I pride myself on having tastes in video games that stray outside of the norms. Everybody and their half-retarded inbred brother can swear up and down about how they played FFVII back in the day and it changed their shit, while all the punk intellectual gamers who beat off regularly to their Star Ocean wallscroll can talk about how those people are idiots for not realizing the superiority of Final Fantasy VI. Meanwhile I’m sitting in the back of the classroom going “Jesus fucking Christ, when can we stop talking about Final Fantasy? Pretty kids with swords and angst does not make a game.” When I was a kid, you didn’t sit around in your house and watch cutscenes. No, you fucking invited John from up the street over and the two of you would light up the screen like the digital commandos you had trained to be. Nintendo was the only god we swore allegiance to, our leader in this digital revolution. And we were ready for the call. Sometimes we were colorful mercenaries, blasting away at swarms of the alien horde. Sometime we were a band of haphazard heroes, brought together by circumstance, fighting against the evil empire to regain the hope we had lost. And sometimes we were cold gunslingers, dressed in colorful Day-Glo outfits with a set of laser guns at our sides, riding towards destiny and never looking back.

Sometimes, we were Sunset Riders.

My earliest memory of Sunset Riders is probably when I was staying with my family at this somewhat fancy hotel (they had a pool and stuff) because we couldn’t afford a real vacation. Adjacent to the pool area was a tiny arcade, filled with all sorts of wonderful mid 90s era arcade games, the kind I still get all hot and bothered for when I find one in a pizzeria or some other hole in the wall. I have a thing for cabinet design, don’t ask me why. Being a kid, I had like a dollar my mom had given me, and wasted it playing air hockey and who knows what else. It’s then that I notice this kid playing some cool four-player cab near the door. He’s running around cowboy town, lacing up bandits with Technicolor bullets and dodging gunfire like… well I mean, he wasn’t that good at the game. Kid was like ten or something, he was getting killed all over the place. Still, I see an empty joystick and there’s a hot quarter burning in my pocket so I’m in. Soon, we’re natural compadres, silent gunslingers manning bright joysticks. But, despite my youthful enthusiasm, I’m soon dead in the sand, searching my pockets for another quarter I know I don’t have.

“Hey” the kid says to me, eyes not moving from the machine. He silently lays a bag of quarters down on the machine, not taking his other finger away from the button as a steady stream of bullets fly out of his gun. “Need a quarter?”

The next hour is spent with me and this nameless kid felling do-gooders, riding bright steeds into the heart of battle, and listening as the sixteen-bit digitized voices of our onscreen avatars yell “Yee-haw!” in appreciation of our efforts. But like so many memories, this one fades away. I said goodbye to the kid, thanked him for all the quarters, and as far as I know I never saw him again. But that moment would always remain in the back of my mind.

It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m going through the crap at the yearly “kids” tag sale they have at the library, going through the discarded beanie babies and action figures hoping to god some kid will have the Super Nintendo games his older brother left behind when he left for college or something. Low and behold, I find myself pawing through a collection of familiar grey plastic, the only sight that can truly warm my heart. It’s mostly crap, your standard Mario World, Donkey Kong, random sports game lineup. Until I get towards the back. The label is faded, torn, maybe even photocopied, I can’t tell. But there’s no mistaking what I’m seeing. Sunset Riders. And it all comes flooding back, the sand, the horses, the sweat on my brow as I dive for cover, letting loose a volley of purple burst fire in retaliation.

$5 is a cheap price for a dream.

I soon find myself in my room, eager-eyed peers gathered around the television as we lay down hails of gunfire. A second controller has been commandeered from Peter’s closet, whose dad gives me a scornful look as we retrieve it, one I know stems from when I helped throw his lawn furniture in their family pool while they were on vacation. But fuck him, the hearts of the believers burn brighter than his hatred. And there, in this haven of mahogany wood paneling, bathed in the glow of an old television, we were kings.

“Watch out for the dynamite, throw it back!”

“The jump is coming up, don’t fuck up the jump Peter, you always fuck up the jump!”

“Oh Jesus, get behind the fucking barrels, this guy just won’t die.”

The game features four personas for the player to adopt. Two of them, the city-slickers Steve and Billy, use pistols, which though offering a higher rate of fire are totally dumb and useless. The best characters in the game are Bob and Cormano, who at their highest level of power-up will absolutely wreck anything in site with one colorful blast from their purple-spitting duel shotguns. Though both of them play the exact same, popular thought usually leads to a fight over who takes Cormano first, since the motherfucker is a mustachioed Mexican man wearing a huge pink sombrero. You just don’t get much tougher than that. Maybe the closest Konami ever came to that level of character design was the legendary Yagyu Jaguar Genbei from Neo Contra, who is a huge motherfucking black samurai in power armor. I like to imagine that anytime Konami designs a character, there’s a boardroom meeting with a bunch of serious looking Japanese men in suits questioning “Could we work a bionic arm in here somewhere? Or like… a rocket launcher that bursts out of his chest?”

And so, our heroes advance, through a slew of stereotypical Western locales and characters. From when the first boss, a fat evil tycoon by the name of Simon Greedwell, grasps his chest and declares in shitty 16-bit stereo sound “Bury Me With My Money” before falling from the balcony to his death, you know you’re in for a ride. Taking down train bandits by horseback, saving the barmaids at the local pub and being rewarded with a quick show, leading an assault on Chief Wigwam (Chief Scalpem in the Arcade version) and his gang of swapped to appear more racially sensitive character sprites. All the while mashing down the fire button and watching colorful firework-like displays of bullets litter the screen as generic bandits scream “ugh” or “ah” as they meet their end.

One place Sunset Riders really shines is the control. Unlike most arcade games where you basically had “Attack” and “Jump” (see Final Fight), the boys of Sunset Riders have some serious tricks. They can grab ledges and swing themselves up, throw sticks of dynamite back at adversaries, dangle from a balcony while firing, and even employ a slide maneuver ala Megaman. Also of note, is the extensive attention to detail. A bunch of fleeing chickens appearing before the emergence of a herd of bulls (which you must run atop to stay alive), the crispy corpse of an enemy caught atop a flaming bridge, the bandits falling from moving trains and rolling along the ground. Beautiful stuff to watch.

The game switches up between the regular stages with some that are set on horseback. These stages are a real fucking pain in the ass because in addition to streams of bullets coming from every angle, the enemies are playing dirty and tossing logs underneath the legs of your horse. These would always be where the most valiant players tripped up, cursing “What the fuck! If I try to jump them there’s like a goddamn bullet right behind me waiting to hit me!” The best strategy in these stages was to wildly swing your cowboy around on his horse trying to fill every nook and cranny with gunfire hoping some guy would pop out of the bushes and catch one between the eyes. There’s also a shitty bonus stage in-between some rounds, featuring essentially a shooting gallery of static gunslingers for you to cycle through and hit. This was maybe one of the best competitive aspects of the game, as towards the end of the stage the screen is littered with guys and each players is wildly pounding fire trying to shoot more than his buddy.

To me, there’s no better sidescroller than this. A pinnacle of early 90s arcade know-how flawlessly ported to the SNES. With a good friend by your side and a case of mountain dew, there was no better way to spend a lazy summer afternoon. This is the kind of game I’ll tell my grandkids about. When they’re lighting up their brain interface helmets with the latest version of “Virtual Final Fantasy 20XHundred” I’ll be there to say “You fucking kids never played a video game in your life.” Then maybe I’ll hit one of them because old people can pretty much do whatever they want and get away with it. My grandfather used to steal all the time. It was awesome.

Sadly, as with most arcade games that don’t care how many lives you use, you arrive at and end. Sir Richard Rose, the white man who had hired all these rather insensitive racial stereotypes to stand in your way, meets his end at your hands. Filled with thousands of hot pink and green bullets, flashing red as one does when he is near death, he says words fitting of any English criminal mastermind in their final moment.

"I say...bit o' bad luck..."

And with that he collapses. At this point, the room has erupted with the shouts of friends who have stayed to watch this game come to its conclusion. In the end we would laugh, and rest our hands, and watch as our heroes collected their bounty of $100,000 United States dollars – adding it to their already overflowing wallets – money accumulated from previous stages and bonus games. And as the summer day came to a sad close, we couldn’t help but watch as our heroes mounted their barbed steeds, rearing up in one last huzzah, before riding off into the glowing orange sun.

The End.

Presented by Konami