LAST Week in Retro: The Outfoxies

Note from Jeremy: Sorry this didn't go up on schedule Sunday! The past week has been a little chaotic, as you may have noticed, but we'll be back on track this coming weekend. Thanks for your patience.

March 1995: Namco Asks, "What If We Made Super Snuff Bros?"

by Diamond Feit

It feels like the 1990s was a booming decade for movies about professional killers. Perhaps the flashpoint was John Woo (The Killer, 1989) or Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, 1990) or Quentin Tarantino (take your pick), but we got a lot of movies about murder for hire. Video games about professional killers have always been around, but they stand out less because almost every action game requires the player character to become a non-stop instrument of death—usually for an in-game reward. Even Mario and Luigi made a profit killing those animals living in the pipes in Mario Bros (1983).

I bring this up because smack in the middle of the 1990s, Namco looked at the booming fighting game genre (including the more violent entries from overseas... possibly) and gave the world The Outfoxies, a "battle action game" entirely starring hitmen, hitwomen, hitkids, plus a hitchimp. In the process, they almost invented a new video game genre.

The Outfoxies is a variant on the one-on-one fighting game, though it is notably not classified as one in Japanese; the former are called taisengata-kakuto games, The Outfoxies is a taisen action game. Like a traditional fighter, each match pits two characters against one another in an arena with each player tasked with lowering their opponent's health bar to zero. However, in The Outfoxies, each stage is a multi-level battlefield full of breakable objects and hazards. Many of these stages are moving vehicles such as planes or boats, and as such they pitch up and down as the battle proceeds, all via glorious sprite-scaling. Each character can dash and jump and strike their opponents, but there are no special moves as we know them today, and melee attacks are not terribly effective. The real road to victory in The Outfoxies is grabbing one of the random weapons scattered about the stage and using it to murder your enemy.

And yes, that was a deliberate word choice: Every character in The Outfoxies is a professional killer, and in one-player mode, an anonymous benefactor is hiring you to "eliminate" the other killers one by one. At the start of every round, none other than the voice of Alucard himself, Robert Belgrade, commands, "Kill your enemy by any means!" At the end of a match, the defeated party screams and collapses in a pool of their own blood—I did mention that one "character" is a pair of children, right? They look like they escaped from Village of the Damned, but still...they are kids, and you have to kill them.

Despite these heinous implications, The Outfoxies always presents itself as part battle royale, part slapstick. Breaking a crate might reveal a weapon, or it could just reveal a flopping fish. Tossing a barrel at your opponent will cause them to stagger for a few seconds with the barrel on their heads. The entire final stage, when your anonymous benefactor tries to kill you instead of paying you off, is a chase sequence through an opulent mansion loaded with death traps. If you succeed, "Mr. Acme" meets a comical end and the credits roll as your killer of choice enjoys the spoils of his/her/their murderous rampage. Looking at the original Japanese arcade flyer for The Outfoxies, the artwork and ad copy suggest the game is an homage to American action movies; the release of the game in March 1995 is described as a "roadshow," a term still used for major film releases in Japan to this day.

For anyone who reads about The Outfoxies, plays The Outfoxies, or even just watches gameplay footage of The Outfoxies in 2020 , there's an uncanny resemblance—in concept if not aesthetic—to Super Smash Bros. Both are inspired by fighting games while eschewing some traditions in favor of big stages that mix platforming with fighting filled with lots of random items. Of course, regular Retronauts readers know that Super Smash Bros was a 1999 game released almost four years after The Outfoxies. Was one of Nintendo's most successful franchises inspired by an oddball arcade game? Is the presence of a "Hirokazu Tanaka" in The Outfoxies' "Special Thanks" credits proof a connection exists? Or are the two games so functionally and tonally different that this is all a coincidence? Hirokazu Tanaka is a famously common Japanese name, after all.

I'm not here to place pushpins in a corkboard and cry conspiracy. All I know is that when I first happened upon The Outfoxies in a Japanese arcade, it blew my mind that I hadn't seen it sooner. As it turns out, the game didn't have much of an impact in 1995, and no home console version was ever released (despite being announced), giving it a very short legacy outside of emulation fans. Today, googling The Outfoxies brings up a number of articles and videos made by fans of the game recommending it as a ’90s oddity that deserves to be remembered. I wholeheartedly agree to that.