This is war! Or at least that's what I thought back in the day when I spent my coins on the arcade game 1942. In this Capcom title set during World War II you piloted a fighter clearly inspired on the legendary P38 Lightning, with the goal of reaching Tokyo while destroying planes along the way.
Released in 1984, this challenging shoot 'em up created by the designer Yoshiki Okamoto, who is best known for his on work on early games of Final Fight, Street Fighter and Resident Evil series, was not a technical marvel of its time, mainly because the stages changed little in appearance from one to another and its soundtrack wasn't varied either, however, this didn't really matter due to the noisy atmosphere of the amusement arcade where you were playing the game.
Anyway, 1942 introduced a curious gameplay mechanic that some later games in the genre would keep: performing a maneuver to dodge the projectiles of the rivals instead of dropping a bomb, however, what earned this game a legendary status was not that, but the addictive on-screen action.
In each stage there were countless of planes to destroy with a couple of guns, and you also had the valuable help of two small planes, which were placed on the sides of your fighter shooting at the same time as you, this gave you more firepower that was especially useful in those moments where some stronger planes appeared. On the other hand, the final enemies also deserve to be highlighted, since they were gigantic planes that instead of exploding into a thousand pieces when you defeated them, they fell due to the weight of the amount of lead that you put in their fuselages.
Perhaps the most curious and risky creative detail about this shoot 'em up is that Capcom, being a Japanese company, dared to portray the people of their own country as the villains of the story set in the World War II. I think doing something like this nowadays, could probably generated some controversy, just remember the commotion that arose when the movie Oppenheimer was released in Japan.
Anyway, the truth is that this classic action game was Capcom´s first hit in the old arcades, then it was adapted for several home consoles, including the Nintendo NES and more importantly, several sequels were made. Now, I would like to know if you had played any of its versions.