Spy Hunter review: a car full of weapons and a rule about civilians

The road scrolls up the screen, and you are driving a spy car with a machine gun in the nose. Black cars try to ram you off the pavement. A helicopter shows up and starts dropping bombs. Pull into the back of a weapons van and you come out with oil slicks, smoke screens or surface-to-air missiles. It is every secret agent fantasy an eleven year old ever had, packed into one long highway.

A cabinet that felt like a car

Spy Hunter's controls are a big part of its pull. You steer with a futuristic yoke covered in buttons, work a two-position stick shift for low and high gear, and press a pedal to accelerate. There were sit-down and upright versions of the cabinet, and either way the machine felt like a cockpit more than a game.

George Gomez, the designer, sketched the road map out on a long scroll of drawing paper, and it shows. The road forks, the scenery and weather change, and at certain points the car turns into a speedboat and the chase moves onto the water.

The rule about civilians

Here is the smart part. The highway is shared with ordinary drivers, and the goal includes protecting civilian cars, not just destroying enemies. Blow up an innocent car and your score counter stops for a while. No lecture, no game over, just a quiet penalty that stings. So the fantasy of a car full of weapons comes with a demand for control: aim carefully, time your oil slick, and do not spray machine gun fire into traffic.

Spy Hunter handed you an arsenal and then asked you to be careful with it.

The start is generous, too. For an opening stretch you have an unlimited supply of cars, so a new player gets to learn the road before the game starts counting lives. After that there is no ending. You drive until you run out of cars.

What it meant back then

Spy Hunter was a hit in American arcades, among the top five highest-grossing machines of 1984 and 1985, and the sit-down cabinet was the one every kid at the roller rink or mall arcade wanted to climb into.

The game was meant to be a James Bond game with the Bond theme, but the license could not be acquired. Instead it played an electronic version of the Peter Gunn theme, over and over, and for a generation of Americans that tune is not a detective show at all. It is the sound of a white spy car tearing down a highway with a helicopter overhead.

Playing it now

Spy Hunter still feels great to drive. The weapons are fun, but the real skill is restraint: knowing when to brake, when to let a black car pass, and when to save your missiles for the helicopter. Learn the forks in the road, respect the civilians, and it becomes a long, tense drive you do not want to end.