This Week In Retro: Rush'n Attack (Patreon)

October 1985: Thankfully "I Ran" jokes went unused

by Diamond Feit

Do you have any enemies? I don't mean people you merely dislike or even loathe; at this point social media forcefully delivers the toxic opinions of a dozen assholes we'd never hear from otherwise onto our screens every day. No, I want to know if there are people out there that feel nothing but hate for you personally—and you in turn hate them.

Back in middle and high school I didn't have many friends but there were a number of kids who seemed to take pleasure in hurting my feelings. They didn't injure me or steal my stuff, they just made sure to insult me whenever they saw me outside of class. Compared to mean kids I saw on TV or in the movies I suppose I got off easy, but that didn't stop me from resenting both my bullies and the system that ignored my pleas for assistance.

I considered these tormentors my enemies for a number of years until we all graduated and the verbal abuse came to a sudden end. I would still run into them from time to time but they no longer took umbrage with my appearance or my unusual last name. Initially I held a grudge and treated them coldly, but at some point my anger combined with their indifference to turn me into the offender, not them. 

One particularly aggressive boy frequented the same after-school hangouts that I did, mocking me as he bested me in Mortal Kombat. Years later he worked as a pizza delivery driver which meant I often saw him at my front door; our surprise truce eventually turned into a kind of friendship and we never spoke about our past. We both left town for different destinations in our 20s and one day I heard that he died. Even though I never forgot how much emotional pain he put me through, I actually felt remorse.

On a much larger scale, I think back to the efforts of the U.S. government and the media during the Cold War to convince me that entire nations stood in opposition to "our way of life," thus making them our collective enemies. As a kid I accepted this propaganda uncritically, believing that America represented freedom while the Soviet Union rejected all forms of self-expression unless approved by the State.

While most of this indoctrination came from domestic sources, Japanese video games also fired the occasional pot shot at their northern neighbors. 40 years ago this month, Konami first released Green Beret into arcades, although the US version carried the much more inflammatory title of Rush'n Attack.

Rush'n Attack proudly broadcasts its pro-military stance to potential players with drawings of uniformed soldiers on the arcade marquee and on the side of the cabinet. Like many other contemporary software products, the game stars a lone hero sent to infiltrate enemy territory—in this case with specific orders to "Rescue the Prisoners of War." I always found the screen showing the captured soldiers tied to posts and unable to move disturbing. Three of the four men struggle against their bonds while the fourth doesn't budge an inch; I always assumed he had expired.

The shrill sounds of a siren begin each stage with the unnamed hero already standing inside a militarized complex featuring tanks, fighter jets, and missiles lining the backgrounds. Rush'n Attack never shows any maps or signage to indicate just where you're going but with red stars adorning all the equipment and enemies sporting long coats and bushy hats, it's clear that the game takes place somewhere inside the Soviet Union. Funnily enough, your soldier dude wears green camouflage even though he spends his whole mission fighting in wintry locations.

On that matter, the Department of Defense must have had a tough financial quarter when planning this operation as they sent you into battle carrying nothing but a knife. Then again, the troops running to intercept you do so largely unarmed, instead aiming to punch or kick you to death. This makes the few foes who do wield guns or explosives extra dangerous as you run headfirst towards their position.

What players really need to keep an eye out for are special enemy commanders who appear infrequently crouched low to the ground. Stabbing one of these guys spawns a special weapon with limited ammunition but greatly increased firepower. While the bazooka and hand grenades have their uses, I always held a sick fascination with the flamethrower as it dispenses red death in a flash at great distances, looking like the heat rays used by the Martians in The War of the Worlds.

Control-wise, Rush'n Attack keeps things as simple as possible with one joystick for moving and two buttons for killing. All four stages require running to the right and lack any real sense of exploration, although there are ladders to climb and small gaps to jump. Selectively deployed land mines also impede progress, forcing you to carefully leap over them or use your special ammo to clear a path.

Rush'n Attack doesn't have boss battles but each stage ends with a mob of soldiers storming the screen. These include dogs, one-man helicopters, and elite troops who actually use the flamethrowers instead of merely carrying them. Rush'n Attack also lacks any ending; clearing all four stages has you rescue the POWs but the game says "Proceed to Next Camp" and sends you back to the first stage. 

I pumped a small fortune of quarters into every Rush'n Attack cabinet I could find until a port came to the NES two years later. By that point it felt a bit aged compared to the more expansive experiences available on that platform in 1987. Still, Konami made a serious effort to update the game with more stages, more enemy variety, more power-ups, and a new two-player co-op mode that lets you sneak behind the Iron Curtain with a friend.

On NES, Rush'n Attack drops the rescuing prisoners angle and instead tells you to "Destroy the Enemy's Secret Weapon." This culminates in a special denouement where you must collect bazookas to shoot a missile priming for launch until it explodes in its bay, all while guards try to take you down. Completing this mission triggers an actual ending and a credits crawl; I wonder if "Hideo from Naniwa" who's listed as the sole programmer could have been a young Hideo Kojima? He would have joined the company just one year earlier.

The 8-bit version even has an all-new soundtrack that immediately overwrote all my memories of the arcade version which only uses a single, minimalistic marching tune for the entire game. When I looked up playthroughs of the different versions for this column, I was shocked that the music I long associated with Rush'n Attack only exists on the NES. The game struggles to draw all the sprites on screen in the thick of combat and the flamethrower got cut, but otherwise I'd say the console port surpasses the arcade original in terms of depth.

Lacking any sales data, I cannot imagine that Rush'n Attack moved a significant amount of units as Konami left it to rot in the 90s. Either that or the game's inherent Cold War scenario made revisiting it after the Berlin Wall fell a fool's errand. Enhanced arcade ports of Rush'n Attack did resurface in the early 21st century when publishers rushed to mine their back catalog searching for fresh material; this led to a digital-only 3D sequel called Rush'n Attack: Ex-Patriot in 2011, a game I'm certain I played exactly once and never touched again.

Even though Rush'n Attack debuted in arcades long before I could watch any R-rated movies, it immediately tapped into the part of my adolescent brain that craved violence. I had already spent years running and gunning in other action games but because Rush'n Attack restricts the use of firearms and explosives, the kills feel more intimate. You have your orders in one hand and a knife in the other; get to work.

It definitely took me reading the title out loud more than once before I realized what Rush'n Attack really meant. While I found the pun groan-worthy, I doubt I thought much about the message it sent. Again, I grew up in a country that insisted everything about the U.S.S.R. was antithetical to The American Way. Why would I question murdering their armed forces one slash at a time—especially when they're holding brave U.S. soldiers as hostages?

Four decades after the fact, I'm in shock. Konami already had a perfectly acceptable title for a game about fighting a plausibly-anonymous army, why would they craft cursed wordplay just to ensure Americans understand that this game involves killing Russians? My best guess is Konami's staff in Illinois saw the box office receipts for Rambo: First Blood Part II and sent an urgent FAX back to Japan proposing a new branding for the U.S. market.

The U.S.S.R. collapsed and the Cold War ended a long time ago, but I stopped thinking of Russians as enemies even earlier. I clung to the concept of having enemies a while longer, however, convincing myself that anyone who wronged me did so deliberately for malicious purposes. It never occurred to me as a child that my bullies were themselves children and might not act rationally at all times.

These days it's really difficult for me to consider any human being an enemy. Even when the computer in my pocket informs me of heinous deeds occurring on the other side of the world, I try to remind myself that those people doing awful things are people and I cannot know what motivates them.

That said, I can think of a few Rush'n Attack-style pun-based names that, if slapped on a video game about going buckwild with a knife, I would purchase and play in a heartbeat. I believe in human fallibility over the existence of evil but some folks out there are working overtime to convince me they've replaced their humanity with naked avarice.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.