This Week in Retro: The Super Spy [1990]

October 8, 1990: SNK Invents the First-Person Shooter (and Brawler, and Stabber)

by Diamond Feit

Are you as excited as I am, folks, to discuss a genuinely innovative and ground-breaking arcade game from SNK? Because this week The Super Spy turned 30 years old, and while few people remember it fondly today (if they remember it at all), it absolutely stands out amongst 1990 releases as a very early action game to use a first-person perspective.

As previously established, the NEO•GEO debuted on April 26, 1990 in Japanese arcades as an affordable alternative to other cabinets. NEO•GEO hardware used interchangeable cartridges for software which only cost a few hundred dollars apiece, a fraction of what a new printed circuit board (PCB) cost at the time. NEO•GEO launched with a shooting game, a sports game, a platform game, and an *ahem* adult mahjong game. These all have their charms—no comment on the skeevy mahjong game—but none of them could be called "ground-breaking." Eye-catching, yes, but all four were examples of well-established genres at the time. The four launch titles were followed by a golf game in May and a beat-em-up and a racing sim in July: All arcade standards. But on October 8, the NEO•GEO got its first truly original game in The Super Spy.

Officially, The Super Spy is a "3D Action" game, the same genre as NAM-1975, which was available at launch. But the two games have little in common. NAM-1975 depicts its player characters on-screen, aiming and shooting at a player-controlled targeting reticle as they automatically march to the side. But from the moment the attract mode splashes across the screen, The Super Spy makes it clear that the player controls the person whose perspective provides the viewpoint into the action. The camera zooms into the back of hero Roy Heart's head, then stops as he punches the title. Once the game starts, the player is in control, moving Roy back and forth freely, entering doors and hallways as they like, exploring a building as enemies march right up to the screen to attack Roy—and the player.

Combat in The Super Spy is methodical. The beat-em-up was a popular genre at the time of its release, but fighting in those games is more about crowd control than anything else. The best brawler strategy is to line up a group of thugs with your character and mash the attack buttons until they go down. Enemies in The Super Spy are patient to their own detriment, never rushing or surrounding the player but instead taking turns moving forward into melee range. That's good news for players, because an enemy close enough to hit Roy is close enough for Roy to hit them back.

I jokingly called The Super Spy a "first-person shooter" in the headline above, but it's not that far from the truth: Roy starts the game armed with a knife and a gun, though its ammo is limited. The knife also "rusts" as it is used, making it less powerful over time. This means that for the majority of the game, Roy punches and kicks enemies to death rather than spraying them with bullets. Still, the inclusion of Roy's fists (and whatever weapon he happens to be holding) front and center predicts the viewpoint of DOOM and all the similar games that would follow in its wake.

More than "first-person shooter," the most accurate descriptor for The Super Spy is role-playing game. Dungeon crawlers on personal computer and home consoles alike had featured first-person viewpoints for years, though these typically played out through tile-based mazes with rigid 90-degree turns. Levels in The Super Spy are certainly maze-like, with corridors to roam and rooms to explore (some of which offer fresh weapons or health pickups while others only contain more enemies). Whether you pick the right or wrong path, enemy spawns are a constant threat in the game; there is no timer in The Super Spy, but players rarely go more than 15 seconds without a fight on their hands. Fortunately, Roy gains experience from every foe he kills, and gains offensive and defensive power each time he levels up.

Is The Super Spy secretly a metroidvania? There is free exploration and backtracking, and Roy grows stronger the longer you play, but there are only two areas in the game and not much in the way of lasting power-ups. It's possible to find a machine gun on a few different occasions, but like the default pistol, there's not much ammo for it. You can find a pair of brass knuckles hidden in the second area, but that's not a transformative find like Samus Aran's ice beam or Alucard's gravity boots; it just means your punches do more damage. No, the most effective power-up in The Super Spy is, as with most arcade games, putting another coin in the slot when Roy's life bar empties out, granting yourself a fresh knife and a full pistol clip in the process.

For a 1990 release, The Super Spy certainly seemed ahead of its time. I had already been smitten with the bold red NEO•GEO cabinet from the moment I first laid eyes on it, but when The Super Spy appeared at my local pizza parlor, I was left speechless. A game where I see all the action from the hero's perspective and I must astutely fight my way through an army of men? I could never finish it, not even once I acquired the home cartridge version years later, but The Super Spy's gigantic sprites and literal in-your-face action felt like the most exciting action game that could exist—a feeling that was triggered again a few years later when an older teen showed me Wolfenstein 3D on his computer.

There is one aspect of The Super Spy that is so predictive of the future it feels a little creepy with 30 years of hindsight. According to the narrative, Roy Heart is charged with destroying the factory hideout of Zolge King, a terrorist organization. Most of the enemies you fight are palette swaps of the same two guys: A generic special forces soldier or a stereotypical "Arab" complete with a keffiyeh over his face (both men look like they walked off the set of a Golan/Globus production of the 1980s). When the battle is won, the player gets a rather somber text ending which reads:

TERRORIST POWER HAS INCREASED IN OUR HIGH TECH ERA. EACH COUNTRY IS THREATENED BY THIS POWER. THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES FOR TERRORISTS. THE DEATH TOLL RISES EACH DAY.

This pessimistic epilogue is shown over an unnamed cityscape with a pair of distinctive twin towers visible on the right, a clear analogue to the World Trade Center in New York City which would be bombed underground in 1993 and eventually destroyed on September 11, 2001. Am I actually intimating that SNK predicted 9/11?? No. Am I suggesting that a team of Japanese game developers had their doubts regarding the effectiveness of the War on Terror?? M-maybe!

What's more likely is that The Super Spy drew a lot of inspiration from the popular American action movie about killing terrorists in an office building, Die Hard. The words "Die Hard" (ダイ・ハード) and "Roy Heart" (ロイ・ハート) look very similar in katakana, and don't forget that in that first movie, John McClane does self-identify as "Roy Rogers."

I never made that movie-game connection as a kid, just like I never reached the ending which suggested that terrorism is a threat that cannot be contained. I just thought playing a video game in a first-person perspective was rad as hell. 30 years later, it still is—and even if The Super Spy isn't the most refined example of such a game, it was certainly amongst the very earliest first-person action games to exist. Yippee-ki-yay, Roy!

Shoutout to LordBBH, a retro-game streamer who has cleared The Super Spy on a single credit more than once and has written extensively about this game; his knowledge made this column possible.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.