This Week in Retro: Code Name: Viper (Patreon)

February 23, 1990: Code Name: Viper Straddles An Invisible Inspakuri Line

by Diamond Feit

Video game history is built on clones. Every hit game has opened the door to dozens if not hundreds of audience-seeking wannabes. In the 21st century, it doesn't even have to be a hit: A trailer for a unique video game concept will likely spawn a handful of imitation mobile apps in a matter of hours. But back in the old days, the primary ingredient for drawing a crowd of copycats was success.

There were, of course, exceptions. Let's talk about Code Name: Viper—right after we talk about Rolling Thunder.

Released in arcades in 1986, Namco's Rolling Thunder was not a particularly unique action platformer. The hero has a gun, walks to the right, jumps up and down, and opens doors to receive more ammo or a machine gun upgrade for the basic pistol. The hero has a lifebar, but contact with any enemy does 50% damage. A bullet or bomb does 100% damage. Eventually, he rescues a lady in peril from a green-faced alien.

What Rolling Thunder lacked in originality it made up for in style. The hero is a dashing, slender man in a turtleneck who wouldn't look out of place in a Connery-era Bond film. The standard enemies wear day-glo hoods, making them look like a neon-colored division of the KKK, and when killed their clothes crumple to the ground like a dispatched Jedi knight. It's not quite as cool as Sega's Shinobi (1987) because there are no ninjas, but with all the doors and vague spy qualities it's reminiscent of Tatio's Elevator Action (1983) minus the elevators. As a kid I found it hypnotic and played it every chance I could, and when it eventually made it to the NES in 1989 I was elated.

Turns out there was a catch: Rolling Thunder, being a Namco game, was brought to the NES courtesy of Tengen. That meant it came in a big black cartridge which almost didn't fit inside the NES because it was unlicensed. Nintendo hated that, eventually suing Tengen (aka Atari Games) which forcibly disappeared Tengen games from the market, cutting short Rolling Thunder's chances (among others) at a second life on home consoles in the U.S.

Now let's talk about Capcom's Code Name: Viper, an action platformer originally released on the Famicom on February 23, 1990 as Ningen Heiki Dead Fox ("Human Weapon Dead Fox"). The hero has a gun, walks to the right, jumps up and down, and opens doors to receive more ammo or a machine gun upgrade for the basic pistol. The hero has two hit points: Contact with any enemy does one point of damage, but a bullet or bomb does two. Gameplay cannot be copyrighted, but Code Name:Viper closely mirrors all these fundamental aspects from Rolling Thunder, by that point a four-year-old arcade game (and an 11-month-old Famicom game).

Code Name: Viper is not a wholesale clone of Rolling Thunder so much as it is transparently derived from it. Aesthetically, it is very different; the eighties had come and gone, so the hero looks more like a soldier of fortune than someone who would unwind from a gunfight with a shaken martini. Instead of a damsel in distress at the end, the entire operation is presented as a literal War on Drugs as Viper flies around South America shooting beret-clad paramilitary thugs (no hoods, but they are brightly colored and they "melt" when killed). There are hostages to be rescued behind some of the doors in each stage, one of whom provides a bomb necessary to open the exit. After clearing each stage, the player receives a few words* of a secret drug cartel communique, eventually revealing that Viper's commander is the one behind it all. The final mission has Viper fly back to Beverly Hills so he can kill his commander personally, an early example of Detective James Carter's theory from Rush Hour 2: "Behind every big crime there's a rich white man waiting for his cut."

*(In Japanese, all the hostages speak with an Osaka dialect, making those fireside scenes much sillier. In the U.S. they are played straight: Drugs are bad.)

A few years ago at BitSummit, the indie game festival in Kyoto, a friend who works in games taught me a wonderful Japanese word that applies perfectly to Code Name: Viper: Inspakuri, a portmanteau of "inspire" and pakuri, Japanese for "copy" in the plagiarism sense. Video games in general have an inspakuri problem as lots of developers (especially indies) start off making a game based on their favorites and run the risk of creating a thinly-veiled clone of the original. As a Capcom product, though, Code Name: Viper is no quiet indie release, and the resemblance to Rolling Thunder is uncanny. But why? Rolling Thunder was no Pac-Man; there were plenty of other action platformers in its vein but no others that cribbed it so closely. As a kid I wondered if Code Name: Viper was meant to cash in on the vacuum left by Rolling Thunder's absence on NES, but this seems unlikely: The Famicom release one year earlier was licensed, unlike the Tengen version, and the rulings which hurt Tengen all came after Code Name: Viper's release.

Whatever the reasoning, it would seem that Namco had the last laugh. Today Rolling Thunder remains in circulation as an arcade classic and is included on multiple compilations such as Namco Museum for the Nintendo Switch (Yes, it's Flip Grip compatible!). Code Name: Viper has never been reissued on Virtual Console or in any other format in the U.S. or Japan, despite being a fun action game with top-notch music from Junko Tamiya. Were it not for the Rolling Thunder connection, perhaps no one would remember Code Name: Viper at all, decades later.

But that's why I'm here, remembering it for you.