Elevator Action

Elevator Action
Elevator Action
Developer(s)	Taito
Publisher(s)	Taito
Platform(s)	Arcade, NES
Release	1983
Genre(s)	Action, Side-Scrolling, Platform game
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players

Elevator Action is a 1983 arcade game by Taito. It debuted during the "Golden Age of Arcade Games". Innovative in gameplay, this game was fairly popular for many years. The musician was Yoshino Imamura. The game was followed by a sequel, Elevator Action II (also known as Elevator Action Returns).

Description

The player assumes the role of a spy who infiltrates a building filled with elevators. He must collect secret documents from the building and traverse the 30 levels of the building using an increasingly complex series of elevators. The player is pursued by enemy agents who appear from behind closed doors. The player must outwit them via force or evasion. Successful completion of a level involves collecting all the secret documents and traversing the building from top to bottom. In the lower floors of the building, the elevator systems are so complex that some puzzle-solving skills are needed.

The game cabinet was a standard upright. The controls consisted of a 4-way joystick and two buttons, one for "shoot" and the other for jumping and kicking. The graphics are extremely simple, 2D color graphics. The maximum number of players is two, alternating turns.

Gameplay

The player assumes the role of Agent 17, codename: "Otto", a secret agent for an unspecified organization or government. As Otto, the player must "acquire" (steal) a series of secret documents from a tall building which Otto enters from the roof. Otto must traverse the building's numerous levels via a series of elevators and escalators while acquiring the documents. After retrieving all the documents, Otto must escape via the getaway car at the bottom of the building and thus progress to the next level of the game.

The documents are located behind closed doors which the player enters to retrieve. Enemy spies appear from behind some doors and the player can evade them or attack them in a number of ways. Using his gun he can fire at them or use it to sever a hanging light above their head, dropping it on them. The player can also kick the enemies (by jumping into them) or attempt to crush them with an elevator Otto is riding. The player loses a life if hit by enemy fire—physical contact with the enemies themselves will not affect him. Otto may jump over low enemy fire or duck to evade higher enemy bullets. The environment itself also lends itself to some danger for Otto; the player will lose a life if he falls into an empty elevator shaft, or is crushed between a descending/ascending elevator and the floor/ceiling.

The upper levels of the buildings are fairly easy to traverse and sparsely populated with enemies. As the player progresses downward, enemies become more numerous and some escalators appear for travel between levels. In the lower floors of the buildings (which, since the building is traversed from top to bottom, is actually further into the level), the elevator system becomes very complex and traversal more difficult. On these floors, not only does the player need to manage to get to the bottom floor, they must at the same time evade or dispatch the numerous enemy agents attempting to apprehend them. Traversing these lower floors requires some puzzle-solving skills and this novel gameplay added to its appeal.

Legacy

Since this game was fairly successful, it was followed by a sequel in 1994 called Elevator Action II, sometimes known as Elevator Action Returns. Though featuring far superior graphics, it never achieved the same success as the original.

The Killer List of Videogames includes this game in its list of "Top 100 Video Games".

A port to the original Game Boy included the ability to acquire different weapons, such as a machine gun that fired more rapidly.

An enhanced remake of Elevator Action, titled Elevator Action EX, was released on the Game Boy Color in Japan. The game was released in the United States with a Dexter's Laboratory licence, under the title Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage.

There is also another enhanced remake on the Game Boy Advance, called Elevator Action - Old & New, which was released only in Japan.

In 2005, Elevator Action was released on the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and the PC as part of Taito Legends.

The title of the dojin game ElePaper Action is a parody of Elevator Action's title, though the two games are not similar.

Some of the chapters in the Hellsing manga are named Elevator Action.

On March 5, 2007, the NES port of Elevator Action was released on the Wii Virtual Console.

2 games for Palm OS platform, Agent Z and its sequel Agent Z 2 by Ellams software are based off Elevator Action.

Ports

Like many games of this era, Elevator Action was ported to some home systems in 1985 for personal use. It was ported to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System. A port was planned for the Atari 2600, but never released. However, a prototype of the game was found and released to the hobbyist community in 2001. There are some issues with collision detection, and the game is only 95% complete, leading many to speculate that the video game crash of 1983 was a key factor in its non-release. More recently, Sony published a mobile version of this classic game.

Series

There is a sequel to Elevator Action called Elevator Action II, known as Elevator Action Returns. It is an improvement over the original Elevator Action including an in depth story and more mature style. It was later ported to the Sega Saturn in Japan as a console game and is also included in the Taito Legends gaming edition for the Playstation 2.

External links

Elevator Action at SpectrumComputing.co.uk