Half-Century Challenge Series: https://www.backloggd.com/u/C_F/list/half-century-challenge/

HCC #6 = Gun Fight (1975)

Welcome back to the Half-Century Challenge folks. Mega recently put out a banger review for the challenge so as usual, check it out too: https://www.backloggd.com/u/MegaTheRealOne/review/1619202/

Let's talk about violence in video games. Despite the cult classic status of games like Splatterhouse, it was not until the 90s with games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Night Trap that violence in video games became a mainstream and particularly controversial issue. In the early to mid 70s, one would be hard-pressed to display blood and gore in their software, let alone market it to millions of young gamers. However, to equate violence in video games to Mortal Kombat fatalities is rather reductive of a broad topic.

While studying Gun Fight (known in Japan as Western Gun, but that name kinda wouldn't cut it over here) I came across several videos on Youtube declaring it to be the first violent video game ever made. And... that's not true is it?

Gun Fight in and of itself was already based on one of Sega's Electro-mechanical video games. If one really wanted to stretch it, the player could get bitten by snakes off-screen in Oregon Trail. And that's not even getting into text adventures like Highnoon, which in all honesty is just Gun Fight without the purdy visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2gK5-VBMg

That's when it dawned on me. There was no universal idea of what constituted a video game back then, and even now it's still arguable. Should the electro-magnetic game this was adapted from be considered part of the same medium as Gun Fight? Should Highnoon be considered a video game, or merely a software translation of one of those choose your own adventure books? Even now people argue if all visual novels are video games, after all.

Regardless of all that, it's not a stretch to say Gun Fight was the first game with visceral death and murder on the glorious arcade screens of old. This is especially true of the North American release, which better emphasized the violent aspect of the game. That's right, the Japanese version was infamous enough to make the news with its concept alone, but it was quite different from the North American release: https://youtu.be/XbnYBB42J6c

I've often seen people associate western media with violent content more. There's obviously a case to be made when the ESRB is less strict about violence than the CERO (one need only point at how violence is censored in the Japanese releases of games like Resident Evil or Mortal Kombat to see the point) overall.

Western Gun's English localization, Gun Fight, illustrates this trend rather well. The sprites of the human characters are made larger and more distinctively human. Furthermore, the Japanese version allows both players to explore a fairly large map for its time and implement strategy to their movement. This is not really the case in the English version; the players basically move like Pong paddles with slightly more horizontal freedom. There are still objects to block bullets (the precursor for cover shooters of today in fact!) but by all means, the game's focus is now aggressive killing.

With hindsight being 20/20, it's interesting to see the seeds planted in the overall North American localization industry here. Only a few years after Gun Fight's release, companies would "de-anime" countless games. This is evident in perhaps thousands of games, but egregious examples would be as follows:
>The cover art for games like Pocky & Rocky 2 (Chibi artstyle in Japan, more reminiscent of western cartoons here)
>The Americanization of game titles (Mega Man becoming Rock Man, Akumajou Dracula becoming Castlevania, Ninja Ryukenden becoming Ninja Gaide- ok that one doesn't even make sense lol)
>The anime cutscenes being removed in games like Contra or Super Aleste (which itself was renamed to Space Megaforce)
>Licenses being stripped from works, such as Solbrain being transformed into Shatterhand
>Licenses being added to works, such as Puyo Puyo being reskinned into a Timon & Pumbaa spin-off game
>Characters like Ristar and Kirby becoming more badass than cutesy
etc

Japanese games being significantly retooled for western audiences? That's right folks, the process was solidified in 1975, fittingly with Western Gun.

Aside from that, it's also worth pointing out the Japanese version used Discrete Logic while the Midway localization was the first game ever to use a microprocessor. It was also one of Taito's most successful games ever, especially for the time it came out. 1975 was quite a dry spell for the industry. If it wasn't for Western Gun's release, I doubt that Space Invaders would have ever come into existence to change the landscape of gaming forever with its codifying of the early shmup genre or progressive difficulty in the medium.

In fact, when interviewed about the North American release of his game, Western Gun's creator Tomohiro Nishikado actually commented that while he found Gun Fight less fun than Western Gun, he was very impressed with the graphics in it. So much so that it actually led to him designing Space Invaders with a microprocessor in mind, as chronicled in "Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life" by Chris Kohler.

I played Gun Fight with a friend. Which version I prefer is irrelevant and both are worth experiencing for all the historians in the audience. It's about 5 minutes to experience the totality of the game, and while it's not interesting to most people today, it's no doubt one of the most interesting development processes for a video game. As a developer myself who is interested in the history of media, I'm endlessly fascinated by what went into this both in the western and eastern releases.

“You can take the game out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the game.”
-Arthur Bear, 2026

Next time: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)