(Originally published to Glitchwave on 8/4/2024)
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Contra
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Genre(s): Run and Gun
Platforms: NES
Release Date: February 20, 1987
Raise your hand if Contra has vexed you, brutalized you, or made you question your skill as a gamer. If you didn't answer yes to all of the options listed above, you're lying through your teeth and need to confess your sins of dishonesty. It’s quite alright to feel overwhelmed, for Contra is arguably the video game that first instilled the aggravating sensation of “NES hard” that the 8-bit console and this primitive era of gaming became synonymous with. Admittedly, the NES wasn’t a bastion of breeziness before Contra arrived to shake things up with a world-shattering earthquake, disrupting the balance of fair difficulty forevermore. Hell, Konami, the development team behind Contra, sufficiently traumatized gamers of the 1980s with the wavy flight patterns of the Medusa Heads, the armored defenses and acute reflexes of the ax-men, and scythes materializing out of thin air in Castlevania a year prior. However, certain contextual evidence behind Contra suggests that it was the first game where the pain became so excruciating that it could no longer be ignored.
The title “Contra” is not an accepted word in the English dictionary, so don’t try to use it during a game of Scrabble thinking it's a shrewd maneuver. Rather, it’s a prefix that encompasses a definition of opposition for every word that it provides the former half of (ie. contraceptives combating pregnancy or contraband defying the regulated methods of commerce). Using the stem of these words broadly for the game’s title connotes that the game’s themes involve, but are not limited to, varying degrees of dissension, contention, and civil unrest. But between whom, you might ask? Well, depending on the localization of the game, the antagonists causing the strife will vary. In the Japanese and North American versions, Bill and Lance, the two playable beefy dudes who obviously stem from Arnold Schwarzenegger's platoon in Predator, are on a mission to annihilate an alien threat that crash-landed from an asteroid that fell to Earth. The Japanese version is the only one that illustrates this conflict in the opening cutscene, while the American version simply brushes by the context and catapults the player into the fray of action. Due to the lack of contextual clues in the American version, many players believe that Bill and Lance are enlisted government soldiers tasked to eradicate a plaguey communist presence. Given the outlying context of the Cold War era during this game’s development, the shiny red armor of the enemies, and the “Red Falcon” faction that they belong to that will clearly ring “Soviet Army” in the minds of every player, American Contra is a game that will strike a feeling of pride for the good ol’ stars and stripes if that’s how you roll. Any traces of alien activity that would render this story speculation void can be explained by the commies collaborating with extraterrestrial forces to insidiously squash the West’s freedoms. Those vile fiends. Contra’s depiction in both Europe and Australia is so radically different that the game, and the series of Contra titles that would follow, is called “Gryzor” and “Probotector” respectively. In both versions, regardless of the title, Bill and Lance have been shifted into gray, metallic robots who are ambushing a squadron of other androids that come in multiple different colors. The reason for this drastic warping of Contra’s characters and thematic makeup is that Germany, a peacemonger country completely unaffiliated with war and instigating conflict, wanted to censor the game’s “violent content” to protect the impressionable sensibilities of their children. I guess the entire continent of Europe complied, and Australia did the same because the land down under has always jumped at any reason to censor video game content. Did they stop to think that our future robot overlords would find the premise of a savage robot civil war to be unsavory? Someone at Konami will eventually pay for their lack of foresight.
However, no matter how one’s homeland decides to depict Contra for its denizens, the game’s “run and gun” gameplay will fortunately be an indelible core to Contra’s gameplay. For those of you unaware of this genre with the fun rhyme scheme, it’s a subsector of the “shoot ‘em up” orientation of games where the objective is to spray the screen with a ceaseless burst of bullets while dodging an equal amount of firepower discharged by the opposing forces. Contra was admittedly not the first title in the genre, but it certainly holds an Elvis Presley status of being the first of note that spurred the inspiration for the following run and gun titles moving forward. Contra was a surefire success on the NES because it combined the overwhelming excess of screen-spanning obstacles with the platformer-intensive trend that defined most of the acclaimed titles on the NES. Because a large portion of a platformer’s fabric is predicated on the design of its levels, Contra displays quite a varied array of level themes for a game whose primary goal is focused on shooting rather than jumping. The opening jungle area is arguably the set piece most vividly conjured up in the memory banks of the ye-olde NES era. Disintegrating bridges will lead to the player swimming in the drink adjacent to the earthy, verdant ecosystem above, with a striking color contrast between the greenery of the jungle and the crisp blue of the waters. The hailstorm of bullet fire here culminates into a blockade barrier armed with cannons, a sizable first boss that stops the scrolling entirely. The jungle reappears after the first level but in this instance, the player will be ascending upward avoiding the bottom ground as it's being eaten by the screen. Contra often switches up the trajectory of how its levels progressed through, and the most apparent instances of this change are with the alien base stages that occur between jungle areas. Here, the character’s movement is confined to a horizontal space while they dodge enemy fire facing directly toward them, and each section is completed when the player destroys the glowing central unit usually found in the center. The snow level adds a polar opposite climate to the jungle while providing the same side-scrolling progression, and the energy zone’s protruding flame beams effectively complicate the straightforwardness of running and gunning. The standout area of Contra is the alien hive finale, despite the linear progression it shares with plenty of previous levels. Its otherworldliness is quite spellbinding with its general haze of alien activity. Considering that the fellow NES title Metroid shares the same graphical architecture, it's time that gaming historians start citing H.R. Giger as an integral influence on the medium in its early days.
Contra is also associated with the broad arsenal of firearms at the player’s disposal. That is if the player manages to catch the flying capsule that contains the winged ammunition modification to the player’s standby automatic weapon. The piddly little marbles that spurt out of the standard gun simply won’t be sufficient enough, so keep watch for these trinkets that appear periodically. Actually, keep this advisory statement in mind, but not as a rule of thumb. Refrain from acquiring any other alternative ammo once you’ve secured the Spread Gun. Sure, the rapid-fire alteration, the laser, and the swirling flame launcher are certainly improvements on the standard method of offense, but I need to highlight how the Spread Gun dwarfs all of them to the point of irrelevance. With the large and bulky bullets firing from three different angles, the player can practically let the gun just mow down all of the single-hit enemies that might appear from multiple places on the map without too much skill with one’s reflexes. Getting up close and personal with any formidable enemy like a turret or any of the bosses will still result in the Spread Gun obliterating it in a matter of seconds. I may have a nostalgic attachment to the Metal Blade from Mega Man 2, but the Spread Gun easily matches its outstanding, unparalleled power in its respective franchise and its massively celebrated repute.
Realistically, the player will still have to settle on whichever weapon modification passes by, for, likely, they’ll only retain their augmentation for a minute in any best-case scenario. The NES has a pension for whipping the players into submission with their difficulty but good fucking God, is Contra the lord of the NES challenge hill. The run and gun gameplay already connotes that a splash of bullets and other deadly progression snags will constantly swarm by the player from all angles, but Contra adds insult to the probable possibility of injury by only giving the player only three lives for the entire duration of the game. I should also note that Bill and or Lance will shed their mortal coils upon receiving any sort of damage, so the stipulations reveal themselves to be three hits before the player is forced to restart from the first screen of the jungle. And here I thought Konami was one of the few benevolent NES developers who tried to accommodate players with safety nets like health bars and unlimited continues, using Castlevania as an example. It turns out that I was duped again and that Konami is capable of crafting a horrible beast ready to barbarically devour player’s souls and shit them out all over the sidewalk. Fear not, concerned gamers, for the only way to attenuate the harsh circumstances surrounding Contra is perhaps the game’s greatest contribution to the medium. At the first screen of the game before pressing start, the player can enter what is colloquially known as “ the Konami code,” a sequence of specific button presses that will grant the player a bountiful thirty lives as opposed to the miserly amount typically given. Youths of the 1960s had “the twist” and the youngsters of the 1970s were attempting to “do the hustle,” the kids of the 1980s continued this trend of memorization to this code to ensure a (marginally) smoother pathway to the end credits where the Red Falcon menace is wiped clean from Earth’s surface. Gradius was technically the first game to feature the Konami code, but its popularization in Contra paved the way for the utilization of this auxiliary enhancement.
Contra’s reputation truly precedes itself. It’s an unquestionably essential game in the historical sense of gaming. Yet, I question whether or not a game that’s only enjoyable if you cheat is an indictment of its overall quality. Admittedly, one could still have a blast charging through the throngs of alien forces with only three lives available, but the select few people who can accomplish this have been practicing since the game’s release. I, and many others, do not have the time or patience to overcome Contra’s strict difficulty curve, which is why I will always resort to using the iconic code to simply stand a chance past the jungle. Frustratingly absurd error margins aside, Contra is still high-octane fun to be had on the NES with marvelous presentation and diverse gameplay styles. Contra is also at its best with another person manning Lance but proceed with the utmost caution.
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