This Week In Retro: Spy Hunter (1983) (Patreon)

June 1983: Ah, Mancini—the spy's best friend

by Diamond Feit

I know a majority of Retronauts supporters live in the United States, a country that prioritizes roads over public transportation, but I'm curious if anyone reading or listening to my columns actually enjoys driving a car. I'm approaching the 30th anniversary of getting my learner's permit and I can tell you that while I love the freedom that driving can provide in certain contexts, I do not find any pleasure in the act of operating a motor vehicle. In fact, having experienced multiple jobs that all but required me to commute via my own automobile every day, I know that the more I have to drive, the less I want to do it.

Maybe it all comes down to me not being a car guy. I view them as tools or mobile storage solutions, not as an extension of myself or my personality. Countless movies have tried to convince me that asking a man to drive a minivan represents a great affront to his masculinity and I cannot for the life of me understand what the problem is. I dislike vans, trucks, and SUVs because they're too big, necessitating hyper-vigilance while on the road else I bump into something or, heaven forbid, someone. An unsexy car does not have any impact on my own sexiness.

That said, I know a cool car when I see one, and 40 years ago that car was the star of my new favorite arcade game. Even as a child I tended to avoid driving games because I failed to see the appeal of pretending to navigate a racetrack. Getting behind the wheel of a fantastic super contraption though is another story, and Bally Midway's Spy Hunter offers just that.

Arcade-goers in 1983 had no shortage of driving simulators to choose from, with the particularly popular Pole Position having debuted the previous year. The genre even predated the "video game" as we know it, for in the 1960s and 70s manufacturers produced electro-mechanical cabinets that used physical props and moving parts to create the illusion of driving a motor vehicle on a scrolling road. These games often had a steering wheel instead of a joystick and a gas pedal at foot-level to increase the authenticity of the experience.

Spy Hunter follows in this tradition but presents itself just differently enough to grab the attention of potential players. Instead of a wheel, the cabinet features a bespoke yoke shaped like the letter W that looks like it belongs in a fighter jet, not an automobile. Each of the two grips have triggers and thumb-accessible buttons, plus a big red button in the center where the horn should be. On a hardware level alone, Spy Hunter draws spectators in just so they can discover what kind of game could possibly warrant all these inputs.

For the curious lookie-loos who dare to investigate Spy Hunter, they will discover an arcade game that straddles genres. While successfully steering a car and minding the road is certainly a prerequisite for enjoying Spy Hunter, describing it as a "driving game" feels disingenuous; your vehicle comes loaded with an arsenal of on-board weapons, each with its own dedicated button. If you're not eliminating hazards as they approach your spy craft, your game can end in a flash.

By default, the car can fire twin machine guns straight ahead, an efficient way to communicate to slower drivers that you wish to pass. The remaining armaments must be unlocked during gameplay by making a quick pit stop inside a tractor trailer. The truck requires players to enter while on the road, as it only pulls over to let you out, not in. You can add a smokescreen, oil slick, or surface-to-air missiles by hooking up with your allies; the first two can take out tailgaters, while the latter is the only way to deal with bomb-dropping helicopters.

With all this potential firepower at the player's disposal, Spy Hunter throws in one caveat to make the game more challenging, at least from a high-score perspective. Normally, the player constantly accumulates points while in motion.  As you drive and face off against a variety of hostile vehicles, you and your enemies must both navigate civilian traffic. This is not a closed course like in the movies; you will see plenty of ordinary, unarmed cars and motorcycles during your mission. Should any innocents crash and burn, the game will freeze the score counter for a few seconds.

Spy Hunter, like so many of its contemporaries, stretches on forever. The challenge lies in surviving longer than other players while still scoring enough points to enter your initials. By including a penalty for friendly fire, Spy Hunter dares players to balance their safety with those of strangers. Mowing down anything that moves will reduce the overall flow of traffic, but at the cost of fewer rewards. After all, that big red truck that brings you upgrades isn't bulletproof.

I've described Spy Hunter rather objectively so far, focusing on the hardware and listing the different ways you can blow stuff up, but innovative genre-bending gameplay wasn't the only reason it became a smash hit. Aesthetically, Spy Hunter managed to mash-up several pop culture properties—skirting copyright law in the process—to give it an extra hook.

The gadget-laden car comes straight from James Bond, a character so popular in 1983 that he starred in two competing films released that year. While the design of the vehicle itself is unique, all the weapons seen in Spy Hunter had previously appeared in past Bond films. However, the shape of the steering yoke and having the car enter a large truck are clear nods to Knight Rider, the NBC television series which premiered the previous fall.

Yet the most unmistakably borrowed element of Spy Hunter is the game's lone music track, an electronic rendition of Henry Mancini's theme song for Peter Gunn. Conceptually, the tune seems like an odd choice; Peter Gunn had nothing to do with spies or vehicular combat, and the show first hit the airwaves in 1958 when my parents were still in elementary school. While I loved Knight Rider and likely already knew James Bond at the time, it would be years before I learned Spy Hunter's music was not an original composition. By now, I suspect the only people who remember this piece of music at all associate it with video games instead of a black & white detective show.

With distinct gameplay accented by a melange of hip secret agent references, Spy Hunter impressed itself upon millions of video game fans. Ports to every console and home computer soon followed; I personally spent hours playing the Commodore 64 version with one joystick in my hands and another on the floor so I could press a second button with my toes to fire the special weapons. A 1987 arcade sequel, Spy Hunter II, introduced two-player mode via a split-screen, giving each driver their own dedicated view of the road. The NES got its own sequel, Super Spy Hunter, a rebranding of Sunsoft's 1991 Famicom title Battle Formula.

Like many other vintage arcade games, Spy Hunter has spent the 21st century bouncing from studio to studio as publishers attempt to cash in on its name recognition. Four different games appeared between 2001 and 2012, two of them serving as "reboots" as if the 1983 game had any plot that required such attention. Hollywood has threatened to make a Spy Hunter movie for the past 20 years, signing well-known directors like John Woo and Paul W.S. Anderson, both of whom have long since moved on to other projects. Universal originally wanted Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to star, ironic given that he has spent the last decade in an on-again off-again relationship with another series all about cars causing chaos, the Fast & Furious franchise.

Of course, any sensible person can tell you the ugly truth: Spy Hunter no longer needs to exist. 40 years ago, the idea of driving a car and shooting other motorists made for a unique video game—even if so many pieces of said game came from other, more famous sources. Today, players have their pick of any number of titles that revolve around road rage, be they cute and friendly or grim and dark. Likewise, if any movie studio wants to get Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson into a fancy car and have him race/shoot past a squad of villains, the script doesn't need any spies who hunt. Hell, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson may already do this on his way home from the gym without any cameras filming the action.

Even though I retain fond memories of the original game, I can comfortably say my spy hunting days are behind me. I still hold little interest in media built around automobiles, though I welcome any movie, tv show, or video game that uses cars as a jumping-off point to tell new stories or simply deliver non-stop action; the aforementioned Fast & Furious series serves as a perfect example of the latter. Should I ever find myself desperately seeking a secret agent who drives a car loaded with optional extras, I'm certain that James Bond—played by whomever next assumes the role—will return and fill that void.

At this point, the galaxy-brain move is to return to the source and bring back Peter Gunn. The original cast and creator Blake Edwards passed away years ago, along with most of their fans, so as long as a savvy producer ponies up for the Mancini theme song, they can hire any actors to make Peter Gunn do whatever they'd like. Maybe this version of Peter can collect sports cars and restore them in his spare time, adding automatic weapons to the chassis while he's under the hood adjusting the fuel line. I know someone who'd be perfect for the part; operator, get me the number of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts about video games, films, and dessert.