My previous blog post explored the emergence of video game Westerns in the 1970s. Driven by a mixture of technological limitations and public familiarity with Westerns and electromechanical shooting games, these new video game Westerns asked players to take on the role of the gunfighter in a relatively small digital world. Set in the mythic West of films, television, and novels, these games relied heavily on visual symbols such as pixelated covered wagons, cowboy hats, and pistols in arcade games like Gun Fight (1975) and Outlaw (1978). Although Hollywood Westerns had largely disappeared from movie theaters by the late 1970s, the genre remained familiar to generations of players who understood the symbols, settings, and tropes. Beginning in the 1980s and well into the 1990s, as improved gaming technologies allowed for more varied gameplay and better graphic animation—in some cases a live action cinematic experience—American and Japanese developers experimented with new kinds of Western games. The two dominant types of video game Westerns of this period were the arcade shooting gallery and shoot ‘em up games, which treated the West as one big shootout. As new variations of the Western video game emerged and technologies evolved in ways that allowed for more expansive digital worlds, many of these games continued to draw on frontier mythology and they more often than not focused their gameplay on gunfighters and bounty hunters who carried out what historian Richard Slotkin calls “regenerative violence” to exact justice and civilize a lawless land through the use of the hero’s gun.
By the end of the 1970s, video game Westerns were all but extinct. With the release of the space fantasy film Star Wars in 1977 and the arcade video game craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s, alien invasion, space, fantasy, and maze games such as Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), Pac-Man (1980), and Defender (1981) dominated arcade manufacturers’ production lines. But following the video game industry crash and shakeout of 1983, game developers revived the Western in 1984 with a series of new arcade shooting gallery titles, including Exidy’s Cheyenne, Sigma’s Wanted, Sanritsu Denki’s Bank Panic, and Konami’s Badlands. These arcade shooting gallery games, which drew heavily from earlier electromechanical and video game Western shooting games, became one of the principal video game Westerns of the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s.
Cheyenne, Wanted, Bank Panic, and Badlands all centered their gameplay on a gunfighter who must capture (or kill, though it’s not always clear) outlaws in a shooting gallery-style game in which enemies popped up from behind rocks, cacti, or doors. For example, Cheyenne, Wanted, and Badlands all tasked players with shooting outlaws in classic Western movie settings like desert canyons, ghost towns, main streets, mineshafts, and saloons. Set in a bank, Bank Panic tested quick recognition and reflexes by challenging players to identify the difference between bank customers and bank robbers who emerged from behind any three of a dozen doors at a time and shoot the robbers before getting shot themselves.
Much like the first Western video games of the 1970s, most of these games provided little backstory or reason for the use of violence other than taking on the role of a bounty hunter. For example, the names and faces of outlaws on wanted posters set up the action in Cheyenne, Wanted, and Badlands. Only Badlands, a laserdisc game with cinema-style cartoon animation similar to Dragon’s Lair (1983), provided brief background narration from the gunfighter/hero, who explained that his family was killed and that he “won’t let them get away with it!” This assault is only alluded to briefly at the beginning of the game and in the game’s marketing flier. Nevertheless, the sneak attack on the player/hero’s family—often a symbol of civilization in the Western—stands out as a common convention of the film Western that forces even the most reluctant hero to pick up a gun and bring the perpetrators to justice.
Not long after the introduction of the Western shooting gallery game, Japanese developers rolled out the Western shoot ‘em up game with the release of Capcom’s Gun.Smoke in 1985 and Data East’s Express Raider in 1986. Loosely inspired by the long-running television Western Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Gun.Smoke begins like many other Western video games with several wanted posters that illustrate the outlaws and bandits the player must defeat to make the town safe. From there, the vertically-scrolling shooter tasked players with firing their guns at a frenzy of swirling enemies reminiscent of Capcom’s 1942 (1984). Data East’s side-scrolling run-and-gun shooter, Express Raider combines elements of the side-scrolling shooter and the arcade shooting gallery into a single game about robbing trains. On some levels players fought off coyotes and guards protecting the train, while on other shooting gallery-style levels they shot at the train’s cars, windows, and engine from the saddle of a horse. But what’s most interesting about Express Raider is that it’s one of the first games to place the player in the role of the Western outlaw instead of the bounty hunter. Playing as a train robber who must, as the opening screens states, “Raid the train. Get the gold!” ran counter to most previous Western video games that focused on using violence to bring order to a chaotic West. Here, the player acts only to gain treasure. Although all of these games showed the continued relevance of the Western video game, none rose to the top of an arcade industry in recovery. Some of these games would get a second life on consoles and personal computers, but as the coin-op industry searched for new hits, Westerns once again mostly disappeared from video game screens.
The success of a few notable Hollywood Westerns at the end of the decade, such as Young Guns (1988), Young Guns 2 (1990), and Dances with Wolves (1990) renewed developers’ interest in making Western arcade shooting gallery and shoot ‘em up games in the early 1990s. TAD Corporation’s 1990 shooting gallery game Blood Bros., challenged players to blast outlaws, bandits, and Indigenous enemies in 25 stages of play. Blood Bros. looked similar to previous shooting gallery games, but in addition to playing as a gunfighter, the game allowed players to use an Indigenous warrior character. Yet in placing the Indigenous character in the role of hero, the game still identified Indigenous people with stereotypical feather bonnets and featured several battles against screaming Indigenous enemies, including a village with tepees to be destroyed. Konami’s 1991 shoot ‘em up Sunset Riders allowed up to four players to blast their way through Western settings to defeat outlaw bosses and collect rewards. The game owed as much inspiration to the Western as it did to Konami’s popular four-player beat ‘em up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989). Yet Sunset Riders opening video sequence, which used closeup shots of a character’s face and revolver and music reminiscent of Italian (or “Spaghetti”) Westerns like Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), set the game clearly in the world of the Western.
Technological advances like the adoption of digitized live-action graphics also prompted developers to reinvigorate the Western arcade shooting gallery game with titles like American Laser Games’ Mad Dog McCree (1990), Mad Dog McCree II: Lost Gold (1992), and The Last Bounty Hunter (1994), and Konami’s Lethal Enforcers II: Gunfighters (1994). Although live actors and authentic-looking Western backdrops characteristic of Hollywood sets stood in stark contrast to pixelated graphics of previous titles, these games intentionally drew on the hokeyness of some B-movie Westerns and carnival shooting galleries. For instance, in Lethal Enforcers II, the outlaws heckle the player by yelling “You can’t hit the broad side of a barn” while in Mad Dog McCree II, an outlaw stumbling out of an exploding building holds his cigar and coughs out, “Got a light?” The games were filled with these sorts of comic moments that poked fun at the genre even as the game’s scenarios or plots still revolved around a gunfighter hunting down outlaws. Only the Mad Dog McCree games veered slightly from this basic story by including a kidnapping and rescue scenario in the first game, and a search for “lost gold” in its sequel. The kidnapping of the mayor’s daughter in Mad Dog McCree is also just one example of how women appeared as bystanders, victims, enemies, or guides, but never as playable characters in these games.
Arcade video game Westerns like Cheyenne, Gun.Smoke, Sunset Riders, and Mad Dog McCree reflected changes in video game technology more than changes in Western mythology. In building off previous Western video games, arcade shooting gallery and shoot ‘em up games of the 1980s and 1990s condensed the Western into a series of shootouts that might appeal to players who wanted to demonstrate their skill and reflexes with a light gun or with joysticks and buttons. These games filled a vacuum left by Hollywood Westerns, but they mostly shared reliable, well-worn plots—if they explicitly shared any story at all—that resembled B-movie Westerns with easily identifiable heroes and villains. Yet, unlike a true shooting gallery of tin cans and targets, in video game Westerns, the targets often shoot back, justifying the player’s action without the need for more complex storytelling. Arcade games, which focused on quick, 25-cent gameplay sessions, could not sustain long stories or many cut scenes that explored characters’ backstories or motivations. These games were, as historian John Wills notes in his article “Pixel Cowboys and Silicon Gold Minds,” “interactive dime novels” that “provid[ed] affordable and accessible figments of Western reverie to all classes.” And much like the heroes of these dime novels, the gunfighter persisted as the primary character and entry point into the Western. As the prospector guide tells us at the beginning of Mad Dog McCree, “We’ve got a sheriff. What we need is a gunslinger.” After all, with few exceptions like Express Raider, Western video games up to this point nearly always made the player a hero who must use the gun in a lawless place.