This Week In Retro: Ikari Warriors (Patreon)

February 1986: Not-So-Fast, but Furious

by Diamond Feit

Does anyone else avoid reading the news these days for mental health reasons or is it just me? I find myself inundated with images of federal agents and the military assaulting and bombarding civilians, foreign and domestic. Beyond the emotional and psychic damage I incur from viewing such non-stop horrors, these scenes compel me to re-examine my own complicated views on the United States armed forces—specifically how video games have spent literal decades depicting them as heroic.

Even though I came of age in an era when our military had no wars to fight, I still grew up on a steady diet of propaganda convincing me of their inherent importance. American movies, television, comic books, and children's cartoons all did their part, but let's not undersell the influence of my public school education. When you start each day pledging allegiance to the flag hanging in every classroom, deferring to the republic becomes common sense.

Japanese video games also contributed to the offensive by borrowing imagery and iconography from U.S. pop culture and feeding it back to us in an interactive format. The protagonists of Commando and Rush'n Attack may not carry the red, white, and blue into battle but the artwork on the cabinet and the depiction of the enemies make it clear which side the player characters represent.

40 years ago this month, another military-themed action game debuted in arcades, again coming from developers based in Japan. Cribbing ideas from Capcom's Commando and a recent Hollywood blockbuster, SNK's Ikari Warriors invited players to invade an unnamed jungle in the name of—you guessed it—freedom.

Fundamentally, Ikari Warriors looks and plays a lot like Commando: Both games star a soldier who marches from the bottom of the screen towards the top. He carries a machine gun and a limited supply of grenades whereas the opposition has stocked up on heavy weapons, vehicles, and blockades to fend off this attack. Bullets travel in a straight line but grenades arc through the air before landing and exploding, offering a means to destroy targets on higher ground or behind walls.

Beyond these superficial similarities, the two games look and feel quite different. Commando's Super Joe arrives on the scene in a helicopter, one that drops him off at the start and picks him up when needed. He runs at a brisk pace across battle-scarred terrain, stocking up on grenades when he can but never upgrading his equipment. Based on the uniforms and general level of technology on display, one might assume the game takes place during World War II.

Ikari Warriors opens with a military jet crashing in a dense jungle. The heroes—plural, as this game supports cooperative play—emerge from the wreck wearing nothing but colored bandanas and simple black trousers. Ralf & Clark (renamed Paul & Vince in the U.S. version) move slowly, especially when wading through hip-deep water. Power-ups litter the battlefield, including armored tanks that they can commandeer as their own. Thanks to a few far-out elements like automated homing mines, the setting always struck me as a modern or a near-future conflict.

Ikari Warriors inherits its most distinctive feature from SNK's T.A.N.K. (a.k.a. TNK III), a 1985 action game operated with a rotating joystick called a Loop Lever. Turning the shaft controls the character's aim while pushing the stick steers them around. This enables players to move and shoot in different directions with a single instrument. It also enables the developers to throw far more hazards at players from all angles.

From a design perspective, Commando and Ikari Warriors follow the same overall layout with periodic massive gates blocking the player's vertical progress. Commando treats these obstacles as makeshift boss battles, spawning a sudden horde of soldiers onto the screen who must be defeated before the doors will open. Ikari Warriors has an encampment of enemies guarding each gate but it's up to the player to blast their way through with grenades or artillery fire.

More significantly, Commando has no ending. Super Joe eventually reaches and torches a stone stronghold, but the game simply starts again. Ikari Warriors sends Ralf & Clark on a specific journey into a concrete complex, one adorned with swastikas in Japan but left unmarked in the U.S. version. The heroes walk down a long red carpet to the game's only boss battle against four automated cannons and an apparently deceased villain sitting in a giant throne. Demolishing these final defenses allows Ralf & Clark to liberate their captured commander, a massive man who congratulates them and awards the player 1,000,000 bonus points.

To fully explain why Ikari Warriors captured the attention of so many players—myself included—we must touch upon its other creative inspiration, the 1985 American movie Rambo: First Blood Part II. Following the events of 1982's First Blood, the sequel transforms haunted Vietnam veteran John Rambo from that first film into a one-man army who delivers bizarre lines like "To survive a war, you gotta become war." I was too young for R-rated action at the time but images of star Sylvester Stallone bare-chested and armed to the teeth proliferated across all media as the film raked in hundreds of millions of dollars around the world.

Japanese distributor Toho Towa retitled the second film Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu (ランボー 怒りの脱出) with ikari meaning "rage" and dasshutsu meaning "escape." According to Ikari Warriors planner Koji Obata, SNK sought to acquire the Rambo license for their game but the deal never manifested in time. Instead, they simply titled the game Ikari in Japan, with the U.S. version adding Warriors. In the game Ralf dresses exactly like Stallone does on the movie poster with Clark substituting a blue bandana for red so players can better tell the two characters apart.

Like Rambo a year earlier, Ikari Warriors found great success, ranking high on 1986 arcade charts in Japan, North America, and the United Kingdom. SNK immediately began work on a sequel of their own, shipping it in Japan before year's end and abroad in 1987 as Victory Road.

Ports of Ikari Warriors appeared on all home computers and consoles, though the lack of a loop lever necessitated gameplay compromises. The Famicom/NES conversion became notorious for its sluggish frame rate and poor performance; Jeremy Parish described it as "one of the absolute worst" games on the console. 10-year-old me didn't care though, in part because 10-year-old me had nothing better to do but also because I loved the arcade game so much that I could spend hours plugging away at anything that kinda looked like it.

40 years later I retain a fair amount of affection for Ikari Warriors, certainly more so than most of its contemporaries because SNK packed it with oddities like giant arrow-spitting faces carved in rocks and the aforementioned corpse serving as a final boss. The sequel swerved into even stranger territory, dropping Earthly foes entirely for a battle against aliens in another dimension. If they released that game today they would have called it Isekai Warriors.

Ralf & Clark returned for one more Ikari game in 1989 before trading their firearms for martial arts, joining the cast of SNK's crossover series The King of Fighters in 1994 and returning in each subsequent year. That means there are grown adults who have spent their entire lives only knowing these two tough guys as brawlers and grapplers with no memories of their military service.

I think it's for the best that the Ikari Warriors series faded away, freeing up its stars to reinvent themselves and develop distinct personalities and broaden their fashion sense. Their 1986 adventure—and the 1985 film it riffs on—have their strong points but also read as overly simplistic and dated today.

At this point, any story of American soldiers assailing a foreign nation would only remind me of the real-life war crimes our current administration commits openly and without remorse. I know I'd much rather enjoy a virtual sparring session with Ralf or Clark than I would another jungle incursion, because I prefer not to wonder if my favorite video game characters belong in The Hague.

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.