Boot Hill! A 1977 arcade game developed
the late Midway Games (RIP). And is a sequel to the relatively lesser
known game Gun Fight.
The game cabinet is something to behold.
It has two joysticks. The much smaller joystick on the left moves
your character in eight directions (which was twice or even four
times more directional freedom than most games at the time), and a
much larger two directional joystick with a trigger on it that aimed
your gun and fired (does this duel joystick setup sound familiar?).
The most impressive thing in my opinion is how the game managed
color. See, rather than having a simple black backdrop like Pong, or
using clear colored strips across the screen to simulate color, this
game used mirrors to project a hand drawn landscape of a western town
onto the game console. Take a look at the screen shot above, this
game looks pretty good! It's also a shame that I was not able to play
this on it's original cabinet as the game loses a LOT in the
emulation process as both this beautiful hand drawn landscape is
replaced by a simple black screen, and the keystrokes used in lieu of
duel joysticks aren't nearly as immersive. But, sacrifices must be
made in if I'm going to complete all 1001 games. I should count
myself lucky to be able to play this near 40 year old jem at all.
In this game you play as a cowboy on
boot Hill and you're in a gun fight with some loser on the other side
of the screen. Your goal is to bust a cap in the butt of this moron
while avoiding getting smoked yourself. The game introduces strategy
by only giving you six bullets and you can't reload. You must decide
between firing all your shots at once in a hailstorm of bullets, or
carefully picking off that asshole with precisely aimed shots. It's a
type of strategy that you don't see in modern shooters, conserving
ammo and only firing when the timing is perfect was not in my nature,
it was kind of a different experience. This game marks the first
shooter on the list, as well as the first game with weapons, guns, an
opponent, a human opponent and killing said human opponent.
While it is a first for many things, it
is actually a lot like Pong, but instead of making sure you avoid
missing the ball at all costs, in this game you cannot get hit
by the bullet at all costs. This is one of the reasons why I started
playing this list in chronological order. To see the evolution of
genres happening as they did back even before the “Golden Age”.
This “It's like Pong but...” applies to a lot of games that would
come in the future. Pong became Breakout, Breakout inspired Space
Invaders, Space Invaders inspired Galaxian, Galaxian became Galaga
and so on.
Overall, I enjoyed this game more than
Pong or Breakout, as it was the first one that after my Game Over I
actually wanted to play it again, more than once. It was fun, but if
anyone REALLY wants to play this game, I HIGHLY suggest tracking down
an arcade that still the original old school cabinet.
Next up: Combat
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