Gun.Smoke
Introduction
Gun.Smoke began as a 1985 Capcom arcade shooter designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, who would later oversee the studio’s biggest hits like Final Fight and Street Fighter II, with programming by Takashi Aoki and a soundtrack by Ayako Mori that helped make it one of Japan’s highest-grossing arcade games in early 1986. Capcom brought it home in 1988 with ports for the Famicom Disk System and NES, adapting the coin-op experience for cartridge with a new soundtrack composed by Junko Tamiya for the console version. Players control a Wild West gunslinger fighting through vertically scrolling frontier towns and canyons on horseback and on foot, gunning down outlaws, dodging environmental hazards, and facing off against boss gunfighters, while collecting upgrades that expand the hero’s weapon options beyond his basic six-shooter. Its Western setting was unusual for a shoot ’em up at the time, and the game is now often cited as a clear tonal and thematic ancestor to Capcom’s own Red Dead Revolver decades later, a lineage that eventually fed into the modern Red Dead Redemption series after Rockstar took over the franchise.
