Spy Hunter was developed and published by Bally Midway in 1983 and it proved to be a major success for the company. Playing as a spy you had to drive a heavily armed car, and sometimes a boat, destroying various enemy vehicles and speeding along the vertically scrolling roads. The idea was to make it as far as possible wasting as many bad guys as you could along the way.

The game-play was excellent and this exciting action/driving hybrid was massively popular in the arcades. You drive a fictitious vehicle called the G-6155 Interceptor, apparently modelled after the 1982 Chevrolet Camaro Z28. The busy top-down vertically scrolling roads were packed with innocent vehicles which you had to avoid or risk a penalty to your score. There were also four enemy vehicles rendered in dark blue which each had their own special abilities. The Switchblades were fitted with tire slashers like chariots of old and if they got close enough they would cause you to crash, the Road Lords were armoured vehicles impervious to machine gun fire who tried to ram you, the Enforcers were limos with shotgun wielding thugs onboard and the Mad Bomber were helicopters who tried to drop bombs on you. The player was armed with a terrific array of weaponry including machine guns, oil slicks, smoke screens and missiles.

You could reload periodically if you spotted a weapons van by driving up the ramp to board it and there were also occasional boathouses which you could drive into to switch to an armed boat for a section. Sometimes the bridge out sign would force you into the water. The boat was also armed with machine guns and oil slicks and enemy boats would drop explosive charges into the water ahead of you or fire torpedoes at you.

The game was released as an upright cabinet and there was a sit down cockpit style variety. Each featured a steering yoke with four buttons for your weapons, a gear stick for high or low gear and a pedal to accelerate. By covering a good distance and destroying enemy vehicles you could get bonus lives to extend the game. The game-play would continue as long as you could survive and there were also occasional icy road sections which made the car tough to handle.

The game is very reminiscent of Bond and the developers originally wanted to use the Bond music but they couldn’t get the rights so they plumped for the theme tune to an American private eye series called Peter Gunn. It was a classic film noir style show and the music was a perfect fit with the game-play.

The game was a very successful single player release and it got ported to various home consoles. There was also a sequel in the arcades which featured co-operative two player game-play but it was a commercial failure. The game-play in Spy Hunter was much copied and a host of clones stole elements from it. Bizarrely Universal Pictures acquired the rights to it back in 2003 and a big budget action movie based on the game is due out later this year. You can play the original game in your browser at Midway’s website.