Super Contra

If you ever spent your formative years hunched over a sticky arcade cocktail table, squinting through the haze of cigarette fog and suburban teenage ennui, chances are “Super Contra” was your baptism by fire. Not to be confused with whatever mutant cousin was making the rounds on someone’s NES in a Midwestern basement, “Super Contra”—or “Super C” if you’re feeling both lazy and friendly—was Konami’s 1987 answer to the question, “What if we made the first Contra game meaner, louder, and with approximately twice the shrapnel?”

Published in the golden delirium between Reagan’s final term and the death of big hair, “Super Contra” is the kind of run-and-gun side-scroller that could turn a well-behaved child into a twitchy, quarter-munching desperado. It’s the sequel to “Contra”—and make no mistake, it wears the badge like a shrapnel-riddled purple heart. Legend has it some junior marketing exec wanted to call it “Super Contra: The Alien Strikes Back”—because, of course, aliens don’t need consistent branding, only sequels.

The basics: You’re still Bill Rizer or Lance Bean—recognized here by their glorious pixels and the sort of American jawlines that probably chug protein powder for breakfast. Your job? Sprint and swagger through five stages of tropical jungles, mechanized hellscapes, and the sort of military-industrial nonsense that would give Oliver North fever dreams. The plot? Something about Red Falcon returning, because apparently no one in the Reagan era knew how to kill an intergalactic organism the first time.

Forget about story, though. Super Contra is all about *feel*: The bulging, hand-painted sideart glistens with Cold War bravado, depicting hyper-muscular super-soldiers who look genetically engineered from Stallone’s biceps and Saturday morning cartoons. The soundtrack blares a synth-metal dirge, the sort of tune that seeps so deep into your memory that years later, when your car’s check engine light comes on, you’ll swear you hear the Jungle Theme in the hum of the dashboard.

But “Super Contra” didn’t just rehash the old moves. No, Konami spiked the gameplay with a sadistic sense of innovation: Gone were the gentle, top-down interludes of the first; in their place, vertical scrolling levels—where gravity, and your own hubris, are just another thing to betray you. The weapon system? Stripped down, muscle-bound, still cruel. Die, and that spread-shot you cherished more than your little brother is gone, gone, gone. It’s a shooter’s purgatory—you reload, you re-die, you curse, and you accept that some lost soul standing at your elbow will, inevitably, mash “start” and steal your last life right before you hit the boss. You will hate him, but you will also be him.

You’ll remember the feel of the joystick sticky with the ghosts of spilled Mountain Dew and joyless adolescence. You’ll remember the cabinet attract mode, blaring at maximum volume, daring you to dump your lunch money into something less predictable than Skee-Ball. Most of all, you’ll remember the way the screen exploded into a million death blossoms—bullets, grenades, player-vaporizing snot rockets—so relentless that survival felt like a party trick and a minor miracle.

Forget the Konami Code. This isn’t the NES, pal. “Super Contra” allowed no such cheat-day mercy in the arcade. Here, your only “thirty lives” came in increments of quarters, clinked down in an act of desperate faith and mild financial ruin.

It was gnarly. It was unfair. It was the best possible way to train for an adulthood full of unwinnable battles and sudden ambushes. And in the flickering half-light of a dying arcade, amidst the smell of burnt popcorn and broken dreams, it was—somehow—the time of your goddamn life.