennis players you face off against will have things like moving walls behind them to block the ball from scoring unless both the location and timing of the hit are perfect, which can be tough to pull off — the incessant flailing that saves you against a fleet of surfers firing off endless balls at you will keep you from even accidentally scoring against opponents that require intention and precision. One thing that’s vital in these matchups is exactly what powers the win against the surfers, however: hit the ball right back at the opponent, and hope it knocks them over to give you an opening to score.

Look how wide open things are with one player knocked over.

The computer will certainly attempt this against you to open up a lane, and it’s devastating when they do; you might pop back up fast enough to avoid being scored upon, but that will feel like an impossibility while your character flails on their back like a turtle struggling to right itself. Use this strategy to create opportunities for your own offense, however: the fact that these matches are timed means you can’t just play high-quality defense until you get lucky and score. You also need to create offense, especially as the complexity of the stages increases and both adds in and removes elements of luck.

Paddle Mania isn’t just a single-player experience, but has a wealth of multiplayer options, as it’s got not just versus multiplayer but also cooperative arrangements. There are three difficulty levels, as well, which can let you both ease in and challenge yourself further, depending. While it released exclusively in Japanese arcades back in 1988, Digital Eclipse and NIS America partnered with SNK for the 40th Anniversary Collection featuring pre-Neo Geo titles and eventually brought the game, officially, outside of Japan.

It’s surprising that it took so long for Paddle Mania to make its way out of Japan, considering how obviously innovative and enjoyable it is once you play it. However, it’s possible that, with the way it was marketed with its art and name, it was assumed that the underlying wackiness would never be given a fair shake stateside, either because it wasn’t what it looked like and so people might be disappointed in that, or because it would be dismissed as “just” a tennis game or late Pong clone of some kind. That, or SNK also wasn’t yet SNK yet, at least not in the way people think of it now, so couldn’t afford to just distribute anything with their name on it internationally.

Regardless of the why, you now know Paddle Mania exists, and that it’s not a tennis game even if it features tennis players and art and sure seems as if it were marketed to make it seem like tennis. Trust the name of the game here over that marquee and flyer, though: there are paddles, yes, and also mania.

Covering SNK games is difficult these days. There is no formal boycott of them in place, such as with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) move against Microsoft and in turn its Xbox division for its continued partnership and profiting off of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. Without guidelines and organization, it’s a bit of a wild west situation where everyone takes this all into their own hands and makes their own decisions. Over at Read Only Memo, Wes Fenlon did a great job of breaking things down and explaining that, at the least, you can't hide from the idea that the coverage of and purchasing of SNK games means further enriching of the government of Saudi Arabia, given the storied developer and publisher is wholly owned by the same Public Investment fund that it utilizes for “sportswashing” its country’s image. If the United States government fully owned a developer and profited off of its existence and then turned around to use those profits to spill blood, there would be questions to answer about their games, too.

Through that fund, Saudi Arabia has acquired small pieces of entities like Capcom and Nintendo, as well as bankrolled an attempt to take over EA. With the first two and similar cases, I haven’t seen a need to back away from coverage of newer or older games — that’s not a case where the PIF gives the government of Saudi Arabia any control, even if it’s all larger than something like getting a return on a 401(k) investment. SNK is the opposite situation, however, and so I’ve had to consider my own coverage knowing just how much of the studio is under that level of control. Where I’ve landed is that it’s worth writing about SNK games that fit this publication’s purview, but not with intent to get you to go out and buy whatever modern release of them exists in the present — play if you want, but remember that emulation exists, and don’t expect any “Re-Release This” or “Past Meets Present” columns for these titles going forward.

The main thing here is that it’s a bit complicated, in that these are older titles that deserve to be mentioned as part of the history of a company that’s as old or older than plenty of people reading this, but the lens through which it’s all looked at, at least, matters. Whereas there has been a total shutdown of coverage of Microsoft-owned games in this space — even ones that aren’t commercially available in the present, I don’t even want to give Microsoft an idea to work with until it’s complied with BDS demands — that seems like overkill here as far as an individual decision sans organized boycott goes. So, there will still be the occasional SNK game covered in this space like has been the case, but if a new, say, Metal Slug arrives, you won’t find any coverage of it here, as it’s not something I’ll be picking up or getting behind a megaphone to shout out.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Volition was never shy about its stances on labor and exploitation. Even before the studio existed under that name, there was Descent, which opens with your pilot opining on how the bureaucrats would replace all the workers with robots if they could even as those robots are infected with a virus that causes them go to haywire and threaten the lives of the actual people who do work out in the stations you now need to destroy. Then, of course, there is 2001’s Red Faction, a first-person shooter that begins with your character, Parker, being tricked into joining the labor force on Mars, which is essentially made up of unwitting prisoners who are worked to the brink of death, at which point they are then actually killed or experimented on, and replaced by the next wave — labor is cheap and replaceable when it is not respected, and the game opens with Parker taking part in a riot that begins when corporate security working for interstellar conglomerate Ultor kills a fellow miner in the midst of a plague the company is doing nothing to stop or protect workers from.

Red Faction: Guerrilla, though, the third game in the series that switched things up from first-person shooter to third-person, open-world experience, is more explicit and dedicated to its message than anything the prior Red Factions managed, and those games were not exactly subtle about the point. It was released in June of 2009, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, caused by speculation on property values and a secondary market that formed around the mass of loans given out at the time, all designed to fuel consumption and create additional assets for investors to pass around as collateral for additional loans. Once the housing bubble popped and these mortgage-backed securities were no longer so secure investments, the world’s economy suffered even worse than it already was during what was called the “Great Recession;” the irresponsible speculation with American investors at its epicenter exacerbating an existing issue that impacted the entire world with effects that went well beyond the year attached to the crisis’ name.

Whereas Red Faction opened with an explanation of exploitation caused by a corporation’s abuse of workers far from the protections of Earth, in Guerrilla, it’s Earth that is at the center of the issue. The reason? The planet’s natural resources have been churned through and the global economy has collapsed in response, owing to the lack of production of goods and materials combined with a shift in the markets to rampant commodities speculation — again, Volition is not a subtle company. There was no product being invested in by the speculators that bought and sold mortgage-backed securities, merely endless trading on the foundation of a very shaky house of cards in order to juice the economy. In the world of Guerrilla, with Mars a relatively untapped resource owing to the newness of humanity’s presence on it, Earth's corporations and financial leaders saw it as the solution to their problems at home. With Earth's demand for resources it cannot acquire from itself any longer running high, the militarized Earth Defense Force has turned Mars into, effectively, a mass forced labor camp — a move that has reinvigorated Earth’s economy owing not just to the more efficient pipeline of resources from the red planet, but also thanks to heavy investment into the EDF as a security force to ensure that said pipeline is always providing materials, whatever the cost.

Image credit: MobyGames

Volition is not necessarily explicit about this in terms of dialogue, but it also does not leave you to imagine this is the case. Most of the loading screens in Red Faction: Guerrilla are merely an image of the area that you are loading up, but on pre-set occasions tied to the game’s narrative progression, those screens are a (mostly) still from a news broadcast on Earth, hosted by the EDF itself. These are full of some more obvious nods to what’s going on in the game, like a chyron that says, “Mars development vital to Earth economy,” but also scrolling text that will display items such as, “leaders convene emergency summit, seek ways to pacify Martian laborers” after some particularly damaging bits of worker resistance occur.

The most telling item to track, though, and a brilliant little bit of work from Volition, is the stock ticker at the bottom. These scroll through various stocks that are rising and falling, and more of them fall — and by more — as the game progresses and the guerrilla resistance at the heart of the game finds success. You can see not just how much these stocks are rising and falling by, but what they are trading for. And the Earth Defense Force itself is shown on this ticker.

Just to fully emphasize the level of control the EDF has even over the news, this broadcaster is adorned in the military force’s colors.

You see one stock, the name of which is partially obscured, trading for 36.43 of whatever the currency utilized in this interstellar world is. Two of the others are trading for less than they were — Colonial Transit LTD. being one of them — thanks to the Red Faction’s decisions to mess with infrastructure established by the EDF that helps keep Mars as nothing but a planet-sized forced-labor camp for Earth’s benefit. The one stock seeing a boost is the Earth Defense Force itself — whereas the obscured stock at the start is trading for just over 36 bucks, and Amrukuo Co. is at 302.67, the EDF is trading at 7,889.24. There’s a lot of money to be made in keeping workers in line, and it’s not just from the labor they produce.

There are, of course, parallels to the present-day here that make Red Faction: Guerrilla continue to resonate well beyond the initial bounds of the 2008 financial crisis. Consider the role that the rampant use and explosion of generative AI has had on computing and energy resources, on available processing power and hardware; data centers continue to spring forth to churn through electricity and water while emitting disruptive, incessant noise pollution, all so that investors can reorient and get theirs out of the economy through a promise of a future that cannot be fulfilled. And as wonderful as it was to see NASA’s astronauts out in space on a mission that saw them go deeper into our solar system than any person has ever been, just for the sheer sense of achievement and wonder, the point of the Artemis II mission was as a test for eventually returning to the surface of the moon itself and establishing a lunar base. There are already investors putting up funds for mining operations, especially for the rare-on-Earth Helium-3, and companies like Interlune are already being careful to call what they want to do “harvesting” rather than “mining” given that the latter is associated with the idea of environmental destruction. Who does the moon belong to? Like what was once a natural starry sky that is now stuffed with an ever-growing number of commercial satellites, the answer is “whoever gets there first.”

And while countries can’t claim the moon (or any celestial object) for themselves owing to a 1960s United Nations treaty, there is nothing stopping a private company from finding its way up there and doing whatever it wants so long as it’s willing to bear the reception to its activities back on Earth. And also, you know. The United States doesn’t exactly listen to the United Nations or anyone basically ever, and especially not at the time of this writing, and there are clear desires to mine the moon and travel through space in an expansionist, capitalist way from American interests both private and governmental. Elon Musk doesn’t want to go to Mars; he wants you to go to Mars, far from the relative safety of Earth and its regulations and oversight, in order to risk your life toiling away producing further wealth for himself and his small army of progeny he plans to live forever through. Jeff Bezos isn’t interested in the scientific exploration of space; that’s a guy who isn’t satisfied with the already nearly nonexistent limits placed on his wealth and abuse of labor and wants even less regulation in his life, which he hopes to find among the stars.

Red Faction: Guerrilla understood this before it could apply the names of today, because it’s not as if this idea of colonization and exploitation started with the likes of Musk and Bezos and their capitalistic ilk. While it’s not a a corporation running Mars this time around, with the EDF in its place, it’s still very much an issue of corporations and capital at its heart: remember the stock ticker display of the EDF’s share price. The exploitation of Mars and its workers is big business on Earth, where the long arm of the planet and its economic and political leaders has decided that violence occurring out of its sight is justified if it allows for the quality of life people planet-side want to exist. There’s a global north vs. global south parallel here, with Mars as the stand in for the latter and Earth as a whole filling in for what others might refer to as “first-world” countries that dominate the economy and control all that can be controlled for their benefit at the expense of “third-world” and “undeveloped” nations; so long as the exploitation of workers and violence waged against them happens out of sight, leaving everyone to go about their days without having to consider the source of all that they possess and experience, then it can continue unimpeded. The Red Faction’s violent uprising against the EDF, its exceptionally expensive and disruptive destruction of property and infrastructure and killing of these security forces that constantly commit what would be considered war crimes if anyone would admit that there was a war happening, forced the issue out into the open.

Image credit: MobyGames

One thing Guerrilla’s narrative is brave enough to do is not blame the behavior of these violent imperialists on some magic spell or singular evil entity pushing them all forward. Well, besides capitalism, but that's the idea here: Volition doesn't shy from the point it was making like, say, Ogre Battle or various Fire Emblems have to muddy the waters with demons and ancient curses that change the behavior of a populace from its truer, more benevolent nature. In Guerrilla, the behaviors of the ruling class are nakedly displayed for what they are, which is growth at any cost enjoyed and pushed by the ones who don't even have to consider walking away from Omelas, because here it’s 140 million miles out of view. That distance and the insatiable needs of a planet powered by consumption and capital to the point that it has already pushed itself to ruin drives the EDF here; it was once an ally of the original Red Faction in the sense it could be appealed to in the first game to save miners on Mars from a larger-than-life persona guiding security forces with his hand, but here, it's simply Earth and its global military that is the adversary, with the only unnatural force compelling it capitalism, which dominates and enslaves those living under it on the home world, as well.

Volition not only avoids shying away from these implications, but does not leave them as implied. A late-game briefing outright tells you what the problem is and who is at the root of and benefits from it. “The EDF has organized a top secret economic summit,” the briefing begins. “Our ‘Giants of Industry’ call themselves civilians, but make no mistake. Every EDF massacre and atrocity on this planet is done for their benefit. Mars makes them rich, and brutality keeps their workers in line.” The point of the mission is not negotiation with these “Giants of Industry” or to intimidate them into changing their ways; no, you’re about to kill every major economic leader who happens to be on Mars for a summit to discuss The Red Faction Issue, while they are all in one place, as a message back to Earth that this exploitation of workers is too expensive of an endeavor to keep up, that the lives of those toiling away on Mars might be cheap but keeping them in line any longer is going to be prohibitively expensive.

In the late-game mission “Death By Committee,” the player hears exactly what the Red Faction’s leader thinks about the cause of and perpetuation of the suffering of Mars’ population.

Big fan of violence as a solution to your problems to the point of investing in its perpetuation abroad, huh? It’s not quite the imperial boomerang in action; maybe more like the one that Wile E. Coyote throws violently whipping back to harm the one who wielded it in the first place. And considering that we currently exist in a world where the crimes of the financial crisis that occurred during the development and release of Red Faction: Guerrilla went largely unpunished, if anything allowing for similarly brazen tactics to continue right out in the open to the world’s further detriment, it’s difficult to look upon this game’s mission statement with anything besides Alonzo Mourning Acceptance face.

There's never a “this is wrong!” narrative device or conflict in Guerrilla — the one time that protagonist Alec Mason is upset with what the Red Faction is doing follows a botched mission where he’s feeling down about their chances; he’s concerned that this revolution isn’t a winnable one, that the endless resources of Earth and the EDF will eventually kill them all. There is hope, though, as you are reminded by your commanding officer again and again, in making this war too costly to win as many revolutions have managed before, but it’s going to take dedication and destruction.

Everything you do to the EDF, everything an NPC does to them, is assumed to be deserved. Mason is concerned for the safety of his brother’s illicit, revolutionary activities and wants to put his head down and work upon his arrival on Mars, but when his brother is almost immediately murdered by EDF forces in broad daylight rather than apprehended, Mason picks up his hammer and starts looking for nails. The mid-game torture scene, where a named Red Faction member literally pries information from an EDF officer while you fire at EDF forces giving chase from the turret atop your vehicle doesn't get so much as a blink out of your character, who just does his job in the mission and does it well. That officer, as is made very clear by the recollection of the torture he himself inflicted on the Red Faction member currently returning the favor, had it coming. You attack targets in the city of Eos where commanding officers and VIPs reside, getting them where they live, not just work, and making EDF sympathizers enjoying the comforts of the urban setting, far away from the mines and labor, feel as unsafe as you and your people do. It's nasty work, that is not denied, but it’s also seen as necessary in a battle against an entire world and its interplanetary military that has effectively enslaved an entire population for its enrichment.

Image credit: MobyGames

It is also made clear that your side, for all its violence, is righteous and the one with its humanity left. An early mission has you going to a peaceful worker rally to protect it because the EDF will absolutely turn it into a violent encounter with guns.  “If we fight for them, they'll fight for us.” Before you can even reach the destination, the EDF has already begun firing on the crowd; the mission successfully concludes only if you manage to protect these protesting workers from further harm, and if you chase down and kill the escaping officer who has a noted history of inflicting violence like this upon workers.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about Red Faction: Guerrilla's missions and game structure, unlike Volition’s other open-world experience, Saints Row, which at least plays on expectations a bit with some real goofball setups like the ragdolling insurance fraud and its clear Grand Theft Auto Parody foundations. In this sense, Guerrilla is very by the numbers for its time. However, the way in which you play and complete these missions is what's refreshing. Being able to play stealthily and place some charges in specific locations for maximum impact and minimal violence, or go in swinging a hammer to drop structures and soldiers alike, means you can play to your own strengths and desires rather than playing out a more scripted sequence. Use a gun if you must, but maybe wait until you have the one that obliterates molecules so you can make clean, explosion-free holes in buildings — more on that weapon in a bit. Load a car up with charges and drive it into or through the walls of a reinforced base of the EDF, jump out, then hit boom when you're safely away. Load up a car with fellow guerrillas, then attack fortified towers built outside what should be civilian offices or residential areas to take them down and back. Just use your hammer to start breaking whatever is holding up EDF structures or the skulls of members of the EDF itself. You've just got a lot of freedom here that reminds you that these are the same devs that make Saints Row, in that regard, and that they applied those lessons of player freedom and imagination to the revamped destructible environment tech, GeoMod, of Volition’s PS2-era gem. Now a third-person game instead of a first-person shooter because, despite the presence of guns, this one isn't really a shooter anymore than the game where you can equip a dildo baseball bat is.

Also refreshing is how deeply intertwined the narrative mission and gameplay missions of Guerrilla are. The first mission is called “Better Red Than Dead” just so you don’t miss what you’re getting into here, and is about erasing traces of your past, pre-game hideout to avoid being tracked to your new one, which gives you both an opportunity to play around with the explosive charges miners are authorized to carry, and to see what happens when the EDF descends on your position once you’ve caused a little mayhem. Speaking of mayhem, there’s an actual tracker labeled “Mayhem” that pops up when you’ve managed to cause enough destruction in a certain stretch of time. A combo counter for racking up destruction bonuses, measured by the financial cost of said destruction, is a fun video game-y thing, naturally, but it also serves as a reminder, narratively, that driving these EDF forces out can be accomplished by making it too expensive for Earth to justify continuing the fight any longer. Blowing up some tanks full of fuel is one thing, but taking down entire stretches of infrastructure that provides power to EDF forces while also exploding APCs and shooting down expensive aircraft or taking down their landing pads while they are on them? That’s going to really leave an impact on the next quarterly financial briefing.

Spoiler: the torture is how you find out that weakness. Image credit: MobyGames

There are story-progression missions aplenty, but Guerrilla leaves much of the decision about what to do and when to do it up to you, as there are myriad “Guerrilla Actions” that are repeating missions that wrest control of an area from the EDF, lessening their presence there during future gameplay, while also boosting the morale of Mars’ non-military populace. “If we fight for them, they'll fight for us,” indeed. A higher morale gives you additional scrap bonuses after a successful mission that can be used both for upgrades and at a couple of points to advance the plot, but it also means more and more Red Faction members rolling up with weapons to help you out and keep Guerrilla from being Alec Mason vs. the EDF. There are also missions that don’t initially appear on your map that come over your radio, asking for help defending an apartment complex or chasing down a courier or finding a traitor and dealing with them before they can turn over a list of names to the enemy. These are optional, and while useful for building up control of a region and morale of the Red Faction, they also serve a narrative purpose of making the revolution feel like, again, it’s more than just Alec Mason being told what to do by a commanding officer. You get to play with the big fun guns because you’re trusted and eventually proven, but you are far from the only freedom fighter out there on Mars.

The revolution takes all kinds, too. Mason, for all the destruction he causes, is rather level-headed — he can’t have too much personality, after all, as the playable protagonist of a game that emphasizes player choice and freedom, or else that might get in the way of the player’s immersion in the world of Guerrilla. There are those in the Red Faction who won’t go as far as he does in a number of ways, but there are also those who make him seem moderate in comparison. Like Jenkins, for example, who occasionally calls out to Mason from his personalized ride that’s equipped with a massive rocket launcher primed for taking out extremely visible targets to announce to the EDF and anyone else watching that the Red Faction is here.

Jenkins is a true believer. His obsession with leaving Earth behind — coming up with a Martian language, his disgust for terraforming because it makes Mars “juuuust like Earth” — highlights a truly radical point of view that embraces Mars and Martians as their own thing instead of an extension of Earth. A truly new beginning for humanity free from the vestiges of its origin. “You want to know why they're doing what they're doing? So they can screw it all up one more time!” Sure, he won't learn to breathe carbon dioxide like he wants to, but this viewpoint signals a willingness to change humanity itself rather than bend Mars to its will, like was done to Earth.

Retro spotlight: Red Faction

Where Volition planted the seeds for what would become one of their finest games.

Retro XP • Marc Normandin from Retro XP

Despite holding the most extreme views on display in Guerrilla, no one treats Jenkins like a madman, either, not in-mission or not in random chatter you pick up from other Red Faction members while walking around camp. That’s important — he's simply part of the Red Faction, like anyone else committed to a New Mars, and his dedication is to be respected and embraced. And this same discipline means traitors to the cause are dealt with, permanently, by you or, as is implied by the radio calls, by whoever decides to answer the request to intercept those who try to name names to the EDF to protect themselves at the expense of the revolution.

Jenkins’ point of view harkens back to the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, within which an early and central conflict among the scientists and engineers sent to Mars to figure out how to make it a thriving resource for a failing Earth is how to treat the planet. Should it be a Mars for Martians, its natural state maintained as much as is possible, with people molding themselves to their new home rather than the other way around? Or should it be quickly and violently terraformed and transformed and mined and exploited, existing both in subservience to Earth and its demands as well as a lesser Earth 2 redesigned to solve the problems of its parent? While themes like this don’t play out in Guerrilla as explicitly as they do in, say, hidden gem Lack of Love, there is still a clear nod to the ideas of Robinson and those that he was inspired by in the treatment of Mars and the idea of what being Martian means, both through Jenkins and through the “Marauders,” a high-tech civilization of Martian-born humans who put on the appearance of being straight out of Mad Max despite their scientific acumen. This group broke off from the version of Mars forced upon the planet by Earth, and serve as the closest thing a story about another planet without a native population can get to having one, much like how in the Mars trilogy this scientific dispute among colleagues ends up resulting in not just separate settlements but civil war and revolution.

Image credit: MobyGames

Also thematic, but missable in the same way that something like Gundam has inspired the “Wow, cool robot!” meme, is Red Faction: Guerrilla’s Nano Forge. This sci-fi rifle, developed with Marauder tech found by Mason in-story, breaks anything down — buildings, vehicles, even people — molecule by molecule until it just isn’t there anymore. This isn't just a GeoMod 2.0 idea put into action, a showcase of how much more powerful Volition’s destruction capabilities had become since the start of the aughts when it was focused on making new doors and pathways with explosives through tunnels, nor is it just another in a long line of inspired weaponry from the developer. The Nano Forge rifle also serves as a metaphor for what needs to be done to rid the forced labor of Mars of its enemies. Leaving behind any traces of the power of the old won't finish the job; breaking them back down into atoms, however, will.

This game felt revolutionary back in 2009, thanks to its themes and lack of subtlety. In 2026, with truly revolutionary media so difficult to come by in the mainstream, with so much toned down to appease shareholders and keep anyone from getting any ideas about the problems of the world or where they come from, with the news itself under the control of the wealthiest and most powerful in the world to a degree of consolidation that makes 2009’s levels look like child’s play, Red Faction: Guerrilla basically feels impossible even to someone who was around for and impacted by it the first time around. It’s a game worth playing for the first time or revisiting, and not just because it feels great to play, or that its open world is of a comfortable size that takes a couple of dozen hours to get through rather than hundreds; it’s that it is an exceptionally considered, thematic game with a message that resonated both at the time of its release and into the present, a brilliant piece of art with something to say and an audience more receptive to what it is saying than at any point in its existence. “Wow, cool gun,” of course, but it’s the meaning behind that gun that sticks out most in the present, and has now outlived Red Faction and Volition itself.

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This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

It’s rare that a game distributed by a company as significant as Taito has unclear origins, but that’s the case with the 1980 fixed shooter, Phoenix. Depending on where you look, development is either incorrectly attributed, cited as unknown, or assigned to one of two companies without a definitive response as to which it actually was. Sometimes you see Amstar, one of the companies with regional distribution rights, credited as Phoenix’s creator. Joel Hochberg, who worked for Centuri — the American distributor of Phoenix — said in a 2006 interview that “a small Japanese developer” was responsible for the game, and the licensing deal they had. A 2005 supplement to Masumi Akagi’s In The Beginning, There Was Pong, that collected development and publication data from games released between 1971 and 2005, cites two companies as possible developers: TPN and Hiraoka. You can’t necessarily take that at face value, however, as there have been errors discovered within this book, as noted on the Internet Archive page hosting the text.

TPN licensed the game to Taito in Japan, per Akagi’s research, while Hiraoka — also based in Japan like TPN — licensed Phoenix to Amstar, per Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. And per Akagi, Hiraoka and Amstar both then licensed the rights for American distribution out to Centuri. So, we know who didn’t develop the game — it wasn’t Taito, Amstar, or Centuri, and Atari entered the picture later for the home port — but all that does is narrow down who might have rather than definitively answer the question.

Which is wild, considering that Phoenix ended up being Centuri’s most significant arcade success: in 1980, the company posted losses of $4.5 million, per a report in The Miami News, but in 1981, the year Phoenix released in American arcades, Centuri made a $7.5 million profit, and it became their best-selling cabinet by 1982 according to The Jackson Sun. It was also one of the first three games that Atari contracted home port rights to, at a time when licensed home ports were still a relatively new thing and lawsuits for clones were becoming more frequent. And Taito was already Taito at this point: Space Invaders had released two years prior, in 1978, so the company deciding to attach itself to another shoot ‘em up was notable all on its own.

Image credit: Arcadeology

And yet, it’s an open question as to who is responsible for Phoenix despite all of this. It’s a shame, too, as Phoenix is… well, it’s not a missing link between Galaxian and Galaga, but it is a stepping stone between the two, a high-quality game that did well and was known in its era, which bridged the innovation gap between the two far more famous games a little and helps remind that hey, Namco didn’t just go from Galaxian right to Galaga. There were other companies, other developers, other ideas that existed and went out into the world in between. It’s fitting that Taito would be the one to distribute Phoenix in Japan, considering that they were responsible for Space Invaders, which in turn pushed Namco to develop Galaxian in direct reaction to it, in competition with a behemoth the likes of which the video game world had never known before and has rarely known since.

This is a lot of preamble, yes, but stick with it. Space Invaders created the concept of a fixed shooter, as well as the very idea of “what if enemies attacked the player,” a shift from the Breakout- and Pong-style games that dominated the era. Previously, video games with violence were more like Midway’s one-on-one dueling game, Gun Fight, rather than this kind of dynamic action setup. Galaxian, per designer Kazunori Sawano, was already in early development when Space Invaders landed, but after Taito’s industry-shifting hit took hold, Namco’s president Masaya Nakamura told the Sawano’s team that it had to be “the post-Invaders” game. While Galaxian wasn’t quite at the level Space Invaders was — truly, the list of games that have had that level of success is a short one — it managed to iterate on the concept in a way that made it popular and influential in its own right.

An early version of “rank” in shooting games, or STGs, came from 1979’s Galaxian, as Sawano explained that the ships were programmed to react to the player’s own movements and change their own in response, giving them “a will and personality of their own,” which would in turn cause the player to change their own behaviors, creating a constant back-and-forth loop between the two. (For more on rank’s history and purpose and implementation, here’s a long look at that and Battle Garegga.) Galaxian also featured RGB graphics (and is one of the first games to do so), displayed multi-colored sprites the year after Space Invaders arrived in black and white, and the hardware it ran on was capable of displaying scrolling, which in this case Namco used to have an animated, scrolling starfield in the background rather than changing from the fixed shooter format of the day. The look of the game was such a change for the era that Tomohiro Nishikada, the creator of Space Invaders, said of Galaxian in a 2000 interview that the follow-up games he was making with leftover black and white boards at Taito, in comparison, had “good gameplay” but were “a sad sight compared to the colorful screens of Galaxian.”

Game Machine had Galaxian behind only Space Invaders on the list of most successful arcade games of 1979 in Japan, and it managed to finish second in 1980 as well, behind another Namco monster in Pac-Man. Galaxian led to Galaga in 1981, which ended up being a massive hit even in comparison to Galaxian, to the point that it’s easy to forget, in retrospect, that Galaga was a sequel and that it’s part of the Galaxian series, rather than entirely its own thing.

Before Galaga, though, there was Phoenix, and Phoenix had further tweaks to the fixed shooter formula. Released in 1980, Phoenix also used a scrolling starfield background for multiple stages, but rather than twinkling white stars on a black background, instead, it featured planets, star fields, galaxies, just a wide variety of celestial objects, and all with a blue hue to them rather than white. The ship itself animated, as parts of it would be in motion as you moved the whole left and right. Enemy sprites were significantly larger, too, and every fifth stage featured a distinct boss that took up most of the screen’s real estate — bosses were still a relatively new feature to arcade games, as Ken Horowitz wrote in 2020’s Beyond Donkey Kong, and distinct bosses with their own stage even more so.

Whereas Space Invaders had every enemy slowly descend, the game only speeding up as more and more were defeated, and Galaxian purposefully slow-played the difficulty by having just one enemy ship come down at a time at first and gradually increasing the intensity of the entire experience as you cleared more and more levels, Phoenix had the enemy come down in bunches, to be fended off simultaneously, with little regard for whether you were prepared to take on a handful of foes at once… right in the very first stage. This level of challenge was even noted by Centuri in its manual for the cabinet, which stated that, “PHOENIX is an exciting new space game, with special audio and visual effects, challenging the skills of the most experienced player. Fascinating visual graphics and extraterrestrial sounds add to the intensity of this game.” Contrast this to Galaxian, which Sawano “spent a great deal of effort” to keep balanced and inviting, per that earlier interview. “The difficulty from one stage to the next is almost imperceptible; however, if you compare stage 1 to stage 10, it’s very clear that stage 10 is harder. That’s the kind of slow build-up I went for, where things gradually seem to get harder, but there’s no apparent disjunction. I think it’s a very important concept in game design.” Phoenix isn’t unfair by any means, but it clearly had a very different goal than Galaxian and Sawano in mind.

Image credit: MobyGames

It takes processing power capable of such a feat to manage this kind of setup in the first place: the reason enemies in Space Invaders speed up as you defeat more of them is because the hardware wasn’t as bogged down by the volume of objects on screen, which allowed everything to move at a brisker, more difficult for the player pace. Phoenix, arriving on more powerful tech and in a world where people were already intimately familiar with the genre rather than being outright introduced to it, could get right to the fireworks factory. And then there was sound: while Space Invaders had a four-note song made up of chromatic bass notes that sped up the fewer enemies remained on screen, and were more akin to sound effects strung together than the sounds you’d get from a dedicated sound chip, Phoenix featured a soundtrack in addition to its many sound effects; Phoenix was another leap forward on multiple levels.

And yet, it was still very rooted in its era. Fixed shooters would not be replaced by more free-form STG for a little bit yet — Xevious was not even on the horizon yet — and, in the most “it was just 1980” reminder possible, Phoenix’s upright cabinet lacked a joystick: instead, there were two buttons labeled “Left” and “Right” for movement, just like the early upright Space Invaders’ cabinets from two years prior.

A Centuri Phoenix cabinet, located at the American Classic Arcade Museum in Laconia, New Hampshire.

If you’re not used to the Left-Right buttons in place of sticks or a directional pad — and why would you be in 2026, unless you already had years and years of exposure to and experience with them — it can be a little disorienting at first. Even for myself, despite my immersion into golden-era arcade cabinets over the years, it tripped me up for a bit — it’s all those Namco games with their joysticks that I played that kept this from being an instantaneous transition back in time. A couple of quarters later, though, and my brain was rewired as needed, to the point I was able to get through a full loop and see what Phoenix had to offer beyond the initial couple of stages.

The first two stages have smaller bird-like vessels coming at you in significant numbers, and right out of the gate: again, this is not like Galaxian, but more like Galaga after it’s ramped up the difficulty a bit in terms of the volume of foes coming your way. Only — and this is important for the premise you’ve been reading for a bit now — it predates Galaga’s aggressiveness by a calendar year. In the first stage, you fire more slowly, dodging both ships and their fire, but in the second stage rapid-fire is enabled so that you can do the same thing but with better defense. Yes, defense, not offense: the ships are coming at you even more aggressively here, so you’re more fighting back instead of taking the fight to them. There’s a scoring trick here in these first two stages, as well: if you can hit a basic bird ship coming at you while it’s moving diagonally instead of coming straight down at you — a more difficult shot to make that involves better timing and movement tracking — you earn 200 points rather than 20. More advanced Phoenix spaceships — those are the bird-like ships you’re fighting — can be worth more base points, as well.

Phoenix received an Atari 2600 port that had to make cuts to the game, as well as downgrade visually, but it remained a popular pick in its day. Image credit: MobyGames

Stages three and four feature a wave of bird eggs rather than a formation of bird ships: these eggs will inevitably hatch into larger birds that can also fire shots at you, just like the ships — if you can quickly destroy the eggs before they hatch, they will be worth more than the enemies that come from them, which makes the entire setup basically the opposite of the patience approach that Galaga ended up going with in order to force you to find scoring tricks by not just firing continuously and at random, or before the formation was set. These hatched monstrosities are significantly different than the ships more than just visually, as you can hit the left or right wings of the birds and not actually destroy them. The wings will eventually regenerate, as well; your focus has to be on the center of the bird to end the threat, which puts you right in line with the shots it’s firing at you. Finally, the fifth stage of the loop is the boss, where an alien pilots a massive ship. You fire repeatedly through the ship, blowing away more and more of its exterior, until you get to a scrolling belt that takes damage. Once you’ve cleared enough of the belt away and have an open shot at the alien piloting the thing, you can clear the stage with a single hit of it. It’s not as simple as that, of course, as bird ships from the earlier stages are counterattacking you at the same time that the boss ship itself is shooting, causing you to have to dodge fire while you send off your own. Getting rid of all of the bird ships also doesn’t solve anything, since another wave will just be launched by the boss ship.

The loop then repeats, only more difficult this time. To help you actually complete a loop (and then further ones), you have more than just your offensive capabilities, but also a force field with a dedicated button. This won’t protect you from ships that come down and crash into you, but it does absorb enemy fire. So, if you’re quick enough, you can repel an incoming fiery death, but you can’t just spam the force field button, either. And while you can shoot while under the protection of this temporary shield, you’re stuck in place. Given that enemies can just crash right into you — and absolutely seek you out and hang around at the bottom of the screen basically taunting you with the knowledge that they can get you but you can’t get them at that time — you do not want to leave yourself open to that possibility more than you need to.

Only one way to get an eggscellent score in Phoenix. Image credit: MobyGames

Phoenix was successful and different enough at the time that, like with Space Invaders and Galaxian, it found itself with a legion of bootlegs and clones rather than being considered one itself. Atari even ended up suing Imagic for their game, Demon Attack, as Retro Gamer detailed back in 2016 (issue No. 161). The issue was copyright infringement: Atari was protecting their exclusive license to produce Phoenix for the Atari 2600, but the two parties ended up settling and Imagic was allowed to release the game all the same, despite the attempt at an injunction.

Despite Phoenix’s success and popularity in its day, it’s been mostly forgotten about. Not by people who enjoy playing it, but in terms of being available to even discover or rediscover. Taito reissued it exactly one time, as part of its Taito Legends collection that released for the Playstation 2, Xbox, Playstation Portable, and Windows back in 2005. Taito has not, however, put it on any of their other compilations, or added it to the Egret II Mini console in any way, and Hamster has yet to include the 1980 fixed shooter as part of its vast Arcade Archives lineup, as well. Its port hasn’t made its way to the ever-expanding Atari 50 suite of games, either; you either play this one on a cabinet if you find one, happen to have the means to play its re-release from 2005, or you emulate in MAME. That’s a surprising turn of events, considering how regularly Taito goes to its deep library of games — including its deeper cuts — and how Hamster has had no issue releasing notable games that far more people have forgotten about than remember.

Given that Taito keeps digging, though, and Arcade Archives continues to mix plenty of 1980s in with its more recent shift to the 1990s, maybe this will all change and Phoenix will once again do that thing that phoenixes are famously known for. Maybe by then we’ll even know who is responsible for developing the thing.

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This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The early history of Looney Tunes video games belongs to Atari, which checks out the second you remember who it was that owned the giant 50 years ago. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, in the lead up to coming out with the Atari VCS — later known as the Atari 2600 — sold the company to what was then known as Warner Communications in 1976. Licensing deals were a lot simpler when you were essentially licensing to yourself, so, a Road Runner pinball machine arrived in 1979, and then there was nearly a Bugs Bunny game for the Atari 2600 until it was canceled in favor of Snoopy and the Red Baron, marking the occasion of the first-ever Peanuts video game instead.

Looney Tunes would need to wait until April, 1984 for its first video game, when Taz came out for the 2600, as well — while you control the titular Tasmanian Devil, it’s always in the shape of a tornado with him spinning around. So, he only sort of appeared on screen in the game itself, and in Europe the game was instead released as Asterix — which, frankly, got a much more appealing title screen rendition of the licensed main character, as well. The Taz one looks like someone was drawing him from memory, but to be fair it was likely difficult to replicate his whole deal in the specific style and hardware of the time.

The next year, Atari Games, Inc., which spun out of Atari after the video game crash when Warner sold off a significant number of assets to Jack Tramiel, would release Road Runner to arcades. As Warner still had a 20 percent stake in the assets it had sold off, there was a vested interest in getting these characters adapted to video games, and while Road Runner wasn’t the first Looney Tunes video game around, it certainly looked and felt like the first to be a true translation of what those cartoons were about.

Image credit: MobyGames

Road Runner was released for the Atari System 1 board, which would also host the likes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, RoadBlasters, and Marble Madness. Bright colors, speed, loads of objects and detail… System 1 hardware was capable of producing some technologically impressive beauties, and Road Runner certainly qualifies. The sprites weren’t particularly huge here, but you can even see on the title screen that the backgrounds and landscapes evoke the coloring of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote shorts, and the two characters pop off the screen with instantly recognizable looks.

Road Runner is not an endless runner, no — this was 1985, we weren’t at that point in the development of these genres yet — but it’s certainly a predecessor. It’s not quite right to call the game as a whole a platformer, as there are only certain sections where Road Runner has to leave his feet, using the only button the game has to do so. It’s not a racing game, either, even if you see it labeled as such on occasion, but instead a chasing game — you control Road Runner, in an attempt to keep out of reach of old “carnivorous vulgarius” himself, Wile E. Coyote. And to do so, you have to, essentially, endlessly run. That’s a bit of an oversimplification that does the actual high-level skill and strategy of the game a disservice, though, and you can stop, so you won’t see the runner label applied, either. It’s a chase game; you are being chased.

The version of Road Runner that was released was not always the plan, and in fact the game predated the creation of Atari Games. In 1983, Atari was working on a prototype LaserDisc game which was, in many ways, what ended up being released on System 1 hardware as Road Runner. There are a couple of notable differences, however: the game’s backgrounds and roads in the prototype were all stored on the optical storage of the LaserDisc rather than generated by the PCB — that’s printed circuit board — as ended up being the case for the actual release of the game, and the LD edition was loaded with cutscenes from actual Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote shorts. Basically, when Wile E. Coyote died in the game, it would cut to actual footage from one of the shorts to show him dying in a similar fashion.

It’s difficult to tell in this video how high the quality of the roads and backgrounds were, but if you’re familiar with what the actual shorts starring these characters looked like, you will recognize a little more of the look that layout artist and background painter Maurice Noble utilized after taking over these shorts, where the southwestern American desert was made more visually abstract — all kinds of rock formations that don’t make logical sense and don’t exist in nature, but don’t have to since this is a cartoon. Meanwhile, the System 1 game leans more Robert Gribboek, likely since what was possible graphically changed with the move from LaserDisc; he was going for realism in the visual representation of the desert before Noble’s era. But, aggravating shadows and 2010 shaky cam aside, this is what we have to work with when it comes to footage of a rare prototype in action.

During development, Atari decided that LaserDisc wasn’t the future nor the present, and Road Runner became a conversion kit release for System 1 hardware instead, with all of the LaserDisc elements removed. While the cutscenes were a nifty addition that made everything feel a little more genuine, and the background graphics and roads look wonderful even in a video that objectively does not, there is something to be said about how the Road Runner release that did happen is paced. You aren’t interrupted by these cutscenes in a game where the idea is to run, run, run, to keep ahead of Wile E. Coyote, to always be moving to avoid him. You get to stay locked in, in your flow state, however you want to describe it when you’re really feeling the game. There’s something to that idea, but maybe it’s easy for me to say that in 2026 when I have multiple Looney Tunes shorts collections I can pop in to a media player when I want to experience a little Coyote vs. Road Runner action.

Speaking of the shorts themselves, Chuck Jones, director, producer, and one of the creators of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote shorts alongside writer Michael Maltese, revealed that he had rules for how these cartoons were supposed to go, which were published in his (highly enjoyable) 1990 memoir, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist. Those nine rules:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “Beep-Beep!”

2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.

3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” — George Santayana).

4. No dialogue ever, except “Beep-Beep!”

5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — otherwise, logically, he would not be called a Road Runner.

6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.

7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences, must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.

8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy.

9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

Now, Maltese felt these were “post-production observation” and not rules used during the making of these cartoons, as he explained in an interview included in another book, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, but that part isn’t necessarily important for the point that’s about to be made here. What matters, as far as adapting Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner’s escapades into other mediums, is whether or not those adaptations manage to feel true to the originals — whether these were actual rules or just “post-production observations” brings you to the same place, as far as that feel goes. Road Runner, the video game, does an excellent job of adhering to these nine ideas, which helps it feel very much like it’s honoring the source material and not just slapping a license on a game. No offense to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, which is fun in spite of its failures in this arena.

Wile E. Coyote is repeatedly entrusting his cause to Acme products, like rocket skates, dynamite, literal rockets, powered pogo sticks, and more — the end result for all of these, should Road Runner escape his clutches, is for some kind of explosion or fire that temporarily stuns Wile E. Coyote in place, looking humiliated but able to literally and figuratively dust himself off and get right back to it. Road Runner doesn’t ever harm his antagonistic partner himself, but his actions can lead to the Coyote being harmed: for example, thanks to Wile E. Coyote tracking Road Runner as closely as he does in terms of the paths he takes, you can basically trick him into getting hit by a car by dodging it at the last second.

Technically, it’s the Coyote’s own ineptitude that caused the accident, since he couldn’t dodge the vehicle the same way that the Road Runner could, and there was no direct intervention by the fleeing bird, either. Plus, since the cars are a part of the natural environment of the southwestern desert — you are on a road, after all — they are not an “outside force,” nor are they a circumvention of the rule about every “mechanical convenience” coming from anywhere but the Acme corporation. Also, in the very first short with these two, Wile E. Coyote gets run over by a bus whose horn he mistakes for the Road Runner’s signature “Beep-Beep;” see? Ineptitude and vehicular mishaps were established as a risk from the start.

The footage from shorts found in the LaserDisc prototype is gone from the game System 1 intro, but the fake Latin gag still found a home. Image credit: MobyGames

Wile E. Coyote is hoisted by his own petard on plenty of occasions, especially in later levels, as mines left laying around the road end up being just as much, if not more, of a hindrance to him than they are for the eagle-eyed Road Runner. (Road runner-eyed Road Runner?) They are regularly placed near piles of bird seed, which have also been left out to slow the Road Runner and control his path. Little does the Coyote know, though, but in the game, the bird seed also increases Road Runner’s speed — you can get a lot more done on a full stomach. And picking up all the bird seed will result in higher score bonuses at the end of each level, as well as giving you more in-level points for keeping a combo going throughout. Later on, lemonades are also introduced: the idea here is that they take longer to acquire than the bird seed, so there’s more of a chance that Wile E. Coyote will be able to sneak up from behind and grab the Road Runner while thirst is being quenched. They are optional pickups, but also worth a ton of points, so worth sipping whenever you’ve got a moment to spare.

And it’s worth it to let the Coyote get close, but not too close: it’s not said openly by the game that this is a going concern, but you’ll notice at some point that when Wile E. Coyote falls behind and off the screen, he’ll don a pair of rocket skates and come back faster than before. Those rocket skates don’t last forever, but he only has to catch up to Road Runner once for you to lose a life.

Road Runner received ports to a number of platforms, including the 8-bit Atari ST home computer. Image credit: MobyGames

Dodge vehicles, avoid mines, jump over gaps to avoid falling, time your forward — and sometimes backward — progress to avoid Wile E. Coyote’s incessant grasping. This game is a bit nonstop, although it does control at variable speeds thanks to the joystick used to control Road Runner’s momentum: you can speed up or slow down as necessary, though, stopping is not advised. If you didn’t watch that above video of the arcade game being played, you should, because you’ll see someone who has mastered it in action — Wile E. Coyote never stood a chance.

Road Runner ended up being ported to various platforms in the aftermath of its arcade release: the Atari 2600 as well as an unlicensed Tengen cartridge for the NES, and then a slew of home computer ports for the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and ZX Spectrum. None of them can match the System 1 visuals, but the Atari ST edition at least makes a pretty solid effort since it was a 16-bit machine. The NES game also looks good, though not at the level of the Atari ST release thanks to the more limited color palette that Nintendo’s 8-bit console was working with. Still, there’s a level of detail there that can be appreciated considering those circumstances, especially when put up against most of the other 8-bit releases.

The NES version of Road Runner is missing some of the brighter colors and detail of the original arcade edition and Atari ST port, but is one of the more impressive 8-bit renditions despite this.. Image credit: MobyGames

Like so many classic Atari arcade titles and games that Warner owns the rights to, Road Runner is nowhere to be found in 2026. At least, not on modern hardware in a legal fashion. Emulation exists, though, and if you happen to find an actual cabinet to play Road Runner, you should — that joystick gives you some serious freedom of precise movement for the little guy, and can help you more easily escape the clutches of the always-hungry Wile E. Coyote. I’ve filed this one under “It’s New To Me,” but Road Runner was actually new to me in spring 2025, when I played the cabinet at the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Laconia, NH — an unlicensed Tengen cartridge and another trip to the ACAM later, and it’s not so new to me anymore, but I picked up that port and played it again on a cabinet for a reason. This is a real good one, and worth playing and playing again to commit its patterns to muscle memory like the best arcade games so often are.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Bally Midway was into racing games from nearly the beginning of its history. In 1975, Midway released its first arcade title, Gun Fight, and its third game, 280 ZZZAP, got its full release in early 1977. If that name doesn’t scream “racing,” well, that’s because it’s been 50 years since it was first shown in public: first called “Midnight Racer,” the name was later changed so it was named after Nissan’s Datsun 280Z, making it one of the first games with a licensing deal.

In 280 ZZZAP, you race at night, avoiding other drivers, turns, and against the clock. What’s funny about being licensed like this is that you can’t actually see the car, as the view is not from behind or the side of it, but it does say “Datsun 280 ZZZAP” at the top of the playing area, so you can’t miss the connection, at least. Despite this early foray into racing, though, Midway didn’t play it straight with cars for years after this. Spy Hunter, released in 1983, is a vehicular combat game, not a racer. Demolition Derby, released the next year, should be pretty self-explanatory in its goal. The company didn’t seem to have that much interest in the industry arms race that came out of racers like Namco’s Pole Position, instead ceding that territory to arcade rival, Atari, which distributed Namco’s games in the United States.

Midway did eventually go back to a more straightforward racer. Well, straightforward compared to vehicular combat games, anyway. Max RPM, released in 1986, doesn’t emphasize combat or collisions, but instead is just you racing against an opponent and the clock. Rather than lengthy tracks, though, full of twists and turns, Max RPM focused on drag racing. These courses are all very short, and very fast, and you can win or lose in the blink of an eye. There is the one monitor, split in the middle, that allows for head-to-head racing, with a blue car for player one, a red car for player two. You don’t need to have two players, though, as the second car can be controlled by the CPU; more importantly, you need to beat the clock, anyway, as winning against your opponent isn’t enough.

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

Those qualifying times are designed for you to not make any mistakes, especially as you get further along. And you can make all kinds of mistakes in Max RPM. There is debris on the road that you can hit which will slow you down, ever so slightly. Drafting plays a vital role, to the point that you need to use the on-screen rear view mirror to see where the other car is when it’s behind you in order to not allow them to draft off of you: being ahead if a temporary thing if the car in the back can successfully draft, and the courses are not long enough to make up for that happening. There are speed boosts — nitrous oxide, per the game itself — spread all over the road, especially after the first few courses, and they might seem optional but are anything but. Maybe you can best the other driver without hitting most of them, but you still have to beat the qualifying time to advance further, and that becomes more and more difficult as you progress.

Just as important is shifting gears. Your transmission has four of them, and the very nanosecond that your speedometer hits the red, you need to shift up to the next one in order to keep building speed. Hit the gas hard enough before the light goes off to signal the start of the race and you can shift into second basically from the jump — fail to get that kind of head start, and you will regret it, because again, even if your opponent also falters, the clock is the clock.

While it’s drag racing, every race isn’t necessarily a straightaway, NHRA-style. There are slight turns, but it’s more like angling your driving than actually turning for real. The wheel is a lot tighter than what you would need to actually turn, designed more for going slightly left or slightly right, more for trying to angle yourself behind the car in front of you — or out of its own possible drafting path — than anything else. And to make sure you avoid debris but hit speed boosts as they come up, of course.

You have the four-speed stick shift, the wheel, and a gas pedal as inputs on the stand-up cabinet— no brakes. There is no need for or time for braking in Max RPM — the name of the game is not a suggestion, but a directive. Check the video below for examples of the first few courses, which go in a pattern of straightaway, no-frills qualifier and then the actual course, which will be more complicated, lengthier, and have more to concern yourself with than just getting to the finish line as quickly as possible. That’s still the goal, but this is where stuff is in the road, to be avoided or rammed into for speed boosts, and also where additional use of the wheel comes in for reasons beyond drafting and avoiding being drafted off of.

That first qualifying course is just 1,320 feet long. That’s a quarter-mile track, for a car where you are flooring it. The computer-controlled car in the video above finishes in 11.90 seconds with a trap speed of 149 mph — that’s the average speed over the last quarter-mile, which is the entire course in this case. The actual course itself is longer — it takes place in Atlanta, though you can’t really tell as much from the road itself — but still takes player one just 23.41 seconds to complete. The qualifying time was 25.25 seconds; the player would have done better if they had attempted to draft, but instead, they banked on the opponent hitting something in their way to slow them down, which happened. The CPU car actually had a significantly higher trap speed — 176 mph to 131 — but because of the debris it smashed into, you can see it get practically shoved back and behind player one.

I don’t know why the player didn’t shift into fourth gear in the second full race, but it’s good that they didn’t, for instructional purposes. They finished 4.99 seconds behind despite hitting multiple nitrous canisters for speed boosts, with a trap speed 71 mph slower — they not only lost to their opponent, but did not qualify and suffered a game over because of it. No drafting, no slamming it into fourth at the first opportunity to do so — see how easy it is to fall behind by a significant amount in races this short?

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

You might have also noticed — if you did watch the video — that the dashboard of the car that shows a speedometer also indicates whether you are drafting or not with a flashing D — at least you don’t have to guess at it. Since you don’t have any time to spare, that matters! Draft while you can, or lose.

You can earn some bonus time with your performances to give yourself some more room for error in future races, but the difficulty does ramp up considerably. You will get to a point — against the computer, anyway — where you are blowing it out of the water, not struggling in any way, and then you might find that you lost for failure to beat the qualifying time, anyway. You have to get everything just right at this point — jump off that starting line, shift the second that it’s time, avoid the cones and garbage on the road, drive right into those speed-boosting nitrous oxide canisters, and, if you’re ever behind, draft to get back ahead immediately. And also, don’t fall behind. There’s simply no time for it, not when you’re trying to achieve — wait for it — maximum RPM.

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

The game’s lead programmer was Tom Leon, who prior to Max RPM worked on Tron, Spy Hunter, and Rampage for Midway, and afterward would develop for Spy Hunter II, which used a split-screen setup akin to Max RPM’s, albeit for cooperative play rather than competitive. Working with Leon was Brian Colin, who had also developed Spy Hunter and Rampage and would get to Arch Rivals in 1989, but unlike Leon stuck around in the game industry for decades after leaving Midway behind (and worked with Midway on sequels to properties he had originally helped create in the first place, through his own studio, Game Refuge.

While Colin was initially credited for his graphical and animation work, he was eventually a game designer as well, and usually worked with programmer Jeff Nauman both at Midway and after leaving to found Game Refuge. However, Max RPM was one of the rare occasions after 1985 where Colin worked with a programmer besides Nauman. The team did some great work, too, as Max RPM is simple in many ways — drive fast, go (mostly) straight — but it all goes so quickly with failure feeling like it’s on you and not the game that it’s easy enough to toss another quarter in to see if you can do better.

And what more can you ask for out of an arcade game, other than to understand what it is that it needs you to do, and to feel like you can do that very thing if only you allow yourself the opportunity? You could ask for the game to be available in the present, but that’s just not the case with Max RPM, which is a shame: it’s not even available in the recent-ish past, as it was not included in the Midway Arcade Treasure series that came out in the original Xbox, Playstation 2, and GameCube era. Luckily, if you’re in the New England area, Funspot in Laconia, NH does have a fully operational Max RPM cabinet inside the American Classic Arcade Museum portion of the building. And if you aren’t near enough for a pilgrimage there, there’s always emulating the game on MAME — luckily, since the wheel isn’t as necessary for turning as in something like Pole Position or TX-1, even a keyboard’s arrows can work just fine for emulation.

Given that Warner Bros. Games now owns Midway’s titles now and likes to pretend that it does not, MAME or a road trip is the best you can realistically hope for with Max RPM. Maybe that will change at some point, though, when someone at Warner Bros. realizes that, at the least, letting Hamster put out Arcade Archives releases of Midway’s games will make more money than letting them sit dormant, or remembers that a developer like Digital Eclipse is out there to put in the necessary work of bringing the past into the present. Until that time, MAME or a road trip.

It’s a real shame for racing fans that Warner Bros. Games has been so derelict in its duty here, given that, beyond Max RPM, Bally Midway (and Williams, which also eventually roped in Tradewest and Atari Games under the Warner Bros. umbrella) famously developed and/or distributed the likes of Cruis’n USA and Cruis’n World, Off Road Challenge, Hydro Thunder, and San Francisco Rush 2049 for arcades, as well had a hand in a number of console-exclusive racers during the same period in the 90s. That’s a whole bunch of releases — and not even all of them mentioned above — just sitting there in the warehouse of their mind, rotting away in the present day. What a waste.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.