June 1986: I can dodge bullets?
by Diamond Feit
As a kid I grew up on entertainment leftovers from past generations, partly because old tv shows aired in syndication long after their cancellation. It's also second nature for parents to share media that they previously enjoyed with their burgeoning offspring. My father raised me to appreciate Mel Brooks movies and baseball; time will tell if my children retain any affinity for Spider-Man or Castlevania.
This diet of decades-old material exposed me to a lot of old-timey actors and themes at a young age. Were it not for my dad's VHS collection, I never would have encountered Humphrey Bogart outside of caricatures in Looney Tunes cartoons, nor would I grasp why Bugs Bunny cared one iota about a strange man with a long face.
Speaking of Bogey, I definitely saw The Maltese Falcon while still in elementary school as it introduced me to gangsters and the world of organized crime. I know I understood cops vs robbers as a concept, but these suit-wearing gun-carrying tough guys were a band apart from the masked burglars featured in comic books. They looked sharp, spent big, and openly disdained stuff like \"waiting in line\" or \"paying taxes.\"
Once I became aware of them, gangsters popped up everywhere in pop culture. In the 1989 Batman movie, Gotham City is overrun by mobsters until one of them falls into a vat of chemicals and turns into a homicidal clown. New York's John Gotti regularly made front-page news with a grin on his face despite his frequent arrests. Captain Kirk and the Enterprise even met an entire planet of gangsters in Star Trek, a story I'm shocked the franchise hasn't revisited in the decades since.
Naturally, video games embraced imagery of these violent men at every turn. Hogan's Alley tested my ability to identify threats at a glance with paper-thin cutouts of gangsters in a shooting range. Early beat-em-ups like Renegade featured a progression of bad guys from street-level hoodlums to well-dressed mobsters. Narc imagined one wealthy wheelchair-bound man as the source of America's illegal drug trade and let players shoot that man with a rocket launcher.
40 years ago this month, one arcade shooter out of Japan leaned hard into the crime-fighting genre with a period piece set during Prohibition in the United States. Empire City: 1931 challenges players to take down the entire New York mafia one bullet at a time.
Empire City: 1931 begins on April 10th, 1931 on the streets of Manhattan. There's no in-game acknowledgement of the story but supplemental materials indicate the protagonist is an angry young man out for vengeance. The arcade flyers claim he lost his family \"in a bloody gang shoot-out\" and now he's looking to get even.\u00a0
Empire City operates in first-person, but there's no plastic gun here. Instead, players use a joystick to move a reticle at targets on the screen. These targets all conform to the classic gangster dress code, each wearing a trenchcoat and a hat. They're also all packing heat, setting their sights squarely on the player.
Within seconds of beginning a new game of Empire City, a woman will scream. She's being held hostage by a goon in a nearby doorway. A countdown in the corner of the screen indicates how soon he will fire; players must take their shot before the enemy does if they want to keep going, as every bullet in Empire City is fatal.
Picking off one gunman spawns another, usually taking cover as they ready their aim. Not every bad guy hides behind an innocent bystander; some peer out of open windows, take position behind obstacles, or even pop out from a manhole. Whatever their position, they won't wait more than a few seconds before pulling the trigger.
Empire City uses horizontal arrows to indicate the position of the next foe since the field of play can scroll in all directions and there's no guarantee two hazards will appear in the same vicinity. It's quite likely, in fact, that players will need more time to seek the mafia than the mafia needs to shoot, especially if they're nestled out of sight up high or down low.
Fortunately, Empire City has a Defense button dedicated to keeping the player alive. Pressing Defense offers a split-second of invincibility, just enough to avoid one bullet and restart the deadly countdown. It's not a foolproof maneuver, however, as Defense depletes your reserve of bullets and violently jerks the reticle upwards. The game also shows the player character with a shocked look on his face; this graphic covers most of the screen, so you'll need at least one entire second to regain your composure and recenter your aim.
I have no idea what's actually happening when I press the Defense button, by the way. Is my character dodge rolling or ducking behind a waist-high wall? Is he bunny-hopping to evade incoming projectiles? Why does this mystery move cost bullets, are they falling out of his pocket in the chaos?
Empire City: 1931 unfolds as outlined above for eight full rounds of action. Most rounds take place in the same street setting but with day swapped for night and vice versa. At least one round occurs inside the largest hallway ever built such that multiple mobsters can sneak into view one after another. The enemies don't offer much variety although one guy with a Tommy gun is a particular nuisance as just being in his presence saps your ammo supply.
Each round advances the \"story\" in so much as the dates on the screen advance from April through September. The final round, however, is a test of skill. Having finally cornered the boss of bosses, players have 10 seconds and one bullet to assassinate the unnamed kingpin as he scoots between windows in his penthouse. Success means a plethora of bonus points and the cycle begins anew, but failure costs one life and sends players back to the previous round.
I discovered Empire City many years later in a college game room where I spent my summers. Despite its age relative to the neighboring cabinets, the basic loop of \"find bad guy, shoot bad guy, repeat\" quickly buried its hooks into me. It also offered incredible value because the more time I spent with Empire City, the longer I could play for just one of my precious laundry quarters.
What really cemented Empire City as legendary to me was the fact that I only encountered the game in that one setting. Over time it faded into the depths of my memory like a long forgotten dream; any attempts to explain it to my friends resulted in nothing but confused looks.
Ironically, Empire City must have succeeded by some metric because the license holders did their damnedest to keep the game in circulation. An 8-bit port made its way to the Famicom and MSX but only in Japan; an announced NES version never materialized. Infogrames brought Empire City to multiple home computer platforms as Prohibition. Original developer Seibu Kaihatsu produced a spiritual sequel in 1988 called Lead Angle or Dead Angle depending on your region, but it slipped past me unnoticed.
Today we can thank the benevolent Hamster Corporation for rereleasing both Empire City: 1931 and L/Dead Angle on modern platforms via their Arcade Archives series. I can only imagine what a 21st century native might think of this game set nearly 100 years before their birth, especially as mob movies and gangsters have seriously fallen out of fashion. Do kids today understand that Capcom didn't invent the Chicago Typewriter seen in Resident Evil 4? That fancy suit Leon S. Kennedy wears when he carries it isn't just for show, you know!
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.