Picture it: the late 1980s in a pizza parlor in Auburn, Michigan. My brother and I were probably in town for a basketball game my dad was coaching and we would sometimes play in only when it was a rout one way or the other. Anyway, the pizza parlor had the arcade version of Elevator Action and we played it for a little bit.
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The game is kind of silly like a lot of games back then. You play as a secret agent who starts at the top of a building. You have to find hidden documents in specially marked rooms with red doors and get them to the bottom. Along the way there are bad guys who look sort of like the black Spy vs. Spy guy. You have to shoot them and avoid their bullets by ducking or jumping or going into a room. You can shoot out light fixtures to make it dark to help you escape sometimes. The most grisly way to kill the evil spies is to crush them with the elevators if they're under them. You can also get crushed if you're under an elevator when it comes down or if you perch on top of one when it reaches the top of the shaft.
The levels get more and more difficult as you go with more bad guys, more elevators (and escalators), and more stuff to find. I'm not sure if it's one of those games with an end level because I've never gotten really far on it.
Elevator Action was not on the Atari systems but there was a version for NES, though I don't think we ever got it. Probably just as well as it would have probably cost like $50 for a game that while fun would only be amusing for a little while.
A few years ago from Amazon Vine I got a knockoff Gameboy thing that came preloaded with a bunch of Japanese games. Elevator Action was one of them. So I got the chance to play it again and still haven't gotten farther than two or three buildings. You can probably get one of those knockoff game systems for pretty cheap on Amazon, Wish, or Temu.
The game does have a really catchy theme song that if you start playing you probably won't get out of your head for a little while.
1 comment:
Forgot about this game...it was like Donkey Kong and Burger Time that were fun for their time, for a little while, and we were young and they were great graphics and games for their day....but time moved on and left these games in the past.
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