Past meets present: Elevator Action Returns

It’s incredible how quickly the video game industry used to change, in terms of priorities and design. That’s not a knock on the current standards, but a reminder that a whole lot of what you see today got its start at the beginning of the HD era, two decades ago — there’s a reason that people fight over what qualifies as truly “retro” and what’s just a continuation of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era into the present, only shinier and on more powerful hardware.

Leaving aside the validity of those arguments, though, there is no debating how different things were for video games in 1994 than in 1983. Taito’s Elevator Action released in ‘83, and it was shockingly violent, especially for what was a cartoony, 8-bit depiction. Shocking because, just a few years before, in 1978, Taito made its presence known worldwide with Space Invaders, a game that asked the then-profound question “what if enemies attacked the player, though?” — a question that came with the caveat that those enemies could not be human, because series creator Tomohiro Nishikado felt it would be “immoral” to attack people. Five years later, Elevator Action had you firing off a pistol at countless anonymous baddies coming out of doors, delivering running dropkicks to their face, dropping light fixtures on their heads, and getting them crushed underneath elevators because it was gnarly and also worth more points that way.

However, it still very much had the trappings of its day. Jumping was closer to that of Mario in Donkey Kong than Mario in Super Mario Bros., and running wasn’t an option yet. There was music, but it was a single stage theme that took less than 30 seconds to loop, with a secondary, faster-paced “hurry up” theme for when you were taking too long and things were about to get frantic. The levels, as a baseline, were all the same in terms of the 30-floor building they were contained within, but the placement and number of red doors you needed to enter to retrieve the documents that were the whole point of all of this shooting and death-by-elevator were what changed, and since later levels took longer, danger increased more often the further you dug into the stage loops.

Now, don’t misunderstand — all of that ruled and still rules, to this day. Elevator Action is an expertly crafted arcade game, that understood arcade game design from the day and remains thoroughly entertaining and capable of hooking new players over four decades later. Its arcade sequel, 1994’s Elevator Action Returns, simply shows how different things were in arcade game design just over a decade later, in a similar way to how Elevator Action was markedly different from Space Invaders even five years on — consider not just the graphical changes from the seminal space shooter to the elevator-focused one (from black and white to full color, more detailed and animated sprites) but also the audio: that 30-second looping theme was an evolution from Space Invader’s four-note, descending chromatic bass note song, the first continually playing in-game theme, and made without the aid of programmable sound chips, too.

Elevator Action Returns had its own massive audio changes, too. Rather than about a minute of looping music total and the same stage theme in every level, Returns includes multiple themes per level, as they change after you hit certain points in the stage, adding new musical wrinkles to the themes that keep the loops from all being similar. Also, the music is courtesy of Taito’s house band, Zuntata, and features varied instrumentation playing an extremely jazzy, upbeat selection — maybe not the soundtrack to the destruction you’ll cause that you expected coming in, but it fits wonderfully like it was always supposed to be there. Who knew rocket launchers and pianos worked together so well?

While the first level starts out looking like an updated version of the kind of building the original Elevator Action took place in, that changes in a hurry — when you get to a certain point in your descent, all of a sudden the building begins to fill with holes, and a massive chunk of it collapses, blown up and knocked down by some maniac in a helicopter. That’s “Red Suit,” the leader of a terrorist group looking to bring on a new world order through revolution. This is pretty clearly not a revolution for the people, either, but one of those where the vision is that this guy gets to be in charge of everything now. Your unit, the DEF, was formed to take him on, and from this point forward the game diverges significantly from the original, in a pretty similar way to how Donkey Kong ‘94 utilized the original Donkey Kong at first as a way to guide you into the brave new world it was about to blow your mind with.

While opening red doors remains necessary for progressing through the game, and enemies continue to appear from other doors continually, everything else has changed. It’s only in the first level that you’re collecting documents a la the OG Elevator Action; the rest of the time, you’re defusing bombs that Red Suit’s goons have planted — with this in mind, you’re no longer teleported to the floor with a missed door, but the game blares an alarm at you to let you know you’re close to letting a bomb stay fused. This game is much faster-paced, and not just because you can make your character break into a sprint and jump gaps. It’s deserving of the run-and-gun moniker, rather than being a platformer like the original, for a reason. No longer are you limited to three shots before a reload, as you can just fire nonstop with your pistol like you’re playing Contra. There are limited-ammo machine guns and rocket launchers now, too, and you’ll need them, as there are places with entire waves of enemies to contend with, some of them with jetpacks or flying around on what look like jet skis that can take to the skies somehow.

Blue doors can be opened by you, and you get a bonus item from them, with the item in question determined by when you pressed the button to stop the spinning wheel. Most items are just worth points, but there are also health recovery ones — oh, yeah, you have a health bar now, to compensate for the added chaos. And that chaos is also as graphic as you can imagine it would be, freed even more from the shackles of a more overall conservative view toward violence in games. Huge explosions, the ability to set enemies on fire with said explosions — it’s worth more points than shooting them, you know — and of course the inherent changes that come from depicting violence with an 8-bit board producing sprites that are somehow both blockier and smoother compared to a 32-bit one full of far more detailed and expressive ones.

There are loads of destructible objects, often hiding items within them — be they health recovery, points, or the powerful limited-use weapons — as well as security cameras that call more enemies to stop you if they catch you, light fixtures, and control panels for environmental hazards like electric gates that will absolutely fry you if you touch them while they’re activated. Security robots cling to the ceiling and wheel their way to you. Zombie-like, dual-wielding men appear from doors, and take a whole lot of rounds to kill compared to anything you dealt with in the original Elevator Action. Security dogs come running at you at top speed. The fancier a jacket on a foe, the more powerful their weapon, and later enemies begin to lie prone to make it more difficult to hit them, or to even see that they are firing at you.

There is so much more to think about and to do here, even with the basic premise being the same as the game that arrived on the scene 11 years prior. Luckily, it’s not all flash and explosions, either, as there is still loads of strategy, some of which begins before you actually step foot into a stage. That’s because you have your pick of three playable characters. Kart Bradfield moves the fastest, but his firing speed and the power of his gun are mid. Edie Burret is the weakest as far as shot power goes, but her firing speed is the quickest, and she moves plenty fast, herself — given hitting an enemy with a shot interrupts their own actions, speed is as valuable as pure power. Then there’s Jad the Taff, who is not only the big boy of the bunch, but hits like it, too. He’s the slowest option, to compensate, but he can also damage enemies just by bumping into them — Kart and Edie can attack from up close for extra points, but you have to actually hit the attack button to do it instead of just big guying your way through a floor.

All three have named handguns that are spoofs of existing guns: Kart has a Glog 18 instead of a Glock, Edie a Berletta instead of a Beretta, and Jad has a Dessert Eagle, which should be a confectionary Counterstrike mod if it isn’t already. Each of these characters also has a unique secondary weapon, which can be long tossed while standing and thrown a shorter distance while crouched: Kart throws a hand grenade that causes widespread damage, Jad has a sensor bomb used as a proximity mine, and Edie has the best of the bunch in one guy’s opinion, as it’s a fire bomb. Remember: setting dudes on fire is worth lots of points. But on top of that, Edie can setup an exploding perimeter around her, either on a small scale by setting fire to enemies waiting for an elevator or getting on/off of one, or by tossing off grenades left and right to protect her flank as she deals with a larger wave of enemies, in the moments where you are purposefully pushed to your limits there. It’s extremely funny to set a fiery trap and watch guys in trench coats saunter right into it, oblivious to the fact that only you are, for whatever reason, impervious to flame.

When you have to feed another credit in, you get to choose if you want to play as a different character, so you’re not restricted to the one you pick at the beginning forever unless you manage to stay alive. And here these choices do mean something, since this is no longer a game that just loops and loops with slight variations and increased difficulty: Elevator Action Returns expects you to master its six stages over time, learning all the little tricks and danger spots, where to find hidden items, and how to properly prep for the most difficult combat moments in the game. The game is designed in such a way that it’s easy enough to progress without an encyclopedic knowledge of the game’s systems, but you will need to know what all the tools in your toolbox do, and how to use them, to make it all the way through. It’s not the most difficult arcade game in the world by any means, but with just one life by default and a health bar that will be melted away by late-game enemies — of which there are many — you do have to eventually figure it all out.

The sheer variety of levels — and the things that can happen within them — keeps Elevator Action Returns feeling fresh throughout. The design and setting is different each time out, even if the basic task of “don’t die, enter red doors” is both simple and ever-present. Taito went all-in on the action-movie-esque goofiness here, too: the second level opens with a helicopter flying directly at a building, and then it crashes right into it as enemies scatter. It turns out that’s your helicopter, and it’s how you decided to enter the building — that’s a far cry from the stealthy zipline entry of the original game, and also showed that your DEF members are as willing to go all-out and blow things up to achieve their mission as their target, who again, you are introduced to in the previous stage because he exploded a building you were in, alongside the concept of Elevator Action itself.

Sadly, despite the fact that Elevator Action Returns is a tremendous piece of arcade gaming, it was not a commercial success in the same way as the original — fighting and 3D games had taken over arcades by 1994, so while Taito created an undeniable masterpiece on its 32-bit, F3 System board, it lacks the legacy of the game it’s a sequel to. Luckily for you, though, none of that matters: Taito hasn’t let the fact it didn’t become a high earner like its predecessor keep it from being released again and again. As happened with a number of Taito games, both from that era and otherwise, it was ported to the Sega Saturn, and Ving did an excellent job of things there, too, getting a nearly arcade-perfect iteration of the game on the system. You’re limited to how many credits you get in this one, which makes completing it a more difficult task, but practice makes perfect and all that — and Elevator Action Returns is a game that you will want to keep coming back to.

It also received home ports to the Xbox, Playstation 2, and PC in the next era of consoles, thanks to Taito Legends 2. These ports have some problems, as graphically they lack the sharpness of the arcade original and Saturn port, in addition to introducing issues like the machine gun not rapid-firing like it should. But that was mostly a problem two decades ago when a rarity was otherwise unavailable. In the present, Elevator Action Returns is included in the Egret II Mini arcade cabinet, and, more conveniently for most people, the Saturn port has been re-released in the present with various optional quality of life features like rewind, slowed-down play, and an expanded options menu for credits and lives, as Elevator Action Returns S-Tribute — this game is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One, with it also working on the successor systems for the three consoles. For $15, you can pick up a fantastic port of the game that, otherwise, requires you stumble upon it in an arcade, or have a Saturn and also pay an average of $200 for just the disc on the secondary market.

The worst thing about Elevator Action Returns is that it came out at the wrong time. Arcades were focused on different things at that point, and 11 years in between games might have also contributed to the issue — there weren’t exactly people lining up for a sequel to Elevator Action in 1994. You don’t have to care about that in the present, though. Elevator Action Returns does not forever belong to the context that it once did, in a market that didn’t necessarily see the appeal nor give it the shot it deserved. It’s 2026, and Elevator Action Returns has an incredibly low barrier to entry owing to it being available on the last two editions of the big three modern consoles, as well as Steam, at a cost of $15 when it’s full price. Who cares that it wasn’t what was hot in 1994, and now it’s 2026 and old? It’s there, for you to play whenever you want, and you should if for no other reason than that it rules. What more could possibly be required?

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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