XP Arcade: Elevator Action

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Elevator Action is pure, classic arcade. In the sense that it is, itself, a classic arcade game, but also in its concept and gameplay, which is about as arcade as it gets. You are Agent 17, codename “Otto,” and your goal is to steal all of the documents from some 30-story buildings before escaping them in a bright red car waiting outside at street level. What’s in the documents doesn’t matter — that legions of guys in suits come out of doors and start firing guns at you tells you all you need to know about their contents. You aren’t supposed to have them, and yet, having them is the state you’re continually trying to get to.

There is both a simplicity and a complexity to the action. Ascend and descend stairs and elevators. Duck out of the way of slow-moving bullets, or jump over them if they’re low enough. Return fire with a pistol with its own slow-moving rounds that can fire off three at a time before a quick pause to reload that mostly serves to add some timing and strategy to the mix, or just run right at an enemy agent and kick them in the head — it’s just as effective as shooting them in the face. You need to acquire every document in each building, but don’t worry, they aren’t hidden. All of the red doors have documents in them, and when you’ve retrieved said documents, the door is no longer red. If you miss one as you descend to the ground floor, you’ll be warped right back to the topmost floor that has a document still in it, and then have to work your way down again after acquiring it. Oh, yeah, and the longer you take, the more aggressive and numerous the agents defending these buildings are. Don’t skip the red doors, yeah?

You can shoot out the lights while riding elevators down, briefly gaining some cover. Agents won’t stop firing at you when this happens, but it does feel a little like they react less to your actual presence and more to your perceived presence, so if you think you can work well in the confusion, then go for it. If you happen to drop one of the light fixtures right on an enemy’s head, well, that’ll do the trick just as well as a kick or bullet, too.

The building is meant to be a bit of a maze — not labyrinthian, but with enough little twists and turns to keep descending from being as simple as riding an elevator from the top to the bottom. It’s straightforward enough at first, with an elevator or two heading down in the narrowest sections of the building, but as you descend floors and things widen, you start to find walls separating the left and right portions of the building, or stairways, or an elevator on one side but not the other side, or the same thing happening with stairs. Or you end up with an entire mess of elevators that connect to not standard floor, but other elevators, elevators all the way down, except for the parts that still have doors for enemy agents to come popping out of, guns blazing. Well, the Elevator Action version of guns blazing, anyway. It’s still too many bullets for a a secret agent who jumps with an intentionality more like Donkey Kong-era Mario than Super Mario Bros. Mario, so even a few bullets on screen at once can spell your doom given how long and mechanically you hang there in the air.

You can duck, you can jump, and while you can’t actually run, jumping while moving forward does give you a bit of a spring in your step, which you can then use to dropkick a guy in the face. This is useful a whole lot of times, but maybe never more useful than when there’s an agent in an elevator ascending toward you, and you decide to time your jump kick to the face right for when the guy is going to attempt to shoot you, solving two problems with one boot. The longer you survive, the tougher these guys end up getting, so you do need to be mindful of how long everything is taking you. Things become a lot tougher when, for instance, enemies can lay prone on the floor and keep shooting at you, but you aren’t able to do that in return in order to avoid fire. When the music changes, you know that things are about to get worse for you like this.

Elevator Action just keeps going, getting tougher each time you enter a new building. You don’t have any continues, so, good luck on getting to the point where you have to wonder if the game ever actually ends, but at least you do earn an extend every 10,000 points. Of course, getting to 10,000 points in a game released in 1983 is a lot different than getting to 10,000 points in arcade games from even a couple of years later. You score 100 points for shooting an agent, 150 for dropkicking them or shooting one in the dark — dropkicking an agent in the dark is 200 points — and 300 for defeating one via shot lamp. You also score 300 points if you can crush an agent with an elevator, which seems like a good time to point out that Elevator Action is an incredibly violent game for 1983! You’ve got to remember that “what if waves of enemies attacked the player” was a new concept when Taito released Space Invaders just half-a-decade prior, and using aliens instead of people was a purposeful decision because creator Tomohiro Nishikado felt that killing waves of humans would have been immoral. Just a few years later, Taito would release a game where you could crush a guy with an elevator in order to steal some documents you just kind of assumed held meaning.

Those documents, by the way, are worth 500 points each, and clearing a level gives you your biggest payout: 1,000 points multiplied by which number building it is that you’re clearing, though, only up to a 10,000-point bonus. Points are not particularly easy to come by outside of that massive bonus, even if you’re a skilled player, and the ways to score more points than usual involve putting yourself at considerable risk, which can, in some cases, cancel out the benefit of playing that way. Scoring vs. survival, the eternal battle of the arcade game. This tug of war powers so many classics, and Elevator Action gets in on that action just enough to keep you both hooked and thinking.

Taito released Elevator Action to arcades in 1983, on the SJ System board — the successor to their “Invaders” board that had released in 1977, and despite predating Space Invaders, was nicknamed for it for reasons that should be pretty obvious if you know anything about Space Invaders. Elevator Action is far and away the standout on this 8-bit arcade board, which is not necessarily meant as a slight against the other games it shared it with, but is more a pro-Elevator Action statement. Still, if you’re something of a casual arcade or Taito fan, this is the one you know the name of from that bunch. Or, to put it another way, Elevator Action is one of just two games from the SJ System board — Pirate Pete being the other — that Taito bothered to put on their impressive mini cabinet, the Egret II Mini, which, four expansion packs in, includes over 80 arcade games that Taito developed or has the distribution rights to.

Elevator Action was ported quite a bit. The Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Famicom and NES, Game Boy, MSX, SG-1000, and ZX Spectrum all received ports in the game’s heyday, and it ended up, decades later, with a mobile re-release and on Arcade Archives, putting it on the Switch and Playstation 4. Elevator Action, as mentioned, is in the Egret II Mini as one of its stock releases, appeared on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Consoles via its NES port, and was included in the first volume of Taito Legends, released for the Playstation 2, Xbox, and PC. It was also included as an unlockable in the Sega Saturn conversion of its arcade sequel, Elevator Action Returns, which changed the gameplay and setup so much that it requires its own dive to explain, and in turn is still available through the Elevator Action Returns S-Tribute re-release.

Most of my experience with Elevator Action has come by way of Taito Legends and the Egret II Mini — I haven’t picked up the Arcade Archives release solely because hey, there are already multiple copies of the arcade game in my home, including one that can be played with a four-way stick as originally intended — but I did get a chance to play on an upright cabinet at the American Classic Arcade Museum, located within Funspot in New Hampshire. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just assuming things about the simplicity and approachability of some classic arcade games, and how easily they get their hooks in and show themselves to be fun, mostly because I’m very receptive to said hooks. However, my wife was with me and had never played Elevator Action before, and she was immediately into it even before figuring out what those red doors were for — a reaffirming moment like that is always welcome. Sure, she’s pro-arcade, too, but you’re reading this right now, aren’t you? This is news you can use.

If you yourself have never given Elevator Action a try, for whatever reason, it’s worth checking it out. Taito’s output from this era — post-Space Invaders, pre-Bubble Bobble — isn’t nearly as well-regarded or explored as other stretches of their history, and some of that might have to do with the lack of killer arcade experiences within that era. Again, I point to Taito’s own lack of re-releases from it, despite their general approach to bringing the past into the present with regularity. But Elevator Action is the standout from that crop that holds up. There’s a reason it stuck around on the top earners charts in Japanese arcades for almost an entire year after its release, you know? And it did much better abroad than Taito had expected it to, as well.

Elevator Action’s particular style of gameplay was revisited by Toaplan in their action-platformer eroge, Pipi & Bibi’s. That game is something of a combination of ideas from both Elevator Action and Namco’s Mappy, with half of the stages borrowing from the “run around a building for sensitive materials while avoiding agents trying to kill you, it’s all a timing puzzle with elevators and stairs,” and the other half being trampoline-based a la Mappy’s mode of transportation. The game has plenty of its own original flair, though, and the combination of the two ideas makes it far more than a game that’s just aping a Taito classic while adding naked women to it. The 1980s had a few more titles that fit into the same general bucket as Elevator Action, but their output slowed down as arcade priorities changed and more console-centric development took off. It all does make you wish that more companies had tried their own spin on Elevator Action to see what else they could come up with to add to this strong foundation, but then again, we’ve got Elevator Action and Elevator Action Returns as is, and they’re both widely available all this time later. Maybe Taito got it right both the first and second time, in ways we can still appreciate decades later, and that’s more than enough.

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