Elevator Action review: a spy story told one floor at a time

A man in a suit arrives on the roof of a tall building. He slips inside. Doors line the halls, and enemy agents step out of them with guns. A few doors are red. Behind those are the papers he came for. At the bottom, a car is waiting. Between here and there is a very slow elevator.

The building is the enemy

Elevator Action is a platform shooter, but the thing you are really fighting is the architecture. The agent, code-named Otto, has to collect documents from rooms marked by red doors and work his way down a 30-story building, riding elevators and taking stairs. Skip a red door and try to leave, and the game sends you back up to the highest floor that still has an unopened red door.

That rule is the whole design in one line. You cannot rush. You have to read each floor, find the red doors, and plan a route down through a building that was clearly not built for you.

Elevator Action is a spy story where waiting is the action.

Lights, elevators and a lot of improvising

Otto can fire up to three shots at a time, jump, duck and kick, but the fun comes from the building. Try shooting out an overhead light and the hallway goes dark for a moment. Better still, drop a light fixture right onto an enemy's head. Stand in the right place and you can crush them with an elevator. Each building also has a stretch where the lights are out, and walking into it feels like a movie scene.

Take too long and an alarm sounds. The enemies get meaner and the elevators get slower, which is exactly the kind of pressure a patient player needs.

The elevator you have to wait for

The best moments are the quiet ones. You stand in an elevator, watch an enemy walk toward the shaft, and decide whether to go down now or wait one more second. A good player learns that every elevator is both an escape and a weapon, and that the wrong floor at the wrong time is the end.

What it meant back then

In North America, Elevator Action was Taito's first game sold as a conversion kit, so a lot of American players found it inside a cabinet that used to hold something else. It fit right in at a pizza parlor or a bowling alley, the spy theme easy to read from across the room. Kids who grew up on TV secret agents could walk up, drop a quarter, and be one for a few floors, until they rode an elevator straight into trouble.

Playing it today

It holds up because the rules are few and the building is full of choices. It rewards calm players over fast ones, which makes it a great game to hand to someone who says they are bad at arcade games. Let them take their time, and watch them grin the first time they drop a light on somebody's head.