Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 318: Cowboy Games

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Believe it or not, there are topics we've never covered in the past 14 years of Retronauts, so it's always a treat to shine the podcasting spotlight on a subject that's gone untouched. And this week, we're talking all about cowboy games: the genre that traces its roots back to the very beginning of the medium, and only recently came back into vogue thanks to the wildly popular Red Dead Redemption series. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Henry Gilbert, and Nina Matsumoto as the crew looks at the rootinest, shootinest Western games made between 1975 and 1991. And stay tuned for part two, ya varmint! Be sure to read Nina's newest book: Sparks! Double Dog Dare. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, there's a solid snake in my boot. Iha, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one. Bob Mackie, and I'm the sheriff in this town. And today's topic is all about cowboy and western games. Before I continue, who is across from me in the same room?

I'm giving everybody a Wild West nickname. Howdy, partner. It's Henry Gilbert. Have Zapper will travel. And Henry's one mean ombre. who is my co-hosts of Retronauts, and currently in North Carolina, not part of the Old West. That is me, Jeremy Parrish, the Hans Gruber of this cowboy episode. And Jeremy's low-down varmint.

And who else do we have on this podcast? I'm Nina Matsumoto, and they never let me join in any cowboy games. It's true. And Nina is a Philly. I tried to find non-offensive terms for women in the Old West and there really aren't any. I'm not going to call you can hope for as a small horse. Exactly.

I'm not going to call... You can at least make me sound dangerous. Come on. Boy, you're not a Montgomery Wardwoman. I'm just looking at a list of cowboy slang right now. But yes, thanks for joining us for another episode of Retronauts. This is all about cowboy games. And this is the topic comes at the request of Nina Matsumoto.

and we were going to record this at Midwest Gaming Expo but someone poison the waterhole and by that I mean we're dealing with a pandemic but Nina, why did you want to do this topic? Well, I'm a big fan of Westerns and I'm not really quite sure why like I can't pinpoint a time in my life

where I realize I liked them though I might have found my answer while taking notes for this episode so stay tuned for that. I want to make clear that I've always been fond of the romanticized, fictionalized, gun-sleeing aspect of the Wild West world, not the ugly historical

side of it. I prefer the cheesier, more stylized takes on it. And I just love that rustic aesthetic of lawless towns, cool, mystery, strangers, desert imagery, and the music. The music is so good. Yeah, the more of the frontier land version of American history. Exactly.

That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, so this episode is going to be a survey of Western and Cowboy games that I curated myself. I know I'm leaving things out. And if I did, I do it on purpose. Just to piss you off, the listener at home. No. I just decided here are the most important ones and we're going to talk all about them. This will go up until the year 2000, but then Nina has a few after that she wants to discuss as well after our initial segments. Yeah, I used to casually

collect games and for a few years I was collecting cowboy games. That was more like within the past 10 years. I just realized like I like cowboy stuff and there's a lot of cowboy games out there and they're a lot of fun. So I would just start collecting any retro cowboy game I could find. A lot of them are way too old, though, for me to find at a reasonable price or to be able to enjoy. Well, yeah, a lot of the things we're covering on this episode

are not playable today unless you pirate them. Very few of these things you can actually download digitally and a lot of the carts are really hard to find. But to provide more context for this, I don't know. I need a lot more time to describe what the Western is and what the genre is, It was really in decline as video games were taking off. Like, I really want to say, and this could be just me being reductive,

but like the cultural revolution of the late 60s, I was pushing back on a more conservative black and white morality of the Western. And basically all of the TV shows, all the popular Westerns on TV and the movies, they basically ended in the 60s or 70s. And I was looking at it was like, were there any big Western TV series after the 1970s? and the only one I could find was Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman was like one of the few that lasted more than a season.

But like... What about a Briscoe County Jr.? That's one season, yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Gunsmoke was like, or Bonanza, one of them, it's like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, wagon train. All of these, they like had like 600 episodes and they ran for like 20 years. But then like once the 70s happened, those were all just dead. And the 70s also, that's when video games happened.

So Western as a genre, was like on life support and dying in the 70s. And then like everything after the 70s, uh, Western involved for the most part was like a comment on the Western and like about the death of the West. And now even that is like the most stereotypical kind of Western you can make. Once upon a time in Hollywood basically is about how that it all died and went away.

Yeah, that's, uh, like so many Western films after they, they've just been postmodern ever since really. They're just comments on previous Westerns or people who like Westerns. or also just about like, you know, the American view of masculinity. It's a lot about that, too. And a whole bunch of dad stuff. A lot of dad's stuff mixed in there, too.

Yeah, like I mentioned, I like the romanticized vision of the West. And when they're more realistic, they're just too bleak and depressing, like the movie Unforgiven, which is an amazing film and a really good subversion of the Western genre. But Unforgiven feels like it would be the watchmen of cowboy films. after that everyone was like oh what if westerns weren't fun actually yeah things like i like my stuff to be stylized like when it comes to fantasy genre i prefer lord the rings or game of thrones yeah i prefer sunset riders to deadwood or something like that where it's like everyone stinks everyone's dying everyone's being murdered and horrible grisly ways see deadwood that's a successful

west yeah though it was like the least popular show on hbo and canceled in three seasons exactly i actually could not get into deadwood uh i it's one of my all-time favorite show I know it's like, yeah, a lot of people's favorite. That's why I was excited, check it out. But again, I just like the hokeyer, cheesier Westerns more so than Deadwood stuff. Oh, yeah. But I do like Westworld, at least the first season of it. And I never watched the other ones.

Deadwood is about the grime and violence and filth of it all. And also saying a swear every four words. Too much swearing for me. I'm a good girl. For her gentle ears. But yeah, like I wanted to ask everybody what their experience with Westerns is because mine is very limited. The extent of it is like Back to the Future Three, one act of that movie, and then the

original Westworld 70s movie, which is more about an evil robot chasing you. So I think it's pretty fun and I have enjoyed games of the genre, but I'm not really big into Western. I'm more into like, you know, pre-war, like detective stuff. It's more fun for me than Westerns. How does everybody else feel about Westerns? Henry, you mentioned you like Deadwood. Oh, yeah.

I'm a big Western fan, though. My favorites are the kind of postmodern ones. Like when, in a film class in college, when we watched Age Coach, I was like, I see the quality of this, but I'd rather watch The Searchers, which is about an old shitty cowboy trying to work in a world that's left him behind. And the Sergio Leone Cowboy Spaghetti Westerns, like, those were my favorites. Like, those just loved the style of Western, but it came at it from a different angle. And then on top of that, I also did go through a real Clint Eastwood phase. I really enjoyed his work. And also, I haven't seen every Sam Peck and Paul movie, but The Wild Bunch is another of my favorites.

But those are the ones I like that are about how the West was a lie. It's actually insanely violent and amoral. And it's about people trying to find some form of justice in an unjust world that's full of chaos and there's no law to it. like those are my favorite westerns and and when i would play western video games i will say i really love games like red dead redemption but when i played them i was like well i i see all the i've seen all the a lot of the movies they're pulling from in this so it feels less original to me even though it's fun to play through it in a game you made me remember that another movie i like out of the three westerns i've seen is a high noon which is not even it's a western but it's also

it's an allegory for the red scare so there's there's a lot more going on there. Jeremy, how about you? Western experience. You are a Texas lad, aren't you? Maybe it's because I was born in the 70s as the Western was declining, but I'm kind of the anti-Nina. Like, when I see something as a Western, I just completely disassociate. I'm like, yeah, not interested. I just cannot bring myself to care about Westerns. I don't know what it is, but maybe it's because it's, you know, like a 30-year slice of American history, where everything is going to be brown and dusty and depressing and there's not going to be a lot of women. There's not going to be a lot of basically non-white dudes in any sort of authority.

You know, when you're playing a video game, your weapons are going to be revolvers and that's it. There's just not, there's just not much to it. And I don't know. I guess I feel like if I wanted, you know, that experience of flinty-eyed people in a dusty hellhole environment, environment, basically being racist and sexist, I would have just stayed in West Texas. That's true. You are, you're betraying your Texan roots by casting off your love of westerns. Well, bear in mind, I don't have real roots in Texas. I lived there for a long time, but that's not where I was born. And clearly, I just didn't belong. So, yeah, like, I don't really enjoy any

Western films or TV series or games that aren't basically like, oh, we used Western trappings to do something completely different. Like, Back to the Future 3 is probably about as good as it gets. Or, you know, like, I was trying to name some other Western games for this episode, but then I realize, like, all of them are just, like, sci-fi or fantasy stories that just happen to have, you know, 10-gallon hats, like Wild Arms or SteamWorld Dig, which is about steam-powered robots in a dusty old West Planet. So, yeah, I'm going to be the outsider here.

So, sorry. Looks like we caught ourselves an outsider here. We don't take kindly to those type of folks here. I'm going to insert a spittoon noise. So Jeremy will for now be known as the anti-Nina. I have a quick question for Jeremy, though. Do you like stammerize stuff? Not really that much either.

I know those two genres are very intertwined, at least in Western media. But yeah, like not really my thing either. Okay, interesting. Well, I jokingly call myself a reverse wiyaboo because I'm Japanese, but I love cowboys and southern food. And I've gone to Arizona and Texas many times. And every time I go, I'm delighted by all the cowboy motifs I see there, whereas my friends who live there are just sick of it. And I'm just like, oh, I love this stuff. So you're a Westaboo.

Yeah. Westaboo. Yeah. And I actually used to wear a cowboy hat for like a couple of years. That's cool. Just like every day. Oh, man. I missed the Nina cowboy hat era.

You miss the cowboy Nina era, yes. I bought in far too late. The black one I wore and a red one. Wow. We're bringing it back once I moved there, by the way. Matching cowboy hats, wherever we go. The thing is, though, I was more inspired by the devil's haircut music video. Okay.

Which was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, which I didn't know at the time because I had not seen that movie. Not about Cowboys, believe it or not. No, it's not. I'm going to the movie theater to see. I'm like, that wasn't what I expected. no um actually i'm not a big movie buff so like i do like watching western films but i don't really um seek them out too much so there's a ton of like great western movies i haven't seen although um yeah i think the the first western movie i saw was back to the future three like oh me too yeah yeah that counts right oh yeah yeah i mean it's explicitly a western for about like

uh i'd say about third of the movie oh at least a third yeah like 60% of the movie yeah i'm pretty sure that was the first one I saw and then I saw Wild Wild West with Will Smith. Well, there you go. Yeah. But then later on I would start watching more actual Westerns. So my favorite is

it's cliche, but it's the good, the band, the ugly, because it's such a good film. Even people who don't like Westerns, I think, would love that movie. They saw it. That whole trilogy is great, but yeah, that's the best one. That's the best one of that trilogy, for sure. And I also love the Quick

and the Dead, the Sam Ramey film. It is such a Sam Ramey film. It's so much fun. And, Bob, we've got to watch that sometimes. I really like Sam Ramey. As a white guy born in the 80s, I'm obligated to. You know what they don't do enough of our tournament movies, and that's a tournament movie, and I love those.

Yeah, it's basically like a street fighter. My money's on the quick. I just wanted to quickly lift off some honorable mentions, though. So there's a dead man in 1995 that stars Johnny Depp. That's an interesting one. The 2010 True Grit by the Coimprits, by the Cohen, brothers. Like that one, yeah.

Yeah, that one's really good. Pale Writer, 1985. It's a lesser-repeachated Eastwood film. Got kind of like a supernatural religious lint to it. And also two Asian cowboy movies, or Sukiaki Western Django in 2007 by Takashi Miquet. There's a cameo by Quentin Tarantino. And it answers a question of what if the descendants

of the Genji and the Hakee clan became cowboys and also the character of Django is there. So it's a cool blend of samurai and cowboy setik. And also, there's a good, the band, and the weird, a 2008 Korean film, which is an even better blend of Asian aesthetic combined with the Wild West. Ooh, I haven't seen that one. I want to check that out. All those are recommended. So, yeah, we got a lot of recommendations up front in terms of, like, Western movies.

You know, another one, true grit that remind me too. I really like the other straight up Western, the Coens did, the Baldabuster Scruggs that just came out, which really is just like an anthology film they did. But it's really good. it's great to see them go back to the old West stuff but but yeah true grit both um film adaptations about it they both fall into the thing of like oh the end of the west like here's the old gunslinger and the West is almost over and and uh and another you know another thing that really got me on my Western kick uh was being a teen in the 90s reading preacher preacher oh for sure Western comic book and all they do is talk about cowboy movies which I was like

preacher's so cool I got to watch all the cowboy boobies they mentioned in this comic. The ghost of John Wayne talked to him or something? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Hey, it was cool at the time. There are too many cowboy comics out there that are super popular, are there? No, not. That was a

60s thing, really. That also went by the wayside. There's a modern one called Pretty Deadly. That's really cool. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a Kelly's pseudiconic one, right? Yes. Yeah. That's really gorgeous artwork. Okay, we've covered a lot of the context of like what westerns are, some good movies. like the games that drew from all of that stuff.

And the first one on my list is one of two Wild Gunman games by Nintendo. And this is not a video game. And if you were at our PRGE live show in 2018, I was doing a little video history of full motion video games. And this is one of Nintendo's super, super early ones. And I want to say like Nintendo invented the full motion video game. Jeremy, you know a lot about Nintendo history.

Is that claim accurate? they were pioneers i think it's definitely make a case for it i don't remember exactly if there were other projection based games before that but i mean that was technology that nintendo invented yeah for duck hunt and before that the um the clay laser clay shooting system um and you know that was that was the solution to a problem which was well there's all these bowling alleys that are just sitting empty in japan and uh no one no one bulls because that that fad lasted for like a year and then went away. So what can we do with all this space?

So they were like, let's turn it into a virtual shooting range. So they came up with the projection system. And then the oil crisis hit, the OPEC oil crisis in the 70s. And they were like, well, we got to make these video projection things a lot smaller

and use a lot less plastic. So they came up with a booth where you could shoot guys who, you know, cowboys or banditos or whoever. And yeah. So I would say, yeah, this was, I'm pretty sure was the first projection-based game system kind of building on the legacy of what they had come up with before.

Yeah, I love the history of Nintendo's pre-video game stuff, you know, products, and this is one of them, and we mentioned it before, but it was part of something they had called the simulation system in which it was a 16-millimeter film technology that could mechanically switch to different tracks of film depending on the outcome of the game. So in this game, it's just like Wild Gunman for the NES in which you fire your gun when the enemy's eyes flash, except in this version, it is live action footage of people. And I don't think it matters where you're shooting your gun on the screen because the technology is not that advanced yet. It's just that you're shooting at the right time. And if you watch this footage online, you can watch a YouTube video of some of this footage.

It's very creepy because there's no music. It's just very eerie, either silence or just like the sounds of like hooves on like, dirt roads. It's kind of weird. The age of the film stock, too. Like, it just, it's creepy and how old it all looks. Like, but, but the invention of it definitely feels like what a toy company would make, not a video game company, too. Yeah.

And, uh, it is interesting. I would like to see, like, how this actually played out, but I have to imagine, like, none of these machines survived or like the film all deteriorated because it's just 60 millimeter film. But yeah, this would eventually become a game we'll talk about later. and this is just one of many simulation system games and it's fun to read about these because there were a lot of weird ones in the works

and one of them that they didn't develop actually in full was called Fascination and that is where you are shooting the clothes off of a Swedish model as she dances around. Whoa. So Nintendo was getting into the horny games market or at least trying to but they missed out on joining the burgeoning porno industry of the 70s, I guess.

Yeah, that was their connection between video games and their Love Hotel business model. Exactly. If you show up to the Love Hotel alone, you can still play fascination in private, I guess. But yeah, so that's like literally the first cowboy video game, and it's not even a

video game, but I mean, it's made by Nintendo. It's kind of a game, and it is an interesting artifact of history. But basically, the next four games are all essentially the same kind of game in a genre that never really exploded as much as like your Pac-Man clones or your

Space Invaders clones did. It was a very short-lived genre, the cowboy versus cowboy genre, and it only really existed for the latter half of the 70s. You know, I'd never seen Wild Gunman before until I was researching for this episode. And I have to say, I love it a lot. The video of it, it's like, it's so grainy and kind of creepy. And spooky westerns are, like, among my favorite. Like, when supernatural junk is laced into cowboy junk, that's totally my jam. And I like how, like, when it's all strung together, like in this YouTube video you can find, I feel like if I don't show someone else, a cowboy's going to crawl out of my TV in seven days and kill me.

It's a real, it's a real Sautico thing with the creepy glowing eyes on the characters when you're supposed to shoot them. It's amazing. But yeah, the next one on my list is a 1975 game called Gun Fight. Again, this is all part of the same, like, cowboy versus cowboy genre. This is actually a very important game that most people don't talk about. I didn't know about it until I did this history. So it's known as Western Gun in Japan, and it's created by the creator of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikato.

Three years before that game, he created this. Two very important things about this game. It's the first murder simulator on record because it is the first human-again-again-compet depicted in a video game. So that is like the future of all video games. It's happening in Gun Fight or Western Gun. And also the American version of this game that Midway developed is the first arcade game.

or video game in general, that uses a microprocessor for its gameplay and graphics and whatnot. So two very important qualities of this game that nobody ever talks about, developed by one of the most important people in video game history, the creator of Space Invaders. On GameCenter CX, when they interviewed that creator, he explained how at first they were going to make the aliens people, but they thought that would be too violent. That's why they made them aliens instead. But I wonder what made them change their mind so quickly.

I guess if you're just shooting another cowboy, it's fine but if you're shooting like a swarm of people that's just that that is the future of game so one murder yeah you're right kind of the iconic western concept you know the showdown the high noon gun out or shoot out at the uh the corral or you know at the town hall or whatever so i guess you know they kind of coasted in um like they drafted in on an existing trope in media so it didn't seem excessively violent it was just you know that's just the this established genre. It's been that way for so long. They even have that in Kirby.

Oh, yeah. I love that one. Yeah. The, well, also in like 75, so many games are just like, they use Pong as a base and then they build something out from there. And so a concept of, well, you have two things on each side

of the screen facing each other. What are they going to do with each other? Shooting bullets at each other is, you can see the natural evolution of that idea. Yeah, it's sort of like, what if the paddle was a person? The point was to not hit the ball, like to avoid the ball. And these cowboys are adorable.

And the cactus looks like coat racks. I love it. Yeah, the little wagons that go by. Like, so, yeah, this, because it's 1975, you're not playing against the computer-controlled opponent. We don't have that technology to have, like, AI, even for a game this simple. So you have to play it with another player. And the bullets that you fire one at a time follow Pong logic and that you can ricochet them off of the sides of the walls and stuff like that. And again, so a lot of these early games are twin stick shooters in a very weird way before we just have a joystick button and a fire button.

In that you have a movement control with one joystick and then a fire control with another joystick where you can fire and move in eight different directions. So it's surprisingly complex for a game from 1975. And what you're saying is that Robotron 2084 is actually Westworld. It is, yes. It's a different game concept and makes it about robots. I was honestly surprised as to how many of these games are twin stick shooters in a. a very very primitive sense. But yeah, like as you, I don't know how the, how you get into these more complex environments, but like as you progress or I guess maybe even randomly, the backgrounds

are more complex. Like there will be cactuses in the way. There'll be like wagon trains that go up the screen and things like that. But again, it is just like a weird variant of Pong or what I think is like more, it's more like the Atari 2,600 gang combat where it's just like one thing versus another thing. You have like one bullet at a time and maybe they look like what they're supposed to look like. So up next we have Outlaw. That's the 1976 Atari game, which is essentially Atari saying, we can make

gunfight. Why can't we do that? The VCS version video you link to us that I watch, like that's the one where they look the least like cowboys. Like when they have their arms ready to draw they both look like pretzels, which

I had a good little laugh at just two, the idea of two pretzels shooting at each other. Why would these pretzels hurt each other? other. But yeah, so the VCS version, there's only a video of that, and that's like, that is basically just combat with Cowboys, the Atari Game Combat. The arcade game is actually a light gun game in that it is a, like, a rudimentary quick draw game with black and white graphics and a color overlay. You need to draw your gun as soon as your opponent draws their gun and shoot him before he shoots you. And it's, uh, there aren't as many light gun

games as you would think this is just one of them. And, uh, this is 1976. So still not a lot is going on tech-wise to make these games very complex. But there are two to different opponents. One is more accurate while one is faster on the draw, and you don't need another person to play this video game. So the future of video games is being friendless, and we're getting there in 1976. If you look at the cover art, it's just the outlaw, Josie Wales. It just straight up ripped it off. Oh, really? Okay. You didn't try to hide it. Yeah. Like the cabinet art? Oh, no, not the arcade version. Oh, the, yeah, 2600 version. For whatever reason, this is the only game I couldn't find footage of, a YouTube footage of. I could only find footage of the

2,600 game, but yeah, it is a very rudimentary light gun game, a quick draw game. I don't think it's actually paying attention to where you're firing, just that you're firing. I have seen Josie Wales, by the way. I didn't actually like it, even though it's a classic. I have not seen it. I wanted to endorse a panel, another gaming podcast did actually. In Mangfast 2016, I went to this panel, which was recorded so you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, called Atari Game Design by a gaming podcast called Geek Nights. and it's all about how you can learn so much about good game design by studying Atari games because of how simple they are

and they spent a long time analyzing Outlaw and they explain what makes this game so good and so simple. It's kind of like how dive kick is such a simple game but because of that it requires like advanced tactics. Yeah, I guess there is like video footage of Outlaw and I think you can't emulate that game very easily unlike the arcade game so that is one that's easy to just kind of pick apart. I really would like to see how this arcade game actually

plays. But again, I couldn't find any footage of it. And I don't know if you could emulate something like this. But yeah, so that is Outlaw. And Boothill is up next. Again, these are very, very simple ones. We'll get to more complex ones very soon. But Boothill is basically midway pulling a Miss Pac-Man before Miss Pac-Man where it's like, okay, we brought over this Japanese game. What if we made a sequel without their permission? In this case, I don't think Taito cared very much or didn't know. Unlike Namcoe found out about Miss Pac-Man. But yeah, this boothill game is essentially a follow-up to gunfight. It's slightly more complex, and there are videos of this online, and there's some technical improvements. Like, there is some degree of

scaling in the graphics, very rudimentary, but the cowboys get larger as it get closer to the player on the screen and smaller as they get further into the background. And when you- I was, like, really impressed by that. It reminded me a monkey island one and two. Yeah, and this is only 1977. So kind of scaling in a game as, you know, rudimentary as it is still impressive. And when you shoot the other player and they die they turn into a gravestone they go back to the boot hill in the background before the grave disappears so fun little effects that were very impressive pre 1980 and they mix up the music that plays through death jingle too uh well i'm using simpson's understanding here when i talk about a death jingle it is a death jingle yeah i mean there's not

like full orchestration or anything and uh in what it's like a painted on background for it Yeah, it's like a single color graphics over a in front of a color overlay or underlay, rather, whatever you want to call it. I think it's probably just looking at it. I think it's probably based with mirrors like they did with the space invaders where you got like the scenery of the moon or whatever on certain versions of space invaders. And it's done by having the monitor upside down and then projected up against a mirror that also has the painting applied to it. So you get this kind of layered effect where you get the monochrome black and white graphics over a color over. overlay by basically just using mirrors. The background art has some slight perspective issues.

I think you kind of walk on the sky and we go back, but that's fine. It's still impressive, the scaling. It is neat. And like all of these games, I was playing games in arcades as early as like, I don't know, 88s. I still never see things pre-1980 or like pre-Packman unless I am at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. So next time I'm at any of these cons, if we have them again, I do want to find these machines because I have never seen

these three to date. Or maybe I have and just didn't realize how important they were. I feel like I probably have walked by these at California Extreme. They'd be there too. And haven't given him a second thought, but I was too distracted by Puyon. I wanted to play that. Or that really bad unreleased Beavis and Butthead

game that I think I played through a lot of that at my last retrogaming Expo. But it's funny. I mean, honestly, I was playing video games and arcades in like, God, 1988, 283. and to be honest, you didn't see a lot of pre-Pakman stuff even then. You know, you'd see like Space Invaders or Atari Football or something, but I don't think video games really got big and started becoming, you know, produced in massive quantities

until after Pac-Man. And then that was kind of the golden age of the arcades. So, you know, even back in the day as someone who was obsessed with video games as a kid and, you know, had pretty regular access to arcades, like these are all new to me. These are not games that I saw out there and about. I mean, anything that was kind of, you know, pre-Pakman, pre-invaders, it just was too primitive to stand up against the kind of the flood of innovation and technical advancement that happened in 1981, 82. So, yeah, I'd love to find these myself.

None of the games were talking about so far have color graphics. They're just like single color graphics, just like one color at a time. But if this strategy hadn't worked out for Midway, maybe we would have never. forgotten to Miss Pac-Man, you know, if Boot Hill hadn't succeeded first. Outlaw has some color, the home version. It does, like different colors on the, on the sprites. Well, the home version is a 2,600 game, right? Yeah, yeah.

That was a color console. But in arcades, you didn't see color until, like, 78 or so. Yeah, yeah. So the Outlaw, I mean, I just included that video in my notes because it's like the only version of Outlaw I can find, but the Outlaw at Home Version is very different than the arcade version. I know we're all going to be able to be. I know we're all getting impatient, but finally we can talk about Nintendo. So Sheriff

1979 by Nintendo This is from the Dark Age of Nintendo arcade games Before Donkey Kong And I'm pretty sure that the Wario Ware series Made us aware of what Sheriff was Because I never knew about Sheriff, never saw it And it is an interesting game Even though it is kind of a failure

On Nintendo's part But it did see a sequel in Japan That is super hard to find information about I tried looking for information too In Japanese Google and they couldn't the sheriff stuff too it's a a lot of Smash Brothers players learned about him

when he was a the yellow sheriff taking over the screen was a trophy attack in the Wii you one I totally forgot about that guy yeah so this game I love the sprite work in this game by the way I want to talk about that let me get over

go over who made the game really quick though so Genia Takeda is the designer of this game and our bro Shigeru Miyamoto did the art for the game and I believe the art for the cabinet as well. It is very Miyamoto-e work of that time. And it is like, it's Nintendo innovating within a genre that exists, innovating within a game type that exists,

which is pretty neat to see, in that it is the cowboy game, but also we are a year out from Space Invaders. So it is almost like a take on Space Invaders with a Western motif in that instead of the invaders marching down from the top of the screen, you are in the center of the screen and these little banditos

are sort of dancing around you and occasionally going into your little square so it's like Space Invaders but a lot more complex just a year later It's kind of like they're mocking you as they dance around makes you want to shoot them more It is true

And you're surrounded by him They're taunting you And going around you in a circle Yeah Yeah I think the cowboy supposed The lead cowboy that you're playing as Is supposed to have a mustache But it looks like a big frown instead

Yeah I was always wondering what was going on. Like, the graphics in this game, I think aesthetically, they are ugly, but they're also charming. And I think also they do a really good job of conveying, like, which direction you're facing because your cowboy in this game is just like this horrible little cheeby mutants with this like perma scow on his face that I guess is a mustache. But like, he is so weird looking, but the weirdness of his design always shows you,

like, which way he's facing and which way his gun is pointing, because he holds his gun in a very stupid way as well. And it's like everything is, nothing is really to scale, but it's all conveying visual information that tells the player, like, I am facing this way. Because, again, this is a twin-stick shooter, except it's very odd. And, you know, they're still figuring out controls at this time

in which you have a movement joystick and a control dial for which way you're aiming. So you're turning a dial to aim and pressing a button on that dial, I believe, to fire. So again, like eight-way control, eight-way firing. It's much different than Space Invaders, but it has similar concepts. like there are little things that enemies can't shoot through until they destroy them.

And you can either, you know, hide behind those or shoot through them yourself to take out the enemies. And yeah, it's pretty interesting. Jeremy, how many takes on sheriff? Yeah. So looking at the dates on this, it's really interesting because it's shipped in Japan about three months before a game by Namco called Navarone, which is kind of the opposite, like the inverse of sheriff.

It seems like this kind of idea of moving around. around field, you know, kind of expanding the invaders concept in that direction was something people were starting to sort of workshop and experiment with. So Navarone, instead of being a sheriff in the center of the screen, defending yourself against things attacking from the edges of the screen, you're actually a boat patrolling the edges of the screen, firing inward toward this enemy base in the center. But it just feels like they're natural compliments to one another. And again, they were produced and distributed about three months apart. So it just seems like there was kind of a thing happening, you know, like people were exploring Invader concepts in interesting new ways and sort of landed on similar results. And so it's always interesting to see things like that. But yeah, like I can definitely sense, you know, the sense of artistry that you would begin to get from Nintendo games here.

This is produced for very primitive hardware compared to Donkey Kong. But, you know, in terms of the narrative, in terms of the design and artistry, they were definitely moving toward the Nintendo that we know now as opposed to just like, hey, we made a Pong clone. Hey, we made an invaders clone. It's something new and different. Yeah, and I believe Exidy brought this over to America, something called as Bandito, they localized it.

But I found this article as like, like, oh, because I, what I was doing during this research process, I was looking at the actual arcade cabinets to just see the controls and see the art and everything, because the arcade cabinet art is often very beautiful. I couldn't find Bandito. And I was like, oh, what did the sheriff cabinet look like? And I found this article on Nintendo Life about this arcade cabinet collector who was trying so hard to find sheriff cabinets. And apparently there were like two known in existence. I don't know what happened to them, but just like two that were on the market that he was able to find. And these are just so pretty. They have this great, like, faux, like, looking like, like wood planks, like wooden floor planks all over the cabinet on the sides with, like, woodburn stencils to say Nintendo Sheriff and like little woodburn stencils of all the characters around the cabinet. And also on the front of the cabinet around the screen, all this great, like, Miyamoto art very much of that era of like Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong Jr. and things like that. I would recommend looking up that Nintendo Life article, just like Nintendo Life Sheriff Arcade Cabinet because

it is a gorgeous looking cabinet. Yeah. I would love to own this. I know what it'll never happen. You have to talk to that guy, I guess. Wood panel electronics in general, I just love. It's gorgeous. Whatever he paid, it was worth it. But I also, when you see the game, too,

I see so much of what Donkey Kong would do in there. Like, every, there is a little story between every level. And it ends with the two characters together and a heart appearing over their head. Or actually, a giant heart made of little heart. So pretty much how, or I was going to say like, well, yeah, it's Popeye, but yeah, I was going to say Jumpman and Pauline together at the end of Donkey Kong, but yeah, you can, you can see so much of that in this like silly little flat game like Miyamoto, I think, especially with the art and trying to tell simple two acts, three act stories in it. He's struggling against the confines

of it already in this game. Yeah, I've seen that on the record. People have said, and again, It's always, it's always hard to find the first. It's always more interesting and, you know, easier to find the thing that was the most important. But this could be, like, the first game with a story told in the game. But in Donkey Kong, it's more of, like, the four-panel manga and that there are four different scenes. In Sheriff, like, there aren't scenes because the gameplay is always the same. You're always in the center. You're not, like, in an environment.

You're not in a thing that changes. You're always in the center of these, like, dancing banditos that are mocking you. And there's a lot of fun Nintendo touches that, like, they just, they don't have the room. or the time or the programming know-how but I love the little touch is like the very ugly sheriff is cute but also like the way the banditos like disappear under their hats

when you shoot them it's like just this tiny little touch that really makes me feel like oh Nintendo made this game that in the very attractive cabinet that is like a very interesting work of like in terms of design very eye-catching in that way

it's also crazy to see the release data this is 79 and you see why these games you know weren't big in the US and also it was few few people US companies developers making it because like this is two years after star wars kids don't want cowboys they they

want space stuff that's totally true yeah and i guess i guess we'd see more of these games if uh westerns were still a big thing in the 70s but i think these are a lot of people who were kids in the 50s making these games thinking like oh yeah i have a lot of western ideas in my head it seems like an easier pitch to get through with a japanese developer too since there's just so few uh in this list so far that were made in the u.s so up next is a game game that is actually available on Nintendo Switch for 799, part of the Hamster Arcade Archives. And I know our friend Shane Bettenhausen is always tweeting about these when like Sony releases one on PS4. And whenever these games get released on Twitter, I'm like, I have never heard

of this game in my life. Why are we some deep cuts these days? And I'm also like, why are we getting this and not like, I have a huge list? I'm like, why are we getting the 10 star and not like, I don't know, Sunset Riders? Like, what's going on there? But yeah, the 10 star is up next. is really uh it's the closest so far to what we recognize as like this is a video game i could play and it feels like a proto sunset writers almost especially with the colors it does yeah very garish and interesting color choices uh has a lot of personality and cool ideas and it's essentially like uh single screen levels three single screen levels that get more and more complex and they run in a loop and they task you with shooting all the bad guys down and like a lot of

these games so far we still don't know about escape this eight way shooting uh eight way movement with a stick and dial combo and I'm still not comfortable with dials and video games like when I would go to like flea markets and I didn't know what a video game paddle was like like a little paddle I'm like what is this like an electric blanket controller or something

like what am I turning with this after watching the videos for all the previous games and then seeing the title screen to tin star I was like oh my god it felt like it'd gone forward in time like 20 years just seeing the the sprite that gets its hat shot off on the title screen for that They actually look like cowboys.

Yes. This is one of those games that is from an era where developers started to have the technical know-how and the hardware available to be more ambitious with what they were creating and really wanted to get like a third-dimensional element in there. But I feel like this game, it's kind of like Congo, Bongo, in that it's just hard to kind of navigate this fake 3D space for me. And I have a lot of trouble with it. So, like, I think it looks neat.

And it's probably fun if you can play with the original. arcade dial. But yeah, the Arcade Archives version was just kind of frustrating to me. It's just one of those games where they got a little bit ahead of themselves, I think, in terms of what, you know, a game experience could actually be. But there's definitely a desire to do something really ambitious and big here. Yeah, I respect that. I mean, like, again, like Henry said, a huge jump in technology.

There's lots of enemies on the screen. There's lots of things that they're doing. They're taking cover. You can destroy things in the background, like you can shoot an enemy out of a window. They'll fall into a water trough. Eventually, you get into stages like different tiers. The final stage is like this barn with a second level that you can climb up to and shoot guys from there. It's really neat.

And then there's like a bonus stage. It's essentially just a quick draw. Like you and another guy are on a horse running past each other. You have to fire at him at the right time. So super complex. And I want to say like this is not the first like run and gun arcade game. I think that's berserk. But it feels like it is the first of what would become things like contract.

because you are technically on a 2D plane of sorts. There is a jump button, and it is more of the, you know, eight-way fire or at least like a four-way fire that you would get in like Contra and even top-down stuff like Akari Warriors. I can't think of an earlier example of this. Jeremy, can you think of anything that's similar to this that's older? I feel like this is the first of what would become the contras of the world. In terms of like run and gun shooting, I mean, elevator action. Oh, yeah. Is that 83? I think that was around the same time as this show.

Okay. So I couldn't say exactly which one came first, but this has the, you know, the varied settings, the 3D perspective. They're both by Taito, so, you know, there probably was kind of coming from the same, you know, bubbling up from the same well of inspiration, just different aspects. You have the spy over here going up and down elevators, strictly 2D. You have the cowboy over here and kind of like an immersive old Western view, kind of a diorama style. Yeah, actually, I looked it up in, sorry, elevator action was 83 as well. So both games pioneering that sort of gameplay by the same company in the same year. You know, the main character looks a lot like Mario.

Do you think that's a coincidence? Ooh, I guess Mario was a star at the time. Yeah, yeah. Another thing about the graphics was it was the first time it hit me in the game. I'm like, man, you're killing a lot of people in this. Like, they're so abstracting the other ones, even though you're killing lots of people in sheriff for some reason this one where I was like man you're really killing a lot of people it's uh we had a sheriff it doesn't look at you're killing people it's true you're like they

are basically aliens in that game yeah yeah they look like invaders yeah and I guess so we had our first murder simulator this is the first mass murder simulator uh so all right so to answer your question Bob it looks like elevator action was out by summer 83 and the 10 star was released in December 83 okay so I guess I guess that's a little bit of chronology there but again these are both tito games so they may even have had some of the same developers I don't know I would imagine yeah I guess I never thought of elevator

action as one of the first running gun games but it is for sure so we're seeing video games uh video game dev slowly desensitizing themselves to the idea of shooting people yeah it's like you killed one guy so many spies in elevator action you can even crush them with an elevator instead of just going to oh man these kids are not

going to turn out okay after these video games so finally up next we have badlands of a very very obscure game. Like, I only discovered it when I was doing that panel about full motion video games in 2018. And so at long last, it's been so long, we finally have anime Cowboys. And it's made by Konami back when the K and their logo was also a J. I don't know what they were thinking. But, uh, I think that's the K from Sunkus, isn't it? From what? The Sunkus logo? The Sunkiss logo? Oh, okay. The convenience store in Japan. Oh, okay. A little letter K with a boner walking. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's pretty awkward. Yeah. It is. I don't know if it's supposed to be pronounced Suncus or Suncusu, because this must be derived from thanks. Okay, I think it's pronounced Suncoast. So despite what this looks like, and I think I even gave out false information at that panel, so apologies. I hope you didn't tell anybody of this, but it is not a light gun game.

It's basically a Dragons Layer game, but with one button, one giant red button. It's basically 14 minutes of anime footage, not of an existing anime like Cliffhanger was, but it's its own proprietary anime in which you're playing as a cowboy. There's a bit of a story about how your wife and child were murdered for no reason is what the main character says. It's a bit disorienting in that you're watching footage, but you're seeing your character from his perspective, but you also see him like doing things from a third person perspective. So this figures into the gameplay where you have to smash that red button when you want to kill the enemy at the right time. But if you see your character on the screen and smash the red button, you're shooting yourself. So it's weird. I love this so much.

It's so incredible. a terrible dubbing which I just adds to the charm and if there's ever a fictional portrayal of me in a movie I think this should be playing on the TV in the background really cool like again they're all drawing from the same

what Morricone is the guy's name who just passed away the they're all drawing from his stuff and this the music and this definitely is it goes to weird places like there's like a dinosaur there's a cyclops monster like what's going on yeah

like you not only fight other cowboys you fight a like a rock monster a swamp creature, dinosaurs. Sorry, Henry. Yeah, no, I want to say thank you for bringing this into my life, Bob, because I love every... I watched this on my morning walk today and was just... I had to walk around a parking lot because I was like, I can't walk into traffic and miss while missing any bit of this. But like, the animation is just so great. I love the designs of it. I love every character in it. I love that for no explained reason, mystical elements show up in it.

And I also really think that it's, it made me think while watching it, wow, it's really stressful to be a cowboy. You have to have a hair trigger at all times. You're walking through a cave and this rock monster starts forming. What do you do? Just the hypertension of being a cowboy walking into a bar of like, do I have to pull my gun at any time? What if the saloon owner is going to shoot me? That one is going to look pretty stupid if I don't shoot him first. Well, that's why I love any videos that show all the possible paths you can take in a Dragon's Slayer-type game,

because it's just a death reel, basically. Oh, yeah, obviously, this is right after Dragon's Lair was a huge hit, so a lot of companies are cashing in on this, even Konami at the time is making their own Dragonslayer-like game. You could actually only shoot a dog or a nun or a kid, like, or one of my favorites is, oh, no, it's a Scorpion on a cactus. Cablam! Cactus and Scorpion just gone. That poor cactus.

Yeah, and I've never played this. I've never seen this. It's not quite as good of animation in terms of how it looks. Like, it's not, it's not a dragons layer, Don Bluth. It's not even like a really good anime FMV game is something called Road Blaster or Road Avenger, and that it's a driving full motion video game and it's all 2D animation like done from the camera's perspective. So a lot of work went into that. That's gorgeous. Look that up and I featured that at that panel as well. But yeah, a very odd game. Again, not a light gun game. You're just stopping the thing when they're just stopping the thing when they're. there's no whammy's on the screen or when you want to shoot something to death. I also have a really wild guess about this, but I think I'm right is that I think the animation is done by Toe, the same folks who are doing Marvel productions in 1983, 84 as well. Like, especially when the dog runs across the screen, it looks just like Miss Lion from Spider-Man and his amazing friends. And just the style and movement to all of it looks so much like the Spider-Man in G.I. Joe cartoon. that Toe was animating at this exact same time. I couldn't find animation credits, but you might be right about that.

And I don't know so much to feel. The animation is surprisingly good. Yeah, yeah, I'd say it's on par with like a good TV production of the time. And this is like bubble economy, Japan. So it's much better than you would expect. Yeah, it's not like eight minutes of original Don Bluth animation. Yeah, like in Dragons Layer. But it's pretty good.

Yeah, I recommend just look up Badlands, 1984, say, Konami, because there are other games called Badlands and their difference. And the logo is shooting the hat until it disappears and turns into the Konami logo. I love that. And it's not, I mean, it's not super quote unquote anime, but when you do die, there are these like little chibi scenes of like you being carried away on a stretcher by these two people with like wacky sound effects. So I do like that. But yeah, Badlands. I bet no one out there has ever played it.

And if you have, let me know. Ellen, in 15 seconds, what is our game club? It's our game dev podcast. Stephen, help. Mechanics, accessibility, art, and animation, level design, prototyping. Everything that goes into making video games. How's that, Mark? Nice. Listen to Nice Games Club wherever you get your podcast, or at nicegames.club.

Welcome to Casual Magic, the show where we explore the fun side of Magic the Gathering. I'm your host Shivamput, and each week we delve into everything from casual format to explorations of creatures and card types to interviews with designers of the game. At Casual Magic, we believe that it just isn't magic without the gathering. come along and play Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex Hi, and we do a show called Norman Woppers. Some call it corn,

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Hopefully we can make you laugh too. You'll find new episodes of the Go-Nintendo podcast on the Greenlit Podcast Network every single week. So up next we have Bank Panic. That sounds like something we just had not too long ago in this country. Bank Panic. It's another cowboy game that feels like it should be a light gun game. Like I went into this assuming these are all light gun games for the most part.

This is not. It's pretty interesting to design of this. This is made by Sega in that you play a murderous banker and you work at a bank with 12 different doors. And at the top of the screen, there is a... little like graph showing like when people are approaching the doors. You essentially move the camera around so you see three doors at a time and you have three buttons in front of you that symbolize each of those doors. Sometimes it'll be someone showing up to, you know, deposit money. Sometimes it'll be a little kid showing up. You shoot the hat out of his hand. Sometimes

it'll be a villain showing up that you murder or a hostage in front of a villain that shows up that you have to wait for the hostage to duck out of the way. Then you murder the villain. So the typical bank experience. Exactly. Exactly. You go into your bank with 12 doors and you hope the banker doesn't shoot you in the head. That's why I'm glad online banking is a thing now. Exactly. That's why I'm going to join a credit union. But yeah, it's a very interesting gameplay. Again, not a light gun game, but I feel like it's borrowing from Tapper and that you have

cues of people approaching you and you have to figure out the best way to, you know, deal with them while multitasking between different hostile and non-hostile targets. Oh, I got it with four sets of three doors. Maybe it's that it's a four, it's just a box. and each side is three doors so you're just facing different walls each time. Who is building this bank with 12 doors? My biggest question is about the little kid

who comes with the target to the bank. I'm just like, who he's going to shoot my target? Oh, boy. It is really neat. I've never seen this in the arcade. Yet another game I've never seen the arcade in this list. But there is a port for the master system. I don't know how well that works,

given that the system does not have three F action buttons on it. So that's the only home port. I think to date any of these games, games have had so far. I don't think any of them have come home in a home console version yet. It was actually ported to the SG-1000 system in Japan before Master System. That sounds like it can't be good. I actually have that version, which I mainly got because I could swear the cover artwork is done by Susumu Matsushita, the Famitsu guy. Like, I can't find any credit or proof that it's him, but the characters look so much like his art, especially

there's a woman in a pink dress like holding, you know, she's kind of like holding a bag of money and has her hand on her face with a look of horror. And she just has that like elongated kind of rubbery look that Matsushita's characters always have. And it really, like,

I just want to know, did he do Sega artwork before he started doing Famitsu? It's, it really, like, I have nothing to say about the game itself, but the artwork has been an object of fascination for me for a few years. If you look up the cover article, also you can see, like I couldn't really parse

like what the game's setting is exactly until I saw the cover art and it just shows where the doors are and where you are supposed to be standing supposedly and actually the artwork in the game itself is really cool and stylized too I like it. Yeah it's right before our next game which features like very big

and detailed sprites of like cowboys and Western figures so let's talk about that one we are now at the baby's toy Marty McFly was good at back to the, sorry wild gunman I almost said back to the future too that's a future podcast Yeah, so 1984 Nintendo.

So this is a very famous scene in that movie that Bull is setting up a scene later in the next movie where he does that at a Old West Target range. But in that movie, there's a few mistakes with that game, and I watched Jeremy's video, and I forgot about these. So Jeremy, you pointed out in your video, Marty McFly shouldn't know about Wild Goodman unless he was either importing Famicom games or he somehow got an NES in its first week of release. Right. The NES was only released in New York City that first week. and he is a kid in California. So that's, I'm very impressed with his video gaming acumen. So either he had like someone fly from California from New York to bring him a brand new

game system or he was like way up on the import scene. I don't know which. I think it was Doc Brown like, Marty, you got to try this Famicom game, Marty. Plug it into my giant speaker, Marty. It's amazing. Yeah, he's clearly a tech guy. So sure, he imported it. Yeah.

And one thing I know, so like when the, um, the Marty McFly goes to the future, date happened. I was writing for U.S. Gamer and I was writing an article about this and I watched that scene again and I was like, oh, the scene in the movie is not the actual gameplay footage of Wild Guman. It's ILM doing a CGI mockup of the game using the game's graphics because in the arcade that he plays, he needs to shoot a bunch of guys on the screen because that will echo a scene that happens in the future in the next movie. Wild Guman does not play like that. And if you watch the movie clip again, you'll see, like, oh, things are moving much smoother than they ever moved in the NES game. So go back and watch it.

You can definitely see, like, oh, it's very subtle, early CGI that's moving around these Wild Gunman graphics. Yeah, this is like super Wild Gunman, basically. We never saw that. I like that Robert Zemeckis is like, he doesn't let the game tell him what his story's going to be. He's like, no, we'll change the game to fit that scene in the past where he's going to shoot three. People at a... No, it's a carnival game. She's three, the carnival game.

Yeah, like, just like super fast, too. Uh, so yeah, this is one of the first video game remakes I could find. Uh, and it's like remaking it in a different medium, too. So this is a, this is looking back 10 years on 1974 as Wild Gunman in a video version of it. And, uh, Jeremy, through your videos, I also discovered that Urban Champion is a remake of a, uh, of a game and watch game, basically. Yep. Can you think of any, any other? remakes that are of this kind of vintage?

Or are these like some of the first ones? Oh, sorry? Oh, Duck Cut. Dunkhead as well. So, like, Nintendo was the only company doing this. So there probably are other examples. You know, Sega did a lot of electromechanical arcade machines in the late 60s and early 70s, things like submarine.

And I feel like they probably, there are probably examples of those that they turned into video games. But I, you know, I've researched the early NES stuff. So I can speak definitively about that. I can't speak about Sega, but I don't want to discount the possibility that, you know, companies like Namco, Taito, Sega that worked in, you know, or even Midway that, you know, had pinball games and stuff,

I don't want to discount the possibility that they also did this sort of thing. But, you know, this is one that has a much greater legacy just because of how closely it is to the launch of the NES in America, the importance of the Zapper light gun in the NES's success here in the U.S. So, you know, just in terms of legacy, this is definitely one of the big ones. Yeah, and I have never played this, actually, but I was watching gameplay videos. So it's super, super rudimentary, like gun gaming, like even less complex than something like

duck hunt. You are basically an enemy will creep onto the screen, and they're very large, like, punch-out style, huge sprites of these Western figures. And essentially, you wait for their eyes to flash, and then you have to shoot them before they shoot you. So that's one of the modes. And the second mode is called B mode in which there are two opponents at once. And often one of them won't even shoot at you. So it's like sort of like multitasking and prioritizing different targets, one of which cannot be hostile. Yeah, I don't think the enemies in this game are sprite based. Like I think their eyes that flash are sprites. But I think you're actually seeing

background objects being moved around. Keep in mind, this was a very early NES cartridge. That's right. So it didn't have, it didn't have bank switching. It had very little memory available. There's no flicker in the characters and given the size of these characters, when you have two of them side by side on screen, the NES could only display eight, eight by eight sprites in a line before they started to flicker and have to have to, you know, alternate and cycle between frames. So, yeah, a big reason this is so kind of stilted and simple is because unlike Duck Hunt where you had actual duck sprites moving kind of freely around as objects, these are just like the backgrounds being shuffled in and being changed around to be interactive.

So it does really limit what you can do. And just like the original arcade, you know, the standalone wild gunman from the 70s, in mode A, it doesn't matter where you're shooting, just as long as you're shooting in time to out shoot, you know, the opponent you take on. And there are different characters you have to face. There's some, you know, very kind of racist-looking Mexican gunners.

and big guys with big, big bushy moustaches and that sort of thing. And each of them has kind of like their own different difficulty level. Like there's a black hat guy who is extremely very quick on the draw. So he's really hard to beat, whereas there's other characters that don't take as long to pull their guns. So you have to be more mindful, especially in the, in the two, the mode where there are two guys on screen at once. because one of them is, you know, one of them may not pull a gun at all, but one of them is probably going to be faster than the other in pulling the weapon. Yeah, and there's a third mode in that, it's just like basically a shooting gallery.

Yep. So nothing that complex. There's some nice Nintendo touches in that the enemies, there's not very many types of enemies, but they all die in like a humorous way, quote unquote humorous way. Like one of them just gets his hat shot off. The other two die in the dirt. I love those character models and they also come back in the, with the Duck Hunt character

in Smash Brothers I think they get a lot of fun out of him. Oh you're right I totally forgot about that. I wish we'd have bought this game because my family loved the Duck Hunt game so much but we didn't buy any other Zapper games as cool as they look like I wish

we had this. Yeah me too I love Duck Hunt and that was also the only like gun game I ever owned. I would have had a lot of fun with this. And Jeremy do you know if there was a was that another lie of Robert Zemeckis that there was a freestanding Wild Gunman cabinet. Did they make one?

I know it was like a Play Choice 10 variant, but was there ever like a just a free standing standalone Wild Gunman? No, as far as I'm aware, I don't think there was a, there were a lot of versus games based on NES titles. They were like expanded, but Wild Gunman never had a standalone. Yeah, I know Duck Hunt definitely did. I played that in the arcade, but I never saw Wild Gunman in my life. Thank you.

So our next game is a Capcom classic, not gun smoke, but gun smoke. Gun dot smoke. Yes, it's different than the very popular TV series of the same name. That period is very significant that will prevent any lawsuit from happening. But this is the most flagrant copyright infringement skirting thing I've ever seen in a video game. I mean, it's a great tradition with this genre because there was a movie in the 50s called The 10 Star. Ooh. I think I might have had John Wayne in it.

So clearly Taito was just going right for it Saying the hell with you, John Wayne You don't scare me, I'm still in your movie title So yeah, what I find most flagrant is like they stick that period in to taunt the authorities It's like the serial killer writing letters to the police It's like you try to sue us We put this dot in here I think the arcade version doesn't have that

Isn't that something they added for the NES port? I mean, you know, I'm not sure maybe maybe in Japan That's the case but I think for America They did sneak that that period in just to be safe. That's how, I mean, this is right after the Donkey Kong lawsuit with Universal, right? So maybe, maybe that's why Capcom would take even the slightest precaution with protecting themselves from a lawsuit there.

This game is, uh, so, uh, Gradius has arrived on the scene, a year prior Capcom's May 1942. And this game is developed by the exact same dude, Yoshiki Okamoto, a big Capcom guy behind things like 1942, Sonson, lots of other great Capcom hits he, producer on and yeah gun smoke is a cowboy schmup and basically another like all these games have weird control schemes that we're not we have not like found a satisfying control scheme yet in that you have a control stick and then three buttons to fire one fires up one fires left and one fires right so you can use different combinations of those buttons to fire in different directions

and that's why the home port is kind of awkward because you can't really do that with a a and b button controller. I'm low-key into top-down shooters. Not so much games where you're a ship shooting missiles, but more so something like this where you're just a guy shooting guns with infinite ammo. And you walk at the same pace too, like you're not slowing down

ever. Yeah, this is like a, this is definitely a schmup because it's auto scrolling. Like you can't, you're not the one controlling the scrolling on the screen, you're just moving around as the screen scrolls. And in the game, and so the arcade game is a bit different than the NES game. In the arcade game, you are essentially upgrading three different elements of your cowboy speed, range, and rate of fire by destroying barrels in the world and

picking up different items. And you can also get a horse to ride on to take a few more hits. That's what horses are good for, just absorbing bullets. And in the NES game, we have finally reached the era in which Capcom is not farming out their ports to Micronix. This is not a Micronix port. Is that correct, Jeremy? I know you might be the authority. The last Micronics Capcom game, I think, was Ghost and Goblins, actually. They only did a few. And then Capcom took over and said, hey, let's make our games actually better on NES than they were in the arcade. I didn't even have to check because as soon as I started a video of the NES first, I'm like, this was not made by Micronics. Like, there's an intro.

At 20 frames a second. Yeah, it must be. Yeah. So this game was actually released in arcades about half a year after Commando. And I really feel like this is the next Commando game, like not in terms of, you know, the franchise, but basically taking those ideas and iterating them and adding more complexity, adding more. more sophistication, giving players more control, more options, more things to collect, more ways to improve their powers. So there is a real continuity of design happening. And that was also, I believe, that was a Tokoro Fujiwara game. So maybe you've kind of got this like

dueling creators thing happening at Capcom. Fujiwara was like, I'm going to make a top down shooter. And Okamoto was like, I'm going to make a better top down shooter. And everyone wins because the games just got better. Yeah. And the NES version of this, I think most people will be familiar with. It's a bit different in that like Biona Commando before it, they try to do a few more things differently but they're not as drastically as Bionicamando in that they beef it up a little bit

more. There's a story with a cutscene that set up the game and there's also an economy in the game instead of just picking up power-ups on the map you are picking up money that you used to buy power-ups with. So they're trying to make it a little more in-depth in the arcade game but you're buying this for the arcade game

experience and there's a bit of a little wrinkle in this in that in the arcade game like once you reach the end of the level you fight a boss in this game you have to find the hidden wanted poster by shooting in the right direction and once you pick it up you can then fight the boss if not the level loops infinitely so you have to find this wanted poster in every level to actually see the boss so they're trying to figure out ways to make this a more in-depth experience but it's still like a 20-minute game this is the most outlaw rich town of any game so far like there has to be 700 bad dudes who live in this town and want to kill you it's almost like a zombie

virus that have all their guns trained on you. It's corrupted all of their minds. That's why you need the infant and ammo. That's right. Yeah, Smith & Wesson made a lot of money off of this guy. So gun dot smoke. So most people have forgotten about it. It was kind of fun on ES game, but it is the spiritual predecessor to one of the most

popular franchises on the planet right now, Red Dead Revolver, because Red Dead Revolver started at Capcom when Okamoto wanted to make a new Western game in the spirit of gun smoke. So that is the root of Red Dead Revolver, which would become Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. And originally, this was known as SWAT, Spaghetti Western Action Team. Oh, so cool. With, like, fantasy and sci-fi elements, but I guess Capcom and the development studio weren't really getting along in terms of what they wanted from each other. So this eventually became Red Dead Revolver, and again, which would become Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2.

But there's a huge polygon cover story behind this, and just knowing that Capcom could have had Red Dead Redemption. They're probably kicking themselves every day. Well, Capcom. It's a fascinating story. I never knew about it. Yeah, the Red Dead Red Dead Redemption exists how it does because of Rockstar wanting that type of game. Capcom would never have wanted that type of game.

It's not, they could have made a game that's, you know, also very good, but it never, they didn't want to make that kind of Western game. It also came at that weird time where Capcom was like, how do we make a game for America? How about this? Yeah, I think the story goes that, like, Rockstar published at Angel Studios game as Red Dead Revolver.

And then they're like, we'll make Red Dead Red Dead Red Dead redemption ourselves. Thank you for your work. Just hit out the door. We'll keep all those copyrights. You have been fired. But yeah, it's so interesting. The story is called How the Red Dead franchise began. And, yeah, again, it all started with Okamoto, a Capcom Bigwick saying, let's do Gunsmoke again.

I wanted to talk about the cover art. I know I keep bringing up the cover art for these games, but I'm an artist, so I can't help myself. I'm sorry. When I went to Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2013, where I could have met Bob five years sooner, but fate prevented that from happening because I missed the retronauts panel. But hey, we were both dating someone else at the time. And the guy I was dating, we both collected retro games together. So when I went there, I bought a bunch of games, including gun dot smoke. And then I Skyped my boyfriend at the time. And he said, oh, I bought some games too. And it turned out we both bought gun smoke. for the NES and we were talking about it and I said oh I love the cover and how it looks like it's colored with pencil crayons and he was like what it looks like a painting to me I think it's pretty cool and it was like a classical comedy of errors where we had no idea what the other

person was talking about until we found out there were two different covers for gun smoke and I had the shoddy one which is apparently more rare and I tried finding out online to see why there's two different covers for this but I can't find an answer yeah you have the like it's not quite as a subpar as the bad Mega Man, but it does remind me of that for some reason. It's more competently drawn. Yeah, yeah. The other one is like, it looks like a movie poster,

like the better one. It's really cool. Yeah, I like that one better. Yeah, why was there two versions? I guess maybe like this art isn't very good. It looks like an eighth grader won a poster contest or something. Yeah, but when we broke up and we had to divide our retro game collection, I took the Gunsmoke that I bought with the shoddy cover.

It has that, again, I like, I can't help but think of Mega Man that Mega Man cover because it has like the little, square of artwork frame by like the sideways like tron grid overlapping each other he's even wearing blue and yellow just like Mega Man in the bad art Mega Man version and he's pointing his guns at you the anatomy is way better though

and he's got like this weird kind of squat bow-legged stance just like Mega Man on Mega Man one's cover yeah this is like the Old West version of Mega Man Mega Man one better version of the cover art that's part ripped off of something else yeah bad box art Mega Man is he at least respects you enough

Not to point a gun at your face It's more at your crotch It's always fun to look up the arcade flyers Especially the Japanese ones for all of these games They have really glorious art I believe this is the Japanese flyer for Gunsmoke the arcade game It is a cool picture of just like a guy with his guns in the air

And there's like Cowboys and Indians And all kinds of Western whatnot And the text overlaid across the cowboy is Rain of Bullets with the Death Delivering Guns I do look like that. I want that. That's a game worth

at least 25 cents to me. I totally agree with you. I'll take the gut delivering guns. I'll tell you. Yes. So up next we have a game that Nina has played. Law of the West.

This is an accolade game for, it came out in 1985. There's a Famicom version of it that was never localized for the U.S. But this is mainly like a computer game. And it's the first one of these that is not an arcade-style shooter.

It is an adventure game with light action elements. Nina. Can you talk more about this one? Yeah, we had this at our house growing up for the Commodore 64. And I absolutely love this game. And it's one of the few games my older brother and sister and I all play together. But it's so fun picking dialogue.

Because it's just a giant dialogue puzzle game. So you could just say different things. You could be a mean cowboy. You could be a good cowboy and just see what happens and see how the people respond to you. And this might actually be the catalyst to my love of Hokie Westerns. because it was my first exposure to Western stuff. And we weren't very good at the game, but, yeah, I don't think we ever beat it. And like you mentioned, it was ported to the Famicom, even though it was never ported to the NES.

I do own the Famicom version, a box copy of it. And it's one of my favorite things in my retro collection. It's got a cool, brown cartridge. And I was actually working on a translation for it for a friend of mine who made Reaper Carts. But I just got too busy, and the project kind of died. Oh, the video of the gameplay is really interesting how it's just always behind the back of the guy. Yeah, you're staring at cowboy butt the whole time. Yeah, it's like that Bruce Springsteen cover perspective.

Yeah. Just zoomed in on his butt. You're supposed to be looking at the gun, you guys. Come on. You can shoot, like, you can shoot a child in this game. Yeah, it's like, as there's a lot, again, it's like mainly like dialogue. It's mainly a dialogue puzzle game. And I think I read somewhere again, it's hard to determine this as a fact, but somebody credited this as the first leg.

game with dialogue trees in it. I can believe that. You can just, like, pull out your gun at any point and shoot the person you're talking to you whenever you want. How to clean up the town. Well, if I killed everybody in it, then we'll clean it up. If I was the only person here, it'd be very manageable. I don't think you can get through the game by being a pacifist, though.

There's no pacifist run of the game, if I remember correctly. There are times where the bad guy will pull his gun on you, and you have to be faster than him. Yeah, I was watching a video, and often you can, like, talk them down. down from shooting, but often you, sometimes you have to, like, shoot them down in the street. Sometimes you have a slap leather, as they say. Is that how it goes? Yeah, slap leather.

That means, you know, your holster's leather, he's slapping, and go, boom, wham. That's, that's a term I've learned from all the cowboy books I've read. I didn't read enough cowboy slang before this, this podcast. But, yeah, Law of the West, really cool adventure game, if you enjoy staring at a butt and shooting children, I guess. Oh, howdy, do I ever know. So, yeah. a lot of the west is really cool again but it's like the one it's the one standout in this and then it's not an arcade style game uh up next we have uh this is our penultimate game in this

podcast this is going to be a two-parter because we are like maybe a quarter of the way sorry we're about halfway through my notes and we can easily do a lot more so this is going to be the uh we're going to cut this off as soon as we get to our next game and there's going to be a part two so up next is a very rare n-ES game that i have never heard of and never played but when i found out about this and read about it i'm like i got to play this it's called cowboy kid uh It came out in 1991, published by Rom Star, in a very short supply. And it turns out it is a pretty neat Western clone of one of the NES Go-Amon games. And the second I saw a video of this, I'm like, this plays just like your legend of the mystical ninjas of the world.

Like, in that there are town segments with all kinds of like mini games and shops and dialogue. And then there are two-de segments. And it's all very comical and whatnot. Yeah, for me, this is a one that got away. Because I had a chance to buy this at a local used game store for $50. Oh, my God. It was a little too rich for my blood, so after, like, agonizing over it for a few minutes, I passed on it, but I should have bought it because I'd never been able to find it since. And you said in your notes that it's like $600 on eBay now.

I mean, that's the one copy I found on eBay box. So who knows what the inflation is on that? Oh, it's boxed. Yeah. I can understand that. Yeah, I should have bought it, Ben. Man, like, I like the early Go-Imon games, too, so it's definitely at my alley. And honestly, I don't play my retro games much anymore, but it would be.

just be a cool addition to my collection of cowboy games. And also, I know I keep seeing this, check out the cover art. It's hilarious. There's a Tom Selleck-looking cowboy. Yeah, it's very much like, there's like a very stern-looking, a Native American man, and a cowboy next to each other. But then you look at the Japanese art, it's called Western Kids is the name of that game. And it's just

like a bunch of super adorable, cute little cowboy and Native American characters in like a pioneer wagon and stuff. It's such a different look. But the graphics of the game itself are super cutesy. Yeah, the cover art for the U.S. is like I expect these guys to start singing YMCA at any other

I'd be happy to know that the cartridge is currently selling for about $300 as opposed to $6, so much more reasonable. Why didn't I buy it? It's only $50,000. $50 Canadian dollars. Oh, that's nothing. Now knowing it's ninja

roots, it makes sense why you're stabbing people so much at the start of the game. You're a knight, you brought a night to a gunfight. Exactly. You just like walk around stabbing people in the beginning

just like Goemann's little pipe or whatever or uh he's good this he has a piper's at eb sumer room one of them starts with like a little pipe yeah but yeah uh i was reading hard for gaming one oh one's article about this and this is all just purely conjecture but their theory was that the studio pixel which is a very little known japanese game studio they converted gomberi goemont two for a western audience like we kind of like changed it uh and they they were hired to do this but then kanami's like we're gonna pass on this and they they allowed pixel to shop it around to other publishers

so that is the theory and hardcore gaming one and one says it is too similar to Gambare Goemontu and also it shares some of the same staff so it is presumed that this was going to be a localized version that Konami passed on but still allowed Pixel to shop it around

to other publishers rather in order to sell it in the West and it didn't really sell in the West I have never seen this game as like a rental even and I probably would have passed on it because of that dorky cover the cover really doesn't sell how charming the graphics are. It's a shame. Yeah. And if you've never played,

I mean, like, they didn't bring over any of the Go-Amon games in our childhood in the 90s outside of Legend of the Mystical Ninja. And there are like at least five other ones of those for Super Famicom and Famicom. So this is sort of like one of those. And those are all a blast and they're all fan translated. And this one did come out in English. And the localization of this one, or I guess it is a localization, it's very charming. It has a lot of the cowboy dialogue we've been trying to talk about in this podcast. So yeah, you're only going to be able to emulate this. No one's going to put this on digital marketplace. You're not going to buy this for $600. So just check it out. It looks very neat and very charming. And if you

like go on, it's kind of like that. By the way, Bob, in your notes, you wrote, Legend of the mystical Nina. That's exactly. I think you had Nina on your brain for you're writing this. I did. I did. I was looking at that and wondering. I will say Nina is a ninja. And she sneaks up in me all the time. It's not like I'm trying to. No, no, but I'll... You'll more aware of your surrounding. I'll just turn around and suddenly you'll be in front of me.

It's terrifying. That bander joke, probably. Exactly. A bell on me. So our final game of this podcast, we're only at 1991, and we have like so many other games to talk about. So, yeah, two-parter at the very least, but we saved the best for last, for the first parter at least. And we're talking about Sunset Riders, Nina, you definitely wanted to talk about. this. And you were part of

fan gamer, a recent fangamer campaign of merchandise. There was an old Western commercial that was playing a lot at the booth when I was working there. Please talk about what you did for Sunset Riders. Yeah, this is one of my favorite games of all time. And if I could have any arcade cabinet, you would think it'd be the Simpsonsor arcade game?

Wrong. I would get Sunset Riders. Wow. Because the gameplay, the colors and music, everything is just so memorable and so fun. And when Fangam are partnered up with Konami and we were brainstorming stuff, I said, please ask them if we can make Sunset Writers merch, please, because I don't think there's ever been Sunset Writers' merchandise aside from the soundtrack being released once on a CD, I believe. Only in Japan, though.

So, Fan Gamer is based in Tucson, Arizona, and that's also the home of old Tucson Studios. And it's like this old Western town that's been used in a ton of films. Just look it up on Wikipedia. You can find a huge list of Western stuff that was shot there. I think Bill and Ted might have shot there. I looked it up. Bill and Ted was shot in Arizona, but they did. They didn't go to old Tucson studios. I was wondering that myself, though, when I saw the movie. They did Rio Bravo, which is like a John Wayne film.

Oh, that's a classic. Yeah. And so we thought, hey, let's make a Sunset Rider's movie to advertise our merchandise. So we rented the studio for a whole day. And I was there just doing general assistance stuff and helping take videos and photos to document the whole thing. And it was amazing. Like, there were fake gunshots and stuntmen falling up buildings. So it was basically like I was at a Wild West film shoot.

I would say it's one of the best experiences of my life and it's called Bear Me With My Money and Sunset Writers Western So look that up on YouTube It's also on the Fang Gamer site actually And the CEO of Fangammer, my boss, Reed He played all of the playable characters Except for Cormato, of course But since three out of the four playable characters

Are just all that like basically all of the same guy almost He played all of them And for this I designed a shirt and two bandanas and another designer, Tony, he designed a pen and a leather wallet that says, bury me with my money. Perfect. I got to get that wallet. I kind of really want that wallet.

Yes, we worked so hard on it. And we knew it was like a very niche product. But that's like the one thing we wanted. Like if we could have picked one thing to make for Sunset Writers, that was it. And we achieved it. Yeah, this game developed by Konami, I want to say at the height of their arcade power, at least in my childhood, because like this was them putting out. out some of the best and flashiest and just coolest four-player arcade games. So 91 had

this, Simpsons and Turtles in Time, and I'm sure there's other ones that I'm forgetting, but like, just, just gorgeous looking games. And this game is so pretty. And what I love about this game, watching a let's play of it again. And actually, this is available on Switch, I believe, as a digital release. You can play it there. But just the, the odd color choices, the pinks, the purples, the yellows, like these very bright and bold colors, are things you're not used to seeing in a Western, but they make this game so interesting to look at. And the voice acting is great too. Oh, God, yeah. So hokey. This was, this is easily my favorite game I played as a kid on this list of games we've done. Like I, I mostly would

only play the Konami Beatem's Ups if they starred a character I liked from television. But this was the one, like, I played Double Dragon in Streets of Rage, but the only other non-tie-in adaptation one of these beat-em-ups I played was Sunset Writers because it was just, I think to me as a kid, it was the colors. Like I just stopped walking through my Florida

arcade. The second I see the colors on the characters and just all this like gunplay action that was going on. It was so cool. And my brother was super into too. We did a lot of two-player game plays of Sunset writers for sure. It's fun

and the track mode is really cool too. Yeah, apparently, close-ups of all the characters. Who did you play us, by the way? The yellow-shirted white guy, I think. I always played as the guy in the pink poncho. Yes, Cremano. He's a lot of people's favorites. But yeah, the game was directed by the same guy who directed

Super C, the sequel to Contra, and that it doesn't have quite the same variety of weaponry, but I think what this game does best is like just give you a bunch of different environments and different types of like environmental challenges. And of course, just like in like Ninja Turtles, you do have a, like you're a riding something level instead of skateboards or whatever you're on horseback but it's a cool mix of like brawler and shooter

at the same time and I think it works very very well and it's a very beautiful looking game and again available on Switch if you want to play it I love that startup animation too of a character like the well the blonde guy drinking a like drinking a whole bottle of whiskey and then throwing it down and getting into

a shootout he's got all kinds of problems there's some like fun touches in here like the horny show You know, some Japanese games would have, like, just like a fun cheesecakey show for a little something for the guys kind of thing, which you would often take out when they took it, when they brought it over here. Like, there's a little show with the dancers you can watch, and it adds nothing to the gameplay or the story even. They smooch you at the end, right? Yeah, I got, I got, when you're playing the game, you can enter a building and be, emerge full of health in smooches. Oh, nice.

Sort of like a link to the past. I'm sorry, no, Zelda, too, rather. But yeah, this game is so cool and lots of fun boss characters with voice dialogues. I guess we didn't really talk about like cultural and sensitivity in these games. And of course, there's a lot of them, especially with like Native American characters. And unfortunately, this game has a character named Chief Scalpum that was eventually, like, so even in 1993, people were becoming more sensitive about these things. So for the home versions, Chief Scalpum was turned into Chief Wigwam. Not the best change, but it is a better change.

And I will say, even in the arcade version, there is some degree of, like, sensitivity there because he is the boss character that you don't murder, like, before you kill him, his, like, sister runs on the screen and it says, no, don't kill him. He was only following orders. So for some reason, they were at least sensitive enough to be like, it'd be kind of weird if you just murdered this Native American man in his own territory here. Yeah, but that was like that moment. I really have a lot of trouble kind of getting over when it comes to Western, just,

like the genres is basically like they they kind of treat native americans the same way that first person shooters today treat muslims like they're just usually treated as fodder and not as actual characters and it i don't know it's it bothers me it's it's it's tough to get past yeah i think like there are games that uh do this a lot more with terms of like native like gun smoke i don't think we talked about that there's a lot of that in that game but it was just considered like oh yeah cowboys and indians the eternal struggle of course some of these are humans and some aren't according two, you know, old ideas. I mean, in more modern games, they do try to avoid that, though.

And there are some sections in the modern stuff where you play as an indigenous person taking down cowboys. Yeah, yeah. Or you meet a friendly one who tells you like, no, no, there's not going to be a whole defend yourself against the hordes level in those. But, yeah, I mean, by even the early 90s, people were talking about like, oh, this was bad. The Cowboys in Indian games we all played that. That was a mistake and also a historical.

Yeah, like even back to the future three that's paying amosh to all the great Westerns is like there's still some sketchy stuff in there. Like the second Marty McFly arrives in the Old West, he's immediately pursued by Native Americans or like, you know, like that's the scene he runs into it, the drive-in that becomes reality. So I know they're paying homage to classic Westerns, but unfortunately, especially if you're in another culture, these things are like iconography for a genre could be problematic and you might not know it if you're not steeped in the history. of those things. I'm glad they at least try to have a more sensitive portrayal in the monitoring stuff. Although the game Gun

does not do a good job with that at all. Oh no, no, no, no. It does not. Yeah, I totally forgot the game. And I confused Gunn with Red Dead Revolver all the time because it came out at the exact same time

for like the same consoles. Red Dead Revolver is way better. But yeah, that is the end of our part one of Cowboy games. Download Sunset Riders on my Switch now. Yeah. This has sold me on this. I think so far

are the ones we talked about, the Tin Star and Sunset Riders are the only ones available for download? I don't think Gunsmoke is, uh, is there like an arcade collection for Capcom that has Gunsmoke on it, Jeremy, that's like available? Um, you know, it might be on one of like the PSP collections that are compatible with Vita, but, um, yeah, I don't know. I can't say for sure. Yeah, so not a lot of these are playable today, but you can find a way if you want to check them out. And we'll have a lot more talk about a lot more cowboy games in the future, because, again, we were only at 1991. We covered 15 years, basically, of history,

and we got a lot more to go. It could buy Wild Gunman. Yeah, Wild Gunman you can buy on Wii U, virtual console. Oh, sign me up. So that is one other game that is out there. Okay, okay. It was in the Capcom Arcade Cabinet collection that was on the PS3 and 360.

Gunsmoke was. Okay, okay. So nothing, I guess, no modern console yet. Probably backward compatible with Xbox One is my guess. Most things are, yeah, I got to give it to old Microsoft on that. Got to do something with that console. But, yes, thanks for joining us again. There'll be another one of these.

I had a lot of fun going through all this stuff. And Nina, of course, we'll be back to talk about more of these games. But yes, thank you for listening to Retronauts, of course. You can find us online at Retronauts. And, of course, we are supported by Patreon, all of our great patrons out there. If you want to support the show and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and add free, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up for the $3 level. If you do, you'll get that, but if you want to hear even more podcasts, you sign up at the $5 level, you'll get just that.

And two exclusive podcasts every month that aren't available to patrons. Right now, we are in the month of August, and we started doing exclusive episodes in January. So if you sign up at the $5 level now at patreon.com slash retronauts, you'll probably get like 13 or 14 episodes that you haven't heard. And that's a lot of time to kill in these times where there's, frankly, too much time to kill. So if you're looking for something more to listen to, we have exclusive episodes there, and you'll get two a month as long as you stay a $5 Patreon. at patreon at patreon.com slash retronauts. Let's go around the fake room we're in here. And let's talk to Nina.

Nina, what's going on with you? Do you have anything you want to promote where we can find you online? I know as of this release, you have a book that just came out. Yeah, the sequel to my children's graphic novel, Sparks. Sparks Double Dog Dare came out early August. So please check that out.

That's about two cats that dress up in a robotic dog suit to save people. and you can find me on Twitter at Space Coyotal that's Space Coyote with an L at the end instead of an E that's Space Coyote

not Space Cowboy as some people mistakenly call me although that is a cool name too although I've only seen like one episode of Cowboy Vibob so Fangamer.com please go there

that's where I work go to collection sort by artists click on Space Coyote you can see all the video game merchandise I designed there please check out

our Sunset Writers Collection although I went to this the site just now we only have the shirt and wallet left the pin and bananas are sold out but the rest of the stuff is half off so you can get the wallet for 20 bucks actually 19 bucks that's a great deal this will go live in uh i think more than a month so who knows how much will be left in the stock there's only one of the shirt left it's a woman's four x oh man i'm moving fast on that wallet right now yeah please do and please watch the bury me with my money and sunset writer's western film because we worked so hard on it and it's a lot of of fun. And also, buy me a cowboy kid or go to hell. Ooh. You already got your wedding gift, so maybe for the recommitment ceremony, I will invite Cowboy Kid himself. Yes.

You'll finally get to meet him. What's that? Is he the Cowboy Kit? The Tom Sellet Cowboy. He's much older now. He's no longer a child. Jeremy, how about you? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me creating content for limited run games doing all kinds of stuff um you can find my video productions at on youtube look for jeremy parrish video works chronologies of game systems and you can listen to my other little podcast alexander's ragtime band a monthly show about progressive rock you hate it we love it

let's find common ground in the middle henry how about you hey follow me henry gilbert on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. Also, me and Bob do our own podcast together Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon where we cover every episode of the Simpsons in chronological order. And on What a Cartoon,

we cover a different animated series once a week. If you wanted to hear all that stuff I heard about Toe for the Badlands game, you should definitely check out the ones we've done for say, G.I. Joe and Spider-Man and his amazing friends. So many cool podcasts there. And we

are also supported by subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons where there is a ton of exclusive to patreon content over a hundred podcasts that you will get extra if you are a five dollar subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and i've been the host of this one bob macky you can find me on twitter as bob servo but yeah that's the end of this episode of retronauts we'll see you again for another new episode happy trails to you Thank you. Oh!