
	Platform NES Genre Shooting / Platform Developer Nintendo Publisher Nintendo Released 1986
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Gumshoe

Purchasing a Nintendo Entertainment System 20 years ago meant picking up a lot of extra paraphernalia, including the Zapper light gun and R.O.B., the one-and-only Robotic Operating Buddy. My family objected to having extraneous gadgets lying around unused – so this meant we wound up acquiring games like Stack-Up for my robot friend (which I think is very funny, for we only ever cheated on Gyromite anyway) – and Gumshoe for the ray-gun. These games were allowed to be profoundly weird partly because the whole concept of “home video games” was so new and undefined; there were no rules.

But let’s start with the most obvious difference between this and your average Zapper game – and maybe the most interesting too. Especially at the time, virtually every light-gun game was a static screen, where the (mobile or motionless) targets would magically appear or “jump out”; if the game wasn’t as benign as Duck Hunt and involved humans, they were facing and attacking you – but Gumshoe is a platform game with a charmingly scruffy on-screen character (“Mr. Stevenson” I presume?) who relentlessly power-walks onward – even off a cliff’s edge. Nor does he pay any attention to the various fauna and mecha that try to run him down. He only defends himself if you personally take a shot at him, leaping into the air to dodge the bullet – which is how you have to get him over those gaping pits (fortunately, he can double, septuple, infintuple-jump his way through the game, which is good, for you know what they say about game-designers and large holes). Oh, and could you shoot everything else in the way too? It’s like Super Mario Lemmings meets Lethal Enforcer – with a lot of pretty red balloons.

So the daughter of retired gumshoe “Mr. Stevenson” (I presume?) has been kidnapped by the local don, who wants the five Black Panther diamonds in exchange for her safe return. So a jaunty afternoon stroll should be all it takes for Mr. Stevenson to retrieve them. Utterly nonchalant, he struts through a desert before climbing to the top of a cityscape and jumping around on the buildings; and when he gets to the sea, he jumps right in without breaking his stride. The sight of him furiously doggy-paddling without changing his demeanor is an image for the ages; it must be seen to be believed. As is probably evident by this description, the game is generally downplaying the quest a little by having the gems “just lying around” (as opposed to being in a bank vault), but when all is said and done, there’s a decidedly seedy air to the proceedings – to the degree that it’s a “straight trade” and the main character doesn’t seem to mind if the don keeps the loot.

But then, he doesn’t seem to be the brightest bulb. “Demo movies” were always a kick in these early games: if you left the title screen running for a little while, the game would take the opportunity to play itself and show you “how it was done”; sometimes a game was reckless with its character, sometimes restrained – ah, but Stevenson. The very first demo shows Stevenson starting out okay, until we see a rogue projectile soaring directly toward him; will he jump over it at the last moment or will it be blasted out of the air? Neither; it strikes him and he perishes. The next demo shows the second level up in the clouds; Stevenson leaps off the starting ledge and casually drops into a bottomless pit (and there are a few more of these!). How cold and callous -- not even the game cares!

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So, just a few seconds into the first level, the game angrily pounds its fist and demands to be thought off as a Mario rip-off. First comes the Angry Projectile. Remember how, as you got closer to the dark, forbidding castle, the turrets would roar to life and spit those scowling cannonballs at you? Across the length of the entire level, high and low – you couldn’t

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escape them. Well, whoever’s waiting at the end of the various levels here thought that was a great idea (and has a great arm…and can run really fast)…so is pelting you with empty liquor bottles (You’d think prepping the ammunition might…affect the sniper’s aim a little, but no.). Then, second of all, there is the Treasure Box; it had a skull face on the front as opposed to a question mark, but the beautiful golden glow tantalizes you with the promise of rich rewards inside. Why, I knew how to deal with these; you strike them from underneath and they disgorge their contents. And I remembered that jumping in Gumshoe involved shooting the main character, not pressing a button; so feeling quite smug at having put several things together at once, I nailed the box on my first try. Oops. Ouch, that looked painful. The sound system did an outstanding job emulating an agonizing death scream. Guess I’m not supposed to do that.

It’s good that I got that out of my system early on, though, for it was an image that I’d be seeing a lot of. The enemies come from all directions – behind Stevenson, beneath him – and you also have to cover Stevenson himself because he’s never more than a few seconds away from an endless drop. Poor Stevenson’s death is possibly the harshest yet seen in any game up to that point in time; Zapper games, more than any other, really seemed to love humiliating you (sometimes I was more interested in putting down the dog in Duck Hunt than the ducks). Although the “Game Over” screen crops up frequently, I accidentally discovered a way to bypass it one day; furious at a series of cheap deaths in mere seconds, I started pulling the trigger repeatedly in an effort to blow out the game screen itself. Impressed by my attitude, it let me continue right from where I left off. Hmph, it would appear that games really do encourage violence!

And, if nothing else, the obstacles Gumshoe throws at you will at least catch your attention. What a cornucopia of monsters! Many of them are visiting celebrities (or at least stunt doubles): the sea urchins from Clu Clu Land, the polar bear from Ice Climber; even the “red” river’s ominously lurking monster seems to be visiting from Joust. In the real ocean, sometimes a devious shark will swim hurriedly up behind you; blasting it leaves a cheerfully grinning skeleton which can still take you out. And the levels themselves, not just what’s in them, deserve to be discussed as obstacles. Each level seems to be randomly generated while you’re going through it; sometimes I stumbled onto a chilling collection of octuple-sized, leering “skull blocks” in the sky level…and this was especially disturbing the first time because they had never been in that level before – and there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for why you might travel through them at some times and not others.

I don’t think there’s ever been anything on a par with the music here. At the first impression, the music sounds annoying, with the fear that it will, at any instant, become maddening; the music “down by the sea” in particular is literally only two seconds of music repeated over and over and over (although the jellyfish, bopping in place, seem to be enjoying it). Yet not only is every piece of music irritatingly catchy despite that; not only does each odd-sounding tune truly fit its level (the “sky” level sounds like an “Upwardly-Mobile Ad-Exec’s Theme”, but it works); but each selection – all of them -- taps into portions of the sound system that I don’t believe I’ve heard used in any other game. Putting it simply, I’m surprised more games don’t sound like this one.

After the diamonds are handed over to the don, his fedora rockets off his head in shock and Stevenson gets his daughter back…for at least part of the day. Later that afternoon Stevenson receives another ransom note, informing him that his daughter’s been re-kidnapped and the boss wants another five diamonds. Whoops. I’m not absolutely certain, but I strongly suspect there’re only a finite number of these things out there. Considering how disquieting some of the rest of this game is, I wouldn’t be surprised if, eventually, after the cycle’s repeated one too many times, there was a grotesque conclusion when Stevenson finally comes up short. I thought I might try to spare him that pain, but he only jumped out of the way – into an oncoming airplane.

Brendan Lynch

(August 17, 2006)


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