NARC

NARC is a run-and-gun arcade game developed and published by Williams Electronics in 1988, created by Eugene Jarvis, the designer of Defender and Robotron, with George Petro. Players take the roles of armored narcotics officers Max Force and Hit Man, sweeping through city streets, alleys, and drug labs to arrest or obliterate the pushers and enforcers of the kingpin Mr. Big. It was a deliberate product of its moment, a Reagan-era war-on-drugs fantasy released at the height of the Just Say No campaign, and it courted controversy with its violence: enemies could be burst apart with rocket launchers, and the game let players choose between busting suspects for points or simply blowing them away. Technically it was a landmark, among the first arcade games built on digitized photographic sprites, giving its cast a grainy, filmed-in-a-parking-lot look that added to the exploitation-movie tone. It was a substantial arcade hit and was ported to home systems, most notably a toned-down NES version published by Acclaim in 1990. Loud, lurid, and utterly certain of itself, NARC distills late-1980s American drug-war politics into a coin-op power fantasy, which is precisely why it sits at the top of the honorable mentions on any most-American-games list.