Rolling Thunder made a gunfight into a matter of patience. Namco’s 1986 coin-op gave its secret agent, Albatross, a pistol that fired only a couple of shots at a time, a limited supply of bullets and a secret base full of hooded guards who could shoot back. The way to survive was to slip into a doorway and wait while the guards passed, or to jump up to the balcony above and take them from there. Retro Gamer’s writer remembered the first time he saw it, in an arcade on Poole Quay: after years of Commando and Ghosts ’n Goblins, “Namco’s game felt very different to everything that had come before it.”
Albatross and Geldra
The story, as the reviews of the home versions told it, is set in New York in 1960. Albatross is an agent of Rolling Thunder, the undercover arm of the World Crime Police Organisation. A secret society called Geldra, led by the elusive Maboo, plans to conquer the world, and has captured Albatross’s fellow agent Leila. He goes in after her through ten levels of Geldra’s base, from a warehouse down into caves of stalagmites and lava, and meets Maboo at the end. As Your Sinclair explained, the ten are five levels played twice, with new hazards such as ceiling lasers the second time round. Retro Gamer described him as “a suave James Bond wannabe”, and the comparison was common: Computer & Video Games called him “a James Bond-type”, and ZZAP!64‘s reviewer said he knew what a baddies’ base should look like because “I’ve watched the Bond movies”.
Doors, floors and bullets
Each level scrolls sideways across two floors, a walkway at ground level and a balcony above it. Albatross jumps between them, and Retro Gamer singled out the jump as the thing that made the game work: it let him escape the guards on one floor or get the drop on them from the other. The doors along both floors are where the guards come from, and where Albatross hides. Doors marked with a bullet hold more ammunition; others hold a machine gun. ZZAP!64’s review of the Commodore 64 version gave the arithmetic: 50 shots to begin with, 50 more from each marked door, and machine-gun ammunition only 25 rounds at a time. Wireframe later picked the machine gun as the game’s “killer feature”: after the slow pistol, a few seconds of continuous fire made Albatross seem “almost invincible”, until the ammunition ran out and he was back to his revolver.
Geldra’s hooded guards are called Maskers, and in the arcade their hood colour showed how many shots each would take, as ACE explained when it noted that the Spectrum version had dropped the colours. Later levels add panthers, bats, automatic lasers, pools of lava and men made of fire. Each level has a time limit. A bullet kills Albatross at once, while a punch or kick takes a share of his short life bar, and a lost life sends him back to the start of the level. That last rule was what most reviewers complained about.
The coin-op ran on Namco’s System 86 hardware. In Britain it was distributed under Atari’s name: Computer & Video Games listed “Rolling Thunder — Atari” seventh in its chart of top coin-ops in July 1987, and Commodore User had it second in April 1987. Atari Games handled it in North America too.
Home versions
U.S. Gold bought the home computer licence, and The Games Machine reported that it was “one of the more expensive licences bought recently”. The conversions went to the Manchester company Tiertex, which, as U.S. Gold’s Geoff Brown remembered, did “720º and Rolling Thunder for us on all formats”, because one company doing every version was cheaper.
They arrived in 1988 and divided the magazines.
| Version | Review | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Spectrum | CRASH 50, March 1988 | 47%: “marred by tedious gameplay” |
| Spectrum | The Games Machine 4, March 1988 | 80% |
| Amstrad CPC | The Games Machine 4, March 1988 | 78% |
| Commodore 64 | The Games Machine 6, May 1988 | 58% |
| Atari ST | The Games Machine 6, May 1988 | 74% |
One of CRASH‘s reviewers, Gordon, asked why Albatross had to go “right back to the start of a level whenever you’re killed”, and thought more playtesting might have saved it. Your Sinclair, on the other hand, told readers to “nip down to the shop and get Rolling Thunder”, warning that it was “piggin’ hard”. ZZAP!64 liked the Commodore 64 game’s play but not its “horribly blocky” sprites or its soundtrack, and called it “merely a competent arcade conversion”. The Amiga version followed later in 1988. The Codetapper site, which takes apart Amiga games’ graphics, found that it drew its action in a window of 224 by 128 pixels and updated the screen only once every seven frames, about eight times a second.
In America, Tengen, Atari Games’ home label, published a Commodore 64 version and, in 1989, an NES cartridge with a password system; Namco published the Famicom version in Japan. Retro Gamer thought the NES game “pleasant”. The arcade original was later included in Namco’s PlayStation compilation Namco Museum Encore in Japan and in Namco Museum 50th Anniversary in 2005.
Sequels and imitators
Retro Gamer argued that Rolling Thunder’s influence outlasted its popularity. Its first issue described Sega’s Shinobi (1987) as “an improved variant of Namco’s excellent Rolling Thunder”, with a ninja in place of the agent, and a later feature traced the same blueprint through Data East’s RoboCop and Konami’s Sunset Riders. The same feature suggested that Taito’s Elevator Action (1983) had inspired Rolling Thunder in the first place.
Namco’s own Rolling Thunder 2 came to the arcades in 1990 on its System 2 board. Leila was now playable, so two players could go in together against a revived Neo-Geldra. Namco converted it to the Mega Drive in 1991. Rolling Thunder 3, developed by Now Production, was released only on the Mega Drive, in North America in 1993; its new agent, Jay, could choose a special weapon before each level.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, p. 55: arcade classic feature (Poole Quay; “felt very different”; the System 86 hardware; “a suave James Bond wannabe”; the two tiers and the jump; doors, limited bullets; Maskers, panthers and giant bats).
- Wireframe issue 6, January 2019, p. 66: “Killer Feature: Rolling Thunder” (the revolver’s rate of fire; the machine gun “seemed almost invincible”).
- ZZAP!64 issue 37, May 1988, p. 78: Commodore 64 review (1960, New York, Maboo, Leila, the World Crime Police Organisation, ten levels, coloured guards, time limit, 50 and 25 rounds; “horribly blocky”; “I’ve watched the Bond movies”; “merely a competent arcade conversion”).
- ST Action issue 3, July 1988, p. 87: Atari ST review (1960, New York; the WCPO, “better known as Rolling Thunder”; Maboo, Leila, panthers).
- Computer & Video Games issue 78, April 1988, p. 48: review (“a James Bond-type”; the hooded guards, ducking into doorways and the catwalk).
- ACE issue 6, March 1988, p. 52: Spectrum review (ten levels; pistol and machine gun; the arcade’s coloured hoods).
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 89: Spectrum review (U.S. Gold; ten levels; lasers, lava pool and “fire-men”; Gordon’s comments; Overall 47%).
- Your Sinclair issue 27, March 1988, pp. 18–19: Spectrum review (Albatross, the Rolling Thunder Undercover Police, the catwalk, ammunition doors; “piggin’ hard”).
- The Games Machine issue 4, March 1988, p. 52: Spectrum (80%) and Amstrad (78%) reviews (converted by Tiertex; “one of the more expensive licences bought recently”). Issue 6, May 1988, p. 57: Atari ST (74%) and Commodore 64 (58%).
- Computer & Video Games issue 65, March 1987, p. 92: the Amusement Trades Exhibition report. Issue 69, July 1987: top ten coin-ops (“Rolling Thunder — Atari”, seventh).
- Commodore User, April 1987, p. 99: top ten coin-ops (Rolling Thunder second).
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 80 and 129–131: Tiertex doing Rolling Thunder on all formats; Tiertex’s founders on their conversions.
- ZZAP!64 issue 39, July 1988, p. 103: “programmers Tiertex (Rolling Thunder, Indiana Jones)”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 68, February 1990, p. 73: Tengen advertisement listing Rolling Thunder for the Commodore 64.
- Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, pp. 76–78: “The Evolution of Rolling Thunder” (the Tengen NES port; Namco Museum Encore; ThunderJaws, Shinobi, RoboCop, Sunset Riders; Elevator Action as the inspiration). Issue 1, 2004: Shinobi as “an improved variant of Namco’s excellent Rolling Thunder”. Issue 17, 2005, p. 6: Namco Museum 50th Anniversary.
- Codetapper, “Rolling Thunder” (Amiga rips) (web, secondary): the Amiga version’s window size and update rate. https://codetapper.com/amiga/rips/rolling-thunder/
- Sega Retro, “Rolling Thunder 2” and “Rolling Thunder 3” (web, secondary): the 1990 arcade game and its Mega Drive conversion, Leila and Albatross, Neo-Geldra; Now Production’s Mega Drive-only sequel, released in North America in July 1993. https://segaretro.org/Rolling_Thunder_2 https://segaretro.org/Rolling_Thunder_3
- Wikipedia, “Rolling Thunder (video game)” (web, secondary): the arcade release dates; Atari Games in North America; the life bar; the NES and Famicom versions in 1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Thunder_(video_game)