50 Years of Video Games: Gun Fight (Arcade)
Even in its earliest days video games were at least a little violent. Computer Space was about blasting UFOs while trying to avoid being blown up yourself, but there was at least some fantasy to it and you had no context for what was in the rocket or UFO as they engage in their little battle in space. In 1975’s Gun Fight though we’d see two video game characters that were distinctly human raising their guns with the intent of killing each other.
Released first in Japan as Western Gun, Taito’s arcade game may be the first to show two human characters engaged in lethal combat, but as I’ve discussed in earlier parts of the 50 Years of Video Games review series, it’s hard to state anything too definitively as a first in video games. It does seem that this claim is fairly solid, as is the claim that it might be the first game to use a microprocessor when it was brought to America and edited by Midway. However, that transition overseas also might be the first time a Japanese game was licensed for use in America, but TV Basketball from the year prior is also declared to be the first and in both cases the companies involved were Taito and Midway. We might just not have the solid records to fully attribute such lofty titles to Gun Fight or TV Basketball, but since it does seem to more solidly be the first game where man was pitted against man in a fight to the death, it at least seems to have a fairly interesting part in history to cling to.
This two-player arcade game is styled after the classic gun duels you might see in a cowboy film, the goal as simple as trying to shoot the opponent before they can shoot you. Both players start a round with a pistol full of six shots, and while the game tells you to draw when the contest starts, both cowboys enter the two-dimensional battlefield with pistols drawn and ready to fire. Player 1 and Player 2 both have a section of the screen to themselves, neither of them able to enter a center space that is wider than just a simple line. This central area not only keeps players at a distance from each other but can be filled with different obstacles that can block your shot. A round is won by a player managing to peg the opponent with a bullet, after which the game will start a new round with new obstacles until you’ve gone through the set of available battlefields.
The areas you fight in themselves aren’t too detailed but the presence of things like cacti and trees do heavily impact how you play. Right as the game starts the two cowboys are lined up so if they fire right away a cactus is going to absorb the shot instead of the opposing player’s body. The cactus will break down a bit depending on where it’s shot, and the same is true of the trees found in later battlefields. They can never be fully removed from play, always having a small trunk that can still potentially block a bullet, but trying to weave around these obstacles before firing requires the player to move and think a little rather than going in guns blazing. The covered wagon that is added to the mix is fully indestructible though and can even move up and down to block your shot, but the cowboys themselves are fairly big targets and even larger than the obstructions so it’s not like a few barriers will prevent players from ever landing a hit.
Players aren’t just worried about shuffling to move in and out of cover though. You can angle your gun to point up and down in Gun Fight and fire towards the top or bottom edges of the screen. Unlike the obstacles that make a bullet disappear, hitting the horizontal edges of the screen will cause the bullet to ricochet, and trying to set up a clever bounce can add some spice to an otherwise straightforward gun fight. On the arcade cabinet the pointing of the gun is even executed with a nifty controller that resembles the grip of a pistol minus the barrel, a trigger used to fire and pulling back and forth moving the in game character’s arm up or down. Actual movement is handled with a separate joystick though, almost making this a member of the twin-stick shooter genre. While Gun Fight is a game that can shift in quality based on how well a player can think to utilize cover or plan a ricochet, it suffers the rather predictable problem of its era in that it is a bit too rudimentary to become too invested in the fairly basic action that unfolds.
Characters in Gun Fight can move around fairly quickly and fire just as rapidly. Until you kill your way to the later rounds where there are more objects blocking your bullet paths it is actually fairly easy for players to earn wins through lucky shots, and when there are more barriers in play and strategy would feel more important it can be hard to really motivate players to leave safe spots. This is likely what the damage to the trees and cacti were meant to prevent, players not given a reliable piece of cover to hunker down behind. However, since you only get six shots, each one wasted limits your options. It can feel like firing wildly and hoping is better than trying to be slick, especially since after your chambers are empty a small countdown begins. In this timed multiplayer contest having to wait ten seconds to get more ammo is definitely a detriment, but you can start to focus purely on outmaneuvering your opponent’s limited ammo or finding a spot where you’re hard to hit. If both players run out of bullets the round immediately resets, but the obstacles are all refreshed so any damage to them is removed. The same would happen if the ten second reload counter reaches 0, but it feels like the rounds could be more interesting and the game could progress more quickly if those damaged trees and cacti didn’t just spring back to life.
The big characters do mean you can’t sit too safely anywhere but it’s not like you can’t see how your opponent is moving and shuffle out of the shot’s path. Unless a player is really committed to stalling the game will probably move at a decent pace but the wins don’t often feel well-earned. Even if you line up a shot well the opposing player can sometimes move quickly enough to step out of the bullet’s path, making lining up a ricochet guesswork. There is that psychological angle of trying to predict how your opponent might move but the bullet travel time can mean they have time to move away from you trying to lead your shot. There’s a basic thrill to be had in landing a hit simply because that means you won a round and the opponent lost, but rather than being some game of trick shooting, quick draws, or dead eye aim, Gun Fight feels like many rounds are loosely guided spray and pray affairs since you can hope your shot flies true but the opponent might have too much control over whether or not they get hit for your aim to matter as much as it should.
THE VERDICT: While Gun Fight may promise the then novel thrill of two human characters dueling to the death, this cowboy shootout lacks the tension or skill seen in the Western staple. Players can scramble around the screen with enough speed they can outrun a bullet aimed right at them, and while you can try to ricochet your shot to be more unpredictable, it often feels like dodging is giving too much power compared to how you point your weapon. Obstructions do threaten to add more texture and strategy to the fight only to make it harder to deliberately win a round, but firing quickly and the occasional prediction do mean the game can at least lead to some quick rounds where the problems don’t feel so pronounced.
And so, I give Gun Fight for arcade machines…
A BAD rating. In Taito’s Western Gun you actually aren’t locked to one side of the screen, and this honestly feels like a really smart way to combat some of Gun Fight’s problems. It’s a bit odd that Midway seemingly introduced a problem with its alterations, but there likely were problems with the original design too. However, being able to run across the entire screen in pursuit of the other players means you aren’t limited to trying to shoot around a covered wagon or needing to pull off a predictable ricochet depending on where the opponent is standing. You would be able to manipulate the other player’s movements more and could follow up on how they were positioned after you send them scurrying with a warning shot, but whether that is true of Western Gun I can’t say. I can say Gun Fight would benefit from giving the players more freedom, the obstructions a good idea but too much of an impediment when the middle area of the battlefield is made off limits. Speeding up the bullets could maybe make the current form of the game work since you’d have a better chance of really thinking about a shot before firing, but the fact the round refreshes when both players are out of bullets might suggest Midway didn’t object to players going in guns blazing as they get an easy retry when neither lands a shot. The 10 second reload counter at least suggests they want players to possibly be more careful, but the game plays out differently than some of its elements suggest simply because the design makes the one firing the gun too often the one at a disadvantage.
Gun Fight isn’t too painful to pop on and play despite its faults, you still have to be a bit reactive to avoid some of the bullets heading towards your cowboy and some of the advantages you have require figuring out how to use the few variables involved in the fight. Learning how to have that defensive edge isn’t a hard or deep process though, but Gun Fight can work as a game you visit and play a few rounds with someone until you start to understand it too well and it moves beyond mindless gunfire. Tomohiro Nishikado, creator of Western Gun, even said Gun Fight doesn’t seem as good as his original version even though Gun Fight looks more appealing with its bigger distinctly human cowboys, but looking at some video of Western Gun’s gameplay it does seem to be the more exciting duel since players being able to move quickly without off-limits areas benefits their offensive edge more. Whether or not Gun Fight truly is the first licensed Japanese game in the U.S., it does seem like the changes made to make it more marketable overseas might have ended up robbing players of a superior experience where thought has a much better chance of influencing the gun fight than luck.