Spy Hunter is a classic for the ages. A game that doesn't miss its charm among today's offerings.
The game started out as a pet project by George Gomez, a game designer for Bally Midway, who wanted to make a game based on his own car, a 1983 Z28, and make the action fast and exciting. He thought about the James Bond films and their car chases, so a thing that sprung into his mind was the theme music. He tried licensing the track but couldn't, since it was too expensive for his limited budget. He then decided to use Peter Gunn's classic spy theme for the game.
For me, using this music was a wise decision. Bond's music is already overdone nowadays, and in 1983 the franchise wasn't doing so well. The Peter Gunn theme works better for this game. A year later the game got released for the arcade with great praise and became a really popular title, one that resisted the apparent 'fall' that happened that year.
The game quickly came to the NES, with a few graphical changes but with the same charm. You drive a super car that has machine guns, and you follow a endless road while fighting enemy cars and dodging innocent civilians. A nice catch to this is the fact that if you destroy civilians, your score gauge is locked for a few seconds. With a certain number of points, you gain an extra car.
The enemies are very varied. There's the bullet-proof strong car, a monster truck with piercing tires, a armed to the teeth limo and choppers. Yep, choopers that drop bombs on the road. You'll need to think up strategies to fight the enemies, as each requires a different way to beat.
Depending on which way you follow, you'll get to a waterway where the car turns to a boat and the game remains with the same gameplay but in the water, where you'll need to dodge a bonus hazard: mines.
Spy Hunter is a game I keep close to my heart. I played the heck out of it when I was a kid on the NES. I had a chance to play it in the arcades and in some other machines in my life, but the NES version really has more charm in it.
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