Retronauts - 617: N.A.R.C.

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Just say "yes" to Diamond Feit, Jeremy Parish, and David Oxford as they D.A.R.E. to remember NARC, a classic ’80s arcade game that took the War on Drugs literally. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, winners don't take drugs. Winners kill drugs. Hello, and welcome back to Retronauts. joining us on this very special episode. No, I'm sorry. It's not episode 420. And no, I'm sorry. We didn't record on April 20th. I didn't plan that far ahead. But know this. It's a very special episode because we're talking about NARC, a video game of some acclaim, and a second video game that's, well, we're talking about it because it's called NARC and just we can't, we can't omit it, you know, as much as we'd like to. But this is your

host Diamond Fight, Hi as a Kite. And joining me this week are two very special guests, starting in the great state of North Carolina. Hey, it's me, Jeremy Parrish. I thought this episode was about narcolepsy, and I was just here to take a nap. So this might be a little difficult. Please, please, do not nod off, Jeremy. Do do everything you can. Take this needle. Take this needle, Jerry. It will keep you awake. And joining us somewhere in North... Is it Catchersall White? Oh, no. You do not want to get hooked on Cat for So White. That will not end will. Joining us north of the border somewhere, I don't know where. Yeah, I'm David Oxford. I don't do drugs myself, but I'm not against it. So I guess you could say I'm going to meet you midway.

All right. Oh, this was a Williams game, wasn't it? Well, it's all. By the time this game came on, I think they were all one happy company, I think. Oh, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Nice But yes We are here to talk about the video game NARC Which means we have to talk about drugs Which means we're making a little bit

Some jokes about drugs But let's get very serious here Because you know As often in the show We have to talk about you know Where we're coming from What we've experienced What our you know

What our history is So everyone please lean into the microphone Give your full address And tell the police where you keep your drugs Jeremy you go first Now I'm seeing Jeremy's doing the The Viz McMahon neck

neck waving thing? No, no. Okay. Okay. Bad idea. Bad idea. I was just trying to, you know, reach the spliff in my collar. No, I actually, this probably won't surprise anyone, have never done any kind of illegal narcotic in my life, or even really legal ones. Like, alcohol is as hardcore as I've gotten. Well, that's not true. I did go see Osric Tentacles at the Fillmore once, and the instant the lights went down, I became incredibly high with secondhand marijuana smoke because everyone there except me lit up. But that's really as close as it's become. I've just never felt compelled to try any of that stuff. And I don't have issues with people who practice, you know, taking drugs in a safe and responsible manner. It's just not a thing for me. Nancy Reagan would be so

proud. Oh, boy. Yeah, we'll get to her. We'll get to her in a minute. As for me, well, you know, obviously these days I'm clean, of course, but certainly in the late 90s and early 2000s, you know, I was a single person. I lived in a studio apartment and I worked for the post office, which means I had a lot of disposable income. And you know what? Me and my friends, we had time for video games, we had time for movies, and we had time to get high. And the irony of that is that, you know, given that I played a lot of NARC as a child, I was very much on board with this message at the time because I was being inundated with said message, both in the media at school, from actual cops, and everyone was sort of coming together to tell me, hey, kid,

drugs are bad. And I believed them for a very long time, until I took the drugs, said, you know what? This doesn't seem that bad. I got to be honest. You know, I didn't, I didn't report myself to the police that day, but I felt like, you know what? I think you guys may have deceived me, but it's fine. I don't begrudge them. I'm sure it was just them doing their job. And I'd rather they did that job instead of, you know, the job they're doing these days, which I don't really want to talk about, but yikes, you know, we're recording this in the midst of some really, really scary videos that are going around the internet. And, you know, I'm from New York. And, boy, I saw clips of what people described on Twitter as an evil fire truck loaded with officers scaling a building.

And I'm just like, what is, how many libraries had to close to buy that thing, you know? But, yeah, this is, this is an episode that's going to wrinkle people who are like, you should leave politics out of games. Well, maybe you should have told that to Eugene Jarvis, because this game is inherently political. There's no getting around it. So it's going to be, it's going to be discussed. Yes. David, do you have anything you want to confess or deny, as need be? Sure, sure, yeah. I don't know if I ever would have tried drugs or not because nobody ever offered me. So that probably says some things right there.

Well, David, if you don't mind me asking, by this tone of your voice, it sounds like you were from the United States originally. Is that true? That is correct. Okay. So I'm assuming, you know, you're of probably a similar age to myself and Jeremy, maybe a bit younger. I don't know. You've got, you've got some spark in your eyes. I can't tell. But I'm assuming you grew up, you know, at some point during the 80s, you were a child. Yes, that is correct. All right. And I need to find a better way to answer questions than that over and over. But yeah, yeah, I was totally an 80s kid. until it became the 90s that I was a 90s kid that's to be expected so I asked that because the bulk of what's happening here especially with the original arcade game but also

the climate that led to the arcade game means we have to discuss today you know the ins and outs the overall big picture of America's war on drugs which is a very expensive and big topic but you know We're not behind the bastards here. I'm not going to do a deep dive or anything.

You know, this is not the focus of the podcast. But we have to lay some background here to sort of explain why this video game is the way it is and where it came from. And because if you were a kid in the 80s, this is what was happening. It was everywhere you talked about it. As I alluded to earlier, you know, as a child in schools, I was actively being fed this line. And in some cases, by actual police officers who came to the school and said, hey kids, you know what's bad drugs. and I'm here to tell you not to do drugs. So how did we get there?

Well, we've done a fair amount of complaining on this podcast about Ronald Reagan, and, you know, that's justified. But today, we need to start by complaining about Richard Nixon, so it's a complete change of pace. Yes, those two have nothing in common. I wish they were probably bridge partners. No, because Nixon, we have Nixon to thank for the actual term of war on drugs, because it really started with him.

In 1971, he made a speech about the fact that drug abuse is public enemy number one. There's a very good chance he said this because he just read about the drug abuse that was rampant, apparently, with our armed forces in Vietnam, you know, to think they were sent to a foreign country against their will. And the real problem is they were getting high. So that was, you know, that was a priority for Nixon. And over the course of several years, he would create agencies, the agency would fold into each. other. He'd create policies. And basically, by the end of his first term, you have the actual DEA, as we know it today. That's the drug enforcement agency. And as far as I know, there's still the top of the food chain in the United States, as far as pursuing drug criminals and

organizations and, in theory, keeping these drugs off the streets, you know, as mandated out of the law. You know, it's kind of a funny name when you think about it. It almost sounds like they're enforcing the use of drugs. I mean, they went through many names, you know. I mean, the first one that he creates is the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, which is O'Dale, O'Dale, which does not go off the thing. So I think someone told him, you know what, we got the FBI, we got the CIA, we need three letters, Nixon. Yeah, O'Dale sounds like your great-grandfather's name.

It's just, it just has that old-timey ring to it. And just for the record, just to show that we're, you know, we're not heartless and we're not just complaining about this. we think drugs aren't so bad. From the start, there are rumblings and misgivings and quotes that suggest that this whole thing really isn't about the drugs. You know, many years later, one of Nixon's AIDS actually went on record saying that the whole idea was because by combating drugs, which were popular with people who protested against the war and a lot of minority groups, this was a way for the administration to strike back against those people because the administration really, really didn't like protesters, and they certainly were not fans of people of color.

Now, people have disputed this quote. Certainly other people who are privy to those talks deny this outright. But we also have recordings that Richard Nixon made by himself in his office talking about people who protested and weren't white. And these are really, really shocking conversations if you hear them from a sitting president. So it's not that he liked people of color, but he certainly, maybe he didn't hate them to create the DEA, but he sure did create the DEA, and as we'll see, the DEA spent a lot of its time and effort combating the communities that weren't white. That's just what happened.

So I'm shrugging, folks, you know? It's a curious coincidence. How strange that a man who was privately racist would create agencies and policies that would target the sort of people that he personally did not like. Now More than ever We need Nixon now More than ever

We need Nixon now Nixon now Now Now we go through sort of a world went to change here because Richard Nixon, Paragon of law enforcement, actually resigns somewhat in shame in 1974, not because of drugs, because of other criminal activity. And his replacement doesn't really go hard in the war of drugs things. His replacement, Jimmy Carter, actually pushes back against all of this.

Richard, it's kind of amazing to read that Jimmy Carter, running for president in 1976, actually seemed sympathetic to the idea that drug addiction is a problem that needs to be solved, you know, not with, you know, legal ramifications, but with, you know, hospitals. And the idea that, you know, maybe some possession of some substances maybe could be decriminalized. He doesn't get around actually in connecting this policy because, you know, Jimmy Carter has his own problems. But the next two presidents after Nixon surely do not seem to grab his baton of room with it. They seem to be saying, I think we've got bigger problems to deal with here in the United States in the 1970s. but then a man, a certain man, arrives in our lives,

you know, riding on a horse, holding a chippanzee, his name is Ronald Reagan. And really, within days, I think, within days of him coming to office, everything gets serious. You know, we have a quote here from Ronald Reagan. I won't do the impression, even though I have Brad Reagan on film. I have this. Ronald Reagan said, we're taking down the surrender flag that's been flown over so many drug efforts. were running up the battle flag.

And Ronald Reagan would spend most of the next eight years of his life gradually increasing and strengthening our policies against drugs and empowering, quote unquote, our law enforcement to do more and combining them with our military and all of this coming together and just, wow, it's made a big mess that we are still dealing with today, even as many municipalities and some states outright have push back against these laws. Other states just have them all in the books. Other countries, I think, followed our lead and have very strict laws against drugs, still being enforced.

Tell us about living in Japan, Diamond. Yeah, I'm not going to point fingers. I don't know if they looked at Reagan and said, oh, we should do that too. I honestly don't know, but I can tell you right now that here in Japan, it is a very serious crime to have any drugs on you whatsoever. I am confident that if I was arrested and I had any sort of thing like that, I would probably just be deported. There probably wouldn't be a trial. They would probably just be, you need to leave. So I am not touching any of that, to be clear. Yeah, I just put together a video on Strider for NES that spends like 10 minutes of its running length, just talking about policy changes that were enacted once Reagan took office.

And it really is remarkable. how much of the state of America today can be traced back to him and really just like the first year of his administration back when he was, you know, still all there and capable of acting quickly and decisively on things. It's weird because, you know, my earliest memories of life, of existence, really start in 1980 or so. I remember some fuzzy things before that. But, like, you know, when you have memories going back to a certain point in history, you tend to think of that as like the starting point for everything because that's where you started. I think it's just a natural tendency for people to be like, oh, everything before that was like, you know, prehistory. Who knows?

It's so nebulous and weird. But I really do feel that there was a radical or maybe reactionary change. in American society right around 1980, and so much of everything that we sort of take for granted today or have to live with today really began right there. And of course, you know, it has decades, centuries of precedent leading up to that point. But I just feel like you can really drop a pin at the first couple of years of Reagan's administration and say, this is the point where things changed. And I don't know, maybe that's solipsism speaking, but I just, I just feel like so much about American society changed. Some for the good, you know, I mean, suddenly we had computers

in the home, which has mostly been good. It, you know, it's just like everything really, just the sound of things, the look of things, the attitudes about things, the policies about things, the technology of things really did, you know, once the 80s came in, it really just looking back at history does seem like a massive break with things that had come before, like a kind of, you know, here's a new chapter of history. It's like in a bad way, like the New Testament versus the Old Testament, but I don't want to pin Reagan as Jesus because let's not take that analogy any further. But anyway, the point I'm saying is like that dude really mostly for the worst,

but better or worse, mostly the worst, enacted a lot of change. in America that had, and the world that has had lasting ramifications nearly, you know, 45 years later, it's been a long time. But we're still kind of living with the aftershocks of all that. Yeah, Jeremy, I actually credit you on this because, you know, I put together a sort of timeline of the war in drugs here, and you added a single note, which really struck me as timely. You pointed out that in 1981, Ronald Reagan passed the military cooperation. with Civilian Law Enforcement Agency's Act, which, you know, the short version is it enabled our armed forces to more closely cooperate with our police forces, which goes against a precedent

from earlier in American history, which was a big deal because we actually wrote, you know, we wrote several documents about this to keep the police and military separate, but as part of this war on drugs, they wanted to have more, you know, military action because they perceived it, they perceived it as an actual war. They said, okay, well, we need the military. involved. Also, they were also very concerned about drugs that were coming from overseas, so they needed to send the military overseas, and they had military actions going on with the countries where they thought the drugs were, you know, they thought they cut them off to the source. And again, as I said, we're seeing a lot of things going on in the United States

as we speak where you've got soldiers and police officers working together. Again, I'm from New York City. They've got soldiers in the in the subways these days, apparently doing random bag checks and I'm like what what is going on here I mean I and it's it's a democratic governor of New York State who says these things and it's like you know people go up there and a Democratic mayor yeah Democratic mayor Democrat governor everyone up across the board this is a blue state but they all decide well you know what we're worried about crime and we're going to do this against crime and everyone's like does this actually help solve crime and even the governor's like well it'll help us feel better about crime and I'm just

I'm just here shaking my head I'm just oh let's spend millions in you know law enforcement salaries to catch a few thousand dollars worth of fare evaders. That's the way to live. That's good policy. It's just, it's really, it's really shocking. And this goes all the way back. It really does. But, yeah, the, um, okay.

So let me say one more thing about the military. Please. Cooperation with civilian law enforcement agencies act. The, um, the line between the military and the police really began to blur with Nixon, I would say. And that's when you had things like Kent State and, you know, cops in riot gear. You started seeing SWAT teams formed where special weapons and tactics basically meant these are cops who, you know, have military training, military equipment, et cetera. But yeah, the 1981 act was really, again, just a huge leap in that that really, you know, took its battering ram and had a

squad of dudes breaking down the doors between the military and the police. And, you know, at this point, looking at Columbia University and so forth, the line between the military and the police is incredibly thin. You know, you started in the late 90s seeing due to more legislation, which incidentally came about under Bill Clinton, a Democratic president, like both sides are guilty of this, really started to basically surplus military gear. could be sold to law enforcement agencies. And that led to what you have now, which is

basically, you know, every guy who goes to the police academy for a few months thinks that he is somewhere, like a cross between the Punisher and a super soldier. And that's you know... Like a super cop, basically. Yeah, basically.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Ice cream soldier. Robo cop without the robo. Exactly. So again, the early 80s, the first year of Reagan's administration, just kicked in the door and said, everything's changing now. Outside, a new day is gone. Outside suburbies crawling everywhere.

I don't want to go, baby. New York to East California. There's a new one coming, I warn you. We're the kids in America Whoa We're the kids in America Everybody listen to the music around And part of that it was all guns

And a lot of this was also a sort of, how do I put this? A kid first approach as well. Very famously in 1982 at a photo up, the president's wife, Nancy Reagan, was asked by a child, what should I do if someone tries to give me drugs? And reportedly off the cuff, Nancy Reagan told this child, just say no. And this quote became a catchphrase. This would dominate, really, I would say, the rest of her life, certainly the rest of her term as First Lady. And it just became a quotable thing. There were PSAs, there were commercials.

She would go on actual sitcoms and just appear as herself and say, hey, kids, you shouldn't be doing drugs. If people try to give you drugs, just say no. And that just became a refrain for many, many years to come. And relayed to that, you have in Los Angeles, completely uncontroversial police chief Darrell Gates, working together with the supertitive schools. Star of a, star of a video game himself. Yes.

Yes, yes. Police squad. That's the police squad. Police Quest, excuse me. I would actually, yeah, police squad starting Darrell Gates. That's, maybe it could be interesting. Maybe it could be in a true atrocity. I don't know.

But these guys got together, and they created something called Dare, that's an act That's D-A-R-E, the drug abuse-resistance education. Now, it's not just a bad acronym, folks. It's also a play on his name because it's Daryl. Yes, not just Daryl Strawberry, it's D-A-R-Gates. This guy was a huge tool. He's dead now. What does D-A-R-Y-L?

There was a movie. I think it was about him. Oh, robot youth life form, I think. Okay. It's been a long time. Data-amilizing robot youth life form or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an 80s kids classic because you've got lots of people with guns chasing a child in the woods.

That's okay because it's very much like our modern era. It's a funny thing. I definitely remember the DARE program, but I remember for the longest time, I had no idea what it actually stood for. Because you'd see the letters there, but I don't remember them ever putting the, you know, abbreviation anywhere near it. I thought the periods were just bullet holes. I had no idea it was an acronym. I mean, you got it. Give them credit where it's due.

They came up with this bad nickname, but they had a very strong branding. They had a logo that everyone could easily recognize. They went into schools. They gave away tons of stuff, school supplies with this logo on it. It's black with red text. It looks super cool. I'm sure I had a ruler that said dare on it for most of the elementary school and probably most of middle school too.

Like, it was everywhere. You know, they were giving away T-shirts. I'm sure most people wore these t-shirts ironically these days. But in the 80s, we were wearing them as children, unironically. We're just like, yeah, I've been told to stay away from drugs. That's why I'm wearing this t-shirt. But yeah, DARE started in L.A. as an L.A. thing, but eventually expanded to all 50 states and even the U.K. They even came to the U.K. in the 90s, which is kind of amazing to me.

But I would love to hear what they were saying over there, probably, I don't know. I imagine something with fish and chips just because I'm terrible that way. Did DARE work? We have no evidence that it worked. In fact, we have some evidence that it did the opposite because when you're sending police into school and telling children about drugs and telling them how they need to avoid drugs, there's at least a decent number of people who learned about drugs because the police came to school and told them about the drugs. So obviously it's impossible to, it's impossible to clinical to analyze this. They've had some studies that say

one or the other, but we have quotes from people. My favorite is this one from Professor Richard Morin who says, Dare is the world's biggest pet rock. If it makes us feel good spend the money on nothing, that's okay. But everyone should know that dare does nothing. Do we need to explain Pet Rocks for the listeners because it does predate the 1980s? That's another 70s innovation, but as far as I know, Pet Rocks never killed anyone. I mean, I guess they're from a high enough building, yeah. My Pet Rock jumped off the Empire State building, and now I'm in jail.

So I will say, you know, you mentioned something about the UK. bear in mind that at the same time Reagan came to office, Margaret Thatcher came to power, and she was actually probably more enthusiastic about fascism than Reagan was. So I can't imagine that, you know, growing up was really that different over there for them, except, you know, with more austerity. We also, if we're talking about drugs in the 80s and law enforcement and the image of all these things together, We have to mention the fact that in 1985, the hot new drug that everyone's talking about is crack. Crack suddenly becomes a national epidemic, or at least a media epidemic.

I can't tell you how many people were actually using it. But there were certainly some high-profile deaths, some young men who overdosed on cocaine. You know, the most famous case is Len Bias, a NBA prospect who was drafted by the Celtics and then died a few days later. a very tragic loss of life, but these deaths only underscored the fact that people perceived America, and especially American cities, as overrun with crime and overrun with drugs. Now, I was still, you know, a child who would go to New York City on multiple occasions, and while I certainly know that the city had a bad reputation, and there are probably some parts of the city that I should not go as a child, so I didn't go there, I certainly didn't

go there and experience any violence or, you know, even half as bad as the stuff you would see, you know, as portrayed in films or in television or as talked about in the newspaper. But that was the perception. That was what was going on. People were talking about this like, like things were falling apart. And the push against drugs and the push to get drugs away from everyone as far as, you know, keep them away from people, especially children got stronger and stronger as the 80s were on, more legislation, more, you know.

mandatory sentences. And again, because crack cocaine was very popular in the cities and popular with not white people, suddenly you had a double standard where possessing a minuscule, a microscopic amount of crack could get you a minimum sentence of five years in prison, whereas you need to have 500 grams, like a pound, a pound of cocaine to get a similar sentence in court. And it's like, that's just, that's fact. That's not like me making up things. Like, that's the actual law. that they wrote. Yeah.

See also the Duran Duran song, White Lions. Talks all about that. I think that was Grandmaster Flash, but yes. Okay, well, I've heard the Duran Duran song. It does make sense that it would have been a cover of Grand Master Flash because that was a sort of social cause that he really took up and broadcast. A street kid gets arrested. Gonna do some time.

He got out three years from now just to commit more crime. A business man is caught with 24 kilos. He's out on bail and out of jail, and that's the way it goes. Gang, sugar, gay. Athletes rejected. Governors corrected. Gangsters, thugs, and smugglers are thoroughly respected. The money gets divided.

The women get excited. Now I'm broke, and it's no joke. It's hard as hell too. Everybody don't buy it. But also important to all this, we should mention this as, as NARC, as the arcade game that we're going to talk about today, started hitting arcades. We also had a cooperation between the FBI and the American Amusement Machine Association, the AAMA, aka the agency in charge of basically almost all arcade games that were being brought in the United States or made in the United States. And that's because the head of the AAMNA was a former FBI agent, a man named Bob Fay. So Bob Faye and the director of the FBI, William Sessions, get together.

They're trying to brainstorm, hey, what do we do here? How do we get this message to kids that they need to stop taking drugs? And they come with the idea of, well, what if we put a loading screen on every arcade game in the country? And it says, winners don't use drugs. And that's where it started. It started, you first started to see it in 1989. So ironically, Narc does not make the cut. Narc probably came out.

We think late 88, early 89, so it just. missed it, but in the years that followed, every machine, and I mean every machine, would have this message. And after a few years, again, ironically, sessions would be fired for alleged misuse of funds, but the message endured. The message endured well into the early 2000s. They just took his name off it. So for over a decade, hundreds and hundreds of classic arcade games, you know, to the ROMs to this day, if you've wound up on emulators, you will see this message. They will remind you not to take drugs. And it's only the American version. The Japanese version doesn't say this, even though Japanese, you know, people were as much, if not more terrified of drugs coming to their schools.

You know, I meant to bring this up earlier when you brought up the punishment in Japan. It wasn't very long ago. I think one of the voice actors for one of the recent Yakuza, like a dragon games, ended up, they basically just kind of like removed them from the game as likeness and voice and everything just because, gosh, what was he just in? session. I'm trying to remember the specifics. He was, he was, I believe he had cocaine on his person. I think it was cocaine. I believe his, I'm not going to look it up, but I believe his stage name was Pierre Takigawa. I think that was him. And yeah, he was arrested and charged with possession. And as what often happens here in Japan, when you're arrested of a crime, almost any crime, but especially a drug crime, yeah, all of Japanese society and especially Japanese media basically rubs out your entire.

body of work. There was a popular duo of musicians who produced a lot of hit songs and one of them got arrested for drugs. Suddenly their back catalog disappeared from streaming. Pierre actually had a recent comeback. I saw him on a Netflix streaming show. So he's

not dead. He's not out of work. But yes, he was in a video game, his likeness, and his voice, and they removed him completely for the overseas launch and eventually the domestic launch as well. So that's also the case. In fact, Another actor I could think, I forgot his name, but he played Jotoro in the live action Jojo's Bazaar Adventure movie and he was arrested for marijuana and all of a sudden his career basically ended and that movie is still available, but you bet your ass if they ever make it of the movie, they're not going to cast him again.

They will have to recast it because you can't have him back. Yeah, Japan definitely, my understanding is comes down way harder on drug-related offenses. like the minuscule possession, much harder than a lot of other offenses. Like, you know, there's comic artists who get arrested for child porn possession, and they end up, you know, continuing on with their career. And I feel like that is a much more heinous crime, in my personal opinion, than half a gram of marijuana. But what do I know?

I think, didn't Paul McCartney get banned from Japan for a while? He was arrested in Japan because he was arrested in Japan because he, He arrived on a flight and he had weed with him. This was a very long time ago. This is not like a 10-year-old Paul McCartney. This was, this was young. Although he probably would still have weed with him as he travels. Possibly.

But yeah, it was a very famous story. He arrived in Arita. He just came overseas. He had drugs on him. And I believe they arrested him and just told him to leave. And he eventually came back, but certainly not that year, maybe even that decade. I don't know how long it was. But it was a big deal.

And it was a big story. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty unilateral for them. It's, you know, blink it across the spectrum, no matter how famous you are. Yeah. And I can tell you, to this day, if you arrive in, if you arrive at a Japanese airport, you will see lots of signs and maybe even a person will come up to you and tell you

and show you a picture card and saying, hello, do you know the drugs are illegal? Do you have any drugs in your suitcase? Can you show me your suitcase? Do you have drugs? And, you know, I just kind of laugh at a little bit because, like, I don't have drugs. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you I had drugs. But whatever, it's just, you know. I've never had that happen to me before.

Maybe I just look too clean cut, too churchy. All right, let's move on from the unpleasant real-life drug stuff and talk about the fun drug stuff, the silly drug stuff that we're here to talk about, which is Narc, which is a arcade game made in 1988, released at the end of that year, it rolled out slowly over the course of that year in the early 1989, and it comes from Williams, aka Midway, aka Ballet. Some three of those words come together. It's a mish-mash. I honestly can't keep even straight, but they were all coming together at that round that point, so it's all fair. Like, if you bought this game on, say, PlayStation 2 or Xbox many years later as a compilation, it would have been called a Midway collection. So it's like, you're not wrong to think of him as Midway. David's joke is 100% correct.

It was a good joke, and I apologize for reining on it. That was, that was like a humor NARC moment, and I don't want to be that person. So I apologize. All good, all good. Now, obviously, as with many things with life, it doesn't come down to just one person responsible for a NARC. But there is one person who comes down first when it comes to Narc, and that is Eugene Jarvis. And Eugene Jarvis, by the way, even in 1988, already kind of a star, as far as video developers go, because he was behind the huge hit defender in the early 80s, as well as, I think he also did Robotron.

And after Narc, he was part of the Smash TV. I know he was at least tangentially related to Mortal Kombat. Like, he did a lot of arcade games and pinball games. So this was just one of many, many hits for young Eugene Jarver. I think he was probably at his late 20s at this point, maybe 30. Like, he came to the company very young. So even to this point, he's still a very young man and still, you know, both an up-and-comer and a very established voice. It's a weird place to be.

Yeah, in 1988, when this game came out, some people might have heard of Shigura Miyamoto from like, you know, a profile with some guy you've never heard. of in Japan talking about video games in Nintendo Power, but he was not a household name. He wasn't famous. He wasn't like the superstar video game creator, whereas Eugene Jarvis, like industry-wide, everyone knew him. So, yeah, it was a different era. He did joust too, right? No, that was John Newcomer.

Was it? Okay, I thought Travis was involved in that. Okay, my bad. He might have, like, been a producer or something on it. I don't know exactly, but the design on Joust was John Newcomer. I've made that mistake before, and I've been corrected, so I will never forget. All right. Well, it's appropriate, Jeremy, you mentioned John Newcomer.

Because John Newcomber is also with a team from Narc. We also have George Petro, who's been a part of a lot of famed Midway, Ballet Williams Games. And Mark LaFredo. Mark LaFredo is also part of this. Those are the four names that came up the most in my research as far as this game goes. Obviously, more than four people to make a video game, but those are the names that came up the most often. And as arcade games go, NARC actually had a fairly long cycle development. They say they started in 1986, and they said they started, and they wanted to go high-tech,

because by 1986, the NES has already arrived. It's not quite a super smash hit, but it's certainly, it's out there in the United States, and I think people could tell, certainly the arcade business, they could tell that consoles are getting better, and they're getting faster, and we need to compete with that. So they had on their list, they wanted to make a new arcade game that would really get people's attention, wow them, and show people something that they couldn't play at home. And indeed, many years later, if you look at the N.S game, like, you really couldn't compare the NES version to the arcade version. They're two totally different animals. Yeah, also you had really cool-looking arcade games coming in from Japan.

And 1985 saw the beginning of super-scaler games from Sega, and Namco was churning out equivalent games. I can't remember which system that is. So, you know, the Japanese arcade makers who didn't have to deal with the realities of the Atari crash that we kind of had to struggle through here in America, were just firing on all cylinders. So that was another form of competition. Like, you know, arcades and home consoles were really, I think, posing an existential threat. to arcades and arcade operators and developers. So, yeah, they definitely were correct in their assessment that they really needed to step it up.

I remember that NARC for the NES was a thing, but it was a thing that I never bothered touching because I was familiar with the arcade game, and it's like you look at the layout there, you look at the NES controller, and it's like, there's no way that's going to work. No, you'll see, when we get to the ports, you'll see, that's actually a trend. I would say

most of the ports suffer because of the fact that the arcade had a very specific setup that it required four different buttons, and a lot of systems at the time simply didn't have that many buttons on their joysticks. Or if they did, they required you to push maybe one button for two different

functions, which is just, you know, inelegant, to put it in a phrase. Kind of surprising that we didn't get a super NES version since, you know, that system had one, the color depth necessary to pull off Narc's graphics, if not the resolution, and also it had enough buttons on the controller. And, you know, the Midway Williams, whoever, definitely made a lot of money

making games for Super Nias, but maybe they came into it a little later. And by that point, Narc was dusty and old. I don't know. Yeah, I was going to bring up the cut because, I'm sorry, David. Please continue. I was going to bring up the Super Nias thing. I wasn't sure if it was too soon. But, yeah, it's funny that it never arrived there, but for those reasons. And it was a claim that was doing a lot of the ports for Midway at that point. So maybe that had something to do with it, too. Well, I can tell that Narga arrived for the NES in 1990. So that was the same year the Super Nintendo debuted in Japan.

And it came to America one year later. So I feel like they probably, they had just made it. So I think no one decided, oh, well, let's do it again. So, bad timing probably. Yeah. But what was not bad timing, I should say, is their decision, one of the things they just came up with to make this game more attractive, more stunning, more eyeball attention is they decided, let's have this game star real people. So all the characters you see on the screen in this game, including the dogs, including the dogs, they were all photographed and digitized. so it's a very old example of digitized graphics.

Again, this is 88, so this is at least a year before Pit Fighter and almost three full years before Mortal Kombat, which of course is also part of the Midway, Bally, Williams family. So of course, Eugene Jarvis was also involved in that thing too. So this is in some small way, a, we'll say a brief stepping stone that would lead to Mortal Kombat down the line, down the line. Not a direct A to B. call it a A to M.K.

Yeah, the visuals in this game are really interesting because they used, according to Wikipedia, it's a medium-resolution monitor, which means it was much higher resolution than the 256 by 240 or whatever, 320 by 240 that you normally saw. And it had really great color depth. But I don't think that. the memory and the artistry were quite there to take full advantage of that. So the game really

reminds me visually of a Mac shareware title from the mid-90s because you also had that same great color depth, high resolution compared to PC games, DOS games at the time. But, you know, creating art assets is very expensive and time-consuming. So they had this tendency to be a little stiff and sparse and yeah it just you know like the the two the two categories mac games and nark feel of a piece to me well it certainly did require a lot of memory and a lot of energy indeed one of the ideas initially was to have two different heroes because it's a co-op game and so they designed two different like two different looking heroes to have in this game but apparently once they started getting things together, according to George Petro, the graphics just took up too much memory, so they couldn't do it. So that's why you have the solution where you have the sort of classic palette swap of blue guy and red guy in exactly the same outfit. And also, they're wearing motor circuit helmets because that way it'd have to see their faces. So, you know, not how they intended to solve this problem, but it worked. Because I think it overall gave the characters sort of a slight air of mystery. Like who are these men who have

all these guns and are unloading justice on the streets. And, you know, are they, are they handsome? Are they scary? Who knows? But they sure love to shoot people. Yeah, I feel like adding the helmets to those guys is a creative choice that really kind of makes the game a lot more ominous. And, you know, the characters go from being Crockett and Tubbs to basically, like, judge dread. It just makes it feel more, you know, like, officer, I need to see your badge number. Why is your badge covered with tape? What's going on? Yes. Although, ironically, Jeremy, you can see each player's badge number on the sort of score screen. So they don't hide that trick yet. Well, they didn't have body cams back then. So.

Thank you. Thank you. But, yeah, actually, it's funny you mentioned the mass thing, because obviously they, you know, according to Jarvis, they took a lot, they had a lot of plenty of material at the time to sort of funnel into this project. Jarvis calls out Robocop, which of course came out the year before, and Robocop certainly has a sort of visor over his face. You can't see his eyes. Dirty Harry was still very much, you know, in the limelight. They were still making dirty Harry moves in the 80s. The Death Wish series was still going on.

It was definitely a little long on the tooth, but they were still. We're still making Death Wish movies in the 80s. He also called out Michael Man's Thief, which is kind of strange because it's not that much a murder in that movie, but it's certainly, you know, it was a big hit. And I guess if you liked it, you liked it. It's had a great soundtrack, but I don't see a lot of connection there. Maybe I'm alone in this, but in a way it kind of reminds me, and it precedes this, but it kind of reminds me of a really violent Power Rangers. I mean, certainly the Super Sentai phenomenon was already big in Japan. I don't know if they would have seen that in the United States already.

But you're right, and that you've got, you know, you've got a set of heroes dressed identically just different colors. And you can't see their faces because that way you don't have, you don't have to hire, you know, you can hire a stuntman to do all the martial arts stuff. And then you can have an actor, you know, do the drama stuff. Or in the case of Power Rangers, you can have white people play the, the main. characters and then just cut to Japanese stuntmen doing the actual work. Yeah. I also have a very curious quote from Jarvis, so I really feel like this sums up Narc very, very well, who says, the cool thing was we played it straight.

So if you ask if Narc was satire or propaganda, you could take it either way. And really, it's both and neither at the same time, which I just don't think that's how anything works, but also I can see how thinking that would inform the decision of how you make Narc. Because, yeah, when you play a video game like NARC, certainly when you played at the time, like to me as a child, I read it as completely straight. Like, oh, yeah, drugs are bad. I'm playing a guy, a cop, and I'm here to get rid of all the drugs.

And as I got a little bit older, I was like, boy, it seems kind of messed up. We had a game all about killing people over drugs. And especially if you view a few of Jarvis's later releases, I don't know that he was kidding. So, you know, it's. Yeah, I mean, he definitely leaned into the playing it straight approach to NARC later in his career. Like, Smash TV. But I don't know if that's a... Like, Smash TV is very jokey.

Smash TV is definitely jokey that, you know, it almost steals the I'd buy that from... I think it does steal I'd buy that from a dollar from a Robo Cup, doesn't it? Doesn't he have since the video? Yeah. But then you look at the sequel to Smash TV, which is... Total Carnage? Total Carnage, yes, that's right. Sorry.

And total carnage just seems like it's a blatant, like, Saddam Hussein, like, riff. Like, you're just, you're fighting a random Middle Eastern guy who's got a silly name. And it just seems kind of racist. I mean, it just, I don't know. You could, I could see jokes maybe in Narc. Smash TV is definitely joking. I don't know what Total Carnage is actually joking about anything. So, yeah, I'm making an ish face and tugging my collar here.

With Narc, it's like, I feel like, you know, the game plays it straight, like in universe, but a lot of the action and the characterization is so over the top that, you know, it's kind of hard to take seriously at the same time. I read it as being pretty straight-laced. Like, it was an incredibly stupid, ridiculous game. But at the same time, there was so much of this, like, don't do drug. You know, everything from Miami Vice to just news reports about crack cocaine epidemics in our nation's slums, that it was hard for me, you know, as a teenager, or even, was I have a, yeah, I guess I was barely a teenager at that point, to read it as anything but like, this is pretty straightforward. And maybe I just wasn't tuning into the irony of it, but, you know, it was over the top and ridiculous, but that just kind of seemed gratuitous.

to me, as opposed to, like, no, no, don't take that. It didn't seem tongue in cheek, I guess is what I'm saying. And, you know, movies were becoming increasingly violent at that point. Robocop, that raised hackles for people because it was so graphically violent on screen. And that was a much more openly satirical film. But at the same time, despite being satire, it's still really pushing. the boundaries of what you could show in terms of violence on a, you know, a mainstream movie screen, movie theater screen. So, you know, there was definitely a cultural movement, a tendency

toward genuine graphic violence in media at that point that was kind of pushing it into the mainstream. So, you know, I think I always viewed NARC in that light and saw it as maybe satire, but also kind of not kind of like, this is, you know, this is legit. So, I don't know, that's kind of, speaking as someone who was there and remembers it all, that's kind of where I came from. The bad guys to me feel like if

the WWF or WCW of the day were to like, you know, have a bunch of wrestlers that were themed around drugs, they'd be the guys from Well, if I may, I'd like to read a passage directly from the Narc Arcade Manual. So this is not Provincial Flyer. This is something that only the people making, you know, operating the machine would read. The gospel. So, excuse me, you're getting a character here.

The city's overrun, slashers, gangsters, pimps, the punks, the punks are everywhere, the scum of the earth, and only the player can restore law and order. trigger finger spraying hot metal before him rocket bomb at the ready the player is a macho urban gorilla defending our city from the ultimate urban scourge this is his neighborhood too he's committed he says no to inner city decadence he carries a badge and a moral code and he backs them both with screaming lead I don't know is that satire I don't know if that is satire it's a bit lurid It's a pulpy. Jarvis also credits the lead artist, lead artist Jack Hager on the project. Jarvis says, Hager came with the slogan,

say no or die, which is written on the sides of the cabinet. I don't remember that part. The Nancy Reagan slogan still very much in the zeitgeist, even though Reagan is out of, is leaving office by the time this game really hits the mass market.

But what kind of NARC, in VIII, what kind of game is NARC? We're talking about NARC, in vague terms so far. What kind of game is a good? Well, I would describe it as run and gun, except you're not really. running. You're actually walking quite deliberately. It's a very, very deliberately paced game. Very straightforward. You're basically marching from left to the right. Virtually every level is just a very long hallway.

Sometimes you encounter locked doors that require passes to open, color-coded passes. But there's only really one case I can think of where you had to find the pass and then double back and open a door. In most cases, you will find that pass as you march to the end, and that will just be the exit. And then you're safe. You get to ago. Also, interesting is that the characters can jump and crouch. This is why you have four buttons. You've got a jump crutton, a jump button and a crouch button. Now, there's no

platforming, really. You can jump over certain objects, but you're never going to, like, jump over a pit or anything. Crouching is more important because a lot of the enemies will attack high, so crouching will get you under their bullets. But as the game goes along, you'll find more and more enemies are attacking low as well, so you have to mix it up, jump, crouch, move, the diagonals, you know, stay mobile, you know, it's felt like a butterfly. You have to, you don't slow down, don't slow it out.

Yeah, during the first part... So in that way, it's kind of like a beat them up, you know, kind of like a double dragon almost. You have to, you have to work multiple planes while also staying level to your foes, because obviously any bullets you fire are going to be straight ahead. You need a lot of your bullets, but then you need to move out of your way

to dodge their bullets, which of course I love, I love, in in Narc, all the bullets are these sort of like long hyphens, like rainbow-colored hyphens that fly across the screen, they're very easy to see, which I think most bullets aren't. So I really appreciate that as an arcade game goaler. They're all tracers. Yeah, you describe it as a run-and-gun, but like for the first part of the game when I'd played, it would be more like a crouching gun, because I would just not let off that

button and just, you know, use that to kind of weave in and out and around everything. Yeah, it kind of makes me think of the gunplay and elevator action. Instead of being a vertical game, it's just entirely horizontal. And going back to it and reviewing it, you know, for the first time in, I don't know how long, decades, I'm struck by how much it reminds me of Defender, which, you know, makes sense because Eugene Jarvis. But, you know, you're dealing with things left and right. There's an element of some verticality where you have to avoid bullets. But also, it uses a lot of Defender sound effects.

And even like the kind of the typeface, you know, the fonts. and the rainbow effects on them, like it's all, and the high resolution, like it's higher resolution than other competing games at the time. It's all very much of a piece with Defender, which, you know, I guess this was kind of his attempt to sort of revisit that style of game in a more contemporary fashion. But I will say that I feel like this is not a patch on Defender. Defender is a great game with brilliant design, and this is pretty dumb.

just mean in terms of like the over-the-top aesthetics, but also just in terms of the gameplay, there's not as much to it. Well, speaking to defender, Jeremy, there's also a mini-map, a mini-map very prominently on the screen, which in later stages is quite useful because it can show you almost everything that's been full of that's on this level, like your character, enemy characters, things you can pick up, and towards the end of the game, the last boss, you'll definitely want to see him coming on the radar, otherwise you'll be in big trouble. So we've mentioned running gun. So what are the guns like? Well, you basically have two guns. There's no power-ups, but you need ammo. Your guns need ammo. Your basic gun is just, you know,

you're shooting bullets. You can't actually run out of bullets, but if you have no ammo, you have to, I think, reload after every shot, so it really slows down your rate of fire, which can be a problem because this game, you know, especially in their levels, will throw a lot of enemies at you. They will storm the screen. So you really need to keep the bullets flying as fast as possible. Kind of turns into a Barney Fife situation. More importantly, however, is the aforementioned rocket bomb rocket launcher, what do you call it? And these are harder to come by, but a single rocket will launch in a straight line, and it explodes.

It will kill almost anything in one hit. It will do splash damage. It will kill lots of enemies, if they will bunch together. It will destroy enemy vehicles, which are a big problem. in the game, because that's the only way to stop them, really. They are essential for the last boss, so you have to really stock up on rockets, and you need to use them sparingly. You can't just fire them willy-nilly.

Another reason you can't fire the millingilly is because a rocket can hit your partner. It's a co-op game. So if you rocket your partner, I don't know if it actually does damage, but it will certainly send them flying into the air, which will be a big problem for them. So you have to watch your shots in those regard. they do make it really tempting though because when the rocket like hits a crowd of enemies then just all these body parts go identical body parts go flying and raining down and stuff that's there there's kind of a certain um oh what's the term i'm looking for just kind of a dark humorous joy to it i mean it's very much the same energy that moral combat would would have a few years later you know punching a guy and having explode into lots of little identical bones you know exactly yeah um it's also the body are charred. Like, they fly in the air, they come down, they're still on fire. It's, like, as a kid for me, when I played this game, I was, like, that's just, like, number one on a list of

one million things that I loved. Because, like, oh, my God, you blow people up. You just blow them up. You blow them up real good. I think it's great that, including a rocket launcher, allows them to save this game as RPG elements. Sorry, I deliberately timed that for when you were drinking, Diamond. All right. It's okay. I did not spit in my water. I didn't spit. Other important stuff, there is a car, which I think is probably a Miami Vice thing. You know, Miami Vice always had a very nice car. So you begin most stages in a, it looks like a Porsche to me, and you jump out of the Porsche.

But some stages let you drive the Porsche. You'll find the Porsche. It is a very long bridge stage where you can find multiple Porsches along the way. You can drive the car. If you drive too fast and hit something, the car will. explode and it'll hurt you, so don't do that. You can fire your guns from inside the car, which is very convenient. The car is not a shield, so enemies can still hit you.

If they get close, they can stab you if they're like a stabby person. As I also mentioned, the helicopters, enemy helicopters will come by. You don't want to be in the car when the helicopter comes by because they will drop a bomb in your car and blow it up. You can hit the, you can ram the helicopter with your car if you're fast

enough and blow them both up together, but also blow yourself up. which isn't really practical. But it works. It'll work, is what I'm saying. You can kill a helicopter with a car if you want to do that. It's an option. Is it worth the quarter?

It's very cari warriors. And as you're moving the field, you're firing bullets, you're getting the enemies. So what are you doing? Well, this is a game about drugs. So as you kill people, they're dropping little baggies that are labeled as evidence. Okay, they're little bags of white powder. We don't know what's in them. We don't want to know.

We just know there are evidence. and you collect them, and at the end of each stage, you get bonus points based on how much evidence you collect. Enemies also drop more ammo for your guns. Select enemies will drop more rockets, so keep an eye out for those things. Also, cash, they'll drop cash. There's no shopping mechanic in the game, but evidence and cash are both valuable as bonus points. But the real charm, I would say, or I would say, like, point-wise, if you want to get a high

scoring this game, the real trick is you want to arrest people, you want to bust them. And to bust them, you must not shoot them. You must approach them very carefully, walk up to them, and put the cuffs on them. Now, there's no special button. It happens automatically, but it's not foolproof. Sometimes you need to get close to a guy and, like, wait for a few seconds, or he'll turn around and then walk away, and you have to do it again. But if you bust someone, they fly off the screen, you get all their evidence, and you get a 5,000 bonus point for each bust at the end of each stage. So you will rack up a huge amount of points in this game if you start busting people. And considering how the default settings give you an extra life every 100,000

points, if you get a high score in this game, you will get a lot of extra lives, and you can play for a really long time. So this, like, once you understand how this game works, I feel like you can get some real power for your buck here, which is one reason why I played it over and over again over many years, because I always knew that I could get probably four or five, six minutes of a really good game going, and if I got lucky, I might even beat it.

But I probably need some more change, because the last boss is a lot. We'll get to him, we'll get to him. But I feel it's actually a very fair game. Unlike Defender, where I die in 45 seconds and I'm done. Just sorry. That was my prime strategy back in the day. I was talking about not letting up off the crouch button,

just basically hold crouch and just, you know, walking over like everybody and rack up the points. I felt like some kind of like, you know, like savant or something when I discovered that. So who are these enemies? Who are these people? Who are we busting? Well, as you might have guessed, the whole theme is about drugs. So everyone in this game either sells drugs or makes drugs or uses drugs. So they're all equally bad, really. It's funny, even though all the people are actually actors, like real people photographed, I couldn't find any reliable online sources to tell who played all these people. And the credits don't say, at least some evidence indicated. that Mark Lafretto on the development side was the model

for some of these characters but I don't know how many or which ones. They didn't want to incriminate themselves. But, you know, it starts up very simple with the Dasloaf gang

who are just your sort of standard trench coat guys, they've got guns. You know, they move very slowly. They're definitely easy in the early stages to just rack up the bust. You know, you'll get lots of points.

You next makes up the hypoman, Dr. Spike Rush, who struts around and literally throws giant syringes at you, and if you get stuck with them, like you flash lots of colors, I guess they're getting you high for free. So, um, bad business model, but I guess it kills you too, so I don't know. I just want to say that was, he was probably my least favorite enemy back in the day besides the final boss, just because I was not a fan of needles then. I'm not a fan now, but I can take them better. but yeah back then just like you know throwing those things like lawn darts hatchet because they were pretty big too

that was just like no no no and also he has um they have real range them like unlike a bullet that fly straight out he can throw him like at angles they'll like bounce around a little bit like they're hard to dodge um so it's it's not easy it's it's certainly it's a major level up from the first enemy who barely who is barely a threat uh this guy is much more dangerous also you fight him in a drug lab where there's giant like bubbling beakers which you can shoot and destroy from bonus points. Also this is the first point when you start to see the dogs in the game. Dogs run on the screen and it's it's kind of funny. You can shoot the dogs and you have to

because otherwise they will eat you. But if you shoot the dogs, they don't die. They just turn into tiny dogs and run away. So the game gets a kindness. You can't actually kill any dogs in this game, but you have to defend yourself. So it's, I guess they're magic bullets. I don't know. Yeah, this was, you started to seeing, I think, around this time people saying, hey, why are you murdering animals? Actually, that goes all the way back to Phoenix, I think, in the 1970s where people were complaining because you were just murdering animals in a video game. So there was always a lot of sensitivity to how violence against animals is portrayed. Not so much against people. You can blow them into little burning jiblets.

But animals, it's just uncool to kill those guys, even if it's self-defense. Yeah. Sort of like these, like, Hulk dogs, and I guess they're just sort of calming them down. Yeah, I guess the bullets will do that. I assume a bullet, I mean, I've never been shot before. Maybe a bullet is just like going to sleep. Maybe it's the ultimate pacifier. The game starts to interest very big threats, and they start escalating.

The next one is the Joe Rockhead, aka Dumpster Man. And I guess this is probably based on the urban legend of someone who took PCP and supposedly broke handcuffs. Because he's a big strong guy, and he has bullet holes in his portrait. And he takes many, many shots to shoot down with a regular gun. And he picks up stuff and throws them at you. Trash cans, including, as his name suggests, dumpsters. He'll pick up dumpsters and throw them at you. You can't bust him, of course, because he would just break the cuffs.

apparently. There's also killer clowns, which to me as a child, never made sense, but I guess people already hated clowns, so I guess that doesn't make sense. According to Jarvis, he said that a mass murderer was in the news at the time, so I'm guessing he was probably talked about John Wayne Gacy, because even though he was, you know, he was more active in the 80s, or like early 80s, by the time they're making Narc, he was already on trial and he was from Chicago too

so a Chicago outfit like you know Williams Midway Valley whatever they would definitely have like daily updates on Gacy so I guess they figured well let's put a clown in our game and he also can't be busted so I guess he's on PCP I don't know it's it's very strange the rules of this game

like the PCP guys cannot be busted but you can kill them and they're very aggressive and the case of the clown when you meet him it's on a stage with um streetwalkers sect workers who are just marching along the streets and he will kidnap him and take them away so you have to rescue them by killing him but you can't shoot them because that's not allowed and you get big bonuses again for saving the women as opposed to hurting them but they're just kind of there and you can walk up to them and they'll sort of like shimmy a

little bit like like duke nuke them and it's it's it's real weird I mean this is you know this is the point in my life when I'm starting to get horny, like, regularly. But even for me, I was kind of like, what are these women doing? Like, I don't know if I even picked up the fact they were supposed to be hookers, because I don't know if I knew what a hooker was. Oh, good. I was worried I'd have to be the one to, like, confess that and everybody just look at me, like, what?

And I would say things only get weirder. You start to have pimps. Pimps who throw dynamite, and they also collect cash at the street. Interestingly, the arcade game does not identify these enemies at all, but the NES game calls them Bevan Face. So, call it a retcon. You got Sergeant Sky High, who's basically a weed rambo. He runs around with a giant, like, M60 machine gun.

You can't bust him either, guys, he's too strong. But you can raid his domain, and it's full of just giant marijuana plants, which you can basically confiscate or bust. Except some of them are booby-trapped and will explode. And I don't know if it's random or if it's just you have to really memorize, because there's a lot of them, and they're very close. together. So if you just try to get them all, you will get blown up. I don't know what the strategy is there, but it's extremely hazardous. And in the late stages, you have the HQ posse who are

sort of like militarized goons. They have automatic weapons. They move in formations and attack together. So they're very dangerous if they hit you because they'll hit you many times at once. However, if you can get around them and touch them, you can also bust them all at once, which, again, again, nets you huge bonuses, and usually they carry rockets, someone's even fire our rockets. So late in the game, even though you're really surrounded by a lot of threats at once, if you can bust those guys, it is a huge deal and very important to try and keep moving. Also, weird fact of those last stages, you're sort of getting close to the main boss, and you're passing his banks, which have ATM machines.

If you shoot the ATM's cash falls out and you get more points. It's just, it's a cute little thing, like to acknowledge the fact that, there is money in this world, and you can still take it, even though I don't think cops are supposed to rob ATMs. I don't know. Not if it's on the up and up, guys. I mean, yeah, okay, never mind. Robbing banks, just say no.

Collecting plants, just say no. No, I was just going to say police departments get a lot of their funding by just taking people's money. Whether or not they are criminals or not. It's kind of a thing you see commented on a lot these days. I don't know if it was necessarily the case back then, but I kind of feel like, yes, I kind of feel like, you know, the problems that we have with a lot of police these days are just amplified versions of problems that we've always had with police, which is that not all of them are in it for the good of the common people. Some of them are just there to enrich themselves or, you know, hurt people. Flex.

Well, Jeremy, it's funny you brought that up. I sort of glossed over earlier, but in fact, in 1984, Ronald Reagan signs the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. And one of the major aspects of that law creates what's called equitable sharing. And that allows law enforcement to share proceeds from seizures they make during arrests. with federal agencies, which indeed makes it profitable for law enforcement to seize high-profile items like homes and cars and anything they view that might have been purchased with funds from drugs. And this is during the arrest. It doesn't have to come, you don't have to be convicted to keep that stuff. So, indeed, there is actual motivation for them to pursue

high profile cases and get the money and they keep the money. It's real. And that's Reagan. I'm sorry. This is not made up. It's just not made up. So it absolutely was a thing at the time. I mean, I guess it explains the fancy sports cars. Exactly. Portions don't grow on trees. Well, actually in this game, they almost do during trees. They give so many Porsches. But they just show up on bridges randomly. Thank you. So when the game comes to an end, you actually go into the inner sanctum of crack. Yes, the bad guys you're fighting this game are all called crack.

That's an acronym, K-R-A-K, crack. And your target is the elusive Mr. Big, who's the leader of crack. And to get them, you have to fight your way through, I think, three solid levels of just pack-to-pack, and just tons of enemies and dogs, and just the worst congestion. And when you fight Mr. Big, he is, he's just a little guy actually, he's a little guy in a wheelchair. But he's very fast and he's got machine guns and it's actually very hard to hit him. So you need to use your rockets and knock him out of the chair. And if you do this three times, he will drop dead and you get his gold card and you get to escape.

And it's funny because this comes out about a year before Final Fight gave us that last boss who was also a wheelchair guy who fired a gun very fast. Although, in his case, he was just faking it because eventually he hops out of the wheelchair, and he's very mobile. So he didn't need that wheelchair at all. Mr. Big maybe needed it, although he's not actually dead when you knock him out of the chair. So, question mark. Yeah, I wonder if this is some sort of reference to something or someone. I looked up to try to see if I could find, you know, 1980s drug lords who were. famous for having been wheelchair bound.

I couldn't find any. I guess there's Ernst Stavro Blofeld from James Bond, but he didn't really run around, you know, like zip around shooting things. He mostly just kind of sat there with a cat and then fell into a chimney pipe.

But maybe they were just... Maybe they were just predicting Tio Salamanca from Breaking Bad. I don't know. Or maybe this inspired him. You know, I should point out that Letter in Part 6 came out in 1986, and in that movie, one of the bad guys is in a wheelchair, he only has one line, he always says, kill him, and he does use a gun. And then eventually, I think Bill Cosby knocks him off his wheelchair, and his legs stay in the wheelchair, but his torso falls off and he dies. It could happen, could happen.

A classic of cinema. But yes, Mr. Big does not die when you kill him, because that's how Mr. Big, that's not how Mr. Big rolls. And I would say, the last boss fight of NARC, I think it's truly one of the ages. I think it's one of the all-time WTF moments, certainly for me as a young person, finally getting to the end of this game. I never would have expected this because Mr. Big comes back and he is a giant head. on a silver disc. And when I say giant head, I mean, he is three times taller than your human being character. So, I don't know, like 10 feet, 12 feet tall, let's say?

Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, yeah, he's a big guy who consists entirely of a head. It's like a statue or something that he had erected to himself that then becomes a weapon. or like an oversized Elias Big Boy mascot. I don't know. So I was never, I always thought the guy in the wheelchair was like a decoy and that the head was the real Mr. Big. So.

Could be. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if it's like a Sigma situation where he's just like, you know, hopping bodies or if it's, you know, like who is the real Mr. Big, I guess. Well, if nothing else, the head certainly talks. So it is definitely a living being. and as the fight goes on, you can blow parts of it off, including the skin.

So eventually it just becomes a skull and a spine dragging itself around. So it's also organic, but it keeps fighting. It keeps fighting until you keep shooting it, and eventually it all catches on fire and makes a lot of jet energy noids and explodes, and the skull cracks open, and bugs fly out of it. I'm going to have to take your word for that because I could never beat that thing, And I believe you're going to go over why. I've fought it several times, but no. The basically, yeah, I want to step on your toes here.

But yeah, it's like, you know, you fight them. And if you lose, then you really lose. Yeah, it's actually, you know, this game is fairly generous. Again, like I said, the extra lives come in handy. You can, you have a life bar. It's not even when it kills. You have a life bar that goes down. You take a fair amount of hits.

but during this final battle if you don't have a second player they can't join in and if you lose all your lives you're allowed to continue but you just start the fight over which means Mr. Big goes back to full health so you cannot buy your way through this fight

you cannot just rocket spam your way through the fight you have to survive you have to do it right now obviously if you build up a lot of lives you can use those lives and the free rockets you get each live you know to your benefit but if you run out of lives that's it. You have to try again from the beginning. Not from the wheelchair stage, from the head stage, but still, the head is very dangerous. It's very large. It moves fairly quickly. If the head touches you, you like explode. It's like, again, like explosions not occurs. Like the silver disc is somehow hazardous to your health. I don't know. It must be covered in drugs. I guess it's made of drugs.

I mean, I feel like the explanation for this entire final battle is that it doesn't really happen. And that after, you know, eight levels of, blowing up drug runners, you've experienced a contact high, and this is just a hallucination, like in your fugue state. That's where I'm going with it. Oh, that makes me feel better. So I actually beat the game then. The rest doesn't matter. It's not real.

It's you grappling with your inner demons as you face the truth about yourself while high out of your mind. Oh, I guess I lost after all. Well, as a caper to the game, if you successfully kill Mr. Big, you get to loot his gold bars. So the very last end of the game is just the one player or two players running to the right and getting as much gold as you possibly can. At this point, if I was playing with somebody, I did try to shoot them because then I could steal more gold, because at this point I learned that the best strategy in life is to get as much gold as possible. And at the very end of the game, there's not really any of the game, but there is a tech screen.

which again, I hope this is a joke, but it didn't feel like a joke to me as a kid. And it said, you've completed the NARC training mission. Contact your local DEA recruiter. So, again, in the narrative of this world, drug dealers and everyone associated with them are to be killed. And that's what the DEA does. So kids, this game is all fun in games, but if you like this, you should probably get in the law enforcement and kill drug dealers. And I'm just, I don't know. I really don't know if that was a joke.

I honestly don't know. I'd honestly love to know the number of people who actually saw that and, like, you know, enrolled or applied or sought out a recruiter. I feel like it probably wasn't very many, but I feel like this is just the Fourth Amendment violating version of The Last Starfighter. I mean, to put it bluntly, I would say a lot of 80s movies and TV shows had a lot of copaganda, and drug dealers were a popular enemy. especially because by the late 80s, we knew that we couldn't keep doing with the Cold War stuff. We had to find a new enemy. So drug lords and their minions became popular, you know, foils. I mean, in 1989, James Bond fought drugs, and he hated drugs.

He stabs it in the movie. He hates it so much. He's stabbing the drugs. He goes crazy. Which movie was that? That was licensed to kill. Oh, okay. I haven't seen that one.

It's a good one. I like it. You're busted. But as far as we're Three You're busted But as far as we can tell NARC did pretty well

Jarvis estimated About 3,700 cabots were in circulation I certainly saw this game everywhere I saw it in so many places I even saw it like in remote areas

When I went on vacation It was a very distinct cabinet You know, as we said, it was all black, had the characters in the side, the joystick setup was very big. The speakers were very big, and all the sounds of this game are just rocking. The music is, I think the music of this game is great. So it's like, I feel like if you play this game or if you're near someone playing this game, it is just an auditory explosion. Even if you don't see the graphics, you're just, you're inundated with streams and explosions and little like, you're busted.

The attract mode uses all voice samples from the game to make it sort of, like, it's not quite a rap, but it's kind of like a spoken word, jazz, jazz fusion, like, freestyle thing, like just a bunch of random sounds stitched together. Hey, kids, do some drugs. Yeah, the theme song was, I remember liking that one a lot, and yeah, it's got the voice clips, kind of like a remix thing. Yeah. And it was, you know, because it was so successful, we know it was ported to many home computers at the time and the NES. And as we said earlier, a lot of these versions, none of them have to digitize graphics. That's for certain. All of them have just, you know, cartoon graphics. Some versions look more accurate than others. I think the Commodore version looks pretty good. The Amiga version sounds pretty good. But really, from a gameplay standpoint, it's really hard to get all those buttons, you know, again, jump button, crouch button, gun, button and Rocket Button are all separate commands. So you've got to really juggle your inputs very carefully here. Also surprisingly because this is, you know, for an NES game, the NES was still very much during Nintendo's notorious, you know, we want no adult content in this game on our system whatsoever. The NES version sticks pretty close to the arcade game in that they don't, they have no

blood, but they still have rockets and people still blow up. But I guess it's a little a little more Looney Tunes, a little more cartoonish, and the evil organization has been changed from crack to quack. So you can't say crack. But otherwise, the manual very clearly, you know, establishes that this is about drugs and you're fighting against drugs. So I guess it's viewed as an anti-drug message. So I feel like the NES game certainly has no irony whatsoever because it's very much about no drugs. Drugs are bad. Shoot the drugs, kids. Shoot them up. I remember it seemed to be pretty heavily advertised in comic books and stuff, too. Yeah, I think by all accounts, it was, I don't know if it sold well, but it certainly was pushed as a major release because the arcade game was such a big hit.

And also, I mean, related to that, I would say the show didn't last long, but the lead, the two heroes of Narc officially are called Max Force and Hitman. So Max Force, the blue guy, was even in a cartoon, the short-lived power team, which was basically a bunch of acclaimed wannabes, and it was run on, what was that show? I think it was called Arcade Power or Video Power, right. Not great. No, history does not miss this cartoon, and it did not run very long, but it's, it's a weird combination of characters. You've got, this guy, and you've got Kuros from Wizards and Warriors, and you've got Quirk, the puzzle-solving tomato. And Bigfoot, big for the car. Bigfoot, the car, and the animal.

Yes. Like, if you got that party in an RPG, you would be like, I'm not playing this RPG anymore. There was also Tyrone from Arch Rivals. And, yeah, basically they were all acclaimed characters or, like, you know, licensed through acclaim. So that's an interesting thing to look back at. I believe acclaim was the publisher of Wizards and Warriors, even though Rare was the developer. I think that's not working. Also important, because, as I mentioned, we already mentioned the Mortal Kombat Connection,

but I didn't know this until reading up on this. So because NARC used so much digitized graphics and high-resolution, you know, high-low images, NARC was the centerpiece of their pitch to James Cameron when they wanted to get the Terminator 2 license. and by all accounts, Cameron loved it, and he gave them and let them do whatever they wanted. So, you know, eventually you had the T2 shooter game, which had a lot of digitized graphics, and you had the T2 pinball game, which had clips from the actual movie, and, you know, both did very well. Both were seen everywhere. So, Narc was, if perhaps a small part, a part of that game coming together.

So, you know, we have, it has a long legacy, even if you never played it. Another part of it is I remember it has like a blink and you'll miss at cameo of the Mr. Big Battle in the first Teenage Mutin' Ninja Turtles movie in the warehouse for all the kids before they join up with the

folk clan and they're just kind of indoctrinating them. Yeah, I feel like NARC and Robocop were two arcade cabinets that showed up in a lot of arcade in like a lot of movies. Also bad dudes. I feel like Data East, I think Data Easton acclaim both knew they could get

lot of a, get a lot of free real estate that way. Oh, you got, you got a fight scene? Well, here's some cabinets. Put them in the background. They're okay. Oh, my God, I think Death Wish 4 has seen an arcade, and it's like, it's packed with arcade games, and I tried to pause it to see what they all were. There might be in the background there, because Death Wish, uh, Death Wish, uh, late 80s, maybe even 1990. So, Narc was out by that point. You were saying, Jeremy. Uh, nothing, nothing of value. Okay. Baby, the way I'm pushing you That's been crucial lately

So by these fans They always stunting on me Takes half of the plea To take half of the weed Like Those days They always waiting to bust you Hey assholes

Who's always dying Through customs All the haters I'm willing Just what the bust one Competition They claim a something A bluff for

Well, what is speaking Nothing of value, Jeremy? There's another video game We've talked about Perhaps briefly But we can't ignore it We have to, we do Because in the early 2000s, Williams, Ballet, Midway, whatever we'll call it, they're all basically folded one corporate umbrella at this point.

And it's the PlayStation 2 era, it's the Xbox era, and it's a time when publishers are mining their back catalogs and figuring out what do we own? What do we own? What can we put on these new consoles and, you know, make a buck. And in some cases, it's porting these games directly because NARC was included. on several, you know, arcade compilations at this time. But Midway also did sort of, you know,

reboots or reimaginings, whatever would call them, of a lot of their classic arcade games, and NARC was among that list. So in 2005, we got NARC. Same name, but wow, a different game,

to put it mildly. Because, let's face it, it's 2005. So what's in Vogue? Arcade Shooters? No. What's in Vogue is Grand Theft Auto. So someone, you know, someone in a boardroom somewhere decided, well, here's our ticket. We'll take the world of NARC and drugs and we'll make a gritty, a gritty crime-fighting game about being a cop and dealing drugs and taking the drugs. Because in this version, the drugs are not just evidence to collect. The drugs are power-ups. You can take the drugs

and you get unique effects that last for a short time. And if you take too many drugs, you get addicted, and there's a whole mini-game we have to come down from the drugs or else you get in trouble. I'm not making any of this up. I swear this is a real video game. It's actually one on sale. Grand Theft Auto,

Grand Theft Auto borrowed back that idea for getting drunk in GTA4, I assume. Yeah, no, it's funny. A lot of video games have, like, alcohol mechanics. Certainly the Akeza games, you can get drunk in those games and it's just it's a visual thing

you know your controller vibrates and I think you can equip certain items that make you more powerful when you're drunk and like or even do like drunken boxing like it's a it's a joke but again is a satire is it real

I don't think it's a satire I think someone like they just had a meeting it's like okay what can the drugs do all right well you know when you spoke pot like things seem to be going

slow motion what if the game goes in slow motion when you smoke pot? Or what if you take speed and your cop runs faster? He's faster now because he's on speed. You get it? Like, very first draft jokes, I'm sorry. Like, it's just, it's real, like, and crack, oh my God.

Crack, if you take crack, it means you're a crack shot and you do more damage. I never got to play this one, but. No. Well, what if you take pot and speed together? I don't know if you're allowed to mix drugs. I think, I'm assuming one counselor or another out. I mean, certainly, I can tell you in my experience, when I've taken more than one drug, one works and the other goes away.

So I'm assuming it works as was the same way in Narc. Have some quotes here. Some quotes from some, how about the vice president of marketing? Helen Scheler, who says, following a deep and twisted story that drives the character player control, NARC challenges gamers to bust and kill ruthless thugs and criminals in order to bring justice to the drug-infested streets. By which she means in the video game,

you arrest people for having drugs, but also you can sell the drugs yourself. You can do both of these things at the same time. And, you know, GTA, you're not a cop in GTA, and if you get in trouble, the cops chase you. In this game, how it works is your cop has a badge reputation. and if you do good stuff like arrest people, the badge number goes up. And if you do bad stuff like random violence or selling drugs or taking too many drugs,

then your number goes down. And eventually you can get demoted or even arrested. But it's like if you get or if you badge number goes down and you're demoted, you can't do any more missions. So if you want to play the game, you have to put the number back up to proceed. So it's kind of an empty, like, it's not like a mass effect thing where you can be like good cop or bad cop you have to be a sufficient level of good cop to actually play the game in any meaningful way let's just literally just want to run around and do the drugs and shoot people at random because you can do that forever if you want yeah i was going to say someone played kotor and was like that seems like a good idea let's not put any real thought into how to integrate this

so if you run out of points like you know what do they do like put you on parking meter duty or Eventually they'll just arrest you Like they'll just keep arresting you Like you'll become an enemy Which is not how it works in real life anymore No no unfortunately not And that's the thing yet I mean honestly

Playing this game watching this game today It is almost ludicrous In that you've got The two main characters are a Dirty cop who's coming back From addiction And a straight-laced DEA guy Who are forced to work together

And it's just It's all very rote It's the script is terrible. They hired real actors, to their credit, they spent money on this. They hired real actors. Like, the game plays okay. Like, the controls are not terrible. The graphics are, I would say, bad, but not, like, ludicrously bad for the time.

Like, they're decent for the time. They're very of the era, like, you know, kind of C-tier GTA clone. There were so many of those. It's exactly what you'd expect. Like, to me, it's ugly, but it's not unique. ugly in a way that I would say, oh my God, this game sucks. It's just like, it's an ugly game like so many ugly games of 2005. Yeah, the real ugliness is in its soul. Yes, absolutely. I'm surprised to hear it had a budget for that stuff, because as I recall, one of the,

their pushes for marketing it was that it was 1999, like at launch. Yes, it was sold at a deep discount price, absolutely. Yeah, to the point where they even, like, I believe, stamped it on the front of the box and that was a problem when I was working at Blockbuster and they were selling games as well as renting and we got copies in and up here in Canada the pricing

is a little bit different so they kind of ran into a problem where it's like okay we're trying to charge $2,999 for this game that says 1999 stamped right on the front of the case and eventually they had to just like drop the price because

yeah I don't think you can do that Whiskey bottles and brand new cars Oak to you're in my way There's too much coke And too much smoke Look what's going on inside you I have no inside information But my suspect reasoning here is that

I think Because Midway announced this back in early, I think, 2003 and intended to release it in 2004, but it didn't come out until March, 2005. And as we all know, March is the end of the fiscal year. So I suspect someone said, this game is taking too long, just ship it already. We already paid for all these licenses.

It has a ton of license music. It has real actors who, I mean, look, I'll be honest, they're not doing their best, but they are actual actors from movies that you've seen and probably heard. of. So, like, you know, Michael Madsen had been a lot of Tarantino movies and GTA3. Ron Perlman, Ron Perlman's a legend. We support Ron Perlman's a podcast. Michael Wincott, one of the great voices of all time, you know, one of the evil guys in Robin Hood. Just recently, you heard him

and Nope. He was the cinematographer guy and Nope who had the handheld camera. So a great actor, really. Like, he's a great actor. But in this game, he's playing a dying old man and his performance is somehow even less energetic than you'd expect. And it's just, I'm sorry. It's just, it's really low effort on that regard. And also, it's like, it's a DDA clone, and there's no cars. You never drive anywhere. You have to explore the city on foot.

It's such a strange number of choices that are made here. You know, you're on foot most of the time. You're busting, they want to keep the busting mechanic. So you have a lot of, like, melee combat. and punches and kicks and a meter that fills up and if you have max meter you can super bust someone which is like you do a wrestling move on them and like break their neck but then you arrest them and like double bust yeah it's just it's real bad i'm sorry it's it's it's real it's real six out of ten material you don't get a fancy sports car even the original had a fancy sports car

how do you think no cars no cop cars no cars whatsoever no vans, no buses, no scooters, no bikes. And, like, again, this is 2005, this is Post by City. It is the same year as San Andreas. And, like, I've got my problems with San Andreas, but San Andreas gives you a laundry list of things you can do in this game, you know? And in NARC, it's like, you can do the missions, or you can sell the drugs, or you can play, I think, a three-card Monty mini game if you want, and then bust the guy. who plays the game but, like, they don't even go for the sex worker angle. Like, they're not even edgy in that regard. Like, the whole drug thing is, like, that's their whole ticket. And I feel like they really

counted on this being, like, a bigger news story, but I don't think it really was outside of, like, Games Press, who basically said, it's not great a game, don't buy it, and that was the end of it, I feel. I don't know if you heard otherwise, but... I was in the Games Press.

I was in the games press, and no one wanted to talk about this. This is horrible. I guess it's like they want Grand Theft Auto, like, you know, attention and money and stuff, but instead of going for, like, all the crimes like Grand Theft Auto, they just kind of focused on their niche.

Drugs are our niche. I think they definitely counted on more controversy and more sort of shocking stuff. Because, again, it's still the early odds. It's still a hangover from that, you know, extreme in-your-face kind of attitude. I mean, you know, I'm sure the magazine, magazine ad was very tasteful, I'm saying.

But yeah, critics at the time did not receive it very well. I have an IGM quote from Ivan Seulik, who called it a dark, twisted, offensive, and morally vacant game. The late Ryan Davis for GameSpot said, you know, he wrote a negative review and said that it carries the same name as an enjoyable and knowingly bizarre arcade classic is downright misleading. Because there's just like, there's just nothing fun here. I mean, maybe you might enjoy the actual gameplay, maybe, but the game itself just has no, I feel no sense of humor like, say, a Saints Row.

Like, Saints Row is, it's Rantatha Otto, but silly, but jovial, but ridiculous, and you're a criminal, and you're doing over-the-top stuff. Like, that's what you want in your over-the-top GTA game, not this, not this dark, bleak, just downbeat, lifeless, Crap. It's crap. I'm sorry, it's crap. It's crap. It's mean-spirited and joyless. It's terrible. Like, whatever flaws the original NARC had in terms of tone and subtext, this just doesn't offer anything redeeming. It's so bad. Like a power glove. I'm curious, and I almost hate to ask, but were any of the, like, original main principal developers of the original NARC involved in this? I don't believe so. I think, I'm pretty sure all of them had left by that point. Certainly the credit, Midway is the publisher, but they're not the developer. The developer, it's, depending which version, the developers are credited as Viz Entertainment or point of view.

Because there was more than one version, this game came out for PS2 and Xbox and later came to PC, Windows. So depending which version you played, there might have a different studio actually handling that version of the game. But either case, Midway did not develop it. they were the publisher, so I really doubt anyone from the 80s was still on the product. And indeed, we had a quote from Jarvis who just said, it died a well-deserved death. So he certainly viewed this as nothing worthwhile. So, it's time to come down. Time to come down from the high of talking about classic arcade games and their misfire reboots of the early odds.

I personally, even though I do have to wonder what kind of energy was put into the making of NARC, I still hold an incredible amount of affection for NARC as an arc. arcade game. It's a cabinet that whenever I see it, I almost always put a coin into it, because, as I said earlier, while I'm certainly not good enough to beat it on one single coin, I can get a lot of time for my single coin. And it's just a general, it's a, it's such an absurd game. Even though you don't move very fast, it's very fast pace, there's lots of enemies coming at you at all times, the music, the explosions, it's, it's kind of, it's visually and audio kind of overstimulation. And, you know, kid, adult me, doesn't match.

matter. We both kind of love it. So I still really enjoy Narc. And I, it almost, it almost adds disappointment the fact that they couldn't cope with it with a decent idea to make something fun out of Narc on PlayStation 2. Because a lot of PlayStation 2 games, you know, our secret, you know, our secret treasures of experimentation, not, not this Narc. In this case, the good Narc is the one we all remember and the bad Narc is the one that we kind of forgot. I like to think the original NARC was high energy. I don't actually like either of the games. I have

no funness for any of them. I just find this topic interesting and it's just, yeah, very much a slice of history, a product of its time. And you know, I'd overgrudge anyone who enjoys the game. I won't say games because no one

likes NARC-205. But it's weird because you can kind of see the shape of the future of American society in there and there was a lot kind of building up to that but this does feel like one of those like you know milestones where you're like

oh huh I see how things are going you know bringing things back around to something we were discussing earlier were either of these games released in Japan I seriously doubt it I don't think the arcade game was the NES game was NES only not Famicom

and I don't I can't even imagine the 2005 game even coming within a a country mile of the border. I mean, like, the Grand The Auto games were eventually were released in Japan. They were localized by Capcom, in fact, because Capcom and Rockstar had, I guess, relationship. But I think a game where you play a criminal is one thing, but a game that's all about drug dealing and drug taking.

I feel like that would just, that would, like, explode some heads down at Zero rating board. So I just, I feel like there's no way they would get away with that. Yeah, I just feel like the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, first one, the arcade game just seems kind of in line with their take on things. Well, I think part of the problem is that the cabin itself was a bespoke thing. So I don't know how many, I mean, maybe some got over here because, you know, those cabinets went around the world eventually, but I can't imagine, you know, you can't just send a board out.

You'd want to have the whole thing to get the full attention. And like, if you just put this into a sit-down, whatever, candy cab, I think a lot of it would just be lost, you know? I can see that. Yeah, this is a game that's very much not in line with Japanese aesthetics and design. That's right. There's also dismemberment, which does not go well in Japan either. Oh, yeah, yeah, good point.

So, on that note of what is and is not allowed in Japan, I've determined it's almost my bedtime in Japan. So we're going to wrap things up here. Thank you very much for joining us here in Russia, We really appreciate your listening to the podcast. If you listen to the show for free, thank you so much for listening to Retronauts. However, I might add that if you go to patreon.com

slash Retronauts, you can support this show, and we need your support to keep things going. For $3 a month, you get everything one week early, higher bit rate, and add free. But for $5 a month, which is just $2 more than the first number I said, oh boy, you get a lot more stuff. You get exclusive episodes, two exclusive episodes every month, sometimes three if there's

enough Fridays. You get weekly columns from me, and I read you the column as a mini podcast. You get a monthly community show, also hosted by me, and you get Discord access where I'm at and Jeremy and a lot of other listeners. We all hang out in there. It's kind of a fun place. I imagine when this episode hits, we'll be talking to the Discord, and we'll be having a jovial time about, you know, cops that came to our school and said silly things,

or maybe about, you know, where we saw an arc arcane, what it made us feel like. And did we enjoy it? Did we ever see a real cop drive a Porsche? You know, there'll be any, just a little whole ham on it, you know? Any number of topics might come up there. It's a wild place, our discord, but a friendly place. Patreon.com slash retranos, if you please, we really appreciate that. David, you're the least retron of all of us, so why don't you go next?

Oh, okay, then. I guess if people are interested in following my hijinks, I'm on social media at LBD underscore N-Y-T-R-A-Y-N, except without the underscore on Blue Sky, because they don't do underscores there. And I don't do Blue Sky as much, so maybe forget that part. A lot of my activity you can find at the Mega Man Network, which is the MMNetwork.com.

and the MM network on socials as well. And occasionally I write something, you know, else on Poisonmushroom.org, and I do some contributions for Nintendo Force. And my wife, another retronaut, I believe, yes. Nadia, she streams with me periodically on our Twitch at NightWorks. That's N-Y-T-E-W-O-R-K-S. David, I'm so glad you had to think about spelling it because I never remember how to spell your username when I have to write up a tweet or something that mentions

you and I have to like look it up. I never get it right. It's a very 90s distinct version of night train like the songs. I get it. It's like you don't want to pay guns and roses but you want to have the night train. I understand. Yeah, I was doing it before Mega Man X-5. Wonderful. Jeremy, Jeremy, how about you? What do you want to tell people? You can find me on the internet doing all kinds of things such as retronauts, working at limited run games, and on YouTube, making videos and books. The books aren't actually on YouTube, but, you know. Anyway, yeah, that's all very exciting, and you can find me.

Just look for Jeremy Parrish. And I'm your host, I'm in Fight. You can find me on the internet by going to my website, fightclub. Dot me. That's F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B, a dark place where you money. have taken drugs in your life. Dot M. Me. Me. Because Fight loves me. That's the joke. All the socials as well. But again, it's all linked to the website. Just go to the website. It's okay. It's okay. And on that note, I'll say good night to everybody. And by all means,

don't do drugs if they're illegal. And if they are illegal, don't do too many. Thank you. I don't know. I don't know. ...andah ... ...