50 Years of Video Games: 1942 (Arcade)
1984 was a huge year for Capcom, primarily because that was the year they entered the video game market. Their first game, Vulgus, wasn’t exactly a hit though, and while SonSon and Pirate Ship Higemaru tend to appear in discussions of Capcom’s history and crop up in game collections, it still seemed like Capcom was struggling to find a game that resonated with the gaming public. Perhaps this is why the young developer started to think of what kind of games would resonate with Western players, and soon the Japanese company ended up making 1942, a game where you’re an American who flies his warplane all the way from Midway to Okinawa in an effort to win World War II yourself.
Flying what appears to be the Lockheed P-38 Lightning typical of the U.S. Army Air Corps for the time period, this vertically scrolling shooter gives you a satisfying rapid fire shot that even launches two bullets at a time so it has a broader range for hitting incoming enemy aircraft. The player’s plane is able to move almost freely around the entire two-dimensional play area, some upper areas seemingly off limits but the extra movement space lets you line up shots better and avoid the plentiful enemy fighters. This is an especially important detail because planes will come in from the bottom of the screen at times, usually larger ones that do so slowly so if you do spot their nosecones you can fly upwards to give them room to enter the battlefield. Even in seemingly tight formations your small plane is usually able to weave through the bigger planes, but if you aren’t feeling risky you can always instead do a loop-de-loop maneuver to briefly avoid all danger. You are given only three of these flips on a new life, but if the air space becomes too crowded or you notice a bullet or incoming plane you can’t avoid in time, these are a useful way of essentially briefly exiting play before your plane gets back into position to resume the fight.
1942 has 32 levels to complete, the stages counting down as you progress in a rather nice way of making how much progress you made feel more tangible. Rather than the mystery of not know how much longer you have to go, you’ll always know how close you are to making it to Okinawa, and perhaps that’s why 1942 made the game rather friendly to continuing after a death. While a credit gives you a few lives and you can earn more along the way, 1942 handles death better than many genre contemporaries of the time. There is a small bit of progress lost after you die, but each level has quite a few checkpoint spots it will return you to so that you’re rarely having to fight too hard to return to where you perished. More interestingly, if you do run out of lives, you can still pop in quarters to continue with the current level, 1942 making the path to Okinawa difficult but one that you can reasonably reach eventually on original arcade hardware provided you have the coins and commitment.
The trip from Midway to Okinawa uses other recognizable area names from World War II to refer to batches of levels, the player flying over the Marshall Islands and Iwojima for example, but the actual differences between these aren’t too stark. Every level starts with you departing from an aircraft carrier and landing on one to complete it and while the visuals of the land below change depending on how deep you are into the game, it’s not really until you get to Okinawa where you can see the buildings of the city below that it feels like a truly new location. That isn’t to say it’s all recycled scenery until then. Some areas have you flying over mostly water while others can instead be mostly land, the ground even adorned differently with things like dirt roads, dense forests, and lakes to break them up. Islands can be large or small or even pack dormant volcanoes, so while they aren’t often very distinct until near the end, you can still see that you are moving through new places, although this visual variety comes with a price. While your own weapons fire long red and orange bullets, the shots fired at you are tiny little orange dots. These stands out well enough above water, but above areas like the grassy areas and forests, the detailed textures can mean shots get lost in the visual noise, especially since many planes can be on screen at once firing bullets. All enemy bullets move at the same speed regardless of the aircraft firing so you can sort of assume where some shots might be based on the positions of incoming planes, but since land becomes more and more common the deeper you are in the game, it feels like unfortunately some of the rising difficulty comes from that lack of visual clarity.
1942’s enemy planes are all fairly rooted in reality in their appearance even if some fire their shots in slightly unnatural ways. Tiny planes often come in large numbers with the assumption you’ll quickly shoot a few down, but the ones that are able to stick around a little longer tend to move around the screen as they fire a few shots so you have to keep moving both to hit them and avoid them. Some of these tiny planes are far more willing to sacrifice themselves to take you out too, so if you don’t address that variation you can have a plane dive bomb into you. The basic planes all blow up in a single shot, but the next step up in size involves planes that take quite a few bullets to shoot out of the sky. These often come in formation with other similarly sized planes from below and thankfully wait a bit before they start rapidly firing their weapons, so while they discourage lingering near the bottom you do still have time to respond to their appearance and squeak through to begin firing back. The large planes start off a bit similarly to the medium sized ones but take a lot more work to bring down and each shot they fire includes multiple bullets. While you technically do not need to shoot down any planes besides the boss planes which are always the same aircraft that is almost as wide as the play area and fire a hefty amount of shots as they move up and down, the game does rate you on how well you did in a stage and naturally shooting down an enemy will make things safer for you while also earning points towards a high score. However, planes do eventually leave on their own so sometimes simply outlasting bigger enemies might be the more effective tactic.
There are some special red planes that aren’t so much a threat as they are a way to help turn the tables. While dangerous to the touch, if you shoot down all the small red planes that arrive in formation before they depart, they’ll drop a power-up. All of the power-ups look like the word “Pow” but are colored differently to tell you what help they will provide. Grey letters means you will have double the firepower, each shot now firing four shots which makes you a lot more capable at taking down the larger aircraft. Similarly, a grey and gold variation will instead have two fighters appear on either side of your plane to provide additional fire, although they won’t help you during bosses for some reason, leaving and coming back afterwards instead. They can also be taken down by enemy fire, the only lingering power-up that disappears in a way other than your death. Other power-ups can include things like an additional loop-de-loop use, an instant enemy wipe, or a brief reprieve from enemy fire save for the bigger planes, but all the power-ups are certainly useful so grabbing the Pow when it appears is always going to lead to something even if its just a few more points towards a high score.
While there are a lot of good ideas to lead to a fairly fun shooter on offer, by the time you’ve faced the first boss plane in Level 26, which here is the seventh stage you play, you’ve seen all of the unique enemy aircraft there are to face. By then the game has also done a lot of mixing and matching on which type of planes are fought together and how they enter the screen, and while it is a speedy game that avoids feeling too repetitive because most stages take around two minutes to complete unless you die, making your way through all the levels isn’t as exciting thanks to how much it has to rely on reusing only a few enemy types. The challenge remains present and the few new setups it can whip out still manage to push back against you enough that it could have nearly coasted through purely on the excitement of trying to stay alive, but you also get the bullet visibility problems later so many players would probably be better off not trying to fight the full war and instead only go as far as interest takes them.
No matter which stage you’re in though, the music could definitely use some improvement. While the boss battles have a decent digital tune meant to impress upon you the danger they pose, every other moment of play in a level features a marching song comprised purely of whistles and snares. The whistling’s pitch and the basic rhythm of the snare drums mean it can wear on you over time even if stages start with a mildly catchy lead-in, and while the sound of exploding aircraft is inevitably peppered throughout, it seems almost like the whistles were picked because they would still rise above it. A more appreciated touch though are the oddly named % and Point Up stages. Focused mostly on enemies flying in formations where you can easily shoot them down if you’re quick and move right, only the larger planes fire back in these levels and besides a few formations where the little ones have a good chance of colliding with you, it’s definitely a break stage meant to reward you with more score and a bit of a shooting gallery since the game always tells you the percentage of foes taken down in a level. You’ll still be facing the same planes as always, but the shift in focus means they do behave differently enough that some stagnation is staved off by their inclusion.
THE VERDICT: Despite having only a small selection of enemy aircraft to go up against, 1942 almost makes the gameplay exciting enough that you could forgive it. Being able to move around the air, grab power-ups, and continue onward even after game overs keeps the game kinetic and the challenge is mostly there to make sure you remain involved. As the later levels make it harder to see enemy bullets above the background though and the difficulty leads to more repetition due to more frequent deaths the game levels out into something decent but with a few apparent issues. Were this World War II aerial warpath more concise perhaps it wouldn’t have strained itself in that way, but it’s definitely a solid shooter thanks to the foundational elements of its airborne action.
And so, I give 1942 for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. When the bullets start blending in with forests and soil 1942 goes from an exciting time to conditional fun. It starts off very well with the energetic aerial movement making the fights more than just holding down the attack button, and having the foes come in from below isn’t even an issue since they always give you a little time to realize they’re arriving to get out of the way. The checkpointing means deaths are felt because there will eventually be a monetary cost for dying too often but you can still continue onward and make progress in this adventure. At first that flow makes it easier to forgive that the planes stop running out of new things to try, but when the incoming attacks become harder to track and losses become more frequent it’s hard to feel like seeing some new ground below your plane is worth the continued push to Okinawa. The background marching music and familiar foes start to wear down the experience when you can’t keep carving your way through enemy squadrons at a rapid pace. The difficulty definitely slows down the action but doesn’t completely kill it though, and if you can leave a problem area you can sometimes get in a decent streak again that reminds you of why this game clicked so well initially. However, 32 levels might have simply been too many with the amount of ideas at play, the bullet clarity being an obvious issue but even had that not been a concern, the limited design would have probably been a deterrent to completing the full fight anyway.
1942 still had a fresh approach to vertical shooters for the time, not only avoiding the space setting they’d all been exploring but giving you a fairly capable craft that was both powerful but adequately challenged by the opposing planes. It would go on to get an NES port that sold surprisingly well despite being poorly done, but that just shows how popular this game was for Capcom. It gave them their first breakaway hit and helped them find a stride they have essentially kept up even to the modern day. One of the most prolific and popular game companies truly took wing with this arcade title, and while it had some rough patches in its design, it had plenty of sequels to try and refine the concept. While Vulgus may have been the first video game out of Capcom’s doors, 1942 better shows the promise of a company who would go on to create so many of the best video games of all time.